Since their inception, nuclear weapons have been used twice in combat. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a bomb with a yield of 15 kilotons – the destructive force of 15,000 tons of TNT – on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing over 200,000 people. Three days later the United States destroyed Nagasaki with a bomb yielding 21 kilotons; over 60,000 people would eventually die.

Partially obscured by weather of its own making and morning cloud cover, Apache’s glowing fireball rises skywards, followed by a large debris stem. Its cloud would eventually rise to a height of 85,000’, and produce exceptionally heavy fallout in the northern islands of the Atoll. Military landing craft fill the foreground in this surface view. Apache tested the Mark-27 thermonuclear warhead, stockpiled from 1958 to 1965, with a yield of 2 megatons.