Test for Mankind

The night was drizzly and starless, but in the last hours of June the forecast was for clearing weather. By July's first dawn, the blacktopped, coral runway of Kwajalein islet was ablaze with lights. It was Able-day for Operation Crossroads and the explosion of the world's fourth atomic bomb.

Overhead was the roar of planes. But all eyes, mostly red from lack of sleep, were focused on a glistening B-29 Super-fort, Dave's Dream,* which stood apart at the south side of the strip.

Alongside the plane was a tent in which Manhattan District engineers had assembled "The Thing." A mobile crane had hoisted it from the tent to a trench beneath the plane's open bomb bay. Hidden by canvas from all but a superselect few, The Thing was drawn up into the bay. All that could be told about it was that it was big enough to have a foot-high picture of Cinemactress Rita Hayworth pasted on its side. The Thing was called Gilda (after Miss Hayworth's latest movie).

The bomb bay was closed. In the purpling east, cumulus clouds bumped heads in a huddle. As Major Woodrow P. Swancutt pushed the throttles all the way forward, a rainbow shone overhead. Dave's Dream gathered speed, then rose slowly into the easterly wind. It was 5:54 a.m.

To the north, 240 air miles away, was Bikini, once one of the least-known and most peaceful of Pacific island groups. In Bikini's 200-sq.-mi. lagoon was an anchorage about five miles in diameter. In a space where the Navy would normally have only 14 ships (or five in a cruising formation at sea), 73 vessels had been jampacked for the test.

The air above was cut by fourscore planes, many of them pilotless, radio-controlled drones flown from Eniwetok or the carriers Shangri-La and Saidor. Worker planes kept these in their appointed rounds.

Then to the rendezvous came the queen bee. Dave's Dream's weaponeers, two 26-year-old ensigns, David L. Anderson and Leon D. Smith, had armed the bomb within 20 minutes after takeoff. Soaring at 30,000 feet above the polka-dotted lagoon, Dave's Dream made a dry run into the northeast wind. Bombardier Major Harold H. Wood--known to his crewmates as "Lemon Bar" because of his success at officers'-club slot machines--twirled the knobs on his bombsight, tried to line up the target ship Nevada with the cross hairs of his eyepiece. Topside, the Nevada had been painted a livid orange, striped with white. She wore her campaign ribbons painted on big boards--among them the Purple Heart with two stars (one hit at Pearl Harbor, two at Okinawa).

Duck Talk. The word was passed, "Thirty minutes to go." Around the world ordinary men & women, who would be the casualties in an atomic war, bent their heads and cupped their ears to radio sets to catch this preview.

Operation Crossroads had been ballyhooed as the greatest laboratory experiment in all history. To the listening world, it sounded like an animal circus at feeding time. Static almost drowned out other sound effects: a dozen Donald Ducks quacked endlessly and often pointlessly.

Through it all, announcers asked listeners to concentrate on the tick of a metronome placed before an open microphone on the abandoned Pennsylvania. When the ticking stopped, it would be because the bomb had gone off, and the microphone with it.

"Lemon Bar" Wood was at his bombsight again. He thought he had the Nevada on the nose. The bombsight did the rest. It was 9 a.m. Soon, from a nearby plane, came the radioed word, "Bomb away--bomb away and falling." Dave's Dream broke away in a sharp turn.

No Bull's Eye. The Thing was falling free, faster . . . 32 feet per second faster with every second that passed . . . faster.

After 40 seconds, The Thing went off and so did the metronome. As planned, the burst was several hundred feet in the air above the ships. It was not, as planned, over the Nevada but several hundred yards short, nearer the Independence. It was no dud.

There was a flash which blotted out the brilliant morning sun. Men wearing special goggles so dark as to seem impenetrably black saw a brilliant stab, like lightning. Then the shock wave seized the observers aboard the distant ships and beat upon their eardrums and shook them by the shoulder. Aboard Dave's Dream, Colonel John R. Sutherland was watching through the drift sight when the shock wave threw it up so sharply that it cut him below the eye. To a man ten miles away aboard the Mount McKinley, the heat felt like the hot rush that comes when the door of an oven is opened.

Diminishing Return. From the point of detonation a ball of fire shot upward and seemed to burst in whirling offshoots of flame. After a moment, an immense cloud arose, reaching for the sky and resplendent with myriad shades of purple and rose. Awful as it was, it was less than the expectations of many onlookers. The Russian observer, Professor Simon Alexandrov, pointed to the cloud, shrugged and said with ill-considered haste: "Not so much."

The bomb was of the type used at Nagasaki, and supposedly the best in the world's only atomic arsenal. But scientists had no way of insuring that any two bombs would be identical. The New York Times's jug-eared science editor, William L. Laurence, who had seen the explosions at Los Alamos and Nagasaki, carefully noted that the Bikini bomb seemed less powerful. The diameter of the cloudhead after five minutes was only 4,400 feet, whereas in New Mexico it had been about 7,500. At a height of 22,000 feet it spawned a second, mushroom-shaped cloud which pushed up to about 35,000 feet. The predictions had been for 60,000.

There was no earthquake, no "tidal" (seismic) wave or other catastrophe to justify the fears of crackpots that the bomb would bring the end of the world.

According to Plan. Bikini atoll was still there, its waving palms confounding the punsters who had said it would become "Nothing Atoll." The Nevada still floated proudly. But the damage had been great, and just about what the experts said they had expected. The cruiser-hulled carrier Independence, which took the greatest force of the blast, was a shambles, racked by internal fires and explosions (from ammunition and aviation fuel) which had sunk many a stronger ship in wartime. Because deadly radiation, three to five times greater than men could tolerate, persisted in the water around her hull, her fires could not be quenched.

The Japanese light cruiser Sakawa was as badly damaged, or worse. The strongest ships which had taken crippling damage were the battleship Arkansas, the Jap battleship Nagato and the heavy cruiser Pensacola. Their upper works had been sheared off or twisted; it was doubtful that any men could have survived if the ships had been manned. Their guinea-pig complement of pigs, goats and rats would supply the evidence.

Only two ships had been sunk outright, both soft-shelled transports built on Maritime Commission hulls; the Gilliam and Carlisle. The destroyer Lamson turned on her beam ends and eventually sank. Another can, the Anderson, was in danger of following her. In all, some 30 vessels had suffered graduated damage.*

Aboard the lightly damaged battleship Pennsylvania (on the fringe of the fleet) tethered goats were at ease, munching hay the day after their exposure to atomic fission. Though they looked healthy enough to chew a belaying pin, the question was whether they would later die of radiation disease.

The test was over, and Vice Admiral William H. Blandy, the task force commander, rated a rousing "Well done." The contest of interpretation could begin. The larger test still loomed like a giant thunderhead: man could control the atom, but could he control himself in his use of the atom?

*Named for the former bombardier in its crew, Captain Dave Semple of Riverside, Calif., killed in a B-29 last March in New Mexico.

*Results would be announced in general terms as soon as readings of 10,000 instruments were collated, but for security reasons the Navy would not tell exactly where the bomb went off, the layout of target ships, the bomb-dropping technique, the pressures and heat generated by the blast, or the efficiency of the bomb.

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