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Operation Ivy

American experiment

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Operation Ivy was an American experiment that involved the testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. The first test, codenamed Ivy Mike, occurred on November 1, 1952, at Enewetak atoll. This was the first test of a thermonuclear bomb, and it yielded 10.4 megatons, which was 500 times larger than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The experiment was part of a larger series of nuclear tests conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. These tests, including the devastating Castle Bravo test in 1954, resulted in significant radioactive contamination of the atolls, rendering them uninhabitable.12

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