crews, observers and scientists aboard their ships must have been
both shocked and amazed by the blast as they felt the heat of the
thermal radiation and pressure of the blast wave, heard the thunderous
roar of the fireball ascending and felt the blast winds, now reduced
by time and space to a light breeze.
In fact, had ''Bravo'' been a medium altitude air burst, there
undoubtedly would have been some casualties among the Task Force
personnel, since a 10 megaton burst can produce second-degree burns

up to 25 miles away from the explosion.
More insidious and frightening than the effects experienced by
the Task Force, were the aspects of the white cloud’s height and the
direction in which it began to drift away and downward.

As though

innabited by the trickster ghosts rampant in Micronesian legends, the
dead form of the cloud began heading almost directly for the fleet, as

though in its final paroxysms, "Bravo" intended to play a last
impractical, and very deadly joke upon its creators.

Inherent to the

fallout was the legacy of "Bravo's" processes of fission and fusion,
a boiling mass of harmless-looking clouds containing tens of thousands
of deadly rads of gamma and beta activity.
Within minutes after the cloud began breaking up, everyone's
worst fears were realized; RadSafe staff members had already noted the
unexpected movement of the cloud and soon thereafter Geiger counters on
some of tne ships began to record a steady increase over normal background radioactivity.

Orders were given.

All personnel were ordered

below decks, hatches and watertignt doors were dogged down and, while

TT

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