Today is the 52nd anniversary of the H-Bomb test I witnessed off Hawaii on July 9, 1962 at 2300 hours. I've learned that it was called "Operation Starfish Prime". It was apparently a 1.2 megaton bomb launched from Johnston Island in the pacific to test what it would do to our electronics. Our communications were disrupted for supposedly about a half an hour.On the island of Hawaii, it set off burglar alarms, blew fuses and shut down street lights. Don't know what else it did, but Hawaii was several hundred miles away. When it went off, the bomb turned the sky into a green daylight, then red and yellow. A halo (the shock wave) could be seen in the sky.The aurora from the bomb was seen in Samoa about 2,000 miles away. The bomb created a new radiation belt around the earth. I do not know exactly how far we were. We were issued dosimeters to wear. All I can say is, I NEVER want to see a nuclear weapon go off again.

That was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. It made me look at atomic energy in a different light. Anyone who says we ought to " nuke them" should have been there that night and I think they would haved changed their tune. Ironically a few months later we had the Cuban missle crisis and Kennedy and Khrushchev were threatning to wipe each other off the face of the earth with nuclear weapons.