Operation Crossroads - Background

Background

The first proposal to test nuclear weapons against naval warships was made on August 16, 1945, by Lewis Strauss, future chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. In an internal memo to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Strauss argued, "If such a test is not made, there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned." With very few bombs available, he suggested a large number of targets widely dispersed over a large area. A quarter century earlier, in 1921, the Navy had suffered a public relations disaster when General Billy Mitchell's bombers sank every target ship the Navy provided for the Project B ship-versus-bomb tests. The Strauss test would be designed to demonstrate ship survivability, at least in theory; in the end, the entire target fleet would be effectively destroyed by radioactivity.

Nine days later, Senator Brien McMahon, who within a year would write the Atomic Energy Act and organize and chair the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, made the first public proposal for such a test, but one designed to demonstrate the vulnerability, rather than survivability, of ships. He proposed dropping an atomic bomb on captured Japanese ships and suggested, "The resulting explosion should prove to us just how effective the atomic bomb is when used against the giant naval ships." On September 19, the Army Air Forces (USAAF) chief, General Henry H. Arnold, asked the Navy to save ten of the thirty-eight captured Japanese ships for use in the test proposed by McMahon.

Meanwhile, the Navy proceeded with its own plan, revealed on October 27 by Admiral Ernest King at a press conference. It involved between 80 and 100 target ships, most of them surplus U.S. ships. As the Army and the Navy maneuvered for control of the tests, Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Peterson observed, "To the public, the test looms as one in which the future of the Navy is at stake,. .. if the Navy withstands better than the public imagines it will, in the public mind the Navy will have 'won.'"

The Navy won the contest to design and control the tests, and on January 11, 1946, Admiral William H. P. Blandy was appointed head of Army/Navy Joint Task Force One (JTF-1), newly created to conduct the tests which he named Operation Crossroads. The Army's candidate to direct the tests, General Leslie Groves, head of the wartime Manhattan Project that built the bombs, did not get the job.

Under pressure from the Army, Admiral Blandy agreed to crowd more ships into the immediate target area than the Navy wanted, but he refused AAF General Curtis LeMay's demand that, "every ship must have a full loading of oil, ammunition, and fuel." Blandy's argument was that fires and internal explosions might sink ships that would otherwise remain afloat and be available for damage evaluation. When Blandy proposed an all-Navy board to evaluate the results, Senator McMahon complained to President Harry Truman that the Navy should not be "solely responsible for conducting operations which might well indeed determine its very existence." Truman acknowledged that "reports were getting around that these tests were not going to be entirely on the level." He imposed a civilian review panel on Operation Crossroads to "convince the public it was objective."