American Nukes

About Genie

No one was worried about a fireball engulfing the men as they stood there in the Nevada desert. The blast would be well over ten times higher than Little Boy over Hiroshima and only one-tenth as powerful.

The men, Sidney Bruce, Frank Ball, Norman Bodinger (often called “Bodie”), John Hughes, and Donald Luttrell, are all Air Force officers and they volunteered to be here. Five men are here but in fact there are six, as someone has to run the movie camera. That someone is Akira “George” Yoshitake, a Los Angeles-born Japanese-American who spent some of his childhood at the Rohwer Japanese American Relocation Center in Arkansas, arriving there with his four siblings and parents in 1942 as a 12-year-old boy, serving out the war in the prison camp.

Yoshitake, who worked with the secretive Lookout Mountain photography unit, which documented atomic tests, learned of his assignment the night before and came prepared with two movie cameras and a still camera. Plus a baseball hat for some protection from the radiation.

The five volunteers seem far less prepared. None of them wear hats. The one in the middle sports dark sunglasses but the others squint upwards into the glare of the sun struggling to spot the approaching F-89J Scorpion, about 18,000 feet in the sky. The plane is easy to lose, even after you find it, and the men can be heard on the low-fidelity audio track of the film suggesting various techniques to locate the tiny silver dot.

There’s the plane, they see it, and as the countdown spoken by the officer with the sunglasses reaches zero the Scorpion launches the Genie, a nuclear missile built to shoot down Soviet bombers, and you can see its white streak racing away from the plane.

There are no massed Soviet bombers here today, no sky crowded with Tupolev Tu-4s on a one-way mission to bomb the United States. The Russian long-range bombers are clones of the B-29 Superfortress, the model of plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, and the Soviets designed by reverse-engineering B-29s that had made emergency landings in the Soviet Union in 1944. Today, July 19, 1957, at two in the afternoon, is Operation Plumbbob John day, a nuclear test, the first and as it turned out the only air-to-air nuclear test ever done by the US.

The Genie and its one-and-a-half-kiloton warhead were rushed into service out of fear of these new bombers, the Soviets one way or another catching up so much more quickly than anticipated. The rocket, unguided and with enough fuel for only two seconds of powered flight, would blast out from under the plane’s wing, fly for up to six miles (four was best), and strike the enemy bomber formation within seconds, a debilitating blast nearly one thousand feet in diameter. The enemy planes would have no chance to make evasive maneuvers and, since there was no radio signal to jam, the weapon could not be interfered with electronically.

Why the Soviets would fly their bombers in tight formations remains unclear other than that was how bombers bombed in World War II and so that was how bombers bombed.

High above the desert, the atomic light flashes brighter than expected. While the man with the dark glasses maintains his gaze upwards the others suddenly jerk their heads down, a couple of them dazzled by the flash, perhaps unsure if there are more flashes to come, one man on the right looks at the man next to him for reassurance before he risks looking up again.

They are shielding their eyes from the sun, marveling at the strange puff of purple cloud high up in the sky. Then the blast wave hits and again the man with the sunglasses, narrating into his recorder, knows what it is and is expecting it, the others instinctively cover their heads and cower for a moment before regaining their composure.

The test of the Genie, intended to be detonated over the United States and Canada, has proven that detonating small nuclear weapons way up in the air is safe for Americans way below on the ground, the radiation exposure badges worn by the men registering barely any danger at all.

The Soviet bombers, so greatly feared, never came. As the decade passed and as the next decade passed, as guidance systems on non-nuclear air-to-air missiles improved, and as the ICBM matured and replaced the bomber’s role in a surprise first strike, the need for an airborne nuclear strike capability against other aircraft faded away.

The volunteers and the cameraman, the six men in the desert, would all develop cancer. Four of them would die from it. Of course, all six men participated in several other nuclear tests, of which Genie was the smallest. For each of them though, that day at Yucca Flats, looking up at the Genie, at the explosion it brought, was a defining moment of their lives, a moment that would be remembered by them and by their families until the end, even at the very end.

I know because I read their obituaries.

Gallery

Nukemap

NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.

Videos

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