Nectar, at 1.69 megatons, was a baby compared to most of the other hydrogen bombs when it was fired in the Enewetak Atoll on May 14, 1954 - the last one in the series known as Operation CASTLE. By contrast, "The Bravo event" of February 28, 1954, in the Bikini Atoll, was 15 megatons. They miscalculated the yield on this bomb which used enriched Lithium-6** and it turned out to be about two and a half times more than expected. Bravo was "the single worst incident of fallout exposure in all of the U.S. atmospheric testing program, scattered over more than 5,000 square miles of ocean and islands, resulting in the contamination and exposure of military and civilian U.S. personnel working on the shot, and people of the islands who were earlier moved to a supposedly "safe" island but received large amounts of radiation. Acute radiation effects were observed among some of these people." (from the Internet Archive.)
**The United States produced a total of 442.4 metric tons of enriched lithium from 1954 to 1963 for thermonuclear weapons, tritium production, and other purposes.
In the 1980's and 1990's some of the paperwork from the cold war was declassified: old films, letters, memos, reports. A lot of it is boring, and a lot of it feels like only part of the story - something's missing.....hmmm, guess that's what they mean by "sanitized" - a word the government uses quite often about these records.
I keep reminding myself that military and government documents use their own language, which if you try to analyze out of context can be misleading. I was the daughter of a career Navy man, so I understand that, but sometimes when I read these reports on the native islanders of the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls I feel a little sick.
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