Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester

island chiefs said later that Wyatt’s invocation of the Bible had been the clincher, the masterstroke: “We didn’t feel we had any other choice but to obey the Americans.” And Chief Juda, the local iroij who by custom led the community in all matters, reluctantly agreed.

It has never been fully explained just how or when the islanders acquiesced. The Pentagon later said Chief Juda had given his enthusiastic assent right away, and that he thought the bomb tests were a wonderful idea. What we know from a public relations film made some three weeks later, when the commodore tried to get the chief to repeat his enthusiasm in front of a camera, is that the story was somewhat different. The film’s director had to suffer several takes before Juda performed with the degree of sincerity required. He agreed to make what today looks like a rehearsed and robotic utterance before a gathering of puzzled and miserable-looking islanders: “We will go. We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”3

      That was sufficient for the Americans. Later there was to be much keening and wailing. But initially the islanders did as they had been bidden. The islanders were duly out of Bikini within a month. They packed up their belongings, abandoned their modest houses and beloved outrigger canoes, and left the homes and gardens they had occupied and tended peaceably for scores of generations past, and they went off in a big and ungainly American naval vessel to an unknown island far away—and all at the behest of white men they’d never before seen, so these white men could perform tasks that they did not readily comprehend and that seemed to be of little value to them.

      With enough food for an eight-week stay, they were herded into a single landing craft and bumped uncomfortably over the sea 125 miles east to a very much smaller atoll, Rongerik; it had just half a square mile of land compared with the three and a half of Bikini. Rongerik was already well known to the Bikinians—it took just a day and night’s voyage on an outrigger to get there—and they didn’t like the place. It had poor soil, precious little fresh water, and a wretched few coconut trees. More important, it was, according to local legend, home to a clutch of strange demonic spirits much feared in this corner of the Marshalls. Nonetheless, blithely trusting that the Americans were acting in good faith, they settled in on Rongerik as best they could. They tried to resume a semblance of their disrupted lives, while the testing program back on their home islands got fully under way.

      The transformation of their former home was almost instantaneous. Just as soon as the islanders passed over the horizon, from demurrage stations far out at sea a vast armada of American ships started swiftly moving in to take their place.

      Admiral Blandy had named his testing program Operation Crossroads—“it is apparent that warfare, perhaps civilization itself, has been brought to a crossroads by this revolutionary weapon,” he had said back in Washington—and it was to be run to a very tight schedule. Construction battalions, Seabees, moved onshore to erect blockhouses and barracks and steel towers for all the cameras and radiation sensors and telescopes and men that would be needed; flotillas of ships brought in heavy materials (cement, steel, bulldozers, backhoes, tons of protective lead shielding); and the navy started ferrying in scores of old and captured ships of every type imaginable, which were to be set down at fixed positions in the lagoon and used as targets.

      More than forty thousand men were soon to be involved out in the western Pacific—eating, inter alia, twenty tons of meat and seventy thousand candy bars every single day—making sure the testing program went ahead as scheduled. For everyone knew that with the help of their spies, the Soviets were breathing hard down the Americans’ necks. And those in the U.S. Navy knew, or suspected, that their very profession, their navy, could well be imperiled, because sinking their ships with atomic bombs was now, apparently, quite as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Operation Crossroads was to be the first of the 55 nuclear test programs (most of which involved several separate tests) that would be run by the United States over the next half century. The total of 1,032 atomic bombs that America has exploded since 1945 far exceeds the combined totals of all the other nuclear devices exploded by all other nuclear-capable countries in the world. In later years the United States would conduct tests of different kinds of delivery systems (of gravity drops, ballistic missiles, artillery shells, mines) and for different kinds of uses and customers (for the army; for use in outer space; even for peaceful uses, such as digging great trenches in the earth). Most of these later tests would be carried out in the deserts of Nevada, many of them underground. But the most impressive first 67 of these tests were carried out in the Pacific, and the biggest and most symbolic was on Bikini itself.4

      Though only twenty-three tests were carried out there, the TNT-equivalent tonnage of each of the bombs was enormous; and because the Bikini weapons taken together were so huge (and because the tests of two of them, as we shall see, went so badly wrong) those twenty-three tests account for more than 15 percent of the total power of all the atomic explosions triggered in the history of all American testing.

      Crossroads was the very first of these tests, and it was specifically designed for the benefit of the navy: the ships being led into the anchorage in the weeks leading up to the first of the two main explosions were to be steel-clad guinea pigs, the first nonhuman victims of the Pacific’s atomic age.

      Navy crews first assembled a total of seventy-three ships toward the eastern end of the lagoon, some four miles southwest of Bikini Island. The vessels were clustered in concentric circles around a red-and-white-painted American superdreadnought battleship, the USS Nevada, the ship that had famously managed to get away during the Pearl Harbor attack, despite being hit by a torpedo and bombs during the raid. She was old, built in 1914, and the navy thought that choosing her to be the bull’s-eye for the first A-bomb test would permit her to die with dignity, still in service to her country.

      But she didn’t die. In the end, the bombardier of the plane that carried the first bomb up from the airfield at Kwajalein—the Able shot, as it was termed—proved less than competent and missed her by seven hundred yards. She didn’t sink, was nicely repaired, and limped back into service for two more years.

      This bomb used for the Crossroads Able shot was almost identical in design and delivery to the weapon that had been dropped on Nagasaki a year previously, was essentially the same as the first-ever test weapon exploded weeks beforehand in New Mexico: it was a Fat Man, with a plutonium core, and it was set to detonate in midair five hundred feet above the target. It did so, precisely on schedule if not precisely on target, at 9:00 a.m. on July 1, 1946.

Its explosion, and its effects, turned out to be only moderately spectacular. The press—more than a hundred reporters were gathered on ships moored outside the lagoon5—was seemingly compelled to display reverent ecstasies of purple prose. And who could blame them? After all, the first three atomic explosions had been witnessed only by American military personnel or by the victims. Almost no American civilians had ever seen such a thing—another reason that Bikini, as the mise-en-scène for the weapons’ first public display, remains so symbolically important a place, and why the Pacific, as backdrop, remains the most nuclear of the world’s oceans.

      The New York Times reporter aboard the USS Appalachian, William Laurence, was dutifully awed, dictating over the ship’s wireless:

      As I watched the pillar of cosmic fire from the sky-deck of this ship it was about eighteen miles to the northeast. It was an awesome, spine-chilling spectacle, a boiling, angry, super volcano struggling toward the sky, belching enormous masses of iridescent flames and smoke and giant rings of rainbow, at times giving the appearance of a monster tugging at the earth in an effort to lift it and hurl it into space.

      From this point I watched the atomic bomb as it burst. It was like watching the birth and the death of a star, born and disintegrated in the instant of its birth. The new-born star made its appearance in a flash so dazzling no human eye could look at it except through goggles that turned bright daylight over the Pacific into a pitch-dark night. When the flash came it lighted up the sky and ocean with the light of many suns, a light not of the earth.