Bravo Superbomb Disaster: Its Part in a 16-Year Rampage of Life-Threatening U.S. Nuclear Weapons Testing

Assigned as a draftee to a hydrogen-bomb test operation in the Marshall Islands, Frank Zagone gives his account of the March 1, 1954 detonation of BRAVO, a 15 megaton superbomb, the most powerful and radiologically “dirty” nuclear blast in U.S. history (equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima bombs). He writes about a scientific miscalculation in the design of BRAVO that led to a “runaway” explosion. Radioactive fallout descended on thousands of square miles of the mid-Pacific. Marshall Islanders, Japanese fishermen, and U.S. naval ships were showered with radioactive coral ash. The Bravo Superbomb Disaster establishes the need for final accountability for the underhanded assault by the nuclear leaders on the health of loyal and trusting Americans and Marshall Islanders. Also chargeable to the “nuclear sovereignty” are the social problems still plaguing American society stemming from the several trillions of dollars drained from the U.S. Treasury over decades of financing an overblown nuclear-bomb inventory. The author contends that the New Orleans nightmare Katrina was, in large part, a casualty of our government’s inability to economically recover enough, from the long years of nuclear weapons excesses, to adequately fund badly needed maintenance of our national infrastructure.