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Dawn's first light broke through a heavy haze, diffusing Christmas Island's end-of-the-world ugliness. The barren stretches of sand and scrub, the grey hulls of freighters and barges in the tiny harbor, the naked steel testing towers, the exposed beams of half-completed buildings, all took on a weird beauty. It was already a humid 76°. An 8-knot breeze rippled the coconut fronds. In a small operations building, about 15 technicians sat amid the coffee-cup litter of a sleepless night.
Alone in a darkened room, an electronics technician pressed a microphone switch and began the countdown on Operation Dominic—the U.S. series of nuclear tests in the atmosphere that the free world did not want, but for its survival's sake could not avoid.
Loudspeakers carried the countdown across the claw-shaped coral atoll to scientists huddled in and around instrument-filled trenches. Radio carried it to some 40 ships and 100 aircraft of Joint Task Force 8 deployed over 6,000,000 sq. mi. of the Pacific. One of those aircraft, an Air Force B-52, sped at high altitude toward the island. In the operations center, Dominic's scientific director, William Elwood Ogle, wearing khaki shorts and a green aloha shirt, nodded to Joint Task Force 8's commander, Major General Alfred Dodd Starbird, a tough, tall (6 ft. 5 in.) veteran of atomic testing at Eniwetok and former chief of military applications for the AEC.
All instrumentation was ready. In separate control posts, the Air Force deputy, Brigadier General John S. Samuel, and the Navy deputy, Rear Admiral Lloyd M. Mustin, checked their radarscopes: all ships, all planes were in position. No unwanted craft had strayed into the danger zone. At 5:45 a.m. (Christmas Island time), the countdown reached zero. The B-52 dropped its nuclear payload. A flash pierced the haze. The tests had begun.
Laconic Statement. A special circuit carried the news to Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg in Washington. The AEC relayed the word to President Kennedy, then cruising on his yacht, the Honey Fitz, on Florida's Lake Worth. The President's casual surroundings were deliberate—they were part of a major U.S. policy decision to underplay the resumption of atmospheric tests.
Kennedy had no comment about the test, stood on the March 2 speech in which he explained why the U.S. felt the new series necessary. All that the U.S. Government had to say was contained in a laconic, one-paragraph statement from the AEC, which announced that the detonation had taken place at 10:45 a-m-E.S.T.. and was in the ''intermediate-yield range." Two days later, the U.S. fired a second shot, also in the "intermediate range." That term meant that the power of both explosions was of more than 20 kilotons, but less than one megaton—insignificant in comparison with Russia's 58-megaton terror blast last year. A low-power test was also held underground in Nevada.