Nuclear Test Film - Operation Ivy
10.4 Mt · Nov 1, 1952 · Enewetak Atoll · 693 Hiroshimas
On 1 November 1952 the United States detonated the first true hydrogen bomb. Mike was not a deliverable weapon but an 82-ton experimental apparatus, a building-sized cryogenic flask of liquid deuterium chilled near absolute zero. It yielded 10.4 megatons — roughly 700 Hiroshimas — and completely vaporized the island of Elugelab, leaving a crater 1.2 miles wide and 160 feet deep where land had been.
The fireball was over three miles across. Irradiated coral fell on ships 30 miles away, and the mushroom cloud spread 100 miles. The film was kept from the American public for years; a sanitized version was released only after the Soviet Union tested its own thermonuclear device. Mike proved that weapons of effectively unlimited yield were now possible.