Bikini Atoll, Operation Castle; “Bravo” detonation: the “Shrimp” device is detonated. But due to errors in the bomb’s design, it turns out to be much more powerful than expected. The first signs that something has gone wrong arrive at the trigger bunker, 35 kilometers from the explosion, where Bernard O’Keefe is located. He is a man of strong nerves, who, the night before the raid on Nagasaki, had changed the connections for the plutonium bomb’s trigger because they were incorrect, defying procedure and permits. This is a man who, in 1953, climbed the tower where an unexploded nuclear device lay, and accidentally disconnected the trigger connector. O’Keefe feels the bunker swaying and moving and refuses to believe it: the underground bunker is anchored to the island’s rock and has 1-meter-thick reinforced concrete walls. O’Keefe feels nauseated or seasick. The shock wave has reached them through the rock, faster than the shock wave in the air. After 15 minutes, they emerge from the bunker to observe the scene: the palm trees are down, the birds have disappeared, the radioactivity is starting to rise, then small rocks begin to fall from the sky (35 km away!). They return to the bunker for shelter. They will be evacuated by helicopter, like hundreds of villages on nearby islands more than 100 km away. The explosion had been 15 million tons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bikini Atoll, Operation Castle; “Bravo” detonation: the “Shrimp” device is detonated. But due to errors…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ev-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n