Operation Sandstone was the third American series of nuclear weapon tests. It was conducted in 1948 at Enewetak Atoll. These tests followed Crossroads and preceded Ranger. As was the custom, each explosion was given a nickname.
The tests were authorized on June 27, 1947 and Enewetak Atoll was chosen as the test site on October 11. The 140 inhabitants of the atoll were relocated to Ujelang Atoll in December.
The tests were used to evaluate new atomic weapon designs that had been developed at Los Alamos as part of the Manhattan Project but had not previously been used. The bombs used oralloy, a form of enriched uranium, as a replacement for plutonium, which had been used in all atomic weapons prior to this with the exception of the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which utilized uranium-235. The X-Ray test used a 2:1 mix of oralloy and plutonium. The Yoke and Zebra tests used all oralloy.
Operation Crossroads was a series of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946. Its purpose was to test the effect of nuclear weapons on naval ships. The series consisted of two detonations, each with a yield of 23 kilotons:[1] Able was detonated at an altitude of 520 feet (158 m) on 1 July 1946; Baker was detonated 90 feet (27 m) underwater on 25 July 1946. A third planned burst, Charlie, was cancelled.
The Crossroads tests were the fourth and fifth nuclear explosions conducted by the United States (following the Trinity test and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). They were the first nuclear tests held in the Marshall Islands, and the first to be publicly announced beforehand and observed by an audience of invited witnesses and a large press corps.
Ultimately, the biggest news from Crossroads, not widely reported at the time, was the radioactive contamination of all the target ships by the Baker shot. It was the world’s first experience with immediate, concentrated local radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. (The global fallout from an air burst is delayed and widely dispersed.)[2]
Trinity was the first test of technology for an atomic weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico on the White Sands Proving Ground, headquartered near Alamogordo. Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium bomb. Using the same conceptual design, the Fat Man device was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9. The Trinity detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT and is usually considered the beginning of the Atomic Age.
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