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By Root 833 0

had forced Japan’s capitulation. The battleship Nagato particularly fulfilled that role. The onetime flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the scene of operational planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nagato had been “captured” as a bombed-out derelict on Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The capture, an event staged by military press officers, symbolized “the complete and final surrender of the Imperial Japanese Navy.” Sinking the same battleship with an atomic bomb would ritually “destroy” the Imperial Japanese Navy in a more dramatic manner than prosaic scrapping or scuttling at sea. The battleship’s intended fate was so important that, at Bikini, American support vessels were moored alongside Nagato since “there was some danger that the captured Japanese ships … might actually sink… if they were left unattended.”

At the same time, military planners wanted to show that the United States Navy would survive in the coming nuclear age. According to Admiral Blandy, testing the bomb on warships would improve the Navy: “We want ships that are tough, even when threatened by atomic bombs; we want to keep the ships afloat, propellers turning, guns firing; we want to protect the crews so that, if fighting is necessary, they can fight well today and return home unharmed tomorrow.”

To further test the effects of the bomb, the military loaded twenty-two of the target ships with fuel and ammunition as well as 220 tons of equipment: tanks, tractors and airplanes; guns, mortars and ammunition; radios, fire extinguishers and telephones; gas masks, watches and uniforms; canned food and frozen meat. They also placed sixty-nine target airplanes on the ships and moored two seaplanes in the water near them.

The first test took place on July 1, 1946. The B-29 Dave’s Dream dropped a 20-kiloton plutonium bomb on the target fleet, slightly to starboard of the bow of the attack transport Gilliam. Caught in the explosion’s incandescent fireball and battered down into the water by the shock wave, Gilliam, “badly ruptured, crumpled, and twisted almost beyond recognition,” sank in seventy-nine seconds. The blast swept the nearby transport Carlisle 150 feet to one side and nearly wiped away the superstructure and masts. Carlisle began to burn and sank in thirty minutes. The destroyer Anderson, hit hard by the blast, burst into flames when her ammunition exploded. Burning fiercely, Anderson capsized to port and sank by the stern within seven minutes. The destroyer Lamson, its hull torn open, sank twelve minutes after the blast. The Japanese cruiser Sakawa, badly battered, caught on fire and sank the following day.

The second test took place three weeks later. The Navy remoored the target ships around a bomb lowered 90 feet below the surface. When the underwater atomic bomb erupted at 8:34 on the morning of July 25, a huge mass of steam and water mounded up into a “spray dome” that climbed at a rate of 2,500 feet per second and formed a 975-foot thick column. Its core was a nearly hollow void of superheated steam that rose faster than the more solid 300-foot thick water sides, climbing 11,000 feet per second and acting as a chimney for the hot gases of the fireball. The gases, mixed with excavated lagoon bottom and radioactive materials, formed a mushroom cloud atop the column. The upward blast crushed, capsized and sank the battleship Arkansas in less than a second.

The blast also created “atomic tidal waves.” The first wave, a 94-foot wall of radioactive water, lifted and crashed into the aircraft carrier Saratoga with such force that it twisted the hull. The falling water also partially smashed the flight deck, and Saratoga sank within seven and a half hours. Nagato, its hull broken open, sank two days later. Beneath the water, the immense pressure of the bomb’s burst crushed three submarines that settled onto the seabed, leaking air bubbles and oil.

On the surface, a boiling cloud of radioactive water and steam penetrated the surviving ships. Radioactive material adhered to wooden decks, paint, rust and grease. For weeks after the tests,