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"Lemon Bar" Wood was at his bombsight again. He thought he had the Nevada on the nose. The bombsight did the rest. It was 9 a.m. Soon, from a nearby plane, came the radioed word, "Bomb away—bomb away and falling." Dave's Dream broke away in a sharp turn.
No Bull's Eye. The Thing was falling free, faster . . . 32 feet per second faster with every second that passed . . . faster.
After 40 seconds, The Thing went off and so did the metronome. As planned, the burst was several hundred feet in the air above the ships. It was not, as planned, over the Nevada but several hundred yards short, nearer the Independence. It was no dud.
There was a flash which blotted out the brilliant morning sun. Men wearing special goggles so dark as to seem impenetrably black saw a brilliant stab, like lightning. Then the shock wave seized the observers aboard the distant ships and beat upon their eardrums and shook them by the shoulder. Aboard Dave's Dream, Colonel John R. Sutherland was watching through the drift sight when the shock wave threw it up so sharply that it cut him below the eye. To a man ten miles away aboard the Mount McKinley, the heat felt like the hot rush that comes when the door of an oven is opened.
Diminishing Return. From the point of detonation a ball of fire shot upward and seemed to burst in whirling offshoots of flame. After a moment, an immense cloud arose, reaching for the sky and resplendent with myriad shades of purple and rose. Awful as it was, it was less than the expectations of many onlookers. The Russian observer, Professor Simon Alexandrov, pointed to the cloud, shrugged and said with ill-considered haste: "Not so much."
The bomb was of the type used at Nagasaki, and supposedly the best in the world's only atomic arsenal. But scientists had no way of insuring that any two bombs would be identical. The New York Times's jug-eared science editor, William L. Laurence, who had seen the explosions at Los Alamos and Nagasaki, carefully noted that the Bikini bomb seemed less powerful. The diameter of the cloudhead after five minutes was only 4,400 feet, whereas in New Mexico it had been about 7,500. At a height of 22,000 feet it spawned a second, mushroom-shaped cloud which pushed up to about 35,000 feet. The predictions had been for 60,000.
There was no earthquake, no "tidal" (seismic) wave or other catastrophe to justify the fears of crackpots that the bomb would bring the end of the world.
According to Plan. Bikini atoll was still there, its waving palms confounding the punsters who had said it would become "Nothing Atoll." The Nevada still floated proudly. But the damage had been great, and just about what the experts said they had expected. The cruiser-hulled carrier Independence, which took the greatest force of the blast, was a shambles, racked by internal fires and explosions (from ammunition and aviation fuel) which had sunk many a stronger ship in wartime. Because deadly radiation, three to five times greater than men could tolerate, persisted in the water around her hull, her fires could not be quenched.