Ivy King

Common card · No. 320356

Ivy King was the largest fission nuclear weapon to not attempt fusion boosting, yielding 500 kilotons of TNT. It was tested on November 16, 1952, on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific, by the United States' Truman administration as part of Operation Ivy. Alongside the first multi-megaton thermonuclear test in Ivy Mike, the operation was in response to the nuclear weapons program of the Soviet Union. The production of Ivy King was hurried to be ready in case its sister project, Ivy Mike, failed to achieve a thermonuclear reaction. Ivy King actually took place two weeks after Mike. Unlike the static experimental setup of the Sausage device in Ivy Mike, the Ivy King device was air-deliverable, and as the Mark 18 nuclear bomb, 90 weapons were produced by the Atomic Energy Commission. The weapons were extremely expensive due to the high mass of highly enriched uranium used in the core. On November 16, 1952 at 11:30 local time (23:30 GMT) a B-36H bomber dropped the bomb over a point 2,000 feet (610...

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