


This left a crater 1 mile wide and 160 feet deep. Some reports I read said the steam cloud was 50 miles wide.Ģ3 nuclear weapons were detonated at Bikini Atoll including the 4-6-megaton hydrogen bomb. The massive explosion vaporized everything on three islands, raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees and left a crater that was 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) wide and 240 feet (73 meters) deep." Quoting Andrea Thompson Apon the 1954 blast: "Code-named Castle Bravo, the nuclear bomb was the most powerful ever exploded at the time, at 15 megatons, making it 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. Surviving ships were so radioactive most got scuttled. That blast smashed target ships to junk, wrecked ships leaked tons of oil into the lagoon, corals, and sand vaporized, and a two-mile-wide steam cloud filled with radiation levels so high that the US military was in shock. From 1946-1958 Bikini Atoll was the site of 23 nuclear detonations, including the underwater Baker blast of 1946. The Bikini Atoll Castle-Bravo nuclear test Mahydrogen test created a blast of 15 megatons and a fireball 4 miles wide.
