Map showing points (X) where contaminated fish were caught or where the sea was found to be unusually radioactive, following the Castle Bravo nuclear test. Suddenly fallout was in the public mind â and its popular culture manifestations ( Godzilla, On the Beach) soon followed. Suddenly it was having to release information about long-distance, long-term contamination. Suddenly the United States was, for the first time, admitting it had the capability to make multi-megaton weapons. It became a major site of diplomatic incident between Japan, who resented once again having the distinction of having been irradiated by the United States, and this meant that Bravo became extremelyÂ public. One of the fishermen later died (whether that was because of the fallout exposure or because of the treatment regime is apparently still a controversial point). A Japanese fishing boat, ironically named the Fortunate Dragon, drifted into the fallout plume as well and returned home sick and with a cargo of radioactive tuna. If it had just been natives who were exposed, the Atomic Energy Commission might have been able to keep things hushed up for awhile â but it wasn’t. This necessitated evacuation, long-term health monitoring, and produced terrible long-term health outcomes for many of the people on those islands.

Instead of carrying the copious radioactive fallout that such a weapon would produce over the open ocean, where it would be relatively harmless, it instead carried it over inhabited atolls in the Marshall Islands. The second problem is that the wind changed. The technical error, in retrospect, reveals how grasping their knowledge still was: the bomb contained two isotopes of lithium in the fusion component of the design, and the designers assumed only one of them would be reactive, but they were wrong. Instead of 6 megatons of yield, it produced 15 megatons of yield, an error of 250%, which matters when you are talking about millions of tons of TNT.

The first is that the bomb was even more explosive than the scientists thought it was going to be. Source.īut nobody says something like that unless other things â terrible things âÂ did happen. One of the early Castle Bravo fallout contours showing accumulated doses.

Fallout 3 megaton water leaks