In researching letters I had written my mother while in the Navy/Marine Corps and stationed at Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station on Oahu, Hawaii I reviewed a correspondence I sent her on July 9, 1962 in which I said that I had stayed up late (11:00 PM) last night to watch the bomb explosion over Johnson Island. "There was a tremendous green burst that could be seen as far as Hilo Hawaii. Directly after the burst there was a bright red glow miles in the sky which could be seen for 10 minutes. It was really something to see and quite a show of power." I recall going to the Pali, the highest point on the island, with several of my military budies to view the event. Looking down over Waikiki and Honolulu from this vantage point was breathtaking, especially when the sky exploded with color from the atomic blast. The Fairbanks Alaska Daily News-Miner recorded the event with the headlines "H-Bomb Blast Lights Pacific."
In the Atomic Bomb Chronology: 1947-1979 the entry read: "1962 .7 .8 (USA). High altitude nuclear test, 400 km high Johnson Island of a 1.4 mt H-Bomb. A large power loss in Oahu island, Hawaii due to malfunction of electric supply control device caused by electromagnetic pulse wave emitted during bombardment of ionosphere x-ray and gamma ray of nuclear explosion."
http://www.ask.ne.jp/-hankaku/english/np9x.html
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I heard stories of men flying into the bomb cloud collecting air samples. Most of those men died of some sort of cancer. My dad was one of them, so I'm told. He died of leukemia in January of 1964.
-scottish90019@yahoo.com
Here is a "wirephoto" picture from a newspaper, the Quebec City Chronicle--Telegraph:
Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph - Jul 9, 1962
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