Pearl Harbor Revenge: The Plan to Nuclear Bomb a Japanese Naval Fleet
radioactive Pearl Harbor. Less than a year after the formal end of World War II the United States tested its new superweapons in peacetime. Operation Crossroads in 1946 at Bikini Atoll tested the effects of nuclear weapons on naval fleets and harbors. While burrowing through the vast Manhattan Project archives historian Alex Wellerstein turned up evidence that Bikini wasn’t the first Pacific island in the atomic crosshairs. Another atoll may have been the earliest target considered by the Manhattan Project. For a time before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States c...