Jérôme Lalande

Castle Bravo is the most powerful Bombe H ever tested by the the United States: that is to say fifteen megatons (thousand times more than the two bombs released on Japan).

The explosion took place on the Atoll of Bikini, on March 1st 1954 at the time of the Opération Castle. Intended to test a new prototype of bomb H based on a configuration of Teller-Ulam, the named bomb " crevette" with a 4,56 m length cylinder for a diameter of 1,37 Mr. His mass was of 10,66 tons.

Composed to 40% of lithium-6 enriched and Uranium, it dramatically exceeded the forecasts in term of power. This unexpected effect was caused by the presence of lithium-7, a normally stable Isotope but which is divided into Hélium and Tritium when it is bombarded with energy neutrons. The tritium contributed appreciably to fusion.

The explosion, with seven meters of the surface of the atoll, caused a crater approximately two kilometers in diameter and 70 meters depth. The mushroom cloud reached an altitude of more than fifty kilometers in a few minutes. The fireball itself had a diameter of eleven kilometers.

With its diameter of more than one hundred kilometers, the cloud contaminated most of the surrounding atolls: (Rongelap and Rongerik), just as the Marshall Islands. A boat of Japanese fishermen, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru was contaminated by the repercussions and one of the team members died of the continuations of the irradiation. This test was an ecological and human drama since members of the army, engineers and the populations indigenous were also touched. After this annoying test, a closed area was delimited around the point of explosion with a ray of 1  200 kilometers, is approximately 1% of the surface of the ground.

To see too

External bonds

  • Operation Castle

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