11/03/2026
This week's highlights photographs from Operation Crossroads, the atomic bomb testing done in Bikini Atoll.
The tests took place in July 1946. The United States Navy wanted to know what an atomic bomb would do to a fleet of warships, so they parked more than 90 ships in the lagoon to find out.
Many of those ships were older vessels that had just survived World War II. The USS Nevada (BB-36), which survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, was painted orange so the bomber crew had something to aim at, and the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga (CV-3) was there too, after fighting through most of the Pacific War. Captured ships like the Japanese battleship Nagato and the German cruiser Prinz Eugen were anchored nearby. The first bomb, Able, was dropped from a plane on July 1. The second, Baker, went off underwater on July 25 and threw a column of radioactive seawater into the sky that came down right on top of the fleet. The Saratoga sank within hours, and many of the ships that stayed afloat were too contaminated to ever use again. The military learned a lot from all of this about radiation and how ships hold up in a nuclear attack, and it shaped defense planning for years.
The atoll itself never really recovered. All 167 residents were evacuated before the tests; the reefs were destroyed, and radiation entered the soil and the food. Some families returned in the 1970s and were told a few years later that it still wasn’t safe. Almost 80 years later, Bikini is still mostly empty, and the ships remain at the bottom of the lagoon.
Interested in more? Visit the Portal to Texas History, available on the museum's website at the Center for Pacific War Studies.
📸:
1) Aerial view of an atomic fireball.
2) Atomic mushroom cloud and shockwave
