The day Ivy Mike wiped out Elugelab

“… By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide …”

- Enrico Fermi and I.I. Rabi in an addendum to the GAC’s report on the hydrogen bomb, c. 1951

In June, 1954, Winston Churchill sat in the red room of the White House with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower and watched a film called “Project Ivy” on the president’s television. Later, he returned to London and regretfully ordered all work on air raid and fallout shelters abandoned.

He knew they would be of little use after the horror of what he just saw.

Four years earlier, President Harry Truman made the decision to pursue the development of thermonuclear (hydrogen) weapons — a new type of destructive “superbomb” that differed substantially from the conventional atomic weapons being tested in that it was powered not just by fission (breaking an atom into two pieces), but also the fusion of hydrogen atoms to form a third atom.

While significant amounts of energy are released with an atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb releases significantly more energy, resulting in a much more devastating blast — up to 100 times more devastating.