The first day of November 1952, 7:15 local time, life on the atoll Enewetak, now the territory of the Marshall Islands, changed forever. The thirst for power, the absence of public opinion and the dynamics of a global society divided by a World War II not quite over among the victors, together created a new monster in the field of nuclear tests in the heart of the ocean. Pacific: Ivy Mike.
After the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more blows than spoils of war to make the Japanese suicide bombers surrender, the United States had found itself ahead on the military run. Armed with a war power that no one else had achieved, except the Soviets, who were able to learn the trade quickly, the leaders of the Western world continued to experiment with new devices, to be waved like ghosts in front of those who would have dared to question domination. of a large part of global trade. In that November, the stars and stripes military and scientific forces brought their focus to Enewetak, where the first hydrogen bomb (or H bomb) developed by mankind would have been detonated. Today it would have been called an incredible technological breakthrough, and so it was even then; but in 1952 no one was able to stop the madness of experimentation on a Pacific island, while in the third millennium, in the face of similar events, the entire planet would have pressed, even with a tweet, to stop everything.
With an average energy released of about 11 megatons, considering the megaton as the unit of measurement corresponding to the energy released by the explosion of one million tons of TNT, the H-bomb called Ivy Mike was a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, dropped on August 6, 1945. The “Mike” device was essentially a “thermonuclear implant”, as Soviet observers also called it. It was designed by Richard Garwin, a pupil of Enrico Fermi, at the suggestion of Edward Teller. Deuterium was used as a fuel for fusion, kept in liquid form by an expensive and cumbersome cryogenic system. Eight megatons came from the rapid fission of the uranium tamper, which obviously created huge amounts of radioactive fallout. The detonation formed an underwater crater 1.9 km wide and 50 m deep, and the islet of Elugelab disappeared. Atrocious fate for a part of the atoll, which until 1794 had never been added to European maps.
The United States had obtained a pass to these oceanic islands, thanks to the results of the Second World War. In the Marshall Islands there were in fact the Japanese forces, protagonists in 1914 of a ‘conquest’ against Germany. In 1942 they also built an airport as a detached base for military operations. It took a week for the United States to drive them out in 1944. The local population was evacuated before 1948 for the preliminary work related to nuclear tests, which only ended in 1962. The United States declared the islets safe in 1980, after having removed and collected the radioactive material. But of course they couldn’t get it all, and they didn’t even try. On Runit Island, just south of Elugelab, there is a waste collection point, completely cemented and round in shape: but after so many years there are doubts about its resistance to infiltration, and the radioactive concentration of the area, in other points, exceeds the values of the so-called ‘dome’.
The US military began decontaminating the atoll in 1977. During the three-year cleanup process, which cost $ 100 million and certainly cheaper than the resources spent on bombs, the military collected more than 80,000 cubic meters of soil. and contaminated debris from the islands. The material was crammed into a crater 9.1 meters deep and 110 meters wide, created by the “Cactus” nuclear test of May 5, 1958. The soldiers who participated in that cleaning mission suffered and still suffer from many health problems: butchery meat. It was predicted that most of the atoll would become suitable for human habitation by the year 2026-2027, after nuclear decay, decontamination and environmental remediation efforts would create sufficient reductions in radioactive values. However, in November 2017, Australian television network ABC reported that rising sea levels, caused by climate change, would cause further problems, contributing to the destruction of the dome and the spillage of waste.
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