Castle Bravo 1954: The Yield Miscalculation That Poisoned the Pacific

Описание: On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested by America—and the yield was nearly triple what scientists predicted. Castle Bravo's 15-megaton explosion at Bikini Atoll was supposed to be 5–6 megatons. The miscalculation had catastrophic consequences.
The error lay in a single assumption: that lithium-7, making up 60% of the device's fuel, was effectively inert. It wasn't. When fast neutrons struck lithium-7 nuclei, they produced additional tritium and more neutrons, amplifying both fusion and fission far beyond design expectations.
The under-predicted yield invalidated every safety calculation. Fallout maps, evacuation zones, and dose limits—all drawn for a 6-megaton event—became obsolete within seconds. A radioactive cloud more than 100 miles wide drifted east over inhabited Marshall Islands atolls, U.S. Navy ships, and a Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon No. 5.
Marshallese residents on Rongelap received whole-body doses exceeding 1.75 Gy (175 rad) before evacuation—more than 40 times the limit set for U.S. test personnel. Thyroid doses in children reached 7–8 Gy, leading to elevated cancer rates documented over decades. The Lucky Dragon's 23 crew members suffered acute radiation syndrome; one died within months.
This documentary reconstruction uses declassified reports, dose reconstructions, diplomatic records, and scientific analyses to trace how a neutron cross-section error cascaded into weapons design revisions, international diplomatic crises, and a compensation system that awarded over $2 billion but paid only a fraction.
Seventy years later, the Bravo crater remains visible from space, unpaid tribunal claims exceed $1.8 billion, and the test stands as a case study in how technical assumptions—when wrong—can reshape lives, laws, and entire nations' futures.
All facts documented. No fiction. No invented dialogue. Pure archival history.

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nuclear fallout, nuclear accident, radioactive disaster, forgotten history, abandoned ghost towns, disaster documentary, Chernobyl documentary, Fukushima disaster, nuclear meltdown, environmental collapse, Cold War disaster, nuclear secrets, toxic legacy

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