The Last Sunrise on a Populated Sea

The Nevada rode at the center of the array, her orange paint bright against the darkness, her position marked for the bombardier who would look through his sights and find her waiting below. Around her stretched the concentric rings of the target fleet, ninety-five vessels anchored in the lagoon by calculation and purpose. Sixty miles to the east, the men who had placed her there waited in the darkness for the dawn that would bring the first atomic test in the Pacific. This was Operation Crossroads, a pair of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946. They were the first nuclear weapon tests since Trinity on July 16, 1945, and the first detonations of nuclear devices since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Aboard the USS Appalachian, the observation ship designated as the press center for Operation Crossroads, journalists moved through the pre-dawn hours with the particular restlessness of men told to wait for history. The correspondents had been issued dark glasses and instructed not to look at the flash. They had been given times and distances and safety assurances. They had not been given sleep. In the wardroom, a senator from Missouri checked his watch against the ship’s chronometer, though the countdown would be broadcast over the loudspeakers within the hour. On the deck above, a photographer from Life magazine adjusted the focus on a camera that would capture nothing for the first thirty seconds after detonation, when the light would be too bright for any lens. The scientists from Los Alamos spoke in low voices about wind vectors and delivery accuracy. The politicians spoke about the Soviet Union.

The target fleet lay anchored in the lagoon at Bikini, vessels arranged in geometric patterns around the Nevada. The battleship rode low in the water, her orange paint visible even in the thin light of the stars. She had been placed there to be hit. The bomb would fall from a B-29 flying at thirty thousand feet, and the Nevada was the aim point. Around her, the other ships waited in their assigned positions: the aircraft carrier Independence, the cruisers Pensacola and Salt Lake City, the Japanese battleship Nagato, the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. No crews walked their decks. Instead, they carried the instruments of measurement—pressure gauges, radiation detectors, cameras mounted in bulkheads and trained on empty compartments. And they carried the animals.

The pigs and goats and rats that had been placed aboard the target ships stirred in their cages as the first light began to show in the east. They had been positioned at various distances from the expected ground zero, some in the open air, some behind armor plate, some in the sickbay spaces where sailors would have stood during battle. Patches of varying thickness covered their flanks to test the penetration of thermal radiation. They had been fed and watered and left to wait. The scientists who had placed them there had given them numbers instead of names.

Aboard the USS Mount McKinley, the command ship anchored ten miles from the target array, Admiral William H.P. Blandy sat in the flag bridge and reviewed the final weather reports. The wind blew from the east at twelve knots. The cloud base stood at twenty-two thousand feet, well above the delivery altitude. The sea state was calm. Conditions were optimal.

Blandy had spent eighteen months preparing for this morning, negotiating with scientists who distrusted the military, with politicians who wanted results before the November elections, with a Soviet delegation that had been invited to observe and then denied access to the most sensitive briefings. He had managed the removal of the Bikinians to Rongerik, the assembly of the target fleet, the coordination of forty-two thousand personnel of Joint Task Force One. He had approved the plan to drop a plutonium implosion device from a B-29 and detonate it five hundred feet above the Nevada. The device was named Gilda, after the Rita Hayworth film.

The plane was named Dave’s Dream, a B-29 from the 509th Bombardment Group, the same unit that had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At 0530, the loudspeakers aboard the support ships crackled to life. A young officer in the radio room of the Mount McKinley read from a prepared script, announcing the time remaining before the shot. Personnel not on essential duty would clear the weather decks. Goggles would be worn. No one would look at the flash. The message would be repeated every thirty minutes until the final countdown began.

On the flight deck of the USS Saidor, the escort carrier that served as the base for the drone aircraft, the crews made their final checks on eight B-17 Flying Fortresses that had been converted to remote-controlled unmanned aircraft. Radio-controlled autopilots were installed in the bombers, converting them into drones which were then loaded with automatic cameras, radiation detectors, and air sampling equipment. They would fly through the mushroom cloud after the detonation, gathering data that no human crew could survive to collect. The drones had been given names like the manned aircraft, though no one would sit in their cockpits. Their operators stood at control consoles on the Saidor’s hangar deck, where they would guide the aircraft by radio signal and television feed. In all, the cameras at Bikini would take 50, 000 still pictures and 1, 500, 000 feet of motion picture film.

The B-29 Dave’s Dream lifted off from Kwajalein at 0545, climbing through the pink light of dawn toward the delivery altitude. Major Woodrow Swancutt, the pilot, had been selected from the 509th Bombardment Group, the same unit that had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombardier, a lieutenant named Harold Wood, had practiced the drop run seventeen times in the previous three weeks. Each time, he had released a concrete practice bomb filled with flash powder. Each time, the practice bomb had struck within a few hundred yards of the Nevada. The plutonium device in the bomb bay weighed ten thousand pounds. It would fall for forty-three seconds before detonating.

Aboard the observation ships, the passengers lined the rails. The congressmen and senators had been given deck chairs, though most stood. The journalists had been assigned positions according to the needs of their publications—the photographers forward, the radio correspondents near the broadcast equipment, the wire service reporters close to the ship’s officers who would provide the first official statements. The Soviet observers stood apart, speaking among themselves in Russian, their faces unreadable behind the dark glasses that every observer had been issued. The scientists from the Manhattan Project clustered near the Geiger counters and ionization chambers that had been set up on the deck, their eyes fixed on the instruments that would measure the first burst of radiation from the fireball.

The countdown began at T minus thirty minutes. The voice over the loudspeakers was calm, measured, a voice reading from a script that had been approved weeks before. The aircraft was on approach. Wind checks were satisfactory. All stations reported ready. The reports came back from the drone controllers, from the radiological safety officers, from the damage assessment teams that would enter the lagoon after the shot.

On the deck of the Appalachian, a correspondent from the Associated Press lit a cigarette and checked his watch. War in Europe, the concentration camps, the Nuremberg trials—his dispatches had carried all of it to American readers. He had seen what weapons could do to cities and to bodies. He had not seen an atomic bomb. The scientists had told him that the flash would be visible for a hundred miles, that the sound would take five minutes to reach them, that the mushroom cloud would rise to thirty thousand feet. They had told him that the target ships would be photographed and boarded and studied, that the animals would be examined and autopsied, that the data would be analyzed for months. They had not told him what it would feel like to watch.

In the lagoon, the Nevada waited. Her captain, Cecil C. Adell, had been relieved of command the day before, his tenure ending on the first of July as planned. The battleship carried no one aboard now except the animals in their cages and the instruments in their bulkheads. Orange paint covered her hull for visibility, but beneath it lay the steel of a vessel that had bombarded the beaches at Normandy and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Built to fight, she had been designated to die.

At T minus five minutes, the drone B-17s lifted off from the Saidor and began their approach to the lagoon. They would orbit at a safe distance until the detonation, then fly through the cloud under radio control. Their cameras would record the fireball and the stem and the cap as they formed. Their radiation detectors would measure the intensity of the residual contamination. Their air samplers would capture particles of fission products from the upper reaches of the cloud. The data would be transmitted back to the Saidor by radio link, or it would be recovered when the drones landed.

The voice over the loudspeakers counted down the final minutes. The aircraft was on final approach. The bomb was armed. All stations stood by. The observers aboard the Appalachian and the other support ships turned to face the west, toward Bikini. The dark glasses went on. The cameras were raised. The notebooks were opened.

In the bombardier’s compartment of Dave’s Dream, Harold Wood looked through his Norden bombsight at the orange shape of the Nevada far below. The crosshairs aligned. The release mechanism was armed. The plutonium core, the same design that had destroyed Nagasaki, waited in the bomb bay. The scientists had called it an implosion device. The bombardier called it the ball.

At T minus sixty seconds, the voice over the loudspeakers fell silent. The final count would be transmitted from the aircraft, relayed through the Mount McKinley to the task force. The observers stood in the dawn light, their faces turned toward the target array, their eyes hidden behind the dark glasses, their bodies braced for something that no amount of preparation could make familiar.

At 0900 local time, the bombardier released the bomb.

The aircraft bucked as ten thousand pounds of weight fell away. Major Swancutt banked the B-29 into a tight turn, sixty degrees of bank, the escape maneuver that would carry them away from the detonation point. The bomb fell through the thin air at thirty thousand feet, its fins stabilizing its descent, its plutonium core waiting for the implosion that would compress it to critical density. The Nevada waited below, her orange paint bright against the blue water.

Forty-three seconds after release, the barometric switches triggered.

The flash came first. It was visible for four hundred miles, reported by observers on Kwajalein and Eniwetok, by sailors on ships scattered across the Marshall Islands, by islanders on atolls that had never heard of atomic bombs. The light was brighter than the sun, brighter than any light that human eyes had evolved to see. It lasted for two seconds, a sustained brilliance that painted the clouds from beneath and turned the dawn into noon.

The observers on the Appalachian saw it through their dark glasses, and even then, the light was painful. The congressmen and journalists and scientists who had been told not to look at the flash looked anyway, their heads turning instinctively toward the source of illumination. The dark glasses protected their retinas from permanent damage, but they could not protect them from the knowledge of what they were seeing.

The fireball rose from the lagoon, a sphere of plasma and superheated gas that expanded to a diameter of a thousand feet before beginning to rise. The surface of the fireball was mottled with hot spots and cooler regions, the turbulence of the explosion churning the plasma into patterns that the cameras recorded at a thousand frames per second. The fireball rose at three hundred feet per second, carrying with it the vaporized remains of whatever had been at ground zero.

The shockwave followed. It traveled outward from the detonation point at the speed of sound, a wall of compressed air that struck the water and the ships and the islands. The observers on the Appalachian felt it as a pressure change, a momentary tightness in the ears. The ships closer to the target array felt it as a physical blow, a hammer strike that rattled the bulkheads and sent equipment crashing to the deck. The Nevada, five hundred feet below the detonation, absorbed the shockwave on her deck and her superstructure.

The sound arrived last. A sharp crack, a thunderclap rolled across the water and echoed off the clouds. The observers who had been told that the sound would take five minutes to reach them heard it in less than four. The speed of sound varies with temperature and humidity, and the conditions over Bikini that morning had given the shockwave a boost.

The mushroom cloud formed as the fireball rose, its top flattening against the tropopause and spreading into the characteristic cap. The stem drew up water and debris from the lagoon, a column of vapor and droplets that connected the fireball to the surface. The cloud rose to thirty thousand feet and stabilized, a towering pillar of white that caught the morning sun and cast a shadow across the target array.

On the observation ships, the silence lasted for thirty seconds after the sound. Then the voices began. The journalists shouted into their recording equipment, describing what they had seen in phrases that would be edited and transmitted and printed in newspapers around the world. The scientists read their instruments and compared the readings to their predictions. The politicians turned to each other and spoke in low voices about the implications for national defense. The Soviet observers wrote in their notebooks and said nothing.

The drone aircraft began their runs through the cloud. Guided by radio control from the Saidor, the B-17s flew through the mushroom stem and cap, their instruments recording radiation levels that would have killed any human crew. The cameras captured images of the cloud’s interior, the swirling vortices of hot gas and condensed water, the colors that ranged from white to orange to a deep red that no one had expected. The drones flew through the cloud three times before turning back toward the carrier.

The first damage reports came in over the radio. The Nevada had been hit, but not directly. The bomb had detonated five hundred feet above the lagoon, but the aiming point had been the Nevada’s deck. The miss distance was estimated at fifteen hundred feet. The battleship was still afloat, though her superstructure had been damaged by the blast. Five ships had sunk: the attack transport Gilliam, the attack cargo ship Apex, the destroyer Lamson, the submarine Pilotfish, and the landing craft LCT-1175. The Japanese battleship Nagato was listing but still afloat. The German cruiser Prinz Eugen was damaged but not sinking. The aircraft carrier Independence had taken heavy damage to her flight deck. Some of the 114 press observers expressed disappointment at the effect on ships.

The radiological safety officers aboard the Mount McKinley began to receive the first readings from the drone aircraft. The contamination levels in the cloud were significant, but the cloud was rising and dispersing. The residual radiation on the target ships would be measured by boarding parties after the cloud had dissipated. The initial assessment was that the contamination was manageable. The bomb had been an air burst, and air bursts produced less fallout than ground bursts. The fireball had not touched the water. The fission products were rising into the stratosphere, where they would spread around the world.

Admiral Blandy received the damage reports in the flag bridge of the Mount McKinley. The miss was unfortunate, but the test had still produced valuable data. The ships had been subjected to blast and thermal radiation at known distances from the detonation point. The instruments had recorded the pressures and temperatures and radiation intensities. The animals would be examined to determine the effects of the explosion on living tissue. The test had been a success, even if the bomb had not hit its target.

The boarding parties prepared to enter the lagoon. The radiological safety officers checked their instruments and their protective clothing. The photographers loaded their cameras with fresh film. The salvage teams stood by to assess the damage and begin the preparations for the second test, scheduled for later in the month.

On the deck of the Appalachian, the journalists wrote their stories. The flash had been visible for four hundred miles. The sound had been heard for two hundred. The mushroom cloud had risen to thirty thousand feet. Five ships had sunk. The Nevada had survived. The test had been a success. The atomic age had come to the Pacific.

The animals on the target ships waited in their cages. Some had survived the blast. Others had been killed by the shockwave or the thermal radiation. Still others had been exposed to levels of radiation that would not show symptoms for days. They would be examined and euthanized and autopsied. Their bodies would be studied for the effects of radiation on blood and bone marrow and organ tissue. Their suffering would become data.

The Nevada drifted at her mooring, her orange paint scorched and blistered, her superstructure bent and twisted by the blast. She had survived Pearl Harbor and Normandy and Iwo Jima. She had survived the first atomic bomb. She would not survive the second.

In the wardroom of the Appalachian, a correspondent from The New York Times filed his story. The flash and cloud and silence—all went into his dispatch. He wrote about politicians and scientists watching from observation ships ten nautical miles east of Bikini Atoll; about five ships sunk; about ninety that remained; about a bomb dropped from a B-29 named Dave’s Dream, piloted by Major Woodrow Swancutt under Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey’s command; about a device called Gilda detonating 520 feet above target fleet with yield of 23 kilotons; about premature reports claiming ‘only two were sunk.’ He did not write about animals unseen or Bikinians invisible on Rongerik three hundred miles eastward—only about bomb bringing atomic age into Pacific waters where Operation Crossroads began its series.

The drone aircraft landed on the Saidor, their cameras and instruments retrieved by the technicians. The radiation readings were analyzed and plotted on graphs. The fireball had reached a temperature of ten million degrees Kelvin. The blast pressure at the Nevada’s position had been measured at five pounds per square inch. The thermal radiation had been sufficient to cause third-degree burns at a distance of a mile. The data would be studied for months, for years, for decades. The test had been a success.

The sun rose higher over the Pacific, and the mushroom cloud dispersed into the upper atmosphere. The fission products drifted eastward on the wind, spreading across the Marshall Islands and beyond. The target ships rode at their moorings, their hulls and superstructures marked by the blast. The boarding parties prepared to enter the lagoon and begin the work of assessment.

On the Mount McKinley, Admiral Blandy drafted his preliminary report. The first test of Operation Crossroads had been conducted successfully. The bomb had detonated as designed. The target fleet had been subjected to atomic explosion. The data would be analyzed and the results would inform the planning for the second test. The operation would continue as scheduled.

The radiological safety officers prepared their instruments for the first boarding. The Geiger counters had been calibrated and checked. The protective clothing had been issued. The teams would board the target ships and measure the residual radiation, checking for contamination that might pose a hazard to personnel. The initial readings from the drone aircraft had suggested that the contamination levels were low. The air burst had lifted the fireball above the surface, and the fission products had risen with it. The target ships should be relatively clean.

The first boats entered the lagoon at noon, carrying the radiological teams and the damage assessment parties. They approached the Nevada first, climbing aboard her scorched deck with their instruments held before them. The Geiger counters clicked softly, measuring the residual radiation from the bomb’s neutron flux. The readings were higher than background, but not by much. The ships were safe to board.

The teams moved through the target array, checking each vessel, recording the damage and the radiation levels. The Independence had taken the worst of the blast, her flight deck buckled and twisted, her hangar bay gutted by fire. The Nagato listed to starboard, her hull breached by the shockwave. The Prinz Eugen rode low in the water, her engines silent, her crew spaces empty. The animals in their cages were examined and catalogued. Some were alive. Some were dead. Some would die in the days that followed.

The data flowed back to the Mount McKinley, where the analysts compiled their reports. The bomb had missed the aiming point by fifteen hundred feet. The blast had sunk five ships and damaged many more. The thermal radiation had scorched paint and ignited fires. The nuclear radiation had been minimal, at least according to the first readings. The test had demonstrated that a single atomic bomb could sink a fleet, but it had also demonstrated that the fleet could survive if the bomb missed.

The journalists filed their stories and transmitted them by radio to the waiting press services. The headlines would speak of success and power and the dawn of a new era. The photographs would show the mushroom cloud rising above the Pacific, the silhouette of the target fleet, the faces of the observers watching from the deck of the Appalachian. The world would learn that the United States had tested an atomic bomb at Bikini, and that the bomb had worked.

On Rongerik, three hundred miles to the east, the Bikinians gathered on the beach and looked toward the western horizon. They had been told that the Americans would test a great weapon at their atoll, a weapon that would shake the earth and boil the sea. They had been told that they would see nothing from Rongerik, that the test was too far away to be visible. But some of them claimed to have seen a flash in the west, a brief brilliance that lit the clouds and faded. They spoke among themselves in their own language, wondering what the Americans had done to their home.

The first Geiger counter readings were taken near the target fleet, a faint signal beneath the official pronouncements of success.