When the Japanese Empire surrendered, Vannevar Bush did not rejoice so much as ponder his next move. For eighteen days he watched as Joseph Stalin marched Soviet troops into eastern Asia, positioning his Red Army forces in China, Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, and North Korea. When the fighting finally stopped, Bush’s response had become clear. He would convince President Truman that the Soviet Union could not be trusted. In facing down America’s new enemy, the nation needed even more advanced technologies to fight future wars. The most recent war might have ended, but science needed to stay on the forward march.
As Americans celebrated peace (after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, public opinion polls showed that more than 85 percent of Americans approved of the bombings), Vannevar Bush and members of the War Department began planning to use the atomic bomb again in a live test—a kind of mock nuclear naval battle, which they hoped could take place the following summer in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. There, in a deep lagoon at Bikini Atoll, dozens of captured Japanese and German warships would be blown up using live nuclear bombs. The operation would illustrate to the world just how formidable America’s new weapons were. It would be called Operation Crossroads. As its name implied, the event marked a critical juncture. America was signaling to Russia it was ready to do battle with nuclear bombs.
In less than a year, Operation Crossroads was in full swing on Bikini Atoll, a twenty-five-mile ring of red coral islands encircling a clear, blue lagoon. A July 1946 memo, one of many marked Secret, instructed the men not to swim in the lagoon wearing red bathing trunks. There were barracuda everywhere. Word was that the fanged-tooth fish would attack swimmers without warning.
The natives of Bikini, all 167 of them, were led by a king named Juda, but in July of 1946, none of them were on Bikini Atoll anymore. The U.S. Navy had evacuated the natives to Rongerik Atoll, 125 miles to the east. The upcoming three-bomb atomic test series would make their homeland unsafe for a while, the natives were told. But it was going to help ensure world peace.
On the shores of the atoll, a young man named Alfred O’Donnell lay in his Quonset hut listening to the wind blow and the rain pound against the reinforced sheet-metal roof above him. He was unable to sleep. “The reason was because I had too much to worry about,” O’Donnell explains, remembering Crossroads after more than sixty years. “Is everything all right? Is the bomb going to go off, like planned?” What the twenty-four-year-old weapons engineer was worrying about were the sea creatures in the lagoon. “Let’s say an octopus came into contact with one of the bomb’s wires. What would happen? What if something got knocked out of place?” The wires O’Donnell referred to ran from a concrete bunker on Bikini called the control point and out into the ocean, where they connected to a twenty-three-kiloton atomic bomb code-named Baker. The men in the U.S. Navy’s Task Force One gave the bomb a more colorful name: they called it Helen of Bikini, after the legendary femme fatale for whom so many ancient warriors laid down their lives. A nuclear weapon was both destructive and seductive, the sailors said, just like Helen of Troy had been.
As a leading member of the arming party that would wire and fire the atomic bombs during Operation Crossroads, O’Donnell had a tremendous responsibility, especially for someone so young. “Five years earlier I was just a kid from Boston with a normal life. All I was thinking about for my future was a baseball career,” O’Donnell recalls. In 1941, when O’Donnell was in high school, he’d been recruited by the Boston Braves, thanks to his exceptional .423 batting average. Then came the war, and everything changed. He married Ruth. He joined the Navy, where he learned radio and electronics. In both subjects he quickly excelled. Back in Boston after the war, O’Donnell was mysteriously recruited for a job with Raytheon Production Corporation, a defense contract company cofounded by Vannevar Bush. What exactly the job entailed, O’Donnell did not know when he signed on. The recruiters told him he would find out more details once he was granted a security clearance. “I didn’t know what a security clearance was back then,” O’Donnell recalls. After a month, he learned that he was now part of the Manhattan Project. He was transferred to a small engineering company named for the three MIT professors who ran it: Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier. Later, the company shortened its name to EG&G. There, O’Donnell was trained to wire a nuclear bomb by Herbert Grier, the man who had invented the firing systems for the bombs dropped on Japan.
“The next thing I knew I was asked to go to Bikini in the summer of 1946,” says O’Donnell. “I did not want to go. I’d fought on those atolls during the war. I’d seen bodies of young soldiers floating dead in the water and I swore I’d never go back. But Ruth and I had a baby on the way and she said go, and I did.” He went on, “I missed Ruth. She was pregnant, thank God, but I wondered what she was doing back in Boston where we lived. Was she able to take out the garbage all right?” Forty-two thousand people had gathered on Bikini Atoll to witness Operation Crossroads, and O’Donnell could not sleep because he felt all of those eyes were on him. Thinking about Ruth was how O’Donnell stopped worrying about how well he had wired the bomb.