A geyser of radioactive water rises 6,000 feet over Bikini Lagoon
Three weeks after the Able test fell short of its target, the Navy tried again, this time underwater. On July 25, 1946, the device nicknamed Helen of Bikini detonated 90 feet beneath Bikini Lagoon, punching a vertical column of water and steam into the sky above the assembled target fleet. The USS Arkansas, closest to the blast, had its hull crushed and its propellers torn away before it settled upside down in the crater. Radioactive sea spray coated every ship in range. Decontamination crews eventually gave up, and only nine of the surviving vessels were ever scrapped.
Baker forced the American military to confront a hazard its own admirals hadn't planned for: a battle-ready fleet could survive a blast and still be unusable, its decks too radioactive to work on. The Countermeasure Wash Down System the Navy later installed on ships, and the caution that shaped Cold War nuclear doctrine, both started with the failed cleanup at Bikini Lagoon.
QWhy is a swimsuit named after a nuclear test site?
Four days after the Baker test made headlines worldwide, French designer Louis Réard unveiled a scandalously small two-piece swimsuit and named it after Bikini Atoll, hoping the design would cause the same stir as the bomb. He reportedly described his creation as being like the bomb: small and devastating. The Baker device itself carried a matching nickname, Helen of Bikini, part of a femme-fatale theme that ran through both Crossroads shots.
QWhat happened to the animals left aboard the target ships?
Roughly 200 pigs, 204 goats, 5,000 rats, 200 mice, 60 guinea pigs, and assorted insects were placed aboard target vessels to study biological effects of the blasts. Blandy told the press in September 1946 that suffering among the animals was negligible, that an animal merely languished and recovered or died a painless death. That claim was later shown to be inaccurate once fuller records of the animals' deaths emerged.
QHow did scientists actually detect the plutonium contamination that halted cleanup?
Dr. Stafford Warren, the Army colonel overseeing radiation safety, needed a way to convince Blandy that decontamination was hopeless. The breakthrough came from a self x-ray of a contaminated fish, a simple image that showed plutonium had worked its way into marine life feeding in the lagoon. Warren later credited that single image with doing the trick and pushing Blandy to halt the cleanup effort on August 10, 1946.
