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Eniwetok atoll5/7/2023 ![]() ![]() PERNA: This was just a matter of weeks, a month later. Well, we stayed out there for the second shot which was where we put a weapon on a tower again up at the Bikini lagoon and we set it off on a tower about 200 feet above the ground. It felt like someone took a tremendous plank and slammed it against the airplane, and this was at 11 miles. When the shock wave hit us the whole airplane jerked. We wore goggles for fear of retina damage to the eyes. When the bomb went off here and I was eleven miles at 28,000 feet. Other pilots with other bombers like mine released blast gauges and with telemetering equipment and radio transmission they were able to record the blast and the data scientifically so that they could find out at various altitudes how much intensity you had from the burst of the bomb. When we came down to the point that they were going to release the bomb, I released these blast gauges. I was flying an airplane around the target site and I had what we call blast gauges in my airplane. I did not fly the airplane that dropped it. PERNA: Everything to be tested, to see what happened when you dropped a nuclear weapon. We had a whole fleet of navy vessels, a whole bunch of army buildings, and army materiel, including guns and tanks, etc…. There was no test data to speak of, so we set up this test program and dropped one from an airplane onto a target ship, the Nevada. The ones we had detonated heretofore was the test one in White Sands (the first one that went off), and then the second one was the one we dropped on Hiroshima, and the third one was dropped on Nagasaki. This was a program to detonate a nuclear weapon under scientifically controlled and test conditions. The Bikini bomb test was called Operations Crossroads. ![]() We organized a program to go to an island called Kwajalein in the Pacific in the Marshall Islands where we set up the Bikini bomb test. In January 1946, a couple months later, I joined the unit that had dropped the bomb, and I became Deputy of the 509th Composite Bomb Wing. PERNA: The war ended in August ’45 when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I was convinced when I saw the thing go off that you could never use them” accidentally dropped four H-bombs over Spain. Go here to read about the July 1945 Trinity test at Los Alamos and when the U.S. Perna was present during the bombing on Eniwetok atoll and describes his experiences. Prior to his Deputy position he was a Commander of a B-29 school at Denver, Colorado. He was assigned to organize Operation Crossroads, a program on the island Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific to set up the Bikini bomb test. Perna was Deputy of the 509th Composite Bomb Wing after the end of WWII. ![]() H-bombs, which get their power from fusion, are about 1000 times more powerful than atomic bombs, which derive their force from fission.Ĭolonel Anthony J. Overall there were 43 nuclear tests conducted at Enewetak from 1948 to 1958. The creation and detonation of the first hydrogen bomb on the Eniwetok atoll allowed the United States to temporarily step ahead of the Soviets during the arms race. Previously in September of 1949, the Soviet Union had detonated its atomic bomb, prompting the United States to increase efforts to develop an even greater thermonuclear weapon to surpass the capacity of the Soviets. On November 1 st, 1952 the United States detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb on a large atoll called Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific (190 miles west of the more famous Bikini Atoll) as a part of Operation Ivy. ![]()
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