TRUMAN [over radio]: The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed,
the like of which has never been seen on this earth."”
MAN [over radio]: 3, 2, 1. Fire!
[explosion].
NARRATOR: In 1945, America unleashes the horrifying
power of the atomic bomb.
Devastating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The world will never be the same again.
A year later the U.S. military begins
a series of nuclear tests in one of the
most remote places on the planet.
Nearly 5, 000 miles from the west coast of America,
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean...
Bikini Atoll...
Part of the Marshall Archipelago,
Bikini is a circle of 26 tiny islands around
a lagoon 23 miles across.
Fringed with coral reefs that cling to the rim of
an ancient volcanic crater.
MIKE: Today, Bikini Atoll is one of the most beautiful places in the world,
it's peaceful, it's tropical, it's quiet,
but here is also the location of some of the
most violent actions that ever took place.
NARRATOR: Between 1946 and 1954,
80 million tons of explosive nuclear power rock Bikini...
in a series of deadly experiments.
Left behind are the remains of over a dozen wrecks.
Battleships, submarines and even an aircraft carrier.
'‘Ghost ships' that bear the scars, and hide the secrets,
of the world's most terrifying weapons.
ART: This is the only place on the planet where
you can witness a nuclear battlefield...
NARRATOR: Today, a group of scientists has come to Bikini
on an unprecedented mission: to carry out the world's
first 3D survey of the nuclear wrecks...
The team from the University of Delaware,
led by Dr Art Trembanis,
is on board the research boat Indies Surveyor.
They've brought with them the very latest hi-tech scanning equipment.
ART: So we've taken this very modest tin boat and
turned it into the most advanced sonar mapping system
that's ever been brought to Bikini...
And we're starting to pick it up I think.
Nice. That looks really good.
NARRATOR: The survey team is targeting the area
where the first Bikini tests took place.
The wrecks hidden here are the last physical traces
of this earth-shattering experiment.
Draining them will reveal astonishing stories.
And some shocking images.
The tests have a code name...
JERRY: Operation Crossroads was designed to try to figure
out the nature of war in the atomic age.
JAMES: They brought together 42, 000 men,
a fleet of over 240 ships,
95 of which were going to be used as targets.
They viewed the entire fleet out there as simply
being fish in an atomic barrel.
NARRATOR: The first test of Operation Crossroads,
on July 1st, 1946, is code-named Able.
ART: The Able test was a test of an air detonation of an atomic bomb
and these were fission bombs like the ones,
identical to the ones used and dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those were done in secret and, and part of the wartime effort,
this was being done in the open as part of a planned
and carefully coordinated scientific study.
NARRATOR: The Able bomb, named Gilda, has a power of 23 kilotons.
No one knows how it will affect Bikini.
Will it destroy the entire atoll?
Will it sink every ship?
Will it make navies of the future completely redundant?
Engineers fit the ships with special instruments,
to record blast pressures, radioactivity levels,
and especially the extreme temperatures.
MAN [over radio]: Engineers make a trial run with the instruments
to record the terrific heat spawned by the blast.
NARRATOR: The bomb's target, a bullseye right at the center
of the guinea pig fleet, is the US battleship Nevada
painted an unmissable bright orange.
She's built of solid steel, with a melting point of
2,642 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the Able explosion should be almost five times hotter than that.
Hotter than the surface of the sun.
But things don't go to plan.
[explosion].
Gilda misses the Nevada by half a mile.
And it's where the bomb actually detonates...
that the survey team is now searching.
For a ship that accidentally finds itself
right in the firing line.
The USS Gilliam.
She's an Attack-Transport ship.
A survivor of a torpedo strike and the Okinawa landings.
For the Able test, she's meant to be merely a bystander.
But she ends up being the first ship in history to take
a direct hit from a nuke.
Find her, and they'll learn exactly what happens to a ship
when struck by an atomic bomb.
As the team searches for the Gilliam,
they crisscross the lagoon in their hi-tech tender.
Scanning every inch of the seabed, 60 yards below.
Half a mile away from the center of the Able test,
they pick up a signal.
ART: Look. Sweet!
Yeah I think this might be one of '‘em.
CARTER: No, there's something right there.
ART: Yeah. Oh hoho!
Oh that's nice.
CARTER: Over 100, about 110, 115.
MIKE: Do you think that's Gilliam?
Less structure than I expected to see on that...
NARRATOR: The mapping team hurries back to the Surveyor
to take a closer look at the data.
CARTER: The orientation of the,
the map that was drawn previously suggests that it
was facing to the north, north-west. What we've seen so
far, and the sonar data seem to support that.
ART: Location, orientation and size,
so those are 3 good clues all pointing towards the
suggestion that this would be the Gilliam.
SKIPPER: Alright. Sounds good.
ART: Alright. SKIPPER: Let's go find it.
NARRATOR: Using the sonar data,
the skipper positions the Indies Surveyor directly
above the wreck site.
CHRIS: Relay to Brian, I'm right on top of it.
BRIAN: Roger that.
NARRATOR: Radioactivity levels at Bikini are still high in some places.
But the water is now safe to dive.
The team is about to take its very first look at a nuclear
ghost ship.
CHRIS: The pool's open, the pool's open!
BRIAN: Roger, the pool is open.
CREW: Okay, the pool is open.
CHRIS: Roger, diver in the water!
NARRATOR: The wreck lies 150 feet down,
with visibility limited.
DAN [over radio]: She's, she's just in pieces.
That's extraordinary.
I've never seen anything like this before.
Wow, it, it's like she's melted.
NARRATOR: The divers struggle to even work out which way
round the ship is lying.
DAN [over radio]: Is that the bow?
NARRATOR: The team needs to see the wreck as a whole,
to understand the impact of the nuclear blast.
Using precise 3D data from the survey,
we can now drain the waters of Bikini Atoll...
to reveal the grotesque and shocking remains of the USS Gilliam.
A whole ship has been flattened.
Where once she measured 70 feet from the top of her masts,
she's now been squashed to a third of that height.
One mast is missing and the other lies smashed on the seabed.
The steel gunwales droop over the ship's sides.
And the hull has melted in folds, like loose sailcloth.
All the scientific instruments on board the Gilliam were
smashed or melted in the blast.
But data from other ships further out survives.
CARTER: Yeah, there's pressure there.
ART: So pressure and then to tidal corrections.
NARRATOR: Using this data, and information from historical
records we can reveal exactly what happens to the Gilliam.
Before the Able test, Bikini Atoll is home to 167 people,
most living on the main island.
But their lives are about to change forever.
WYATT: "“The United States government wants to attempt to
turn this into something good for mankind..."”
NARRATOR: In the weeks before detonation, the islanders are evacuated.
And their island is turned into a test bed.
But this isn't just a military experiment.
This is theatre!
JAMES: Operation Crossroads was designed to test the bomb
publicly, to invite observers from all over the world,
to film it, to broadcast it, live,
via radio and show the world just what the bomb could do.
JERRY: It was meant to be a media spectacular.
NARRATOR: The explosions will be filmed by hundreds of
cameras, using half the film stock in the entire world.
MAN [over radio]: The time has come to send the atom bomb by air to Bikini.
The most explosive experiment in history is about to begin.
NARRATOR: At 5:55am,
the B-29 bomber 'Dave's Dream' takes off from
Kwajalein airbase, 200 miles away.
Her only cargo is the Able bomb.
[explosion].
MIKE: It exploded about 500 feet above Gilliam and
basically flash-melted it.
NARRATOR: In less than a second,
the fireball strikes and the Gilliam grows hotter than the
surface of the sun.
The steel sides of the ship start to melt.
Blast pressure from above crushes the ship down
causing it to lose buoyancy and start sinking.
The white hot steel is then quenched by the water as it
solidifies into its final misshapen form.
JAMES: This, the first ship ever sunk by an atomic bomb,
it's surrealistic, it's stunning and it really does
give you a powerful sense of what the power of that weapon was.
NARRATOR: After the first atomic test at Bikini Atoll,
the watching world expects destruction on a biblical scale.
But the same size bomb that flattened Nagasaki,
has only sunk five vessels at Bikini.
Most of the ships are still afloat.
JAMES: When the bomb went off and only five ships sank
all of the press that were watching said, that's it?
That's all?
JERRY: They were expecting that virtually the whole
flotilla would end up at the bottom of Bikini harbor and so
in that sense, this was a huge disappointment.
MAN [over radio]: There is no earthquake, no tidal wave or
other catastrophe to justify the fears of some.
The final verdict remains shrouded in military secrecy.
NARRATOR: But Operation Crossroads is far from over.
The second test is just three weeks away.
This time, the world's first ever underwater nuclear detonation.
Code name: Baker.
JAMES: Baker test was designed to see what a bomb would do
if it had gone off in a harbor.
What would it do to a fleet at anchor if,
instead of being dropped,
the bomb had been detonated, say, by a submarine.
JERRY: It was designed to see whether an
underwater explosion would crush the hulls of these ships
and send them plummeting to the bottom of the atoll.
NARRATOR: Might the explosion even blast a massive hole in
the sea floor itself?
The US Navy tries to allay widespread public fears.
BLANDY: "“The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the
water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships
on all of the oceans drop down to the bottom.
It will not blow out the bottom of the sea
and let all the water run down the hole.
It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy!"”
NARRATOR: Baker will be detonated close to where the
Able bomb was dropped.
To help them understand the effects of an underwater nuke,
the University of Delaware scientists continue their scan.
MIKE: We have the technology out here now to really finish
what Operation Crossroads started.
To look at the whole landscape of Bikini,
the impact of these bombs on the lagoon bottom.
NARRATOR: There's one wreck from Test Baker that they
really want to find...
The Pilotfish.
An American Balao Class attack submarine.
Launched in 1943,
she makes six war patrols in the Pacific.
In July 1946, she takes up her final position for the Baker test.
Less than 400 yards from the center,
with her stern facing the blast.
Suspended at 56 feet with cables and weights.
The Pilotfish will be the US Navy's very first underwater
nuclear casualty.
JAMES: Submarines are built to take pressure and they're
built to take a pounding...but nobody had ever anticipated
the kind of forces that the atomic bomb was going to
generate underwater.
NARRATOR: The surviving ships from the Able test are
rearranged for Baker.
At the center of the crosshairs,
a World War II landing ship, the LSM-60, with a single,
sacrificial role.
MAN [over radio]: Aboard the LSM-60, the bomb-carrying vessel,
last minute preparations...
signal for evacuation..."”
NARRATOR: Suspended 90 feet below
the moored landing ship...
is a watertight steel chamber.
Inside is a 23- kiloton atomic bomb,
nicknamed "“Helen of Bikini"”, the same size and design as
the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
GRANT: Power I'm not gonna have any control.
CARTER: Yeah.
NARRATOR: The team is searching in the area where
the Pilotfish was moored for Operation Crossroads.
CARTER: Uh you do what makes the boat good for you, Graham.
NARRATOR: And it's a bumpy ride.
Taking their lead from the 1946 charts and other post war surveys.
They hone in on the most likely location and
start collecting data.
ART: Cool, yeah.
MIKE: And that's the edge of the crater.
NARRATOR: The scan data suggests a submarine-like shape.
DAN [over radio]: This is incredible.
This can only be the Pilotfish.
It's got to be her.
NARRATOR: There's only one way to find out exactly what blast
damage the submarine suffers.
Revealed for the first time in 74 years...
the first submarine ever destroyed by a nuclear bomb,
the USS Pilotfish.
Compared to the melted mess of the Gilliam,
the sub looks surprisingly intact.
Part of her deck has collapsed.
Reports show that this was caused by later salvage
attempts, not by the bomb.
But the metal of her hull has been '‘shrink-wrapped'
around her internal frames.
Considering how close she was to the blast,
it's astonishing that she hasn't been ripped to pieces.
Then, at the stern, the end of the sub that was facing
the blast, signs of a rip.
Could this be the damage that sinks the Pilotfish?
To answer that, the team examines the way the sub is built.
It has an internal watertight structure, the pressure hull,
and around that, a much lighter steel superstructure.
Damage to the superstructure should be survivable.
The hole seems only to pierce the outer hull.
So the team doesn't think it's this that sinks the Pilotfish.
In that case, what does?
NARRATOR: Can the drained wreck give up more secrets?
By the forward torpedo room,
and piercing the critical watertight compartment,
a much larger hole.
Even the torpedo tubes inside have been squashed together
by huge forces.
So what can explain this hole in the bow,
the end of the sub furthest away from the underwater Baker blast?
ANDREW: And you can see then how the pressure hull's been
pushed right in.
DAN: So that looks like she's failed at the bow.
ANDREW: It does look like that, yeah.
NARRATOR: On board the Indies Surveyor,
the team is trying to figure it out.
MIKE: They estimated about 5200 pounds per square inch of
force hitting the submarine from Baker,
whereas it was only rated to 300.
DAN: This is, this is a monumental failure of the
pressure hull.
NARRATOR: By combining the team's investigation with
evidence from the drained wreck,
we can now reconstruct the final moments of the Pilotfish.
MAN [over radio]: This is Baker Day, the day of the second atomic bomb test.
NARRATOR: The Pilotfish is already tethered to the seabed,
363 yards away, braced for an earth-shattering blast.
[ticking].
MAN: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... Fire!
[explosion].
NARRATOR: Within seconds, pressure waves slam into the
back of the sub.
Traveling close to the speed of sound they force in the
steel panels between the structural frames,
'‘shrink-wrapping' the Pilotfish.
Blast waves make the hull shake,
weakening the structure of the sub.
When these combined forces reach the bow,
they find a weak spot by the torpedo room,
and punch a hole through both superstructure and pressure
hull causing terminal damage.
In under a second, the Pilotfish becomes the world's
first victim of an underwater nuclear blast.
MAN [over radio]: I can see nothing at all of the target vessels,
they are all completely obliterated.
NARRATOR: For the U.S. Navy, it's clear proof of
the deadly effect of an underwater atomic bomb on subs.
The team now wants find out if the Baker blast has the same
impact on the surface.
They're scanning the sea floor,
searching for a ship they hope will give the answer.
And not just any ship...
The biggest of all the warships here.
The gigantic aircraft carrier...
the USS Saratoga.
888 feet long. Fast and powerful...
Her lethal payload is around 18 Hellcat fighters and
40 Avenger bombers.
And she's a battler.
In World War II she survives two torpedo strikes,
and 5 kamikaze attacks.
And over 17 years of service, a world record of nearly
99, 000 planes launch from her deck!
ART: She had come through all of that and was brought
out to the Operation Crossroads tests to be
one of the guinea pigs.
NARRATOR: The carrier is located just 300 yards from
the LSM-60, the landing ship carrying the Baker bomb.
Strapped to her deck are planes, tanks and other
equipment, to see how the blast affects them.
With 1, 000 watertight compartments,
the Saratoga should be almost unsinkable.
She may be huge, but she's not easy to find.
The Bikini wrecks are spread over 5 square miles.
Only a methodical scan will reveal her exact position.
CARTER: A little starboard, we're coming up to the end of
the line in 10...
MIKE: It looks like an aircraft.
There it is...Yeah.
ART: Oh wow.
Hello you big beauty!
Wow.
NARRATOR: There's only one ship on the Bikini
seabed anything like this.
ART: Oh my god she's, look, it's taking up so much of that screen...
just keeps going.
It's just astounding the, the just the enormity of it...
NARRATOR: Intriguingly, the 40, 000 ton carrier
now lies 300 yards from where she was
moored for the test.
Almost immediately, the remains of an aircraft.
Could this be from the deck of the Saratoga?
Then, nearby, the gigantic bow of the carrier.
But if the Pilotfish sinks where she's tethered,
how is it that this enormous vessel ends up so far away?
The answer may lie in the remains of the Saratoga itself.
On her starboard side, extensive damage,
massive warping and rippling, known as washboarding.
This can only be the result of huge horizontal forces
from the blast.
MIKE: And here, I think, I think that may be Saratoga.
ART: I think that's the Saratoga we're seeing here...
NARRATOR: The 1946 charts show the Saratoga's
position, close to the detonation point.
Crucially, she is lined up starboard side onto the bomb.
Exposed to the full force of the nuclear blast.
ART: We've found the Saratoga more than 600 meters away from the blast zone...
more than twice the distance from where it had originally been placed.
NARRATOR: The blast waves that destroy the submarine
have a completely different effect on the surface.
JAMES: Pressure waves shooting out, slamming into the ships,
generating a massive series of atomic tsunamis.
NARRATOR: It's these huge tidal waves that washboard the
hull and shunt the carrier sideways.
But there's no clear sign of a hole that might have sunk her.
So what other forces finally send this mighty carrier to the bottom?
[explosion].
NARRATOR: To understand how the Saratoga finally ends up
on the seafloor, we need to return to the drained
landscape of Bikini Atoll.
Are there any more clues on the carrier itself?
Standing out clearly is a deep channel pummeled into the
flight deck, running half the length of the entire ship.
But if the main force of the underwater blast strikes the Saratoga
from the side, why is her deck so badly damaged?
Using the new survey data, we can explain exactly what
happens to the Saratoga...
inside the explosion.
MAN [over radio]: The final switches have been thrown,
no one can stop it.
The atomic bomb is about to explode.
MAN [over radio]: Firing time!
MAN [over radio]: 4, 3, 2, 1...
[explosion].
NARRATOR: 4 millionths of a second after the initial flash,
a mass of steam, sand and blasted coral starts
racing up into a '‘spray dome'.
Moments later a 94-foot high tsunami slams into the starboard side.
The underwater force lifts the huge carrier 43 feet up...
wrenching her loose from the mooring blocks.
Successive waves toss planes and machinery from her deck.
And as the horizontal forces drive the Saratoga sideways,
a huge column of vaporized sand,
coral and steam races upwards.
JAMES: Half a million tons of lagoon bottom literally ripped
and thrown up, along with a couple of hundred million tons
of water and steam in a mushroom cloud whose stem was
1, 000 feet across.
NARRATOR: 10 seconds after the explosion,
the massive column starts to collapse.
Millions of tons of debris crashes down on the Saratoga...
fatally weakening the deck and the whole hull,
allowing water to penetrate the ship.
Now 300 yards from where she was moored,
the carrier starts to sink.
MAN [over radio]: The USS Saratoga sank at 8 minutes past 4 Bikini time,
7 hours and 33 minutes after the atomic bomb had
dealt her the death blow.
NARRATOR: Nine ships are sunk by the Baker blast,
joining the five already sunk by Able.
As the nuclear mists start to clear,
what will the US military and scientists learn from
Operation Crossroads?
Despite the awesome power of the bombs,
the results are not entirely as expected.
JERRY: Operation Crossroads demonstrated that an atomic bomb
cannot destroy a naval flotilla, that was a surprise,
that was also a disappointment.
NARRATOR: But the most powerful effect of the blast...
is invisible.
JAMES: It became very clear that they couldn't get the
radiation off the target ships.
Worse yet, was the fact that all of the support ships
that had come back into the lagoon were now
also getting radioactive.
NARRATOR: Deadly radioactivity spreads across the whole of
Bikini Atoll.
Levels are so dangerously high,
that Operation Crossroads is shut down.
But the Cold War atomic arms race has now begun.
So America's test program continues unabated,
in the Nevada desert and other Pacific islands.
And in 1949, the Soviet Union detonates its own atomic bomb
in a remote part of what's now Kazakhstan.
The Americans retaliate by planning an even more deadly device.
Eight years after Crossroads,
Bikini Atoll is judged to be safe enough for testing again.
And it's about to experience the most powerful explosion
yet seen on the planet.
The survey team has completed its analysis of the first two atomic tests
but there's one area they still want to explore.
Less than 20 miles from the site of Operation Crossroads,
in the north-west corner of the atoll.
In 1952, the USA plans new tests here
of a terrifying new device.
The hydrogen bomb.
And with it, the nuclear age is about to go thermonuclear.
JERRY: The big difference with the thermonuclear weapon is
that there's no limit to the power.
NARRATOR: While the Able and Baker bombs used nuclear fission,
splitting the atom, the hydrogen bomb harnesses
the much greater energy that powers the sun,
nuclear fusion.
JAMES: You could indeed, with a series of these bombs,
not only destroy another country,
you could conceivably kill all life on earth.
NARRATOR: The question the U.S. military wants to answer
is whether this extraordinary power can be used in warfare.
The first test will be called Castle Bravo.
A huge device, with the code-name '‘Shrimp' is planned
to produce a 5 megaton explosion,
equivalent to 5 million tons of TNT.
300 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.
Its target will not be ships,
but the landmass of Bikini Atoll itself.
Nobody knows how big a crater it will create.
The thermonuclear device is positioned on one of Bikini's
tiny coral islands,
in the north-west corner of the atoll.
It's a huge area, taking many hours to map.
CARTER: I mean you look at it this way you can actually
see the crater.
ART: We're seeing really good data,
we're getting good coverage.
The biggest thing I've ever had to map.
We've covered back and forth all around the perimeter,
certainly enough to get a very clear idea of the
shape and complexity of the, of the site.
NARRATOR: Using the survey team's unique data...
We can peel back the water...
To reveal a turning point in human history.
It's a staggering sight.
The crater is gigantic.
Over a mile across.
But pulling out from the massive Bravo crater
reveals a major surprise.
There's a second crater right in front of it.
Is this also caused by the Bravo explosion?
Or is it something completely new?
ART: Let's take a zoom in here...Wow.
MIKE: Look at that.
ART: So we don't have just one crater here.
MIKE: Yeah. ART: Very clearly we have two!
MIKE: Could we get a line that shows the cross section
of both craters?
Oh wow, look at that.
ART: There were numerous other tests that were done here.
NARRATOR: The records confirm that the larger crater is
formed by Bravo, and that the smaller one is caused by a
later test, codename '‘Romeo'.
But the team knows that the Bravo test is planned to be
smaller than Romeo.
So how has it made a crater...
that's so much bigger?
NARRATOR: The survey team is trying to figure out the truth
about the Castle Bravo explosion.
ART: So that now will be helpful for getting the,
the sizing of it.
NARRATOR: Top secret records now reveal that the bomb's
designers made an important mistake.
JAMES: When that weapon went off it proved to be far more
powerful than the scientists had thought it might be.
Instead of being 5 to 6 megatons,
it grew to 15 megatons force.
NARRATOR: The '‘official' explanation is that
the scientists accidentally load the Bravo device
with twice as much active nuclear fuel as planned.
But declassified documents now reveal that aircraft at the
time were cautiously positioned for a potential
20-megaton blast.
The actual expected figure remains a secret.
JERRY: It turned out to be the most powerful bomb
the U.S. ever exploded.
About 1, 000 times more powerful than Hiroshima.
NARRATOR: With data analyzed, the team combines
their insights with the 1950s test records,
and now can fully explain the terrifying events
of Castle Bravo.
MAN: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...fire!
[explosion].
NARRATOR: The explosion is off the scale.
And the thermonuclear effects are felt far beyond Bikini.
300 miles away on Likiep Atoll,
11-year old Charles Domnick is just starting his school day.
CHARLES: When the Bravo went off,
the trees were shaking, the earth was moving!
I mean the building I was in was shaking!
Everybody was scared,
we were running around like crazy on the island!
NARRATOR: Where once there were 3 inhabitable islands,
after Bravo all that's left is a gaping void.
JAMES: It erupted with such dramatic effect that it sent
radioactive fallout for thousands of miles across the Pacific.
NARRATOR: Bikini's original inhabitants have long since
been relocated.
But lethal nuclear fallout now starts dropping on
the very islands they were moved to.
MAN: The problem this time is especially acute because this entire area
of the Pacific is subject to radiological fallout.
NARRATOR: Dozens suffer serious radiation sickness.
Even to this day, many Marshall Islanders still
report an unusually high incidence of cancers and
other long-term illnesses.
Ever since the Bravo explosion,
there has been much debate about whether or not the
Americans knew that inhabited islands would be
affected by the fallout.
The full truth may never be known,
but the damage to the environment,
and to the local population, is a graphic illustration of
the shocking power of a thermonuclear device.
Amazingly, coral and marine life have come back to the lagoon.
But Bikini islanders still cannot return to their home.
Radioactivity lurks deep within the soil.
CHARLES: For the people of Bikini that cannot go back to
their island for we don't know how long.
Let's put it that way, they are not happy with what's, what's going on.
NARRATOR: The fallout from Castle Bravo fills the world with fear.
But the arms race escalates still further.
In 1961, in the remote Russian Arctic
the Soviet Union detonates a 50-megaton device,
[explosion].
the Tsar Bomba.
By far the largest nuclear explosion the world has ever seen.
Two years later, world leaders decide enough is enough,
and agree to limit nuclear tests in the atmosphere.
But since the 1963 treaty, there have been at least
1500 further nuclear detonations,
mostly underground.
JAMES: By the 1980s there are tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons on the planet, in various arsenals,
capable of destroying all life on the planet
several times over.
NARRATOR: Today's nuclear weapons are more about accuracy, not size,
with multiple warheads mounted on
long-range ballistic missiles.
So far, none have been used in anger.
JERRY: We're currently living in the longest period of peace
between superpowers in history.
Is that due to nuclear weapons?
Have nuclear weapons rendered war so catastrophic
that it becomes inconceivable?
That might be the case.
But a lot of that depends upon luck.
And the question is, when does our luck run out?
NARRATOR: The nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll may have
helped prevent war, but they also created a balance of
terror that the world must live with... forever.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.