Volume 54, Number 2 (2001) Spring

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The first large-scale thermonuclear detonation— the 10.4-megaton IVYMIKE test of 1 November 1952, at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Pacific Proving Grounds on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The test was designed to confirm, at the megaton level, the effectiveness of the newly discovered “Teller-Ulam” radiation “trigger,” an advance that made fusion explosions practicable. The explosion was unexpectedly powerful, five hundred times more so than the fission-technology FATMAN of 1945. It left a crater 164 feet deep and 6,240 feet across where the islet upon which the device rested had been, and it wrecked the unmanned observation equipment on nearby islets. On islands miles away, where scientists had intended to examine birds and trees, etc., to measure biological effects, all animal and vegetable life was simply destroyed. Warships over thirty miles out to sea endured searing heat. The mushroom cloud rose some forty thousand feet and spread out over a hundred miles.

IVYMIKE was not a “bomb” but a test-bed; the Soviet Union made the same breakthrough the next year. Successive tests were devoted to developing serviceable thermonuclear weapons, or “hydrogen bombs,” ultimately producing the vast arsenals that are the subject of one of this issue’s themes—reductions in nuclear weapons. On page 13 begins an exchange of views between Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret.), a former president of the Naval War College, and two members of the College’s research faculty.