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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 ...
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.
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.
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]
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]
The Castle Bravo shot of 1 March 1954, at Bikini Atoll, was the first test of a deployable (solid fuel) thermonuclear weapon, and also (accidentally) [citation needed] the largest weapon ever tested by the United States (15 megatons). It was also the single largest U.S. radiological accident in connection with nuclear testing.
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Castle Bravo detonation, 1st Mar 1954 The liquid deuterium fuel of Ivy Mike was impractical for a deployable weapon, and the next advance was to use a solid lithium deuteride fusion fuel instead. In 1954 this was tested in the " Castle Bravo " shot (the device was code-named Shrimp ), which had a yield of 15 Mt (63 PJ ) (2.5 times expected) and ...