The night was drizzly and starless, but in the last hours of June the forecast was for clearing weather. By July's first dawn, the blacktopped, coral runway of Kwajalein islet was ablaze with lights. It was Able-day for Operation Crossroads and the explosion of the world's fourth atomic bomb.
Overhead was the roar of planes. But all eyes, mostly red from lack of sleep, were focused on a glistening B-29 Super-fort, Dave's Dream,* which stood apart at the south side of the strip.
Alongside the plane was a tent in which Manhattan District engineers had assembled "The Thing." A mobile crane had hoisted it from the tent to a trench beneath the plane's open bomb bay. Hidden by canvas from all but a superselect few, The Thing was drawn up into the bay. All that could be told about it was that it was big enough to have a foot-high picture of Cinemactress Rita Hayworth pasted on its side. The Thing was called Gilda (after Miss Hayworth's latest movie).
The bomb bay was closed. In the purpling east, cumulus clouds bumped heads in a huddle. As Major Woodrow P. Swancutt pushed the throttles all the way forward, a rainbow shone overhead. Dave's Dream gathered speed, then rose slowly into the easterly wind. It was 5:54 a.m.
To the north, 240 air miles away, was Bikini, once one of the least-known and most peaceful of Pacific island groups. In Bikini's 200-sq.-mi. lagoon was an anchorage about five miles in diameter. In a space where the Navy would normally have only 14 ships (or five in a cruising formation at sea), 73 vessels had been jampacked for the test.
The air above was cut by fourscore planes, many of them pilotless, radio-controlled drones flown from Eniwetok or the carriers Shangri-La and Saidor. Worker planes kept these in their appointed rounds.
Then to the rendezvous came the queen bee. Dave's Dream's weaponeers, two 26-year-old ensigns, David L. Anderson and Leon D. Smith, had armed the bomb within 20 minutes after takeoff. Soaring at 30,000 feet above the polka-dotted lagoon, Dave's Dream made a dry run into the northeast wind. Bombardier Major Harold H. Wood—known to his crewmates as "Lemon Bar" because of his success at officers'-club slot machines—twirled the knobs on his bombsight, tried to line up the target ship Nevada with the cross hairs of his eyepiece. Topside, the Nevada had been painted a livid orange, striped with white. She wore her campaign ribbons painted on big boards—among them the Purple Heart with two stars (one hit at Pearl Harbor, two at Okinawa).
Duck Talk. The word was passed, "Thirty minutes to go." Around the world ordinary men & women, who would be the casualties in an atomic war, bent their heads and cupped their ears to radio sets to catch this preview.
Operation Crossroads had been ballyhooed as the greatest laboratory experiment in all history. To the listening world, it sounded like an animal circus at feeding time. Static almost drowned out other sound effects: a dozen Donald Ducks quacked endlessly and often pointlessly.
Through it all, announcers asked listeners to concentrate on the tick of a metronome placed before an open microphone on the abandoned Pennsylvania. When the ticking stopped, it would be because the bomb had gone off, and the microphone with it.