Assigned as a draftee to a hydrogen-bomb test operation in the Marshall Islands, Frank Zagone gives his account of the March 1, 1954 detonation of BRAVO, a 15 megaton superbomb, the most powerful and radiologically "dirty" nuclear blast in U.S. history (equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima bombs). He writes about a scientific miscalculation in the design of BRAVO that led to a "runaway" explosion. Radioactive fallout descended on thousands of square miles of the mid-Pacific. Marshall Islanders, Japanese fishermen, and U.S. naval ships were showered with radioactive coral ash.