The Bluegill "Booster in Fireball" Theory: A Flawed Argument Nuked By Basic Physics
Geoff Cruickshank
Energy production technologist and critical infrastructure security specialist
Geoff Cruickshank - May 30, 2025
This article is the response to Douglas Dean Johnson’s Bluegill Triple Prime: Did a nuclear test knock down a nonhuman craft in 1962? article published on May 21, 2025.
Introduction
“So, through Churchill’s excess of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery, and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born.” (1)
So wrote Charles Bean, the Official Australian War Historian of World War One in an assessment of Winston Churchill’s failure to understand that the large calibre, flat trajectory naval guns of the Royal Navy were no match for the fortifications of the Dardanelles.
Likewise, Doug Johnsons’ excess of imagination and layman’s ignorance of orbital mechanics and basic physics principles makes his assertion that the Re-entry Vehicle (RV) and the spent rocket booster were in the same point in time and space 1020 seconds after launch a statistical impossibility. Doug has simply jumped to this conclusion by finding reference to a “small white dot” in an image that he has not seen nor cannot produce. Along the way of his fanciful journey, Doug has neglected to consider actual flight data of the Thor DSV2E missile during the Bluegill Triple Prime test and even managed to get his wires crossed regarding the platform that filmed a particular view of the event. Like Churchill, Doug has used enthusiasm to convince slower brains of the validity of his theory. In this article, I will endeavour to use empirical data to prove that Doug’s assertions are incorrect.
Flaw No.1: Ballistic Coefficients
Early U.S. re-entry vehicles had a low ballistic coefficient, or beta (β). The ballistic coefficient is a calculation of weight, drag, and cross-section of a vehicle. Vehicles with a low beta do most of their slowing down in the thin upper atmosphere. They take longer to slow down and generate less heat, experiencing this heat over a longer period of time. But war planners and designers wanted weapons delivery vehicles with a high beta, which are usually slender and smoother and generate less drag. They zip through the upper atmosphere without decelerating much and reach the ground still traveling very fast. This is desirable for missile re-entry vehicles (RVs) because the faster a warhead approaches its target, the harder it is for an enemy to shoot it down. (2) The RVs originally selected for the Operation Fishbowl tests were the General Electric Mark II, which were of the low β copper heat sink type. In early 1962, however, it was realised that the copper heat shield of the Mark II would interfere with the generation of enhanced neutron W49 (Starfish) and enhanced X-ray XW50-X1 (Bluegill) thermonuclear weapons used for the tests.(3) Sandia Laboratory proposed to reverse the W49 device in its mounting cradle for Starfish, but this solution would not work for Bluegill. The Department of Defense desperately wanted to test the X-ray kill mechanism described by the Latter brothers in an unofficial RAND report that was leaked in 1961. (4)
Guess who worked for RAND in 1962? That’s right, Dr. Harald Malmgren. (5)
A concise description of the thermo-mechanical spallation effect created by nuclear-weapon produced X-rays was provided by Dr. Byron Ristvet in his Oral History interview with the University of Nevada on April 17, 2006. At some stage, after Doug contacted Dr. Ristvet for his article, the record of interview was removed from the site (well, it was for me at least). No prizes for guessing why.
William Ogle, the leader of the Los Alamos J Division for nuclear weapons design, was also Scientific Director for Operation Dominic stated that “it was essentially mandatory that all devices used were stockpile weapons that had been tested”.(6) General Electric and sub-contractor Avco had been asked to halt production on the copper heatshield Mark II RV in July 1961, as by then it was clear that a high β re-entry was the future of ICBM technology. The Avco Mark IV RV had already been tested in ARPA R&D experiments by 1962, and it was decided that all Fishbowl shots would use them. (7)
The XW50-X1 proposed for this test had a Tsetse Primary and a spherical secondary fusion device called Mace (8), surrounded by a thick tamper of Gold.(9) Using a process called Bremsstrahlung Radiation, electrons ejected in the first few microseconds of the thermonuclear explosion produce high-energy X-rays when interacting with nearby atomic nuclei. The presence of a large amount of copper during this process would severely limit the X-ray output – and thus after discussions with USAF Chief of Staff General Curtis E. LeMay and Strategic Air Command’s General Thomas Power, the USAF agreed to supply the advanced Avco Mark IV re-entry vehicles for all of the Fishbowl shots.10 The Avco Mk IV represented bleeding-edge technology in 1962 – a high β, bi-conic phenolic resin vehicle that punched through the upper atmosphere quickly upon re-entry to deliver the weapons payload onto the target. Interest in a successful outcome for the tests came all the way from the top. (11,12)
For the booster, however, it is a different story. The 65 feet long spent booster tumbling back to Earth through the atmosphere has a very low β.
The high β of the Mk IV RV versus the low β of the booster is Doug’s booster theory, Flaw No. 1.
Flaw No.2: Retrograde Rockets
All the Fishbowl tests used a specially modified version of Douglas Aircraft Company’s PGM-17 Thor missile, with the designation DSV 2E (Douglas Space Vehicle version 2E). (13)
The scientists involved in the complex calculations went to great lengths to ensure that the tests went according to plan, and that the spent Thor missile booster would not interfere with the instrumentation. (14,15)
After a “dry run” test (without thermonuclear detonation) called Tigerfish on 2 May 1962, it was determined that the Bluegill test should fire its retrorockets 2 seconds later than the Starfish test was programmed to do. (16)
As we can see from this image, (17), the Kingfish shot on 1 November 1962 had retrorocket firings at 180.593 and 181.701 seconds after launch. Using the above information stating that the Bluegill test would fire its retrorockets at a time 2 seconds after the other tests (Starfish, Checkmate, Kingfish and Tight Rope), I have used 182 and 184 seconds in my modelling data of the booster and RV trajectories.
To this end, actual flight data from the Bluegill Triple Prime tests gives the time the RV separated from the booster at 176.4 seconds after launch. (18) Using the Douglas Aircraft Company (DACO) data above, the two side-mounted, solid propellant retrograde (“retro”) rockets would fire in what is known as “ripple” mode – sequentially, one after the other. This reaction would work both opposite to the direction of travel and laterally, pushing the spent booster off the line of trajectory of the RV. These retrorocket firings are Doug’s Flaw No.2.
For the retrorocket thrust parameters, I have used the Marc 6 spin-stabilized rocket motor developed and manufactured by the Atlantic Research Corporation (ARC). NASA typically used motors of this type on the upper stages of launch vehicles for missions that required especially high velocities. Variants of this design, such as the Marc 6A1, provided spin-stabilized thrust for the Thor-Able IV Venus probe in the late 1950s. Thrust of the Marc 6A varied between 151 and 292 pounds (depending on the firing temperature) for a duration of 1.2 to 1.8 seconds.(19)
I have also used the RV’s 900km apogee figure from the Project Officers Report—Project 8A.2 Optical Phenomenology of High-Altitude Nuclear Detonations, page 183. (20)
Robots crunching the numbers deliver the unwelcome news for Doug.
Now that we have established the numbers for the retrorocket firings and using known flight event timings, we shall now input the data into Grok, ChatGPT and Co-Pilot and see what the odds are of the Thor booster being engulfed in the Bluegill Triple Prime fireball. The Wright Patterson Flight Dynamics Laboratory’s Project Officer's Report—Project 8A.3 Close-In Thermal and X-ray Vulnerability Measurements—Shots Blue Gill and Kingfish (21) on page 322 gives a fireball diameter of 900 meters. Therefore, the booster must be within 450 meters of the RV at time of detonation to be engulfed in the fireball, as Doug’s theory posits.
The input string is as follows:
A Thor missile is launched at Johnson Island at 23:44:05 local time on 25th of October 1962. At 156.9 seconds the booster’s main engine cutout and the booster is travelling at a velocity of 10375 feet per second at an altitude of 126.5 km and surface range of 3.1km. At 164.5 seconds the booster vernier engine cuts out at a velocity of 10239 feet per second and altitude of 151.7km and surface range of 3.5km. At 176.4 seconds after launch at a velocity of 9892 feet per second and altitude of 187 km and surface range of 4.1 km, the RV separates from the booster. The RV has a weight of 1361kg and high ballistic coefficient and it has an apogee of 900km at surface range 16.21 km and detonates at 1020 seconds flight time at 00:01 Johnston Island local time on the 26th of October 1962 at an altitude of 48.2km and surface range of 35km. The missile booster weighs 3124kg after separation and has a low ballistic coefficient. Two solid propellant retrorockets are fitted on each side of the booster and act laterally upon the booster. One fires for 1.8 seconds at 182 seconds with 292 pounds of thrust and the other fires at 184 seconds for 1.8 seconds with 292 pounds of thrust at surface range 4.3 km. What are the odds of the Thor booster and the RV being within 450m of one another at the same point in time and space at 1020.0 seconds after launch at an altitude of 48.2km?
The results:
Grok
ChatGPT
Copilot
The robots have spoken!
Graphically, the trajectories of the booster and the RV look like this:
The difference between the two trajectories is quite obvious. The low β of the booster, coupled with the retrorocket burn makes it statistically impossible for the booster to be anywhere near the nuclear fireball.
From a plan view, we can see that the booster has been pushed laterally away from the line of trajectory of the RV by the ripple firing of the retrorockets– another nail in the coffin for Doug’s theory. (22)
By the 25th of May 2025, 4 days after posting – the penny dropped. Doug had totally neglected to consider the effects of the retrorocket burns, and the mental gymnastics required to place the booster and the RV in the same point in time and space now took on Olympic proportions. Parameters without proof were now being injected into the “theory” to try and make it fit Doug’s narrative. (23)
Through an intermediary, Doug started proposing wild claims to fit his narrative without a shred of evidence. Panicked statements of some form of RV separation delay or retrorockets failing to fire started creeping into the discussion on Twitter, and as I’m not on that platform the comments were relayed back to me in real time. (24)
Finally, Doug added the following to his article’s edit log: (25)
That last line is quite humorous, because his error changes everything!
Flaw No. 3: The “Small White Dot” viewed from eastern aircraft 60376.
As stated previously, Doug’s entire argument revolves around a single quote regarding an image that he is unable to produce. The divergent trajectories easily explain this as a prosaic explanation.
From the plan view image, we can see where the reference to the “Small White Dot” comes from. With the detonation at 48.2 km height and a surface range of 66.8km from aircraft 60376 (flying at an altitude of around 10km), the falling booster at an altitude of 15km would indeed appear to be “below the fireball” from 60376’s point of view. (26)
Without seeing the image in question, it is impossible to determine how a tumbling, fiery metallic object emanating from within the nuclear fireball could be described as a “small white dot some distance below the burst,” – not within the burst. Flaw No. 3 of the Bluegill Booster in Fireball theory.
Flaw No. 4: Kettles on the boil
Doug’s flight of fantasy now comes to two pieces of footage that Doug has called “Falling Object Movie- Alpha (FOM-A) and Falling Object Movie – Beta (FOM-B)”.(27) Unfortunately for Doug, he has used his misunderstanding of the RV separation event timings to inform both these parts of his theory. The booster did not separate from the RV after it reached the 900km apogee – separation occurred at an altitude of 187km ON THE WAY UP, a full 843.6 seconds (14 minutes 3.6 seconds) prior. As we have seen by the trajectory analysis, the booster is kilometres away at a much lower altitude (approximately 15 km) than the nuclear detonation (48.2 km).
The FOM-B footage is curious, because I posted a strikingly similar cut of that footage 9 months ago on my Harry_Is_White_Hot You Tube channel:
For the piece, I had to slow that footage down twice – using the lowest setting possible on my software (0.25x normal speed) and then running that footage at 0.25 times normal speed. Doug seems to imply in his article that this piece of footage was released publicly by the U.S. Government at this speed – it was not. This footage is from the Department of Energy’s Starfish Prime Interim Report by Commander JTF-8 and starts at the 19 minute 25 second mark. (28)
The footage starts just before detonation – and there is not a fiery, tumbling object coming in from the top of the frame that must exist if Doug’s theory were to be true. The only fiery, tumbling object seen is the one that falls directly out of the fireball in the first few microseconds of the blast. I would be interested to learn exactly where Doug got the FOM-B footage.
When I first started looking into this event in 2023, I had no information regarding the tail numbers of the aircraft with callsigns KETTLE 1 and KETTLE 2. I figured I had a 50/50 chance of getting it right when I labelled those video cuts “KETTLE 1” and “KETTLE 2”. Around the beginning of May 2025, I finally located a copy of the Project Officers Report—Project 8A.2 Optical Phenomenology of High-Altitude Nuclear Detonations, which clearly identified KETTLE 1 as aircraft tail number 53120, and KETTLE 2 as aircraft tail number 60376.
I had called the coin toss wrong.
Flaw 5: Misidentification of the “White Triangle Footage”.
Page 188 of the Optical Phenomenology report (page 242 of the original document) has the following image: (29)
When a side-by-side comparison is made with a still from the 50:24 mark of the Starfish Prime Interim Report By Commander JTF-8, it is clear that they are from the same footage.
Doug’s flawed analysis claims the following: (30)
Not only does Doug misidentify the film technical details, he gets the camera platform completely wrong. Even a 5-year-old could tell you that the frame rate in that footage is not 16 frames per second – the rebounding shockwave detail it provides at the microsecond level makes it clear it is the 2500 frames per second XR emulsion film 95125 from aircraft KETTLE 1 (53120), not film 955318 from a fixed position on Johnson Island. The footage with the white triangle was actually taken by a Photo-Sonics 4C camera, with XR film at an aiming elevation 30 degrees and azimuth of 0 degrees. It used a focal length of 108mm with lens focal number of 5.6 at 2500 frames per second. The shutter sector was 9 degrees with an exposure time of 10 microseconds and a marker rate of 10 cycles per second. (31)
Nuclear film expert Peter Kuran may not be aware that he is influenced by Doug’s “excess of imagination”.
Astute observers will also note something else – a lack of a triangle in frame 2499.
The following snapshot is from the end credits of the Fishbowl XR Summary section at the 1 hour 8 minutes and 46 seconds mark of Starfish Prime Interim Report by Commander JTF-8. (32)
The CG-HR-3, Historical Records Declassification Guide (U), October 26, 2005, states the following regarding high-altitude nuclear weapons effects information: (33)
However, the Department of Energy Historical Records Declassification Guide September 2012 slapped another 50 years on this information: (34)
As all other footage from the Fishbowl shots have been fully declassified in 1998, this only leaves the Bluegill Triple Prime footage as retaining its classification until 2062. Why would that be if there is nothing to hide? (35)
Alex Wellerstein, Professor of Technology at Stevens University and I first communicated around 18 months ago. I originally posted the Bluegill Triple Prime UFO shootdown theory on the r/nuclearweapons sub on Reddit – a place where enthusiasts discuss the intricacies and minute details of all aspects of nuclear weapons and testing.
Alex was initially curious about my theory – he even made a model of the Bluegill Triple Prime test on his excellent NukeMap website - https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/.
For some strange reason, the link he provided me last year no longer works. (36)
Two months ago, Alex posted this on r/nuclearweapons in response to Doug’s email enquiry about Bluegill Triple Prime:
I was banned from r/nuclearweapons for posting about Bluegill Triple Prime and soon got tired of the censorship of that entire site and deleted my account. Hopefully, this article will revive their interest.
Flaw No. 6: No evidence of animosity between Los Alamos and Livermore labs
I find this argument of Doug’s to be the most disingenuous of his article, because anyone who has seen the movie Oppenheimer knows that the root cause of the animosity was Edward Teller. Harold Agnew, a Manhattan Project scientist, and Director of Los Alamos from 1970 to 1979 tells the story of the animosity during a University of Nevada Oral History interview in 2005: (37)
General Edward Giller, the Director of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Military Applications, also discussed the tension between the labs in the same oral history series: (38)
I was personally disappointed that Doug had taken this position, as I had I even emailed him on May 8, 2025, to give him a good reference paper on the matter. (39)
Dr Sybil Francis authored her doctoral thesis on the rivalry between the weapons labs – unfortunately, Doug didn’t want to use it because he felt it ran counter to the theme he was trying to develop for the “slow brains” to consume.
Flaw No.7: Using the Starfish Prime test results for comparison.
Once it became apparent that there was a massive hole in Doug’s booster argument, a flurry of online chatter began claiming that, because the aircraft cameras in Starfish Prime had captured the booster in footage taken during that test, 5 months prior, Bluegill did too. Here, the ignorance of basic physics creeps into Doug’s argument; Starfish Prime was an event that took place at almost 10 times the height of Bluegill Triple Prime (400 km) with a weapon with over three times the yield (1.4 Megatons). A comparison of the position of the aircraft arrays for both tests tells the story. The red box represents KETTLE 1 position, whilst the blue box represents KETTLE 2. The wider field of view of the cameras used for Starfish Prime is very obvious, coupled with the fact that during both Bluegill and Kingfish test shots, the RV had a higher apogee than Starfish Prime, and therefore also had a higher dwell time. (40,41)
The bottom line here is simply this: data from Starfish Prime cannot be used to support the booster theory for Bluegill Triple Prime. The explosion of the W49 weapon during Starfish Prime caused a large diamagnetic bubble in the ionosphere that pushed out the Earth’s magnetic lines of force for up to 16 seconds. The shower of high-energy particles generated by the blast propagates for thousands of kilometres in space in the milliseconds after the blast, impinging on a falling booster that is at a much higher altitude than the Bluegill Triple Prime booster because of the lower apogee of the Starfish Prime RV. (42)
The Starfish Prime test caused significant disturbance to the Earth’s magnetic field for thousands of kilometres across half of the planet, damaging satellites and increasing the dangerous particle count of the lower Van Allen radiation belts. The Bluegill Triple Prime event did neither of those things, because the detonation height was much lower.
Regardless, the chatter from Doug and associates was that they were similar-sized events, which, clearly, they were not. (43)
The extent of the effects of Starfish Prime on 9 July 1962 test can be shown by the representation of the Earth’s size in comparison. (44)
The massive plasma debris field from the fission products produced by the W49 warhead of Starfish Prime extended across thousands of square kilometres. (45) Bluegill Triple Prime, by comparison, was very localised. (46)
Flaw No. 8: Misrepresentation of the falling sphere experiment.
Doug has left a few key pieces of information out here in order to buttress his floundering position. He neglects to inform the reader that the falling sphere experiments were conducted 24 hours before the nuclear tests to measure air density and conduct radar calibration. He also conveniently forgets to highlight the “30 MR reading from one foot away” radiation reading noted in the ship logs, even though he has highlighted the words adjacent to this information. A sphere having a reading of 30 milli-Roentgens was not just a weather sphere – at some point in time, it was exposed to a radiation source. (47). Hardly something a weather experiment is likely to do.
Flaw No.9: The Wright-Patterson Flight Dynamics Laboratory’s early time fireball analysis report fails to mention the booster being in or near the fireball.
In the Project Officer's Report—Project 8A.3 Close-In Thermal and X-ray Vulnerability Measurements—Shots Blue Gill and King Fish, one would imagine that a group of scientists that were closely examining the first few seconds of the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear fireball would mention somewhere in their report that the spent booster was tangled up with their experiments. They do not mention it for a simple reason – the booster wasn’t there. In fact, the 412-page report mentions the word “booster” precisely three times – and one of those occasions is to explain why the booster needs to be separated at exact times to keep it away from the experiment. (48)
In his article, Doug did a rather good job of demolishing Marik von Rennenkampf’s theory about one of the pods being the object in the fireball, so there is no need to go over it here. The Cubic Corporation’s tracking beacons in the pods, plus the accelerometer readings being around half of that expected (200Gs, when the test experiments were planned for 380G) concur with the data collected after the event – pod B1 was about 750 feet away from its intended point at time of burst. Nonetheless, it still elicited a panicked response from Doug when Marik Tweeted his “Pod Theory”. (49)
Interestingly, the Wright-Patterson scientists may have heard the pod theory being kicked around as a prosaic explanation in 1965. They offered the following remarks about it: (50)
Curiously, there is a footnote to this part of the abstract:
Subsequent to the submission of this report, certain ambiguities have become apparent in the data relating to the site and importance of the small source. Later analysis of these data may, therefore, necessitate revision of the tentative results presented in the text.
Whatever could those “ambiguities” be?
Certainly not a Thor booster, that is for sure.
Flaw No. 10: High doses of radiation recorded by Operation Dominic personnel on U.S. Navy ships was “imaginary”.
This part of Doug’s flawed analysis was particularly disturbing, as he appears to be dismissive of the fact that thousands of U.S. personnel were exposed to dangerous radiation levels in the line of duty. (51)
Doug fails to appreciate that the entire reason the report was initiated in 1977 was the fact that thousands of Atomic Veterans involved in Operation Dominic were developing cancer at higher-than-expected rates. (52)
Kaman Tempo, the authors of the report, were also involved in Operation Dominic through their subsidiary, Kaman Nuclear. It was therefore in their best interests to find some other explanation for the high radiation doses. The “damaged seals” theory that Doug cites here does not account for the thousands of cancer-related deaths by Atomic Veterans in the years since nuclear testing ended.
Corporal Warren Smith, USMC, was with the helicopter squadron that located and retrieved the instrumentation pods. He was also required to assist in the cleanup of the failed Bluegill Prime test, when the Thor missile exploded on the launch pad at Johnson Island, spreading weapons-grade plutonium across its sandy beaches. (53)
I have uncovered further evidence of a substantial salvage recovery effort in the weeks after the Bluegill Triple Prime event, and I currently have US Navy salvage diving subject matter experts looking into these events.
Dr John Zinn
I was saddened to hear through Doug Johnson that Dr. John Zinn had passed away. (54)
Dr Zinn was directly involved in analysing the FISHBOWL shots as a scientist at Los Alamos. A paper he co-authored in 1995 regarding the computer code RADFLO (mentioned in his obituary) had the following excerpt: “The first version of RADFLO was written in 1963 shortly after the high-altitude nuclear test series of Operation Dominic in order to model and analyse the Bluegill event”. Was there something unique about the Bluegill Triple Prime shot or the altitude it was detonated at that caused it to have greater scrutiny applied by the scientists at LANL?
As Doug mentioned in his article, I was fortunate enough to have corresponded with Dr. Zinn in June 2023 regarding his work at Los Alamos, with a focus on Bluegill Triple Prime. However, I would like to obtain authorization from his family before publishing the content of our correspondence. (55)
Conclusion
Doug Johnson has found reference to a single mention of the Thor booster appearing as a “small white dot” in footage taken by an aircraft looking perpendicular to the trajectories of an ICBM RV and the spent Thor booster. Without seeing the image in question, Doug has made some grossly inaccurate assumptions along the way that simply do not stand up the empirical data collected during the Bluegill Triple Prime weapons test and the following days. He has left key pieces of information out of his analysis in order to conform to a pre-determined outcome. Not a very scientific method in my opinion. Something very odd happened during that test that continues to defy a prosaic explanation.
Hopefully, this vigorous discussion will encourage other individuals and scientific institutions to commit time and effort to uncover the truth of what really happened that night in the Pacific Ocean in 1962.
References
All URLs Accessed May 29, 2025
3. Ogle, William E. (1984). An account of the return to nuclear weapons testing by the United States after the test moratorium 1958 -1961. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
4. Ibid, Pg. 214
5. Personal communication with Dr. Pippa Malmgren, May 30,225
6. W. Ogle Tapes, April 1974. https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16022955.pdf Pg.8
7. Chuck Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, vol. IV, Pg. 1585. 7 vols. 2007
10. W. Ogle Notes Chron-13 https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16023062.pdf Pg. 54
11. Ogle, https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16156584.pdf Pg. 423
12. Ogle, https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16156584.pdf Pg. 421
14. Preliminary Plan for Operation Fishbowl, November 1961 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA469481.pdf Pg.41
15. Ibid., Pg. 47
16. Fish Bowl and Christmas Island Series December 1963 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA995461.pdf Pg. 106
17. Project Officer's Report - Project 9.4b Pod and Recovery Unit Fabrication https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA995471.pdf Pg. 90
18. Ibid., Pg. 92
20. Project Officers Report—Project 8A.2 Optical Phenomenology of High-Altitude Nuclear Detonations https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA995489.pdf Pg. 141
21. Project Officer's Report—Project 8A.3 Close-In Thermal and X-ray Vulnerability Measurements—Shots Blue Gill and King Fish https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA995482.pdf Pg. 322
23. Personal communications on Signal May 24, 2005
24. Personal communications on Signal May 24, 2005
28. Department of Energy (1962). Starfish Prime Interim Report By Commander JTF-8 https://archive.org/details/StarfishPrimeInterimReportByCommanderJTF8 19 minutes 25 seconds mark
29. Project Officers Report—Project 8A.2 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA995489.pdf Pg 181
31. Project Officers Report—Project 8A.2 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA995489.pdf Pg 175
32. Department of Energy (1962). Starfish Prime Interim Report By Commander JTF-8 https://archive.org/details/StarfishPrimeInterimReportByCommanderJTF8 1 hour 8 minutes 46 seconds’ mark
33. CG-HR-3, Historical Records Declassification Guide (U), October 26, 2005. https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/cg-hr-3/chap8.pdf Pg.3tps://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/cg-hr-3/chap8.pdf Pg.3
34. Department of Energy Historical Records Declassification Guide September 2012 https://www.governmentattic.org/39docs/DOEhistRecsDeclassGuide_2012.pdf Pg. 62
35. Cruickshank, Geoffrey P., Supporting Evidence for Bluegill Triple Prime Shootdown Theory and Hypothesis 2023 Pg.16
37. Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Interview with Harold M. Agnew October 10, 2005 Solana Beach, California
38. Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Interview with Edward B. Giller, Jr. April 19, 2006 Albuquerque, New Mexico
39. Francis, Sybil. (1995). Warhead politics: Livermore and the competitive system of nuclear weapon design. United States
40. Defense Nuclear Agency (1983). Operation Dominic 1962: United States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests Nuclear Test Personnel Review - https://osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16389215.pdf Pg. 236
41. Ibid. Pg. 251
42. Fish Bowl and Christmas Island Series December 1963 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA995461.pdf Pg. 112
43. Personal communications on Signal May 25, 2005
44. E. G. Stassinopoulos., The STARFISH Exo-atmospheric, High-altitude Nuclear Weapons Test NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
45. Dyal, P. (2006), Particle and field measurements of the Starfish diamagnetic cavity, J. Geophys. Res.,
46. Email correspondence with physicist Dr. John Zinn, J-10 Group Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory for Operation Fishbowl 1962 – received 24 June 2023.
48. Project Officer's Report—Project 8A.3 Close-In Thermal and X-ray Vulnerability Measurements—Shots Blue Gill and King Fish https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA995482.pdf Pg.59
49. Douglas Dean Johnson's X/Twitter account.
50. Project Officer's Report—Project 8A.3 Close-In Thermal and X-ray Vulnerability Measurements—Shots Blue Gill and King Fish https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA995482.pdf Pg.8
52. Defense Nuclear Agency (1983). Operation Dominic 1962: United States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests Nuclear Test Personnel Review - https://osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16389215.pdf Pg.11
55. Email correspondence with physicist Dr. John Zinn, J-10 Group Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory for Operation Fishbowl 1962 – received 24 June 2023.
Contact details:
Geoff Cruickshank
Industrial Automation & Security
