Histories Compiled by Ewa Historian John Bond
Nuclear Tests and Weapons History in the Pacific and near Hawaii. NAS Barbers Point was a major support base.
The United States was engaged in a Cold War Nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union to build bigger and better bombs from 1947 until 1991.
Hawaii has a close relationship with nuclear tests and weapons deployment because of its location in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean is a large area and considered an ideal test range for weapons due to all of the open and securable space. Some of the test ships that survived were later sunk in target practice off of Pearl Harbor.
The Pacific was also used by France and Great Britain to test their nuclear weapons. The United Kingdom tested over 40 nuclear weapons in Australia during the 1950s, on the Montebello Islands and at the Woomera Prohibited Area between 1955 and 1963. The French conducted 193 bomb tests which were carried out in French Polynesia on Mururoa and Fangataufa from 1966 to 1996.
Operation Crossroads was a pair of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in mid-1946. They were the first nuclear weapon tests since Trinity in July 1945, and the first detonations of nuclear devices since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The purpose of the tests was to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships.
Navy crews attempting to clean up the earlier huge Bikini test mess were regularly exposed to unseen plutonium. Film monitoring badges showed 67 overdoses between August 6 and 9, 1946. More than half of the 320 Geiger counters available shorted out and became unusable. Geiger counters could not detect plutonium.
The effects on the island people in the area was a nuclear disaster. Their desire to return to Bikini was thwarted indefinitely by the U.S. decision to resume nuclear testing at Bikini in 1954. During 1954, 1956, and 1958, twenty-one more nuclear bombs were detonated at Bikini. Castle Bravo, utilized a new design utilizing a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb was detonated at dawn on March 1, 1954. Scientists miscalculated and the 15 megaton nuclear explosion far exceeded the expected yield of 4 to 8 megatons and being about 1,000 times more powerful than each of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The scientists and military authorities were shocked by the size of the explosion and many of the instruments they had put in place to evaluate the effectiveness of the device were destroyed.
Pressure to cancel Operation Crossroads altogether came from scientists and diplomats. Manhattan Project scientists argued that further testing was unnecessary and environmentally dangerous. A Los Alamos study warned "the water near a recent surface explosion will be a witch's brew" of radioactivity. Ironically the tests forever popularized the Bikini bathing suit as the "atom bomb of fashion."
Bomb Test USS Nevada Sunk about 60–65 miles off Barbers Point
On July 31, 1948, the battleship USS Nevada BB-36 was sunk by a torpedo from a Navy bomber, ending the career of possibly the most battered ship in history. Not only did the Nevada survive the Pearl Harbor attack in which she was hit by a torpedo and as many as 10 bombs but she was also hit by a Japanese Kamikaze suicide plane off Okinawa as well as by shore battery fire, but easily survived those hits. The Nevada also participated in the Normandy Invasion in 1944 and the recapture of Attu, Alaska from the Japanese in 1942.
USS Nevada was used in 2 atomic bomb tests, having survived a first surface blast and then the second subsurface blast. The mighty battleship was then used for target practice by other US Navy warships, including the battleship USS Iowa. Expected to be sunk by the heavy bombardment, the Nevada kept on floating and was finally finished off with the last torpedo.
