[Operation Crossroads: 21 Kiloton "Baker" Bomb Detonated Ninety Feet Underwater, Bikini Atoll Lagoon, South Pacific, July 25, 1946]
U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps
Not on view
Established in 1860, the U.S. Army Signal Corps greatly expanded its operations during World War II, especially in its documentation of the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust in Europe. This remarkable photograph of an underwater nuclear bomb test in the South Pacific was made just after the war’s end from a tower on Bikini Island. It shows a two-thousand-foot-wide detonation water column and above it a funnel-shaped "cauliflower head." In another instant more than two million gallons of water will begin to fall downward around decommissioned warships and create a "base surge" whose first wave will measure ninety-four feet high. The United States used a bomb of the same design and yield to destroy the Japanese city of Nagasaki less than a year earlier, on August 9, 1945.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
