Bikini06Trip

Bikini Atoll, the best wreck diving in the world.

Where

Bikini is located 11 degrees north of the equator in the Marshall Island chain.

"As soon as the war [WWII] ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn't been touched by the war and blew it to hell."
--Comedian Bob Hope commenting on Operation Crossroads

As funny as Bob Hope's comment may sound it is true in other ways as well. Scientists have calculated that if you were to add up all the explosives ever used, meaning all the way back to the Chinese invention of Gun Powder (2000 BC), plus ever single war ever fought up to present day, 4% of those explosions occurred in Bikini.

World Perspective	Bikini Atoll

Why

Pearl Harbor signaled the end of the battleship era and the beginning of the aircraft carrier's dominance. Post World War II, the U.S. only had a 2 military branches: the Army and the Navy. The Air Force was still a division of the Army. After the Japanese surrender, military leaders were grappling with how to use nuclear weapons and also how did the navy, army, and air force fit together. The Air Force was struggling to breakaway from the Army and believed that navies was now obsolete since aerial nuclear weapons would obliterate naval ships. The Navy believed otherwise.

Needless to say, a bit of politics and posturing were going on. In order to help settle the issue, a series of tests were formulated to help answer some of these questions. Bikini and Enewetak were selected as nuclear test sites. The Bikini tests were code named Operation Crossroads and Operation Castle. Operation Crossroads was a nuclear weapon test series conducted in the summer of 1946. The series consisted of two detonations, a low altitude atmospheric test and a shallow water test. The devices, each with a yield of 21 kilotons, were named ABLE and BAKER.

Operation Crossroads

These tests were very public. If you could afford the airfare, you were welcome to watch and/or report on the event. Part of the reason for the large amount of the publicity was to allow the rest of the world to witness the power of the U.S.A. In many ways this was 1 step along the way to escalating the Cold War.

The ABLE blast was targeted on the USS Nevada BB-36, July 1 1946. The entire ship was painted a bright orange to assist the pilots in hitting the target. They missed, by over 1,500 ft. Other ships were positioned around the Nevada with "Christmas Tree" gauges to measure the effects of the detonation. The "Christmas Tree" gauges are mini-scaffolds in a rough pyramid shape. At the top of the gauge was a steel plate with different sized holes. Behind these holes were pressure sensitive plates. After the test, the pressure plates were collected, above or below the sea, to measure the force experienced by the ship.

The BAKER blast was positioned 90ft underwater, July 25 1946. While both ABLE and BAKER were the same tonnage, the Baker blast was significantly more destructive. You'll notice that the picture on the left has a dark splotch in the water column, some believe this is the USS Arkansas — she's a battleship. The circular cloud in the picture on the right is vapor water. In both pictures, it's pretty easy to see the test fleet.

After each test, as soon as 1hr afterward, clean-up crews were taken to the remaining floating ships with the intent of eliminating the radioactivity. Some of this treatments included washing down with seawater and blasting the ships' surface with walnut shells. Needless to say these crews and the scientists were still learning about radioactivity.

Operation Castle

The BRAVO blast was part of Operation Castle in March 1954. This was a huge scientific mistake, to put it mildly. It was positioned 7 ft above the surface and was originally predicted to be a 3 megaton explosion, which is 142 times the size of the ABLE or BAKER blasts. The scientists re-calculated the numbers and said it would be a 5 megaton bomb. It turned out to be 15 megatons. It was so powerful, Guam reported seeing a second sun that morning. Three islands of Bikini were completely vaporized - note the crater in the picture near the top of this page. The winds were blowing the wrong way and radioactive fallout was dumped on Rongelap. A Japanese fishing boat crew was also killed by the fallout.

The term fallout is a direct result of this explosion — BRAVO invented the word. BRAVO also contaminated the atoll. Today, the vegetation still contains radioactive Cesium from that blast. While eating the coconuts is not recommended, eating 1 coconut a day would probably have minimal health effects.

The Diving

The diving on Bikini is very technical and very deep. Most dives are 150-170' which means very long decompression dives. A typical dive is 25-30 minute runtime (from the time you jump into the water until you are back on the anchor line coming up). Then another 40-60 minutes climbing the anchor line and decompressing on high O2 mixtures.