Britannia Radio

“Operation Crossroads”

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

“Operation Crossroads” was the name given to a secret U.S. military experiment in July 1946 testing the destructive power of an atomic bomb on an armada of captured German and Japanese warships lined up along retired American cruisers and destroyers used in the Second World War.

The warships were situated in a deep lagoon at Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Over one million tons of battled-used steel were tethered to anchors without a single human on board, to which add battle-weary submarines on the ocean floor. The ships were connected to a 23-ton atomic bomb.

The impact of the explosion is described in Annie Jacobsen’s book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (2011):

… the underwater fireball produce[d] a hollow column or chimney, of radioactive water six thousand feet tall, two thousand feet wide, and with walls three hundred feet thick. The warships below were tossed up into the air like bathtub toys. The Japanese battleship Negato, formerly the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man responsible for the planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, was thrown 400 yards. The retired USS Arkansas, all twenty-seven thousand tons of it, was upended against the water column on its nose. Eight mighty battleships disappeared in the nuclear inferno. Had the armada floating in the lagoon been crewed to capacity, thirty-five thousand sailors would have been vaporized.

One highly placed colonel in “Operation Crossroads” remarked: “I knew in that life-defining moment the world could never afford to have a nuclear war.”

The destructive power witnessed in “Operation Crossroads” may well have been the reason why The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff reversed America’s long-standing national policy of only going to war if attacked first. Jacobsen writes: “The JCS’s new and top secret first-strike policy, code-named Pincher, now allowed the American military to ‘strike a first blow if necessary.’… The new and unprecedented policy had begun as a planning document less than one month after the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945. Ten months later. On June 18, 1946, the policy legally took effect.” This was probably the consequence of “Operation Crossroads.”