The first hydrogen bomb test erased a Pacific island
On this day · 1 November 1952
On November 1, 1952, Ivy Mike unleashed a thermonuclear fireball that left only a crater where an island had been.
On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated Ivy Mike on Elugelab, a small island in the Enewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands. It was the first full-scale test of a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb, the first weapon to draw most of its energy from fusion rather than fission alone.
The result dwarfed the bombs of World War II. Mike yielded about 10.4 megatons, more than 450 times the force used on Nagasaki. The island simply ceased to exist, replaced by an underwater crater roughly 6,240 feet across and 164 feet deep.
Mike was no usable weapon. It was a building-sized device chilled with liquid deuterium, closer to a laboratory than a bomb bay. But it proved the Teller-Ulam design worked, and it changed the arithmetic of war: destruction was now measured in megatons, not kilotons, and a single test could swallow an island whole.
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