On Saturday, November 1, 1952, the United States detonated the world’s first “Super Bomb” at Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands. A thermo-nuclear device, code-named MIKE, the Super first demonstrated the capability of producing a fusion reaction on earth, similar to that whereby the Sun produces heat.
IVY-MIKE the first Hydrogen Bomb presentsA fascinating narrative of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s involvement in the testing of the world’s first thermonuclear device (H-Bomb) because late calculations suggested that the explosive energy released might be great enough to blow the atoll apart and generate a dangerous tsunami. It also relates the problems faced by oceanographers in dealing with this uncertainty. This book offers an accurate historical perspective of nuclear testing in the Pacific not available in any other work.
Although the narrator of this story is a fictional person who is in a position to know everything, all events depicted are accurate descriptions of actual circumstances. Three days after MIKE was detonated, a destructive tsunami was generated by a large earthquake in the northwest Pacific. The narrator concludes by conjecturing whether it would it have been deemed coincidental had the real tsunami occurred three days earlier.