Blasts from the past: Bikini 60
years on By Ronan Thomas
The detonations roll down the years in a
place synonymous with Cold War history - Bikini
Atoll.
About 3,500 kilometers southeast of
Hawaii, in the azure waters of the Marshall
Islands, "Operation Crossroads" - the first of a
series of US atomic tests between 1946 and 1954 -
irradiated much of the tiny Micronesian coral
atoll and smashed a target fleet of aging warships
anchored in its lagoon. In July 1946, two
23-kiloton atomic bombs, code-named "Able" and
"Baker", were deployed to devastating effect. The
United States served notice to Josef Stalin's
Soviet Union of its resolve to dominate the new high
ground
of nuclear strategy and defend its hard-won
victories of World War II.
The 60th
anniversary of these first tests will be marked on
July 1 and 25 this year and will take place as
nuclear-proliferation issues are again dominating
international geopolitics. Sixty years on from the
Bikini tests, the spotlight is falling on Iran's
and North Korea's potential acquisition of
nuclear-weapons capability.
The Bikini
experience has many lessons. Bikini reminds
nuclear aspirants that the proven benefits of
weapon possession - national prestige and
geostrategic respect - are accompanied by huge
financial costs: testing, maintenance,
modernization and replacement. And then there are
the dangers of managing a nuclear deterrence
strategy - brinkmanship.
Paradise to
Armageddon The atmospheric nuclear tests at
Bikini in 1946 were two among 20 that took place
in the so-called Pacific Proving Grounds between
1945 and 1963. They witnessed use of the fourth
and fifth atomic weapons in history and the first
since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The deep freeze of
the Cold War was setting in.
Today, after
decades of testing (and then non-proliferation
efforts by the US and other nuclear-armed powers),
atmospheric, underwater and subterranean testing
of nuclear weapons is demonized. These same
powers, seeking to preempt 21st-century security
threats, are united in opposition with the
international environmentalist lobby.
But
in 1946 there were no such concerns. The first
atomic weapons unleashed in 1945 - from the
Trinity tests in New Mexico to Hiroshima and
Nagasaki - had been on land. Now it was to be
water. A total of 167 islanders were evacuated
from the atoll and more than 42,000 US service
personnel arrived off Bikini to manage and
observe.
The Able test consisted of a
23-kiloton "Fat Man" atomic bomb dropped by
aircraft to airburst 158.5 meters over the Bikini
lagoon on July 1. Baker was an identical device
set to explode 27m underwater three weeks later on
July 25.
Both tests were designed to
measure fission weapons' effectiveness in
eliminating enemy shipping concentrations. The
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had weighed in at 15
kilotons each. Able and Baker were almost twice as
powerful. From an assembled fleet of 240 ships, 90
appropriate targets were selected.
The
roll call of ships offered up for nuclear
sacrifice was in itself impressive. The
33,000-ton, 271m-long US aircraft carrier Saratoga
led the tethered armada.
Saratoga had
served with distinction at Guadalcanal and in the
Indian Ocean against the Japanese. Anchored
further out, in a concentric circle of steel, lay
a second US carrier, Independence; the aging US
battleships Nevada (survivor of the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and now a target
ship painted entirely in orange), Arkansas, New
York and Pennsylvania; cruisers Pensacola and Salt
Lake City; 12 destroyers, including Lamson and
Anderson; eight submarines, including Pilotfish
and Apogon; and 19 transport ships, including
Carlisle and Gilliam. Alongside were a host of
landing craft, barges and a concrete dry dock. The
ships carried thousands of monitoring devices and,
aboard some, live animals.
Surrendered
warships from the vanquished nations of the recent
1939-45 conflict were also placed in the target
area. They included the huge Japanese battleship
Nagato, bristling with 16-inch guns, cruiser
Sakawa, and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen -
a magnificent vessel famous as the escort ship to
the Bismarck. The Prinz Eugen had been christened
a "lucky" ship by its crew, having emerged from
the Battle of the Atlantic largely unscathed. Its
luck finally ran out in July 1946, but it took
both atomic blasts to sink it.
At exactly
9am local time on July 1, 23-kiloton Able was
dropped by a US B-29 bomber, slightly off target,
but to massive effect. Five ships sank; others
caught fire or were scattered by wave damage. The
entire lagoon was contaminated by radioactive
fallout.
Three weeks later came the
underwater test - Baker. A second 23-kiloton
device, suspended under a US landing ship,
exploded at 8:35am local time. The blast was
powerful enough to lift Saratoga out of the water,
and a vast water cloud chamber and mushroom cloud
rose to more than 3,000m. Sixteen ships, including
both Saratoga and Nagato, sank or were severely
damaged. Again the entire area was flooded with
radiation.
Film of the underwater Baker
test, capturing the blast wave swamping the best
of capital ships, was rushed to Washington: the
footage became world-famous and to this day the
humbling epitome of nuclear effectiveness.
Within days the surviving vessels had been
reboarded, towed away and either decontaminated or
sunk. Twelve ships were actually to remain in US
Navy service after decontamination and returned to
US ports. The bright-orange Nevada, badly damaged
by both blasts, was used for target practice until
1948.
Geostrategic fallout The
Bikini tests in 1946 had profound resonance and
were to turbocharge the US-Soviet arms race.
Responding to Bikini, the Soviet Union
tested its own atomic weapon in 1949, setting off
an arms race that persisted until the Soviet
collapse in 1991. The advent of Mao Zedong's Red
China in 1949 and the Korean War of 1950-53
deepened this international tension radically. The
post-1945 world became one where use of nuclear
weapons was always an active foreign-policy
consideration.
With Operation Crossroads
pronounced a major success, the program continued
in the atoll until 1958, and elsewhere in the
South Pacific until 1963, witnessing even more
powerful hydrogen-bomb explosions. In response to
later tests at Bikini, the Soviets were to carry
out the largest experiment to date - a 50-megaton
thermonuclear device exploded in the Russian
Arctic in 1961.
But the cost of Operation
Crossroads was huge (more than US$1.3 billion)
and, as the arms race accelerated through the
1950s and 1960s, US spending would rise
inexorably. The world moved from bipolar to
multipolar possession of nuclear arsenals. Nuclear
weapons were worn by their possessors
ostentatiously and expensively on the hip.
And Bikini underwrote US nuclear strategic
confidence in the run-up to the Cuban missile
crisis of 1962 - the greatest scare of the Cold
War.
As that crisis passed, atmospheric
testing of the Bikini type was abandoned. The
Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, signed by the US,
China and Britain, banned all but underground
testing. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s,
nuclear non-proliferation efforts, accompanied by
Byzantine international diplomacy, were boosted by
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1992
the US ended all testing - having detonated more
than 1,200 weapons since 1945 - in favor of
computer-based simulations. In the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CBT) of 1996, the five permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council
agreed to outlaw all explosive testing in
principle.
The CBT brought the Cold War
test era to an end. French tests of its force
de frappe, conducted in the Pacific since
1960, ceased. Britain, with a long history of
atomic testing, at Christmas Island in the Pacific
and in Australia, had conducted its last low-yield
test in 1991. The final Soviet test took place in
1990, with the Russian Federation extending test
moratoriums. China, which had tested since 1964,
halted atmospheric tests in 1980 and all declared
testing by 1996.
But the picture today is
far from rosy. The CBT remains a flawed document
as critical signatories have yet to ratify it (US,
Russia and China). More recent nuclear powers have
also refused to ratify (Israel, Pakistan and
India).
In the late 1990s, North Korea's
secretive plutonium and uranium programs -
Pyongyang may now have several weapons or is a
nuclear bluffer par excellence - have cast ripples
of uncertainty across Asia and beyond. And
Pakistan's and India's kiloton-strength tests of
May 1998 refocused world attention on the nuclear
issue as never before.
International
attention has now shifted to Iran after its stated
resumption of uranium enrichment and referral to
the UN last Saturday. Its next moves will have
profound ramifications for the Middle East nuclear
theater.
Amid concerns that a
nuclear-armed Iran could set off a new Middle
Eastern arms race - with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and
Turkey following suit - the added possibility of
preemptive military action by either Israel or the
United States, or both, has become the stuff of
regional nightmares.
History whispers
from the lagoon Bikini's experience is a
salutary reminder to aspirant nations of the
awesome power and responsibilities of nuclear
weapons - though in comparison with H-bomb tests
in the 1950s, those of 1946 were firecrackers. The
15-megaton "Bravo" hydrogen-bomb test at Bikini in
1954, for example, completely vaporized the nearby
islands of Bokonijien, Aerokojlol and Nam, leaving
a huge crater.
In 2006, Bikini Atoll is a
lonely but impressive diving site and radiation
levels in the lagoon are deemed acceptable for
tourism - safe to walk on but not to farm
foodstuffs. Levels of cesium-137 are still judged
too high on the atoll for year-around habitation.
Bikini remains a US scientific research
site, monitoring radiation and cleanup
initiatives. The islanders evacuated in 1946 and
their descendants are permitted visits once a year
only and are embroiled in compensation and
right-of-return disputes. The South Pacific has
been nuclear-free since March 1996 when the US,
Britain and France agreed protocols to a South
Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
Part of
the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the atoll
itself is tiny: 237 hectares surrounding a lagoon
in an archipelago dotted across 386 kilometers. A
broken circle of 23 coral and sand islands in
stunning waters - sea temperatures in the mid-20s
Celsius, with outstanding visibility - from the
air the atoll resembles the whitened bones of a
shark's jaw, with broken teeth. The teeth are the
sunken nuclear fleet.
Ten ships lie in the
atoll, with others scattered in neighboring
waters: the Prinz Eugen sank off Kwajalein Island
to the southeast while being towed away from the
Baker blast site. The Saratoga, sitting upright on
the bottom of Bikini lagoon, 58m down, now
welcomes occasional divers down to its ghostly
flight deck.
For those hoping to develop
nuclear weapons, Bikini's history points to both
their utility and their burden.
The
possession of nuclear weapons, so the argument
goes, deters aggression and major conflicts -
Europe since 1945 being the classic example. In
2006, Asian and Middle Eastern powers are in
theory similar "rational actors" - regional
players that know that actual use of nuclear
weapons, even with vastly smaller yields, would be
a cataclysmic prospect. Fallout would drift
lethally with the region's prevailing winds, from
west to east, and truly accord with the old Cold
War strategic concept of mutually assured
destruction (MAD).
In this sense Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's statement last
October - "Israel must be wiped off the map" - has
perhaps more in common with Nikita Khrushchev's
famous 1956 outburst, "We will bury you!" The
world has been here before: brinkmanship and
colorful rhetoric are nothing new.
Then
there is the cost. Above all, entry into and
membership of the nuclear club remains hugely
expensive. The price of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's successful and heroic deterrence of
Soviet ambitions during the Cold War was perhaps
$8 trillion, according to Cold War: An
Illustrated History by Jeremy Isaacs and
Taylor Downing. It was probably much more. The
cost to the US of nuclear weapons from 1940 to
1998 alone was estimated by the Brookings
Institution at $5.48 trillion, or $35 billion per
year.
The burdens continue. Britain is
soon to carry out multibillion-pound modernization
of its Trident submarine-launched nuclear system.
And just three weeks ago, with an eye to the
alleged ambitions of Iran and other states, French
President Jacques Chirac made a speech intimating
that his country would not hesitate to use nuclear
weapons, whatever the cost, if its national
interests dictated it.
As policymakers and
journalists mark the events 60 years ago at Bikini
Atoll, the message will be clear. Permanent
membership in the nuclear-weapon club is a
reassuring adjunct to national security and
political rhetoric. But possession also portends a
Pandora's Box of decision-making, and only those
with the deepest pockets should apply.
Ronan Thomas is a British
correspondent.
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