72 years ago, the island of Elugelab in the Pacific Ocean vanished in an instant after a 20-ton, 6-meter-high hydrogen bomb released an explosive force of up to 10.4 megatons. This event took place on November 1, 1952, when the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb known as “Mike” as part of Operation Ivy, as reported by Interesting Engineering.
This groundbreaking design was the work of American-Hungarian physicist Edward Teller and Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. The bomb was placed on Elugelab, a small uninhabited rocky island in the Enewetak Atoll, a group of 40 small islands and atolls in an oval shape in the South Pacific Ocean.
The detonation of Mike resulted in the instant evaporation of Elugelab, leaving behind a massive crater with a diameter of 1.9 km and a depth of 50 m. The explosion created a tsunami reaching up to 6 meters high and wiped out vegetation on surrounding islands. Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, informed President Dwight D. Eisenhower that “Elugelab Island has disappeared.”
The explosion generated a fireball 5 km in diameter and a mushroom cloud that rose to a height of 41 km. Witnesses from ships at sea described the explosion as difficult to put into words, with blinding light and immediate heat waves felt up to 56 km away. The massive mushroom cloud expansion was unlike anything seen before, measuring unprecedentedly large at 10.4 megatons.
Mike, standing at 6 meters tall and weighing 20 tons, marked a significant engineering achievement. It was the first nuclear device to use thermonuclear reactions to create a powerful explosive force, rather than solely relying on nuclear fission reactions. The bomb’s design included liquid deuterium fuel, requiring a large cryogenic plant to maintain the fuel at extremely low temperatures.
The Ivy Mike experiment also led to the discovery of two new elements, einsteinium and fermium, named in honor of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. Following the nuclear testing on Enewetak Island, decontamination efforts were undertaken in 1977 and 2000. Scientists predict that the island will be safe for human habitation by 2026-2027.