allegedly been destroyed or lost. But when the Air Force pilot accidentally flew through the Zebra bomb’s mushroom cloud, the incident “commenced a chain of events that resulted in manned samplers.”
“Manned samplers were simply more efficient,” wrote officer Colonel Paul H. Fackler in a 1963 classified historical review of atomic cloud sampling made for the Air Force systems command, declassified in 1986. As the official radiation safety officer assigned to Operation Sandstone, Fackler held sway. Fackler’s colleague Colonel Cody also argued in favor of man over drone. Cody said the drone samples were obtained haphazardly by “potluck.” A human pilot would be able to maneuver around a cloud during penetration so that the “most likely parts of the cloud could be sampled.” It was a case of dangerous semantics; most likely was a euphemism for “most radioactive.” For future tests, Air Force officials decided to pursue both manned and unmanned atomic-sampling wings.
Both kinds of aircraft would be needed for an ultrasecret test that was pending in the Pacific in 1951. Operation Greenhouse would involve a new kind of nuclear weapon that was being hailed as the “Super bomb.” It was a thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, the core of which would explode with the same energy found at the center of the sun. Los Alamos scientists explained to weapons planners that the destructive power of this new kind of science, called nuclear fusion, was entirely unknown. Fusion involves exploding a nuclear bomb inside a nuclear bomb, and privately the scientists expressed fear that the entire world’s atmosphere could catch on fire during this process. Scientists became deeply divided over the issue and whether or not to go forward. The push to create the Super was spearheaded by the indomitable Dr. Edward Teller and cosigned by weapons planners with the Department of Defense. The opposition to the Super was spearheaded by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb and now Teller’s rival. Oppenheimer, who felt that developing a weapon capable of ending civilization was immoral, would lose his security clearance over his opposition to the Super bomb. According to Al O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who wired many of Dr. Teller’s Super bombs in the Marshall Islands, what happened to Oppenheimer sent a strong message to everyone involved: “If you want to keep your job, don’t oppose decisions” on moral grounds. In the end, the weapons planners won, and the world’s first thermonuclear bomb moved forward as planned.
Drones were needed to take blast and gust measurements inside the thermonuclear clouds, and to take samples of radioactive debris inside. During the Greenhouse test series, which did not wind up setting the world on fire, the first drone in went out of control and crashed into the sea before it ever reached the stem of the mushroom cloud. Two other drone missions were aborted after not responding to controls, and a fourth sustained such heavy damage in the shock wave, it lost control and crash-landed on a deserted island called Bogallua, where it caught fire and exploded. When the test series was over, the Air Force ultimately concluded that the unmanned samplers were unreliable. “Following Operation Greenhouse, the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission looked more favorably upon manned samplers,” wrote a Defense Nuclear Agency historian in 1963. “Greenhouse became the last atomic test series during which drone aircraft were used for this purpose.” So when it came time to detonate the world’s first full-scale thermonuclear device — an unimaginably monstrous 10.4 megaton bomb code-named Mike — in the next test series, called Operation Ivy in the fall of 1952, it was decided that six human pilots, all volunteers, would fly straight into the center of the radioactive stem and mushroom cloud. Another group of pilots was assigned to fly along the outer edges of the predicted fallout zones. That group included Hervey Stockman, who, four years later, would become the first CIA pilot to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2.
In anticipation of the Mike bomb’s manned sampling mission, the pilots practiced at the airfield at Indian Springs, thirty miles due south of Area 51. These pilots, including Stockman, then flew sampling missions through the kiloton-size atomic bombs being exploded at the Nevada Test Site as part of a spring 1952 test series called Operation Tumbler-Snapper. “Up to this time,” Stockman explains, “the scientists had put monkeys in the cockpits of remotely controlled drone aircraft [at the test site]. They would fly these things through the [atomic] clouds. Then they began to be interested in the effects of radiation on humanoids. They realized that with care and cunning they could put people in there.”
The Air Force worked hard to change the pilots’ perception of themselves as guinea pigs, at least for the historical record. According to a history of the atomic cloud sampling program, declassified in 1985, by the time Stockman and his fellow pilots left Indian Springs for the Marshall Islands to fly missions through megaton-size thermonuclear bomb clouds, the men accepted that they “were doing something useful…not serving as guinea pigs as they seriously believed when first called upon to do the sampling.”
Stockman offers another perspective. “In those days, I didn’t think much about the moral questions. I was young. The visual picture when these things go off is absolutely stunning. I was very much in awe of it,” Stockman recalls. “The [atomic bombs] that were going on in the proving grounds in Nevada were minute in comparison to these [thermonuclear bomb] monsters out there in the Pacific. Those were big brutes. When they went off they would punch right through the Earth’s atmosphere and head out into space.”
After finally arriving in the Pacific, pilots flew “familiarization flights and rehearsals” in the days leading up to the Mike bomb. But nothing could prepare an airman for the actual test. Stockman’s colleague Air Force pilot Jimmy P. Robinson was one of the six pilots who “volunteered” to fly through the Ivy Mike mushroom cloud. Because the physical bomb was the size of a large airplane hangar, it couldn’t be called a weapon per se. The bomb was so large that it was built from the ground up, on an island on the north side of the atoll called Elugelab. Given the extraordinary magnitude of the thermonuclear bomb, it is utterly remarkable to consider that shortly after Robinson flew his F-84G straight through its mushroom stem, he was able to radio back clear thoughts to his commanding officer, who was located twenty-five miles to the south, on Eniwetok. “The glow was red, like the inside of a red hot furnace,” the record states Robinson said. He then described how his radio instrument meters were spinning around in circles, “like the sweep second hand on a watch.” After going inside the cloud a second time, Robinson reported that his “airplane stalled out and gone [sic] into a spin.” His autopilot disengaged and his radio cut out, but the courageous pilot flew on as instructed. He flew around in circles and finally he flew back into and out of the mushroom stem and the lower part of its cloud — for nearly four more hours. Only when it was time for Robinson to refuel did he realize that the electromagnetic pulse from the thermonuclear bomb had ruined his control beacon. This meant that it was impossible for him to locate the fuel tanker.
Robinson radioed the control tower on Eniwetok for help. He was told to head back to the island immediately. “Approximately ninety-six miles north of the island, [Robinson] reported that he’d picked up a signal on Eniwetok,” according to the official record, declassified in 1986 but with Robinson’s name redacted. At that point, he was down to six hundred pounds of fuel. Bad weather kicked in; “rain squalls obstructed his views.” Robinson’s fuel gauge registered empty and then his engine flamed out. “When he was at 10,000 feet, Eniwetok tower thought he would make the runway, he had the island in sight,” wrote an Air Force investigator assigned to the case. But he couldn’t glide in because his aircraft was lined with lead to shield him from radiation. At five thousand feet and falling fast, Robinson reported he wasn’t going to make it and that he would have to bail out. Now Robinson faced the ultimate challenge. Atomic-sampling pilots wore lead-lined vests. How to land safely and get out fast? Fewer than three and a half miles from the tarmac at Eniwetok, at an altitude of between five hundred and eight hundred feet, Robinson’s aircraft flipped over and crashed into the sea. “Approximately one minute later [a] helicopter was over the spot,” the Air Force investigator wrote. But it was too late. All the helicopter pilot could find was “an oil slick, one glove, and several maps.” Robinson’s body and his airplane sank to the bottom of the sea like a stone. His body was never recovered, and his family would learn of his fate only in 2008, after repeated Freedom of Information Act requests were finally granted by the Air Force.
Back on Elugelab Island, the dust was settling after the airplanehangar-size Mike bomb had exploded with an unfathomable yield of 10.4 megatons — nearly twice that of its predicted size. Elugelab was not an island anymore. The thermonuclear bomb had vaporized the entire landmass, sending eighty million tons of pulverized coral into the upper atmosphere to float around and rain down. One man observing the bomb with high-density goggles was EG&G weapons test engineer Al O’Donnell. He’d wired, armed, and fired the Ivy bomb from the control room on the USS Estes, which was parked forty miles out at sea. O’Donnell says that watching the Mike bomb explode was a terrifying experience. “It was one of the ones that was too big,” says the man who colleagues called the Triggerman for having wired 186 nuclear bombs. The nuclear fireball of the Ivy Mike bomb was three miles wide. In contrast, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a fireball that was a tenth of a mile wide. When the manned airplanes flew over ground zero after the Ivy Mike bomb went off, they were horrified to see the island was gone. Satellite photographs in 2011 show a black crater filled with lagoon water where the island of Elugelab once existed.
