““things went quickly awry. Thermonuclear bombs were still not well understood and the weapon, code-named CASTLE BRAVO, turned out to be three times more powerful than expected, a total of some 15 megatons. A four-mile-wide fireball engulfed everything around ground zero in under a second. Birds spontaneously combusted in the sky, and small animals as far away as 345 miles were found to have suffered retinal burns from the nuclear flash. Poisonous radioactivity ultimately covered an area nearly the size of New Jersey,””
