Roscoe Bartlett: “what I want to spend a few moments talking about this evening is something that will be new to most Americans. They will…”

“what I want to spend a few moments talking about this evening is something that will be new to most Americans. They will not have heard about this subject. Indeed, nobody knew about this until 1962; that is, no one in this country knew about it. There was an experiment over Johnston Island out in the Pacific Ocean that was called Operation Starfish. It was part of a series of nuclear tests that were called the Fishbowl Series. This was a unique one. The others had all been at ground level or some little distance above the ground. This one was an extra-atmospheric, a detonation above the atmosphere. Nobody knew what was going to happen. It was the first time we had detonated a nuclear weapon in a test series above the atmosphere, and there were a number of ships and airplanes and radar, theater-like, that were tracking the missile that launched this nuclear bomb and noted its explosion. The explosion occurred about 400 kilometers above Johnston Island. That is well above the atmosphere. Now, the Soviets have had very extensive experience with this kind of testing. This was our first and, indeed, our only experience with this. So our knowledge about this phenomenon comes from this single test, what we have learned from the Soviets and now the Russians and the number of simulations that we have done since that time. There were no diagnostics to test the effects on Hawaii, which was about 800 miles away, because nobody expected there to be any effect there.…”