I stumbled against this information about Operation Fishbowl. Was this whole project an attempt to break the Earth’s firmament? Is the Earth really flat and they tried to break the firmament described in the bible?

Operation Fishbowl was a series of high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 that were carried out by the United States as a part of the larger Operation Dominic nuclear test program.

Introduction

The Operation Fishbowl nuclear tests were originally to be completed during the first half of 1962 with three tests named Bluegill, Starfish and Urraca.^[1]

The first test attempt was delayed until June. Planning for Operation Fishbowl, as well as many other nuclear tests in the region, began rapidly in response to the sudden Soviet announcement on August 30, 1961, that they were ending a three-year moratorium on nuclear testing.^[2] The rapid planning of very complex operations necessitated many changes as the project progressed.

All of the tests were to be launched on missiles from Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean north of the equator. Johnston Island had already been established as a launch site for United States high-altitude nuclear tests, rather than the other locations in the Pacific Proving Grounds. In 1958, Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, opposed doing any high-altitude tests at locations that had been used for earlier Pacific nuclear tests. His opposition was motivated by fears that the flash from the nighttime high-altitude detonations might blind civilians who were living on nearby islands. Johnston Island was a remote location, more distant from populated areas than other potential test locations.^[3] To protect residents of the Hawaiian Islands from flash blindness or permanent retinal injury from the bright nuclear flash, the nuclear missiles of Operation Fishbowl were launched generally toward the southwest of Johnston Island so that the detonations would be farther from Hawaii.

Urraca was to be a test of about 1 megaton yield at very high altitude (above 1000 km).^[4] The proposed Urraca test was always controversial, especially after the damage caused to satellites by the Starfish Prime detonation, as described below. Urraca was finally canceled, and an extensive re-evaluation of the Operation Fishbowl plan was made during an 82-day operations pause after the Bluegill Prime disaster of July 25, 1962, as described below.

A test named Kingfish was added during the early stages of Operation Fishbowl planning. Two low-yield tests, Checkmate and Tightrope, were also added during the project, so the final number of tests in Operation Fishbowl was five. Tightrope was the last atmospheric nuclear test conducted by the United States, as the Limited Test Ban Treaty came into effect shortly thereafter.

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