On November 1, 1952, the United States launched Operation Ivy, a series of two nuclear tests, conducted at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The first of these was Ivy Mike, which earned a special place in history by successfully demonstrating the terrifying power of thermonuclear devices, better known as “hydrogen bombs”.
The Teller-Ulam Design
In very relaxed terms, the Teller-Ulam design (by Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam) consists of a first stage with a conventional fission bomb, whose detonation releases enough energy to trigger fusion in the fuel of its second stage, based on hydrogen isotopes or lithium-6 deuteride. Teller and Ulam finalized their design in 1951, and a year later, it was time to test it...
Which brings us to Enewetak Atoll and the birth of Ivy Mike. I say “birth” because Edward Teller himself, upon verifying the success of the detonation with the help of a seismograph in Berkeley (he was not allowed to travel), sent an unclassified telegram to the rest of the team at Los Alamos Laboratory that simply said “it's a boy”.
A Beast of a Device
In reality, Ivy Mike was, from every point of view, a beast. The total weight of the device exceeded 74 metric tons, and its configuration was so complex (mainly due to the cryogenic system needed for the liquid deuterium that served as fuel for the second stage) that those responsible had to build a hangar.
The initial stage of Ivy Mike was an TX-5 “optimized” bomb, installed in a separate space to prevent freezing. A plutonium rod assumed the role of “spark plug” for igniting the fusion stage, and all these elements were covered with a casing (read “tamper”) of natural uranium, weighing 4.5 tons.
The final yield of Ivy Mike reached 10.4 megatons, but it is estimated that 77 percent came from the uranium casing, through a process of fast fission. Ivy Mike's cloud reached an altitude of 41 kilometers and created a crater 1.9 kilometers in diameter, with a depth of 50 meters.
All vegetation on the islands in the atoll disappeared after the detonation, and the contamination from the uranium was considerable. To finish, an extra detail: The sound effects in the original recording were added in post-production. I wonder what the noise of such an explosion must have been like...
