Compiled By Ewa Historian John Bond
Operation Crossroads was supported by
NAS Barbers Point in 1946
Operation Crossroads - on Pacific Islands in 1946 was a Navy sponsored atomic bomb demonstration. The atomic bombs tests brought back a lot of contaminated material to Hawaii and to places like Treasure Island, San Francisco have been dealing with this legacy for a very long time. A lot of Site 95 bomb testing legacy remains classified even today. A little known fact is that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) leased land at NAS Barbers Point for supporting Pacific atomic bomb testing.
NAS Barbers Point was part of the MANHATTAN ENGINEER DISTRICT (1945-1946) which grew out of the original Top Secret Manhattan Project that produced two atomic bombs during WW-II. The Barbers Point naval airbase was called “Site 95.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
Operation Crossroads was a pair of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll 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.
A series of three tests was recommended to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships, equipment, and materiel. Timing was critical because Navy manpower required to move the ships was being released from active duty as part of the post-World War II demobilization, and civilian scientists knowledgeable about atomic weapons were leaving federal employment for college teaching positions.
Prospective Operation Crossroads target ships and support ships
at Pearl Harbor on February 27, 1946
The Crossroads tests were the first of many nuclear tests held in the Marshall Islands, and the first to be publicly announced beforehand and observed by an invited audience, including a large press corps. They were conducted by Joint Army/Navy Task Force One, headed by Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy rather than by the Manhattan Project. A fleet of 95 target ships was assembled in Bikini Lagoon and hit with two detonations of Fat Man plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapons of the kind dropped on Nagasaki, each with a yield of 23 kilotons of TNT.
Bikini's native residents agreed to evacuate the island, and were evacuated on board the LST-861, with most moving to the Rongerik Atoll.
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.[15] When the scientists pointed out that the tests might demonstrate ship survivability while ignoring the effect of radiation on sailors, Blandy responded by adding test animals to some of the ships, thereby generating protests from animal rights advocates.
Operation Crossroads was the first operation in which take-off, flight, and landing were accomplished with no one aboard. The feat was an impressive one; many experts had thought it could never be accomplished with planes of this size.’
These were the experiments that captured the imagination of Hanson Baldwin, a military affairs correspondent for the New York Times and Life magazine. He had already predicted that ‘robot planes, rockets, television and radar bombing and atomic bombs will do the work today done by fleets of thousands of piloted bombers.’
Back to the future. As soon as the bomb was released over Bikini the first B-17 control aircraft turned its huge drone (Fox) into the cloud at an altitude of 24,000 feet; Fox was then switched to its automatic pilot, entering the cloud eight minutes after the explosion, while the control (or “beeper”) aircraft raced around the cloud and resumed control when the drone emerged on the other side. Fox was followed by George (at 30,000 feet), How (at 18,000 feet) and Love (at 12,000 feet). All four drones were directed back to Eniwetok atoll where they were handed back to the ground controllers in jeeps at the end of the runway who taxied them to the radiological safe area where the filters and bags were removed and flown to Los Alamos Laboratory for analysis .
In the 1950s, a series of large thermonuclear tests rendered Bikini unfit for subsistence farming and fishing because of radioactive contamination. Bikini remains uninhabited as of 2017, though it is occasionally visited by sport divers. Planners attempted to protect participants in the Operation Crossroads tests against radiation sickness, but one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months.
The Baker test's radioactive contamination of all the target ships was the first case of immediate, concentrated radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called Baker "the world's first nuclear disaster."
Bikini A-Bomb Tests July 1946
Navy film footage depicting the removal of Pacific Islanders from Bikini atoll on March 6/7, 1946
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-cw2ZfCGHg
In February 1946, Commodore Ben Wyatt, the Marshall Island’s military governor, informed the Bikinians that they must leave so that the U.S. government could conduct military tests “for the good of mankind.” On 7 March 1946 the Navy transported the Bikinians to Rongerik Island where, as it turned out, food and water were in short supply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG0Gxy5t0yg
Massive atomic explosion destroys and contaminates the area
U.S. atomic tests in Bikini Atoll in July 1946 staged by a joint Army-Navy task force were the first atomic explosions since the bombings of Japan a year earlier. Documents posted today by the National Security Archive about “Operation Crossroads” shed light on these events as do galleries of declassified videos and photographs. Of two tests staged to determine the effects of the new weapons on warships, the “Baker” test was the most dangerous by contaminating nearby test ships with radioactive mist. According to the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Evaluation Board, because of the radioactive water spewed from the lagoon, the “contaminated ships became radioactive stoves, and would have burned all living things aboard with invisible and painless but deadly radiation.”
The Baker test caused a radiological crisis because task force personnel were assigned to do salvage work on contaminated test ships. Stafford Warren, the task force’s radiation safety adviser, warned task force chief Admiral William Blandy of the danger of these activities: the “ships were “extensively contaminated with dangerous amounts of radioactivity.” It was not possible to achieve “quick decontamination without exposing personnel seriously to radiation.” These warnings eventually led Blandy to halt decontamination activities although only after many military and civilian personnel had been exposed to radioactive substances.
The U.S. Navy’s early March 1946 removal of 167 Pacific islanders from Bikini, their ancestral home, so that the Navy and the Army could prepare for the tests, is also documented with film footage. The Bikinians received the impression that the relocation would be temporary, but subsequent nuclear testing in the atoll rendered the islands virtually uninhabitable.
The bomb drops in Operation Crossroads was from “Dave’s Dream”
a B-29 based in the Marianas Islands
Operation Crossroads at 70
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/07/25/operation-crossroads-70/
There are a lot of things that make Crossroads interesting to me. The bomb was still in the hands of the Manhattan Project. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 had not yet been signed into law (Truman would sign it in August, and it would go into effect in January 1947), so the Atomic Energy Commission did not yet exist.
There were these amazing interservice rivalry aspects: the whole backdrop is a Navy vs. Army tension. The Manhattan Project, and the Army Air Forces, had gotten all the glory for the bomb. The Navy didn’t want to be left out, or seen as irrelevant. Hence them hosting a big test, and glorying in the fact that a Nagasaki-sized atomic bomb doesn’t completely destroy a full naval squadron. (Which was no surprise to anybody on the scientific or military side of things.)
The US had only about 10 atomic bombs at the time. So they expended about 20% of their entire nuclear arsenal on these tests, for relatively little military knowledge gained. The Los Alamos scientists were pretty lukewarm on the whole operation — it just didn’t seem like it was getting them much. One wonders, if the bomb had not still be under military control, whether it would have happened.
