The Nuclear Test That Vaporized an Island

On November 1, 1952, the U.S. detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb, codenamed “Mike”, as part of Operation Ivy. It was the first full test of a breakthrough design created by Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller and Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. Mike represented a remarkable feat of engineering, towering at 20 feet tall and weighing an impressive 74 metric tons. While not deployable as a conventional weapon, its significance lay in being the first nuclear device to derive a substantial portion of its explosive power from fusion, the process of atomic fusion, rather than solely relying on fission, the division of atoms. Its functionality relied on a fission reaction to ignite fusion within liquid deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen.

Mushroom cloud of the Ivy Mike test. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons



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The Nuclear Test That Vaporized an Island
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