Histories Compiled by Ewa Historian John Bond
1962 “Atomic Rainbow Over Honolulu” was a major public spectator event state-wide
From Starfish Prime – Thor missile shots, not from NAS Barbers Point B-52 bomb drops
A local resident said that in 1962 KPOI’s Bearded Bob Lowrie rock and roll DJ did a countdown for the blast. Suddenly the dark night sky turned pea green, and KPOI went off the air – only static . Then a large fireball appeared in the sky west of Honolulu creating a beautiful but chilling sunset 11 p.m. Power went off in Manoa Valley…
Governor Quinn stated to an audience and receiving big applause that the nuclear fireworks was a fitting flourish for the crowning of Miss Hawaii 1962, Pamela Anderson.
“Nuclear blast fired; glow bathes isles,” declared the front page headline in the Honolulu Advertiser. “N-Blast Produces Colorful Display,” said the Star-Bulletin. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the 1.45-megaton blast — about 110 Hiroshima’s — also shorted out part of the Hawaiian Electric utility grid, plunging several streets into darkness, and triggered an untold number of burglar alarms.
Watching from a Waikiki hotel courtyard, Life magazine correspondent Thomas Thompson reported, “The blue-black tropical night suddenly turned into a hot lime green. It was brighter than noon. The green changed into a lemonade pink and finally, terribly, blood red. It was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood on the sky.”
For all of the bomb’s force, it generated no sound — only light in the vacuum of space.
The Advertiser said the flash was followed by a “spectacular pyrotechnic aftermath” lasting seven minutes.
“It was very, very dramatic,” recalls Kailua resident Alan Lloyd, a retired Hawaiian Electric executive. “We were up on top of a hill above Salt Lake, looking out to the southwestern horizon. It was the classic photo- graphic flashbulb — a brilliant flash. The point of detonation was behind a little trade wind cloud, but the whole world lit up right away and then the whole sky turned red and stayed that way for about 20 minutes.”
Along with the blast came a burst of radiation called an electromagnetic pulse that caused voltage surges on Oahu’s power lines and knocked out about 30 street light circuits, including those on Ferdinand Street in Manoa and Kawainui Street in Kailua.
This caused major interest in the Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) phenomena
Honolulu quickly became an EMP poster child. The “Hawaiian streetlight incident,” generated U.S. Senate hearings in 1963.
In 1981, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment calculated that the explosion of a high-yield nuke 180 miles over the central United States would bathe the entire nation in a powerful electric field (25,000 volts per meter), which would easily fry all electronic components and likely knock out electric grids.
In 2005, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., warned that a rogue nation like North Korea or a terrorist group could inflict serious, long-term damage on the United States with the pulse from a single nuke.
1962 NIGHT to DAY
50 years ago today, a hydrogen bomb lit the sky over Hawaii in a renewed nuclear race between superpowers
Honolulu Star-Advertiser 8 Jul 2012
LIFE MAGAZINE / JULY 20, 1962
This Life magazine photo shows spectators on Waikiki Beach gaping at the sight of a high-altitude nuclear test above Johnston Atoll on July 8, 1962.
“The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch.” — Revelation 8:10
The “great star” that lit up the night sky over Honolulu 50 years ago today had no roots in the Bible.
But its effects rivaled the dramatic imagery of Revelation.
A hydrogen bomb test above Johnston Atoll called Starfish Prime turned night to day on Oahu, 860 miles to the northeast.
“Nuclear blast fired; glow bathes isles,” declared the front page headline in the Honolulu Advertiser.
“N-Blast Produces Colorful Display,” said the Star-Bulletin. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the 1.45-megaton blast — about 110 Hiroshima’s — also shorted out part of the Hawaiian Electric utility grid, plunging several streets into darkness, and triggered an untold number of burglar alarms.
Watching from a Waikiki hotel courtyard, Life magazine correspondent Thomas Thompson reported, “The blue-black tropical night suddenly turned into a hot lime green. It was brighter than noon. The green changed into a lemonade pink and finally, terribly, blood red. It was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood on the sky.”
The test shot happened on July 8, 1962, just three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of mutual destruction.
Against that backdrop, the two superpowers carried out what today would be considered outlandish and environmentally reckless: a series of atmospheric and undersea nuclear explosions, complete with radioactive fallout. There was plenty of precedent. The United States first began using the Pacific as a nuclear testing ground in July 1946 with Operation Crossroads.
Two “Fat Man”-type bombs — the same kind dropped on Nagasaki the summer before — were detonated near Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the first in the air, the second underwater, to gauge their effects on arrayed target ships.
Over the next dozen years, Bikini was the site of more than 20 atmospheric tests and ultimately became uninhabitable because of radiation. A patch of Nevada desert, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was the other main test site, but the United States also blew up nuclear bombs elsewhere around the Pacific, including Eniwetok in the Marshalls and off San Diego (Operation Wigwam, 1955, targeting a submarine).
The Soviets were conducting their own tests, meanwhile, but by 1959 the two nations entered into an informal moratorium.
That ended in September 1961, when the Soviets began a new round of tests.
President John F. Kennedy, with less than a year on the job, quickly approved more tests in Nevada, at Christmas Island, 1,340 miles south of Honolulu, and at Johnston Atoll.
THE TEST at Johnston involved a high-altitude burst, with the warhead carried aloft by a Thor missile. One goal was to see if nuclear blasts could be effective against incoming warheads from an enemy intercontinental ballistic missile.
In the initial attempt to launch Starfish, on June 20, 1962, the engine inexplicably shut off after a minute of flight and the missile started to break apart. The range control officer blew it up, destroying the nuclear warhead, but large pieces of the missile fell back to the atoll, some of them contaminated with plutonium.
The second attempt, on July 8, worked without a hitch.
Just before 11 p.m. Hawaii time, the Thor rocket roared to life on the island’s launch- pad, carrying a W-49 warhead skyward.
This was a fusion bomb, different from the Hiroshima kind, which splits apart atoms of uranium or plutonium. Thermonuclear bombs instead fuse together atoms of hydrogen, releasing considerably more energy than their fission buddies.
The United States first detonated a hydrogen bomb in 1954, a notorious 15megaton test at Bikini called Castle Bravo. The ensuing radioactive cloud contaminated 7,000 square miles, including the islands of Rongerik, Rongelap and Utirik, and a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5.
Four more hydrogen bombs rocked Bikini in 1954, then another six in 1956, according to the Federation of American Scientists. In 1958, Bikini and Eniwetok bore the brunt of thermonuclear testing, with another six tests, but then the action switched to Johnston Atoll, with high-altitude tests on July 31 (also visible from Hawaii) and Aug. 11 before the moratorium kicked in.
THE THOR MISSILE rose relentlessly and at an altitude of 62 miles left the atmosphere. It reached an apogee of about 620 miles, then fell from the heavens.
At nine seconds past 11 p.m. Honolulu time, the warhead detonated 248 miles up.
For all the bomb’s force, it generated no sound — only light in the vacuum of space. The burst was seen 1,600 miles away at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshalls. An RC-135 reconnaissance jet photographed a blazing celestial torch.
A report the next day in the Advertiser said the flash was followed by a “spectacular pyrotechnic aftermath” lasting seven minutes.
“It was very, very dramatic,” recalls Kailua resident Alan Lloyd, a retired Hawaiian Electric executive. “We were up on top of a hill above Salt Lake, looking out to the southwestern horizon. It was the classic photo- graphic flashbulb — a brilliant flash. The point of detonation was behind a little trade wind cloud, but the whole world lit up right away. Of course, it faded away pretty quickly, and then the whole sky turned red and stayed that way for about 20 minutes.”
Along with the blast came a burst of radiation called an electromagnetic pulse that caused voltage surges on Oahu’s power lines and knocked out about 30 street light circuits, including those on Ferdinand Street in Manoa and Kawainui Street in Kailua.
The phenomenon occurs when rays from the blast hit the atmosphere.
Operation Crossroads explosion in 1946 showed lot of wild atmospheric effects
“They cause electrons in the ionosphere to oscillate, which creates an electromagnetic field,” says University of Hawaii physics professor Michael Jones, who has kept an extensive file on the Starfish blast. “It can generate huge voltages.”
EVEN THOUGH the effects here were relatively minor, Honolulu quickly became an EMP poster child. The “Hawaiian streetlight incident,” as it became known, generated U.S. Senate hearings in 1963.
In 1981, in the depths of the Cold War, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment calculated that the explosion of a high-yield nuke 180 miles over the central United States would bathe the entire nation in a powerful electric field (25,000 volts per meter), which would easily fry electronic components. That specter was raised again recently by Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich wrote the introduction to a 2009 science-fiction thriller, “One Second After,” about the effects of EMP on a small town in North Carolina. It became a New York Times best-seller. But Gingrich is not alone. As recently as 2005, U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., warned that a rogue nation like North Korea or a terrorist group could inflict serious, long-term damage on the United States with the pulse from a single nuke.
A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space
July 1, 2010 NPR All Things Considered
https://www.npr.org/player/embed/128170775/128248128
Also some local Honolulu residents remember the brilliant light shows put on by the Operation Fishbowl part of Dominic that lit up the sky above the Pacific Ocean with nuclear yields up to 700 times the size that which destroyed Hiroshima. These were not B-52 air drops but instead where accomplished using Thor missiles launched from Johnston Island. These tests included a dangerous launch pad ordered range safety missile explosion, and in another launch when a rocket engine suddenly stopped it was ordered destroyed at 30,000 feet.
On 9 July 1962 the Thor missile carrying the Starfish Prime warhead exploded as planned and detonated on its downward trajectory.
On 25 July 1962 the Bluegill Prime shot went badly with the Thor missile engulfed in flames, causing the range safety officer to send a destruct command splitting the rocket, rupturing both fuel tanks and badly damaging the entire launch pad facilities. The warhead charges sprayed the area with the moderately radioactive core materials. All these safety detonations contaminated the launch pad area and range with plutonium.
This Project Dominic video provides a visual overview of 36 atmospheric nuclear devices detonated in the Pacific Proving Ground from April to November, 1962.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OkoVuiM4II
Discovery Of Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) Effects
The Johnston Island Thor launches there were revelations about nuclear Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) effects that shut down parts of Honolulu’s electric grid, including 300 streetlights, setting off burglar alarms and damaging a telephone microwave link. The most serious damage was done to several important US, British and Soviet communications satellites.
The visible phenomena due to the air burst were widespread and quite intense with a very large area of the Pacific was illuminated by aurorae phenomena. This was actually a major public attraction in Honolulu watched by thousands. Reactions ranged from delight to fear.
By comparison the B-52 bomb drops went very well and largely without any major safety issues. And there were many more bomb drops than missile launches. (A somewhat frightening conclusion today is that North Korea could be far more successful delivering a nuclear bomb to Honolulu in a cargo or passenger jet than a missile.)
By the 1970’s-80’ there were large numbers of smaller “tactical” nuclear bombs and missiles on the Navy airbase, however the 1960’s Pacific bomb tests were conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Defense Atomic Support Agency.
Much of the declassification (removed from Top Secret status) of the history of nukes in Hawaii has only been fairly recent, meaning generally around 2012. One of the more interesting stories published in Air Force magazine was the use of special B-52 bombers in Hawaii in 1962 to carry and drop nuclear bombs on Christmas and Johnston Islands. There were also many missile fired detonations as part of the Operation Dominic project that some Hawaii veterans still remember.
