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What was scary about the growth of the bomb wasn’t so much the growth of the bomb as the people in charge of the growth of the bomb. Within weeks of the Eniwetok test the big hats at the Pentagon were actively thinking of ways to put this baby to use. One idea, seriously considered, was to build a device somewhere near the front lines in Korea, induce large numbers of North Korean and Chinese troops to wander over to have a look, and then set it off.

Representative James E. Van Zandt of Pennsylvania, a leading proponent of devastation, promised that soon we would have a device of at least a hundred megatons—the one that might consume all our breathable air. At the same time, Edward Teller, the semi-crazed Hungarian-born physicist who was one of the presiding geniuses behind the development of the H-bomb, was dreaming up exciting peacetime uses for nuclear devices. Teller and his acolytes at the Atomic Energy Commission envisioned using H-bombs to enable massive civil engineering projects on a scale never before conceived—to create huge open-pit mines where mountains had once stood, to alter the courses of rivers in our favor (ensuring that the Danube, for instance, served only capitalist countries), to blow away irksome impediments to commerce and shipping like the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Excitedly they reported that just twenty-six bombs placed in a chain across the Isthmus of Panama would excavate a bigger, better Panama Canal more or less at once, and provide a lovely show into the bargain. They even suggested that nuclear devices could be used to alter the Earth’s weather by adjusting the amount of dust in the atmosphere, forever banishing winters from the northern United States and sending them permanently to the Soviet Union instead. Almost in passing, Teller proposed that we might use the Moon as a giant target for testing warheads. The blasts would be visible through binoculars from Earth and would provide wholesome entertainment for millions. In short, the creators of the hydrogen bomb wished to wrap the world in unpredictable levels of radiation, obliterate whole ecosystems, despoil the face of the planet, and provoke and antagonize our enemies at every opportunity—and these were their peacetime dreams.

But of course the real ambition was to make a gigantically ferocious transportable bomb that we could drop on the heads of Russians and other like-minded irritants whenever it pleased us to do so. That dream became enchanting reality on March 1, 1954, when America detonated fifteen megatons of experimental bang over the Bikini atoll (a place so delightful that we named a lady’s swimsuit after it) in the Marshall Islands. The blast exceeded all hopes by a considerable margin. The flash was seen in Okinawa, twenty-six hundred miles away. It threw visible fallout over an area of some seven thousand square miles—all of it drifting in exactly the opposite direction than forecast. We were getting good not only at making really huge explosions but at creating consequences that were beyond our capabilities to deal with.

One soldier, based on the island of Kwajalein, described in a letter home how he thought the blast would blow his barracks away. “All of a sudden the sky lighted up a bright orange and remained that way for what seemed like a couple of minutes…We heard very loud rumblings that sounded like thunder. Then the whole barracks began shaking, as if there had been an earthquake. This was followed by a very high wind,” which caused everyone present to grab on to something solid and hold tight. And this was at a place nearly two hundred miles from the blast site, so goodness knows what the experience was like for those who were even closer—and there were many, among them the unassuming native residents of the nearby island of Rongelap, who had been told to expect a bright flash and a loud bang just before 7 a.m., but had been given no other warnings, no hint that the bang itself might knock down their houses and leave them permanently deafened, and no instructions about dealing with the aftereffects.