ad you opened your morning paper 65 years ago today, looking for news of one of the most dramatic events in history—the first explosion of a thermonuclear “hydrogen bomb” on November 1, 1952—you would have found…nothing.
Same with the next day, and the next. On Wednesday, November 5, the papers would have been full of stories about Dwight Eisenhower's election as President the day before. On Friday, a few writers started to hint that a huge bomb had been exploded out in the Pacific. It wasn't until the next day, a week after the “Ivy Mike” test, that an article appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner, based on a single eyewitness account. The anonymous observer had been on the command ship USS Estes off the Eniwetok atoll, some 30 miles from the blast, which unleashed 10.4 megatons of energy—1,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, and twice the total explosive power of all the bombs dropped in World War 2.
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