Roy Norman
Nevada Test Site, 1951
1944 USS Sirius “Final Tubes for
IBM + TauXmtrs”
1947 Guam Island Fire Control
Radar Antenna
www.usscoralsea.net/pages/nuke.html)
Following the launch, Roy Norman and his men went
below deck where the VIPs onboard reviewed the various
components of the Neptune and its special cargo. “I had a
lot of questions thrown at me,” Norman recalls, “until the
Coral Sea returned to port in Hampton Roads later that day.”
“It Worked Damn Well, Let Me
Tell You”
Norman wasn’t quite through with atomic weapons. A
year after the Neptune launch, the Navy
sent him out to Enewetak. It was April
of ’ 51.
Enewetak is an atoll in the Marshall Islands chain,
2,500 miles southwest of Honolulu, HI. “There, I witnessed
two atomic bomb explosions and the first attempt at a
hydrogen bomb explosion.”
The hydrogen bomb tests came about as a result of
fears in Washington that the US was being overtaken in the
nuclear arms race by the Soviet Union. The first Soviet
fission bomb had been revealed in the fall of ’ 49 and
Klaus Fuchs’ espionage activity at Los Alamos, NM was
discovered in January of the following year. Needless to
say, the Cold War tensions were escalating. On January
31, 1951, Harry Truman announced
America’s plan to build an H-bomb.
While the Marshall Islands’ Bikini
Atoll has gotten the lion’s share of
publicity because of its role as the
first site of nuclear testing in the
South Pacific, Enewetak was better
situated to accommodate the large
aircraft needed to move the materials
and the 11,000 men needed for the
hydrogen bomb test, which was code
named “Mike Shot.” Mike was code
for megaton — 10. 4 megatons, in this
case.
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Norman says, “It worked damn
well, let me tell you!
“We had a 225-kiloton explosion
from that one and I think I was only
about 17 miles away from it when it
went off. And it was quite a thing to
see — and hear, too.”
Mike lit up the Pacific sky with a
JULY 2004
