Remembering Ivy Mike
Sixty-two years and two weeks ago, the world saw the demonstration of something completely new. It was a thing both awe-inspiring and terrifying.
On 1 November 1952 – at 0714:59.4 (+/- 0.2 sec) Marshall Islands Time Zone, or 1414:59.4 (+/- 0.2 sec) the previous day on the US East Coast – the world’s first staged (Ulam-Teller design) thermonuclear device was detonated. The nuclear test series during which that test occurred was called Operation Ivy; it occurred at Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands. The test itself was called Ivy Mike; it occurred on Elugelab Island.
The test was successful. And it ushered in the height of the Cold War nuclear competition between the US and USSR that – one that nearly culminated in disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The event is today largely forgotten. It shouldn’t be. The destructive power of the Ivy Mike device – which at approximately 10.4 megatons was the third- fourth-most-powerful US nuclear device ever detonated, and still ranks today as one of the largest man-made explosions in history – is something we should remember.
A few facts about the test:
- The Ivy Mike test had an explosive yield equivalent to approximately 10.4 megatons – that is, 10,400,000 tons of TNT. For comparison, the nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima had an estimated yield of between 13 and 18 kilotons – or between 575 and 800 times smaller.
- The Ivy Mike fireball was estimated to be approximately three and 1/4 miles in diameter. (Some sources estimate the fireball’s maximum extent at slightly more than 4 miles in diameter.) In comparison, the fireball created the Hiroshima weapon was somewhat less than 1/4 mile in diameter.
- The nearby island of Engebi – three miles away from ground zero for Ivy Mike, and well outside the fireball – was denuded of plant and animal life by the blast. Only the stumps of vegetation remained.
- Ground zero for the Ivy Mike test was a building on the island of Elugelab in Eniwetak Atoll. After the test, the island of Elugelab . . . no longer existed. The entire island (roughly oval, about 1/2 by 1/3 mile) had been vaporized and/or pulverized, then sucked into the explosion’s fireball. Remaining in its place was a crater over a mile in diameter and over 160 feet deep. Here are before and after aerial photographs:
Before:
- On the island of Rigili, 14 miles to the south-southeast, vegetation directly in the line-of-sight of the detonation was scorched and wilted on the side facing the explosion.
- A B-36 orbiting the test site 15 miles away at 40,000 feet altitude heated 93 degrees F virtually instantaneously when the device was detonated.
- The mushroom cloud created by the Mike device crested at 27 miles altitude. Its stem was 20 miles across at its maximum; the cloud’s cap at maximum extent was 100 miles in diameter.
While the device tested at Ivy Mike was not a deliverable warhead (it used liquid deuterium vice materials stable at room temperature), two years later a device of roughly the same power that was stable at room temperature had been developed. By early 1955, the US had weaponized devices in the same yield range. The USSR followed not long afterwards, exploding their first staged thermonuclear device on November 22, 1955.
Militarily, at the time there was at least a modest argument in favor of weapons of this immensely destructive scale. Delivery systems of the early/mid 1950s were by today’s standards quite crude in terms of accuracy; getting a weapon within even a kilometer or two of a strategic target was not guaranteed. So weapons that would destroy a strategic target even if they “missed” by a mile or more at least arguably made some amount of military sense.
Unfortunately, those strategic targets were often in or near cities – or were often the cities themselves. We should thus thank God weapons of this type were never used. Had they ever been employed, the death toll could literally have been in the tens or hundreds of millions had a significant number been employed. Even a single such weapon used on a large city could have killed literally millions.
Still, as terrible as they could have been . . . they were also truly awe-inspiring things. And we would do well to remember them – if for no other reason to remind ourselves just how bad total war could be.
Sources: primarily Dark Sun, by Richard Rhodes, plus various secondary Internet sources. If you’re interested in the history of both the US and Soviet thermonuclear programs, Rhodes’ book is a must. Fascinating – and highly recommended.
Category: Historical
The good old days of the military. Just don’t look at the flash and you will be o.k. Now wash the deck down try not to breath or touch the harmless dust that used to be a island.
The safety briefs were probably a lot like the Agent Orange, Small Pox , Anthrax vaccine briefs.
P.S Don’t forget the Ebola Brief.
Sapper3307: to be fair, during the 1940s and early/mid 1950s the long-term effects of radiation exposure were quite poorly understood. It was believed to be much less risky by experts than we now believe to be the case (even though the danger is quite overplayed IMO by many today).
A fair number of the early nuclear scientists also succumbed to long-term effects (and a few to short term effects – Google “dragon experiments”). So it’s not exactly like they were downplaying the risks – they literally didn’t know at the time how dangerous some of that stuff was, long term.
I thoroughly loved my job in the Army but am glad that I never had to do it for real. I’m still fascinated by the power of these nuclear weapons though.
They were indeed awe-inspiring things, nbcguy54.
One of my great disappointments is that I was never able to see (from a safe distance, of course) an atmospheric nuclear test, even a small one. I knew an individual who did; they indicated it was an amazing thing to see.
@ Television Network Guy:
The Army can’t quite make up its mind and keeps changing those initials.
When I was in, it was CBR (i.e., “Chemical, Biological, Radiological”).
What do they call it these days?
Wh en I was trained for my MOS, it was CBR, then it went to ABC (Atomic, Biological, Chemical), later again it went to NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical).
It seems like it has changed again after I got out, but not sure what it was. I got out in April ’67.
We trained to deliver small-yield devices. Our weapon was the B-57 depth bomb. It could be set for air, surface, or subsurface burst and was in the kilotons range.
The weapon was designed to attack a ballistic missile submarine that had either begun launching, or was preparing to launch it’s missiles. It could also be used as an anti-harbor weapon, or for any of a number of other uses. Though we only practiced loads and delivery of a single weapon, the P-3 Orion I crewed could, IIRC, carry up to 4 such weapons.
I am glad we never had to use them. For us, it would likely have been a one-way mission.
I grew up a child of the Pershing Missile system, bouncing between Ft. Sill and different installations in Germany … dad was a Warrant Officer in the Pershing program. The Ivy Mike type of warhead (injected with Tritium to become a fission-fusion device) was the great-grandfather of the Pershing warhead package.
It’s odd that you posted this today as my dad arrived yesterday for a few days. Last night, over bourbon and coffee, he showed me a lot of old pictures of Pershing Missiles, test blasts, test firings, etc, and this happened to be one of the pictures we talked about. He’s still snoring (like a freight train,) but when he wakes up I’ll show him this post.
Thanks Hondo 🙂
The Cold War is back. The Russians are flying bombers around the US, pushing troops into the Ukraine, and threatening western Europe with economic warfare. Maybe playing footsie with China and supplying proxy wars with the US?
In October 1962 I was playing with my friends when their dad came home in a hurry, grabbed his uniform, and told his wife that he had been activated for duration plus 6 – he was an pilot during World War 2. Some idiot (that is, the chairman of the USSR communist party) parked IRBMs 90 miles off the US coast and that was the Cuban Missile crisis. Now it would be a lot easier to use a depressed trajectory shot from submarines.
Some of you younger guys wonder why some of us old farts get excited about Russia. Go back and read Hondo’s article above about the Mike shot then think about one MIRV dropping 10 of those along the US Eastern seaboard. In something around a minute, the economic and government heart and tens of millions of US citizens would be gone. Between us, the US and Russia have more than 90 percent of all the nuclear weapons in the world and long range delivery systems.
Unlikely? Yup. But the US is withdrawing troops all over the world, reducing the size of our military, and there are regular stories about problems with the US nuclear force. We are less capable than we were 10 years ago.
The Russians must regularly evaluate if our response to a counter force or decapitating strike would create acceptable losses to their population. MAD is still with us except our capability has declined.
Have a nice day.
Richard: yeah, amigo – I understand.
I spent the Cuban Missile Crisis as a dependent kid on a Air Force Base that has since been closed.
A SAC base. With a BUFF wing.
Dad was a crew chief.
Hondo…Thank you for this article. I too was an Air Force brat during the Cuban Missile Crisis, my father was a KC-135 boom operator at that point in his career. I remember those old SAC days of him always being “on call and available”. Once he even had to leave momma and us kids in the base theater when the “Alert” light came on. Wish he were still here to talk to.
I agree.
I don’t think anything has changed. If anything, it’s slowly creeping in again.
I know that above-ground nuclear tests are no longer in vogue, but if the Kims are going to play with underground testing and the idiots in the Middle East think it’s just another big bomb, maybe one big ‘BOOM!’ would put a stop to that crap for a while.
I grew up 10 miles from a target city. It was labeled ‘target’ because it had a commercial/private plane airport, large rail yard for both passenger and freight lines, several factories that included a tire plant, electronics plant, grain processing plant for food and ethanol, and a heavy equipment manufacturing company. It also had two very large hospitals, and was within 35 miles of an Air Force base. 10 miles to the west was another chemical plant, and a mile outside my home town was a glass factory. There was a nuclear power reactor 20 miles north, one which could easily have been turned into a breeder reactor.
All of that meant nothing to me until the Cuban missile crisis began and my mother put 5 one-gallon jugs of water and some boxes of crackers in the basement, in case a nuke hit nearby. I was in high school, and I knew if one of those hit nearby, we had little chance of survival, and said so.
None of the nuke testing was really discussed or relayed on the news, but now when you do a search, you will find that there was not only testing going on in the Pacific, it was also going on in the south Atlantic.
We tested in a slew of places most people don’t know about, Ex-PH2. Besides the South Atlantic Argus tests, we also tested one not terribly far (400nm) off the coast of SoCal (underwater ASROC warhead test). Nuclear devices were also exploded at two other locations in Nevada besides the Nevada Test Site; at Amchitka Island in Alaska; at two sites in Colorado; at two sites in New Mexico other than Trinity (Alamogordo); and at one site in Mississippi. However, all the detonations in the US other than those at the NTS were underground tests vice atmospheric tests.
Let me second the recommendation for Dark Sun – it’s fascinating book. Half of it’s a story about physics – learning to make the H-Bomb, and the other half is a counterintelligence story – about how badly the USSR had penetrated us.
Rhodes other book, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” is also very good. Highly recommended. There is a story in one of those books about a guy in Montana or North Dakota who worked on handling the Soviet diplomatic pouch. This is regular airplane loads of stuff stolen from the US. He opened one package and it contained what he believed was plutonium metal. I have the book.
That was in one of the early chapters of Dark Sun, Richard – the chapter titled “Super Lend-Lease”. The Soviets were shipping espionage product literally by the ton back to the USSR via aircraft we were providing them under Lend-Lease. They were flown back to the USSR with Soviet crews vice US crews; the flights originated in Montana.
And yeah – Rhodes other work is also fascinating. Like Dark Sun, half of the book is nuclear history – and half of it is espionage history.
I have that book.
It’s what you read during a blizzard, with lots of hot drinks and refreshments at your elbow, after you’ve cleared out the drifts around the car and thrown snow against the base of the house for insulation. Turn on the radio, make a pot of hot tea, coffee or cocoa, settle in for the long haul. I have several books like that.
Get a copy of Dark Sun if you don’t have it (or The Making of the Atomic Bomb if I’m reading your remark backwards), Ex-PH2. Either book alone tells only half the story.
I do have ‘Dark Sun’.
Bought it a long time ago, probably before anyone here was born.
It was when Waldenbooks was a store, not a bnygone.
OK, I read it backwards. Sorry.
Get a copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb if you don’t have it. It’s damn near as good. And it tells the other half of the story.