Half a century of detonating more than a thousand US nuclear bombs

The 1,032 nuclear bomb tests conducted by the US over 47 years exposed most of the population to radiation, many paying with their lives.

Images from two nuclear bomb tests declassified by the US

The quality of nuclear weapons is a difficult factor to determine. Their power is measured by the visible pressure of the explosion and the heat released, but also by invisible factors such as the electromagnetic pulse and destructive radiation.

Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,032 nuclear tests to evaluate this destructive weapon. Many of the tests were considered unnecessary, too dangerous and strange, but they still helped the United States gain more information about nuclear weapons, at the cost of a series of dents on the ground and long-term health problems for the people, according to National Interest.

According to military expert Kyle Mizokami, the majority of US nuclear tests took place in the middle of the western desert at the Nevada Test Site, with 699 nuclear devices tested both above ground and underground. The average yield of the tests was 8.6 kilotons, equivalent to 8,600 tons of TNT detonated at the same time. The atmospheric tests could be observed from Las Vegas, 8 km southeast of the test site.

The remaining tests took place on Bikini, Enewetak, Johnson and Christmas Islands in the Pacific Ocean. These nuclear tests forced the indigenous population to move away, and those living near the test sites were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive fallout and forced to evacuate.

The first US thermonuclear bomb test took place in October 1952 on Enewetak Island. Codenamed Ivy Mike, the 82-ton nuclear device looked more like a building than an actual bomb. It had a yield of 10.4 megatons, or 10.4 million tons of TNT, nearly 700 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Ivy Mike was the largest test to date, creating a fireball nearly 1.8 miles wide and a mushroom cloud more than 25 miles high.

In 1954, sailors on the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru accidentally passed through a cloud of radioactive dust from the Castle Bravo test, which had a yield of 15 megatons, equivalent to 15 million tons of TNT. One person died, and the rest vomited from radiation poisoning.

One of the strangest nuclear tests took place in 1962 at the Nevada Test Site. The US military then tested a battlefield artillery shell called Davy Crockett with a power equivalent to 10-20 tons of TNT. The test, codenamed Little Feller, took place on July 17, 1962, witnessed by Attorney General and Presidential Advisor Robert F. Kennedy.

A US nuclear bomb test at sea. Photo: National Interest.

Also in 1962, the US tested a series of nuclear weapons in the air, including the Thor rocket carrying the W49 thermonuclear warhead at an altitude of nearly 402 km, outside the atmosphere.

The Starfish Prime test that year produced an explosive force equivalent to 1.4 million tons of TNT and a large electromagnetic pulse spread across the eastern Pacific Ocean.The electromagnetic pulse traveled more than 800 miles, tripping 300 high-pressure lamps and a telephone switchboard, activating burglar alarms and causing garage doors to open.

Nuclear testing wasn’t limited to the Pacific Ocean and Nevada. In October 1964, in Operation Whetstone, the U.S. government detonated a 5.3-kiloton nuclear device just 28 miles southwest of Hattieburg, Mississippi. The purpose of the explosion was to determine whether nuclear tests could be measured by seismometers.

In 1967, the US detonatedwarhead with explosive power of 29 kilotons at depth of more than 1.2 kmnear Farmington, New Mexico, as part of Project Gasbuggy, an ambitious plan to tap underground gas reserves using nuclear bombs. The U.S. government wanted to study whether the explosion would fracture the surrounding rock and expose gas deposits.

This test failed, but the US continued to conduct two more tests near Colorado, codenamed Rulison and Rio Blanco. The Rulison test was successful in uncovering a large gas field, but it was so contaminated with radiation that it was unsuitable for commercial use.

The US also tested nuclear bombs several times in Alaska, specifically the Aleutian island of Amchitka. The first explosionhas a yield of 80 kilotonsThe first took place in October 1965 to test nuclear test detection techniques. The second test took place four years later, with a yield of 1 megaton, while the third, considered the largest, used a Spartan anti-ballistic missile warhead with a yield of 5 megatons.

During the 1952 Big Shot test, 1,700 US soldiers took cover in trenches just 4 miles from the epicenter of a nuclear blast twice as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After the test, the soldiers conducted a mock attack, coming within 160 meters of an open area. The results showed that the number of test subjects suffering from leukemia, prostate cancer and nasal cancer increased.

Bomb craters left in the Nevada desert. Photo: CTBTO.

The United States ended nuclear testing in 1992. By 2002, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that most Americans alive since 1951 had been exposed to radioactive fallout, and the cumulative effects of all the nuclear tests by all nations could have resulted in the deaths of 11,000 people in the United States alone.

In fact, the US has learned many ways to make reliable and safe nuclear weapons, as well as their impact on human life and the environment. However, to gain this experience, they had to pay a terrible price, expert Mizokami commented.

According to VNE