3. Test Able during Operation Crossroads was a disappointment for the Army Air Force
On July 1, 1946, the airplane which had flown as the photographic escort over Nagasaki dropped a plutonium bomb with a yield of 23 kilotons which exploded just over 500 feet above the anchored ships in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll. Two transport ships sank immediately, two destroyers several hours later, and a former Japanese cruiser capsized and sank the next day. Another 14 ships were classified as badly damaged, and the disappointing results (for the Army Air Force) were attributed to the poor ballistic tendencies of the bomb causing it to miss its target by over 700 yards. USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier which had fueled airplanes on its flight deck caught fire, which was extinguished by tugs. Though the USS Nevada survived the bombing, it was determined by animals on the vessel that had a crew been aboard most of them would have received a lethal dose of radiation.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reviewed the radiation information obtained from Nevada and later wrote, “a large ship, about a mile away from the explosion, would escape sinking, but the crew would be killed by the deadly burst of radiations from the bomb, and only a ghost ship would remain, floating unattended in the vast waters of the ocean”. Several of the test animals suffered temporarily from radiation sickness, but recovered. Because the burst during Able was so high in the air, material which was made radioactive and which rose into the air (the source for radioactive fallout) entered the stratosphere and was dispersed over a wide area. There was little discernible radioactive fallout from the Able test. Test Baker, the first submerged nuclear detonation, was scheduled for July 25, with the weapon suspended beneath a landing craft, 90 feet below the surface, the same distance from the bottom of the lagoon.