U.S. Navy After the War, Nuclear Testing-- Part 2: Bikini Atoll Tests

The United States tested its first atom bomb on July 16, 1945,  at a site 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico.  The code name for the test was "Trinity."

Just a year later, a joint Army-Navy task force staged the first atomic explosions since the ones on Japan.  The test was codenamed "Operation Crossroads" and was conducted on the Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.  The goal was to find out the effect atomic blasts would have on warships.

A fleet of 95 ships was gathered was assembled in Bikini Lagoon, and the flotilla was hit by two "Fat Man" plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapons -- the same type dropped  on the city of Nagasaki.  Each had the yield of 23 kilotons of TNT.

The first test, conducted on July 1, 1946, was dubbed "Able" while the bomb was named "Gilda" -- a reference to Rita Hayworth's character from the 1946 film of the same name.  Gilda  was detonated at  520 feet  above the target fleet.

However, it had missed its target aim point by 2,130, it caused signifucantly less dammage than initially expected.

--GreGen