In July 75 years ago, the US military started nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll. An end to the atomic age is still not in sight
It is a symbol of death and destruction that has become an icon, and at the same time a sight whose gigantic aesthetics are still fascinating today: In July 75 years ago, the US Army aimed cameras from various angles on a lagoon in the middle of the Pacific and created images of humanity Crossroads.
The nuclear tests of “Operation Crossroads”, as the company was called, were a starting point for the Cold War, which was marked by the arms race. In Bikini Atoll, the United States decided in 1946 to continue undeterred on the path of atomic armament – less than a year after the devastating drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which caused unprecedented suffering and ended World War II.
On July 1 at 9 a.m. local time in part of the Marshall Islands, an atomic bomb went off for the fourth time. The test was called “Able” and, as before in Japan, was initiated by being dropped from the air. 23 tests were to follow by 1958, just three and a half weeks later, on July 25, the second under the name “Baker”. This time, the bomb was detonated underwater and the picture on the left was created, which visitors to a New York exhibition in 2017 were looking at – as spellbound and at the same time inexperienced as probably nobody did at the moment of the detonation.
“Nobody really saw what happened in Bikini Atoll.” This is the first sentence of the US Army photo book on the tests in the summer of 1946. According to the report, around 42,000 people had traveled thousands of kilometers in the previous weeks Atoll traveled to prepare and follow the demolitions. “But an atom bomb,” it continues, “defies closer examination. It eludes the public eye. “
First, the flash light, “many times brighter than the sun”, lit the day. In a millionth of a second. The troops, miles away, had their eyes buried in their elbows so as not to be blinded. Then the pressure wave pushed a spherical cloud in all directions, only to reveal the column of water and steam shortly afterwards – with a diameter of almost 700 meters and a height of almost two kilometers.
The unmanned ships were placed in the lagoon to test the effects of the radioactive water and pressure waves. Quite a few sank immediately and were still lying on the contaminated seabed decades later.
The fact that testimony was nevertheless given of all these stages of the atomic explosion was made possible by the technology, thousands of measuring instruments and “cameras, built to record what the human eye could never see.”
More than 50,000 photos and 400 kilometers of film were taken on land, air and water. Instead of machine guns, cameras were mounted on airplanes. The image on this page was created remotely from a tower on the reef of the atoll. The cameras in lead casings waited for the detonation, when the picture was finished, flaps closed to protect against the radiation.
To this day, the images act as a threatening backdrop in two ways: on the one hand, as a reminder of the unimaginable destructive power and, on the other hand, as a tool in global power politics.
As of 2021, according to the Stockholm peace research institute Sipri, nine countries – the USA, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – have 13,080 nuclear weapons, around 2,000 of them on alert. That is 320 fewer than in the previous year, as the report from mid-June shows. But Sipri warns: “The global dismantling of operational warheads seems to have stalled, and their number could rise again.” The threatening backdrop remains. From Jakob Maurer
