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 airplane-hangar-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.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Drama in the Desert
Before he became president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to ride through rural Texas in his convertible Lincoln Continental with the top down. According to his biographer Randall B. Woods, Johnson also liked to keep a loaded shotgun in the seat next to him, which allowed him to pull over and shoot deer easily. On the night of October 4, 1957, the then senator was entertaining a group of fellow hunting enthusiasts at his rural retreat, in the dining room of his forty-foot-tall, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned hunting blind that Johnson called his “deer tower.” All around the edge of the lair were powerful spotlights that could be turned on with the flip of a switch, blinding unsuspecting deer that had come to graze and making it easier to kill them.
It was an important night for Johnson, one that would set the rest of his life on a certain path. October 4, 1957, was the night the Russians launched Sputnik, and the senator began an exuberant anti-Communist crusade. That very night, once the guests had gone home and the staff of black waiters had cleaned up, Johnson retired to his bedroom with newfound conviction. “I’ll be dammed if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon,” he told his wife, Lady Bird.
At the time, Lyndon Johnson was not just any senator. He was the Democratic majority leader, which made him the most powerful legislator in the United States. Within hours of Sputnik’s launch, Johnson seized on the Red Moon moment for political gain. The Russians were a threat to America’s existence, he declared: “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses.”
For many Americans, Johnson’s reaction was easier to comprehend than President Eisenhower’s seemingly muted response. Before he was president, Eisenhower had spent his career as a soldier. He was a five-star general. As former commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower had faced many a deadly threat. He had led the invasion at Normandy and commanded the Allied Forces in the last great German offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, which meant he and his men shot at a lot more than blinded deer. In October of 1957, he believed that the 184-pound Russian satellite called Sputnik was not a cause for panic or alarm.