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Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Castle. Detonated on March 1, 1954, the device remains the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States and the first lithium deuteride -fueled ...
The Bohr radius is consequently known as the "atomic unit of length". It is often denoted by a 0 and is approximately 53 pm. Hence, the values of atomic radii given here in picometers can be converted to atomic units by dividing by 53, to the level of accuracy of the data given in this table. Atomic radii up to zinc (30)
The second series of tests in 1954 was codenamed Operation Castle. The first detonation was Castle Bravo, which tested a new design utilizing a dry-fuel thermonuclear bomb. It was detonated at dawn on March 1, 1954. Scientists miscalculated: the 15 Mt of TNT nuclear explosion far exceeded the expected yield of 4–8 Mt of TNT (6 predicted). [6]
But as was discovered in the first test of this type of device, Castle Bravo, when lithium-7 is present, one also has some amounts of the following two net reactions: 7 Li + 1 n → 3 T + 4 He + 1 n 7 Li + 2 H → 2 4 He + 1 n + 15.123 MeV. Most lithium is 7 Li, and this gave Castle Bravo a yield 2.5 times larger than expected. [16]
While most of the Operation Castle tests were intended to evaluate weapons intended for immediate stockpile, or which were already available for use as part of the Emergency Capability Program, Castle Bravo was intended to test a design which would drastically reduce the size and costs of the first generation of air-droppable atomic weapons ...
Operation Castle was an unqualified success for the implementation of dry fuel devices. The Bravo design was quickly weaponized and is suspected to be the progenitor of the Mk-21 gravity bomb. The Mk-21 design project began on March 26, 1954 (just three weeks after Bravo), with production of 275 weapons beginning in late 1955.
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Comparative fireball radii for a selection of nuclear weapons. [citation needed] Contrary to the image, which may depict the initial fireball radius, the maximum average fireball radius of Castle Bravo, a 15-megatonne yield surface burst, is 3.3 to 3.7 km (2.1 to 2.3 mi), [6] [7] and not the 1.42 km displayed in the image.