Today in Technology History
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November 1
Exactly fifty years ago, the world's first thermonuclear device exploded in a secret test in the Pacific Ocean.
In 1950, President Harry Truman announced that the U.S. intended to build a powerful new kind of nuclear weapon. The atomic bombs used against Japan in 1945, and all the atomic bombs built in the intervening period, got their explosive energy from nuclear fission -- that is, from the splitting of atoms. The new bomb the U.S. was working on would use a much more powerful force called nuclear fusion -- the combining of atoms by smashing them together.
Because the ideal atoms to use in nuclear fusion are hydrogen atoms, the fusion bomb is also called the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb. The word "thermonuclear" is also used to describe such weapons because of the extreme heat necessary for nuclear fusion to take place. (The prefix "thermo-" comes from the Greek word for heat.) In fact, fusion requires such a high temperature -- millions of degrees -- that an initial fission reaction is used to generate the required heat. In other words, a hydrogen bomb basically uses a normal atomic bomb as a detonator, a mere prelude to the real show.
The first thermonuclear explosion took place on November 1, 1952 on one of the islands in the Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands between Australia and Hawaii. (The U.S. had already conducted seven atomic tests on the atoll, starting in 1948.) After the test, the small island was gone.
The codename for the test, MIKE, started with the letter "m" since this was the first nuclear explosion measured in "megatons" instead of "kilotons" -- meaning that nuclear weapons had reached a whole new scale of destructiveness. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had about the same explosive force as 15 kilotons (15,000 tons) of TNT. The thermonuclear device exploded in the MIKE test had the same force as 10.4 megatons (10,400,000 tons) of TNT. In other words, the MIKE explosion was almost 700 times as powerful as the explosion at Hiroshima.
Although rumors of a hydrogen bomb began to abound soon after the test, there was no official government comment for a few months -- so the world didn't yet know that the age of the H-bomb had begun.
Related links:
These pages have more information, including pictures and detailed technical explanations relating to the MIKE test:
Click here to read testimonials and eyewitness accounts from people who watched the MIKE test:
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