The First Test of the Super

Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Ozymandius,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

The device the physicist Richard Garwin designed for the first test of a Super bomb was given the name “Sausage.” You may have heard the aphorism about it being best not to watch sausage being made. Not if you plan to eat it. I wonder if they had that aphorism in mind.

“Sausage” wasn’t going to be usable as a bomb, even if it worked. It would just be a “device.” It was six stories high weighing over seventy tons that looked like a small oil refinery.

The “trigger” for “Sausage” would be a Mark 5, an implosion bomb like the one dropped on Nagasaki. By now, we’d made improvements: the Mark 5 was half the size of the Nagasaki bomb but with a design yield of a whole lot more, up to 120 kilotons, six Nagasakis. The yield of one Nagasaki, equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, might be enough to trigger the fusion reaction. But for this first test, no chances would be taken. The Mark 5 would no doubt be set to a higher yield.

In this test for the Super we would be after, finally, a whole lot more than the 120 kilotons the Mark 5 could yield. The Mark 5 would be merely the “trigger” for what we hoped would happen next.

The fission fuel for the Mark 5 would be highly enriched uranium or plutonium, among the heaviest elements known. The fusion fuel in “Sausage” would be liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen is the lightest element.

A big plant was constructed on the test site in the Marshall Islands to make the liquid hydrogen. To remain liquid, hydrogen has to be kept at a temperature near absolute zero. For the test itself, the liquid hydrogen would have to be put into a giant vacuum bottle called a Dewer flask.

After World War II, we had started testing nuclear weapons, in 1946, in the Marshall Islands at what would become our Pacific Proving Ground. We had started testing nuclear weapons in the continental United States only in January 1951, a year and a half before this test of the Super was scheduled. We’d decided to establish this new test site in the southeastern part of the state of Nevada. This was the first test site inside the United States, if you didn’t count the Trinity site in southern New Mexico where we’d tested the very first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945.

The Nevada Test Site was big, 1350 square miles, but we knew that might not be big enough to completely contain the effects of the Super, if it worked. If the effects of this test were experienced off-site, there might be concern. People might start to wonder if we should continue to test nuclear weapons, especially inside the United States. We couldn’t have that.

Supers—if they could be made to work—would have to be tested where we’d started doing our tests after World War II, all the way out in the Marshall Islands, in spite of the extra trouble and expense. Which were considerable. Thousands of people were involved. And a factory for producing liquid hydrogen had to be built.

The tests we’d done so far out at the Pacific Proving Ground hadn’t affected us at home, as far as we knew.

The Marshall Islands were part of a “Trust Territory” that the United Nations had established after World War II at the request of the United States, to be administered by the United States. Did anyone live on those islands? Yes, the ‘Marshallese.” Were they Americans? Yes and no, I guess. Either way, they were people. You can’t kill people in tests. They would have to be evacuated. Would they do it voluntarily?

The birds and fish and plants and other living things in the area of the test would be on their own.

For our first testing operation after the war, Operation Crossroads in 1946, the Marshallese on Bikini Atoll had been told by Navy Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, the United States’ military governor of the Marshall Islands, that they were being asked to move "for the good of mankind and to end all world wars." They agreed to go. Or seemed to.

“Sausage” was to be tested on the island of Elugelab on Enewetak Atoll. An “atoll” is a ring of coral around a lagoon. The Marshallese on and around Enewetak agreed to be relocated for this test also, though I don’t suppose that after the other tests that had been done there by now, they’d have been reluctant to.

The test, called “Mike,” took place on November 1, 1952. It was a huge success.

Elugelab was gone now.

Sausage yielded the equivalent of over 10,000,000 tons of TNT, approaching 700 Hiroshimas. Its mushroom cloud rose to more than four times the height of Mount Everest, earth’s tallest mountain, which no one had yet been able to climb. People kept trying.

“Mike” also generated lots of radioactive fallout. Much of it from what had been Elugelab. Some of it from the sea water and what had been in it.

The Marshallese would have to stay gone for a while, we weren’t sure for exactly how long.

Next: More Tests of the Super