Operation Fishbowl: The Year America Nuked Space and Lit Up Hawaii
Just before eleven on a July night in 1962, the hotel rooftops of Honolulu were packed with people holding drinks and staring at the western sky. They were waiting for the United States government to set off a hydrogen bomb in space.
It didn't disappoint. A flash lit up the clouds, the sky glowed green and then a deep red that hung there for minutes, and the crowds cheered. Nine hundred miles away, a 1.4-megaton bomb had just gone off 250 miles above the Pacific.
That was Starfish Prime, the star of Operation Fishbowl. Before the year was out, Fishbowl would knock out streetlights, kill satellites, burn two men's eyes, blow up a launch pad and hand conspiracy fans a name they've never let go of.
Operation Fishbowl at a Glance
- Operation Fishbowl was the high-altitude part of Operation Dominic, the big U.S. test series that followed the Soviets' return to nuclear testing in 1961.
- The Pentagon wanted to know what a nuclear blast above the atmosphere would do to radar, radios and the missiles meant to shoot down enemy warheads.
- Rockets flew from Johnston Island, a speck of coral about 900 miles from Hawaii, always at night so cameras could catch the artificial auroras.
- Three Thor missiles failed, one of them on the launch pad, and the retry names ("Prime," "Double Prime," "Triple Prime") tell you how rough the year got.
- Starfish Prime exploded 250 miles up on July 9, 1962, with a 1.4-megaton yield. It's still the biggest nuclear blast ever set off in space.
- Its electromagnetic pulse knocked out about 300 streetlights in Honolulu, and the radiation it left behind damaged about a third of the satellites in orbit.
- The last shot, Tightrope, was the final nuclear test the U.S. ever set off above ground.
Operation Fishbowl, Blast by Blast
Why Anyone Wanted to Nuke the Sky
It sounds like a cartoon villain's plan, but the Pentagon had real questions. If an enemy popped a warhead high over America, would radar screens go blank? Would radios die? And if the U.S. fired its own nuclear-tipped interceptors at incoming missiles, would the blasts blind the radar guiding them?
Then, in August 1961, the Soviets ended a three-year pause on nuclear testing, and the race was on.
Johnston Island got the job, a speck of coral far enough from anywhere that a midnight flash wouldn't blind anyone. Every shot went off in the dead of night, because the bombs were expected to paint the sky with auroras and the cameras needed the dark.
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Two Rockets, Two Duds, One Radioactive Lagoon
The first shot, Bluegill, lifted off just after midnight in early June and looked perfect. Then the radar lost it.
Nobody was going to let a live hydrogen bomb wander off over an ocean full of ships and planes, so the range safety officer hit the destruct button. The investigation later found the Thor had been flying exactly where it was supposed to.
Starfish, the second try, lasted 59 seconds before the engine quit and the rocket started coming apart. It was destroyed about six miles up, and Navy divers spent two weeks fishing some 250 chunks of wreckage out of the lagoon, some of them laced with plutonium.
Fishbowl's naming rule was a running joke nobody laughed at. A failed shot got tried again as "Prime," then "Double Prime," then "Triple Prime." Bluegill would need all three.
Starfish Prime: The Night Honolulu Threw a Bomb Party
Third time lucky. On the night of July 8, a Thor climbed nearly 700 miles above the Pacific, and on the way back down, 250 miles up, its 1.4-megaton warhead went off. It was the biggest nuclear explosion ever set off in space, and it still is.
Hawaii treated it like the Fourth of July. Local radio carried the countdown, hotels threw "rainbow bomb" parties on their rooftops, and Starfish Prime delivered: a white flash through heavy clouds, then a glow that rolled from green through purple to red and hung in the sky for minutes.
Even the Soviets had a seat. An uninvited Soviet research ship was parked near Johnston Island, taking notes.
Streetlights, Burglar Alarms and a Dying Satellite
The party crowd went home happy. The scientists didn't.
The electromagnetic pulse was far bigger than anyone had predicted, so big that it knocked much of the measuring gear right off its scales. Hawaii measured it another way. About 300 streetlights in Honolulu went dark, burglar alarms rang around the city, and a telephone microwave link failed, cutting Kauai off from the other islands. All from a bomb 900 miles away.
The blast also left a brand-new radiation belt wrapped around the planet, and some of its electrons were still up there five years later.
Satellites started dying. About a third of the two dozen or so in orbit were damaged. The saddest case was Telstar 1, launched the very next day with the worst timing in satellite history. It beamed the first live TV pictures across the Atlantic that month, then slowly cooked in the new belt and was dead by February 1963.
The Rocket That Blew Up on the Pad
Fishbowl's worst day was July 25, a shot called Bluegill Prime.
The Thor's engine fired, but a stuck valve starved it of oxygen. Thrust died, fuel spilled into the hot engine, and flames started climbing the base of a rocket that was still sitting on the pad with a nuclear warhead on top.
The range safety officer did the only thing he could and hit the button. The rocket ripped apart, both fuel tanks burst, and the warhead's own explosives went off unevenly, scattering plutonium across the launch complex.
Nobody was hurt, but Johnston Island now had a plutonium problem, and the pad had to be scrubbed clean before it could be rebuilt. Testing stopped for 82 days. The comeback shot, Bluegill Double Prime, tumbled out of control and had to be destroyed too.
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Blood-Red Rings and a Purple Doughnut
Then the sky got weird.
Checkmate, in late October, put "a green and blue circular region surrounded by a blood-red ring" directly over Johnston, followed by pink stripes that hung around for half an hour.
Bluegill Triple Prime, the shot that had already been blown up twice in the air and once on the ground, finally went off less than a week later. It worked, and it hurt two people. Two military men on Johnston weren't wearing their goggles when the flash hit, and both got burns on their retinas from a heat pulse shorter than a blink. One man's eyesight came back over six months. The other never saw better than 20/60 again.
Kingfish, days later, gave Oahu the eeriest view of all. People saw a flash, and ten seconds later a great white ball seemed to climb out of the sea and hang there for nine minutes. If you'd been on a Honolulu beach that night without a radio, you'd have had a UFO story for the rest of your life.
The finale, Tightrope, was a small warhead only about 13 miles up. The flash was too bright to look at even through dark goggles, and a yellow-orange disc turned into a purple doughnut. Then it was over. Tightrope was the last nuclear bomb the United States ever set off above ground.
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Why Flat-Earthers Love the Name
Flat-earth believers say the world sits under a solid dome, and some of them claim Fishbowl was a secret attempt to blast a hole in it. The name sounds like a dome, the bombs went up instead of out, and the government kept plenty classified. To a certain kind of mind, that's a case.
It isn't. The tests were about radar, radios and missile defense, and rockets have been flying straight through the spot where the "dome" is supposed to be since the 1950s. Still, Fishbowl earned its place in strange-sky history the honest way. On five nights in 1962, the government really did fill the Pacific sky with glowing rings, purple doughnuts and white balls climbing out of the ocean.
Operation Fishbowl: The Light Show Nobody Wants a Sequel To
The U.S. learned a lot from Fishbowl, mostly the hard way. A nuclear blast in space throws a pulse strong enough to break things 900 miles away, it can poison orbit for years, and launch pads and hydrogen bombs don't mix. The Soviets learned it too that October, when a shot of their own over Kazakhstan blew every fuse on a 350-mile phone line.
In 1963, Washington and Moscow signed a treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater. Nobody has set off a bomb in space since.
That's the real legacy of Operation Fishbowl. For one strange year, we found out exactly what happens when you nuke the sky, and decided once was enough.
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