military personnel launched a case against the government in 1984, alleging that the American government had downplayed the radiation danger. government paid compensation to island residents retired U.S. The Castle Bravo test, and the harm done to the residents, triggered global protests against the testing of nuclear bombs. Some residents had to be evacuated, and the people of the Marshall Islands suffered an elevated rate of cancer. military personnel and the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler exposed to a high level of radiation, according to an article published in 2017 by the Atomic Heritage Foundation. The yield was about two and half times greater than expected and resulted in nuclear fallout spreading for about 7,000 square miles (18,130 square kilometers) across the Pacific, leaving residents of the Marshall Islands, U.S. On Mathe United States detonated a 15 megaton nuclear weapon on the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, in a test codenamed "Castle Bravo." It was detonated on the surface rather than being dropped by air and is the fifth most powerful nuclear weapon detonation in history. A 1,000-kiloton nuclear blast might produce third-degree burns up to 5 miles away, second-degree burns up to 6 miles away, and first-degree burns up to 7 miles away, according to one estimate from. The topography of Nagasaki, which was nestled in narrow valleys between mountains, reduced the bomb’s effect, limiting the destruction to 2.6 square miles.The Castle Bravo nuclear detonation is the fifth most powerful nuclear weapon detonation in history. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. Thick clouds over the primary target, the city of Kokura, drove Sweeney to a secondary target, Nagasaki, where the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning. Hiroshima’s devastation failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, however, and on August 9 Major Charles Sweeney flew another B-29 bomber, Bockscar, from Tinian. ![]() The plane dropped the bomb-known as “Little Boy”-by parachute at 8:15 in the morning, and it exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city. base on the Pacific island of Tinian, the more than 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb was loaded aboard a modified B-29 bomber christened Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world. Proponents of the A-bomb-such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state-believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. No Surrender for the Japaneseīy the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device-a plutonium bomb-at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico. ![]() 1 It commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash created when a nuclear weapon explodes. Robert Oppenheimer worked to turn these materials into a workable atomic bomb. Nuclear fallout is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast, so called because it 'falls out' of the sky after the explosion and the shock wave has passed. They sent them to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a team led by J. ![]() Over the next several years, the program’s scientists worked on producing the key materials for nuclear fission-uranium-235 and plutonium (Pu-239).
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