The Ivy MIKE leak (1952)  Posted June 13th, 2012 by Alex
Wellerstein  On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated
the world’s first hydrogen bomb.1 Shot MIKE of Operation Ivy was
the culmination of nearly a decade of work on developing
thermonuclear weapons, and it released an explosive force
equivalent to 10.4 million tons of TNT — some 800 times the
explosive force of Hiroshima, capable of setting fire to an area
of over a thousand square miles.   The world had entered the
megaton age, but the United States didn’t want anybody to know
about it.  Which is an odd thing, if you think about it. It’s
true, the first atomic bomb test — “Trinity” — had been kept a
secret at the time. But only because the U.S. planned to use it
on Japan quickly and wanted it to be a surprise. There was no
“operational” reason for keeping the MIKE test a secret, except
for the fact that, well, it wasn’t actually really ready for
prime-time, as far as weapons went. MIKE was a big, clunky
cryogenic test apparatus that weighed ove