The Deep Reach

In 1954 a book club for housewives in Suginami, a ward of Tokyo, started a petition to ban the H-bomb. People were scared they couldn't eat fish and vegetables. Within a month they had more than 260,000 signatures. The ward had about 400,000 people.

A test rocket broke up 3 seconds into flight. Its upper stage landed within 300 feet of the ship. The captain wrote that everyone topside "could remember vividly the failure of WINDER missile number three." Then the ship left with three more. Each carried a nuclear warhead.

A 20-year-old deckhand named Oishi Matashichi was below deck on a tuna boat when yellow light came pouring through the porthole. In the engine room, a crewman told a shipmate the sun had risen in the west. The shipmate said he was blowing smoke. March 1, 1954. Castle Bravo.

1958. Nine US Navy ships, about 4,500 people, on a secret nuclear mission in the South Atlantic. The units had never operated together. When lookouts on the USS Norton Sound finally sighted the carrier Tarawa, the ship messaged the commander: "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?"

March 31, 1954. AEC chairman Lewis Strauss tells reporters an H-bomb could be made big enough to destroy a city. The transcript records a "chorus of 'What?'" How big a city? Any city, he said. New York? Yes. The metropolitan area.

Kennedy went on TV about missiles in Cuba at 7 p.m. Eastern on Oct 22, 1962. About 19 hours earlier, the Soviets had set off a nuclear bomb roughly 290 km above Kazakhstan. Below it, a communications line hundreds of km long failed. Its own protective devices had been damaged.

The white stuff fell on the Lucky Dragon's deck until the men's feet left footprints. "We had no sense that it was dangerous," deckhand Oishi Matashichi wrote. "It wasn't hot; it had no odor. I took a lick; it was gritty but had no taste." It was fallout from Castle Bravo.

Summer 1958. The New York Times learns the US plans to set off atomic bombs in space. Reporter Walter Sullivan is told: "I can't tell you not to print it, but I can say this: If you do, the operation will never take place." The Times held it until the tests were over.

Jan 24, 1961. A B-52 broke apart over North Carolina carrying two hydrogen bombs. One slammed into a field. The other floated down on its parachute. In 1969 a Sandia safety supervisor wrote that one "low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe."

65 years ago this week, the Soviet Union set off the biggest bomb in history. It was the toned-down version. Tsar Bomba was designed for 100 megatons. It was tested at about 50, partly to keep the fallout down.