title: Sandara Park

text: In January 2019, Park served as a special guest and support act for labelmate Seungri on his Hong Kong and Manila tour dates for The Great Seungri tour. During that month, Park became a permanent co-host for the all-female talk show "Video Star". Park reunited with former 2NE1 bandmate Park Bom as a featured artist for her single, "Spring", which was released on March 13. Park also became a judge and advisor in "Stage K", a K-pop challenge variety television show, which premiered in April 2019.


title: Sandara Park

text: In 2020, Park made her musical debut through the stage adaptation of the (tvN) drama "Another Oh Hae-young", is set to cameo in the melodrama "Shall We Have Dinner Together" as a patient seeking physiological help to remedy her eating habits. and became new hosts of a Korean program "Idol League" with BTOB's leader Eunkwang.


title: Sandara Park

text: In March 2021, the cast of an interactive sitcom called "ON AIR – The Secret Contract" were revealed, including Park as the female lead named Shin Woo-ri, a writer that knows the secret of DJ Aaron, an arrogant top idol portrayed by actor Hong Joo-chan.


title: Sandara Park

text: On May 14, 2021, it was announced that Park left YG Entertainment as her exclusive contract has expired.


title: Sandara Park

text: On September 1, 2021, Abyss Company announced that Park had signed an exclusive contract with the agency.


title: Sandara Park

text: Sandara Park is credited as one of the leading figures in the 'Reverse-Hallyu' Wave. She is dubbed the 'BoA of the Philippines' by Korean fans due to the similar success between the two, as BoA was the first Korean artist to break through the Japanese market. She holds the national title of 'Pambansang Krung Krung ng Pilipinas' (The Philippines' national crazy or unique personality) given to her by Filipino fans, and her popularity in the region is likened to comedian Yoo Jae-suk's fame in South Korea.


title: Sandara Park

text: In popular culture, Sandara is the icon of "baby-face" amongst celebrities and the public, which is an individual who looks younger than their actual age. Despite being born in the early 80s, Sandara is known to top and beat other competitors in surveys, often with a large gap between their ages, thus earning herself the nickname "vampire" for her youthful skin and look. She is noted for having the ideal facial proportions, called "the golden ratio" by plastic surgeons. Attesting to the quality of her skin, she was described to be a popular choice for both advertisers and consumers, who would be drawn to her clear and seemingly poreless face. In 2012, she was announced to be one of the most beautiful women of her time (1980s).


title: Sandara Park

text: Park features some of the most iconic and memorable styles in the Korean industry, ranging from her signature tail lilt eye make-up, to her bold hair styles and clothing. Labeled a pioneer of unconventional trends, her first appearance in Lollipop sporting her 'palm-tree' hairstyle became the most famous and widely parodied style in 2009 and remains an iconic piece in K-pop. In particular, her 2012 look, for which she had shaved a portion of her trademark locks for the promotional single "I Love You", attracted massive media attention and initially garnered mixed reactions, but was nonetheless praised for its shock factor and contradictory styling to the typical girl-group 'look'. The style is considered to be her most noteworthy transformation.


title: Sandara Park

text: Park is one of the most in-demand faces in both the Philippines and South Korea, having appeared in many TV commercials and print ads over the course of her career. Park's huge popularity led to her instantly signing many Philippine and foreign endorsement deals ranging from personal care and food products to everyday items at the end of the competition. Her first endorsement was for Dong-A pens. Along with other Star Circle Quest finalists, Park modeled for and endorsed BNY Jeans in 2004. She served as the face for Tekki Asian Classic Noodles, and helped promote Canon, a Japanese camera brand looking to solidify their power in the Philippines. She endorsed Confident feminine napkins, and Rejoice shampoo as well. In addition to the shampoo's advertisements, Park also contributed a single to go along with the brand. Park also campaigned for Maxi-Peel with Kristine Hermosa. Following the revival of her career as a member of 2NE1, Sandara endorsed high-profile local brands without the group. In 2009, she became the endorsement model for Oriental Brewery's Cass beer series, one of Korea's most famous alcoholic beverages, alongside actor Lee Min-ho. To help promote the beer, an accompanying music video and song was released to nationwide attention.


title: Sandara Park

text: While promoting alongside 2NE1 for an endorsement deal with Mitsubishi's subsidiary Nikon Corporation, Park was solely chosen to become their main model for their new Nikon Coolpix p300 camera. Dongkook Kim, brand manager of Nikon Korea, stated that signing her would increase their products "attractiveness", and motivate buyers to purchase their items. After her campaign debuted, the company reported a massive increase in sales that put them only behind Samsung, the largest business conglomerate in South Korea, for the year of 2012. The company named the camera after her, going by the official name of "Sandara Digicam". Park is also well known for endorsing makeup brands. Despite having already worked with Etude House in 2010 alongside her group, the makeup brand sought to continue with her for an additional two years with the belief that her image would be a "good influence" to potential buyers. Over the course of her endorsement with Etude, the brand was able to compete with popular local makeup companies and were launched to international success. An umbrella called 'Sweet Bunny' was made available online and in stores to be given to buyers who paid for a certain number of items. The limited special not only increased Etude House's sales, but also attracted a foreign consumer base who, moments after Park was seen holding the item, visited the South Korean stores specifically to purchase the umbrella, where it was bought in every color. In a week, Etude House sold over 40,000 of the umbrellas, ultimately selling out the product. A representative described the reactions of the public as "surprising". The makeup brand won several web awards for their achievements in marketing, services and makeup as well.


title: Sandara Park

text: In 2013, Sandara became the new makeup model for Clio, a well-established makeup company founded in 1993. Immediately after, sites recorded increased sales and her 'bloody series' makeup became a top-seller. The following year, the company's mascara, Salon de Cara, was launched with Park as its model and sold out 130,000 units of its initial stock nationwide in three weeks. The mascara went on to sell a record-breaking 300,000 units in the months following. A fan-signing event was held on November 14 as a thank-you to the buyers. Clio then closed the year with four awards, three of which were modeled by Park.


title: Sandara Park

text: In 2015, Park joined the likes of supermodels Cara Delevingne, Sean O'Pry, and fashion model/TV personality Kendall Jenner as Penshoppe's ambassador. The following year, Park and G-Dragon were chosen as exclusive models for the cosmetic brand Moonshot, launched previously by YG Plus in 2014, a subsidiary company of YG Entertainment. Days after launching products released in their namesake, the product was sold out and required immediate restocking. A representative of Moonshot noted that it was the first time their products left stores at such a high rate and that the overall reservations had gone up substantially. In June, Park became the new endorser for American shampoo brand Head & Shoulders.


title: Sandara Park

text: Aside from her solo endorsements, Park has endorsed Adidas, 11st, Intel, Baskin Robbins, Italian sports brand Fila, Samsung, Yamaha, Bean Pole, and Nintendo Wii with her group.


title: Sandara Park

text: In November 2013, Dara and her brother lent their support for the campaign effort "WEGENERATION" to help the devastated survivors of Super Typhoon Yolanda. Having long considered the Philippines their second home after spending their childhood there, the Park siblings responded to the desperate situation by collaborating with both "WEGENERATION" and charity organization "World Share" to launch an online emergency aid fundraising system. By January, they raised 3 million won (₱116,721) for survivors.


title: Sandara Park

text: In 2016, she provided her services to Purme Foundation Children's Rehabilitation Hospital, donating gifts given to her by fans over the years to the children.


title: Sandara Park

text: In October 2020, Park donated 30,000 face masks to Korea Children's Incurable Disease Association, WE START, and the Korea Pediatric Cancer Foundation. The masks were given to children suffering from leukemia and pediatric cancer to protect themselves from COVID-19.


title: Sandara Park

text: During a promotional visit with 2NE1, Park was caught in the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011. Feeling unwell, Park had remained on the 34th floor of the hotel she and her members were staying in when the earthquake hit. She managed to contact CL using the hotel phone, prompting her to walk up several flights of stairs to rescue her. Assisted by a staff member, they walked down 34 flights and were relocated to a safer location. They were included in "Fuse"'s list of '14 Female Friendships In Music' because of the story.


title: David Otunga

text: David Daniel Otunga (born April 7, 1980) is an American actor and former professional wrestler. Otunga is best known for his time working with WWE. He was the runner-up on the first season of "NXT". He is also an original member of The Nexus and The New Nexus, being the only member present through the entire duration of the stable in every incarnation. As part of the faction, he became a two-time WWE Tag Team Champion, having one reign each with fellow Nexus members John Cena and Michael McGillicutty.


title: David Otunga

text: Otunga was born in Elgin, Illinois, to father Moses, a Kenyan, and a European American mother, Billie, both of whom are educators. He is the youngest of three children. Otunga graduated from Larkin High School and later earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Illinois. Following his graduation, he moved to New York City where he became a laboratory manager in Columbia University's Cognitive Neuroscience Center. He later graduated from Harvard Law School in 2006, passing Illinois' bar exam. After graduating from law school and passing his bar exams, Otunga joined Sidley Austin, one of America's largest law firms. According to Otunga's LinkedIn profile, he worked with Sidley Austin from May 2005 to October 2007.


title: David Otunga

text: In 2007, after his niece submitted his audition tape, Otunga was chosen to be a contestant on "I Love New York 2" and given the nickname "Punk". He became one of the final three contestants in the competition, before being eliminated on the series' penultimate episode. Otunga has since starred in the 2013 thriller film "The Call". Otunga made a guest appearance as himself in the 13,110th episode (Season 52, Episode 84) of "General Hospital".


title: David Otunga

text: In November 2008, Otunga signed a developmental contract with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and was assigned to its development territory, Florida Championship Wrestling. He made his debut on May 29, 2009, under the ring name Dawson Alexander, in a six-man tag team match. Otunga teamed with Barry Allen and Jon Cutler to defeat Abraham Saddam Washington, Derrick Bateman and Camacho.


title: David Otunga

text: On February 16, 2010, after numerous dark matches on both "Raw" and "SmackDown", it was announced that Otunga would wrestle on the first season of "NXT" under his real name, with R-Truth as his storyline mentor. He made his debut on the inaugural episode of "NXT" on February 23, quickly defeating Darren Young. Young defeated Otunga in a rematch on the following week's broadcast, thanks to interference from Young's mentor, CM Punk. After the match, R-Truth tried to offer his support, only to be shoved away by a frustrated Otunga, resulting in Otunga turning heel. R-Truth took exception, confronting and brawling with Otunga backstage. On the March 30 episode of "NXT", Otunga won an 8-man over the top rope battle royal against the other NXT Rookies to earn the right to guest host "Raw" the following week. On the April 5 episode of "Raw", Otunga put himself in a tag team match with John Cena for the Unified WWE Tag Team Championship against ShoMiz (Big Show and The Miz). Later in the match, however, he refused to tag in and walked out, allowing ShoMiz to retain. On May 11, in the second Pros Poll, he was moved to second place. During the season finale on June 1, Otunga came in second place overall in the competition, losing out to Wade Barrett.


title: David Otunga

text: The following week on "Raw", Otunga and the other "NXT" rookies from season one interfered in the main event match between John Cena and CM Punk, attacking the competitors, the announce team, and ring announcer Justin Roberts, before dismantling the ring area and surrounding equipment. On the June 14 episode of "Raw", the rookies attacked General Manager Bret Hart, when he refused to give them contracts. The following week on "Raw", Vince McMahon fired Hart and announced the hiring of a new General Manager, who had signed all seven season one NXT rookies to contracts. The following week, the group was named The Nexus. On the July 12 episode of "Raw", The Nexus, excluding Daniel Bryan (who was fired by Vince McMahon after the Nexus' first night on Raw in part due to choking ring announcer Justin Roberts with his own tie), competed in their first match together, defeating John Cena in a six-on-one handicap match. The Nexus continued to feud with Cena and the Raw roster, resulting in a seven-on-seven elimination tag team match at SummerSlam. Otunga was the fourth member of The Nexus eliminated, when he submitted to Chris Jericho, and The Nexus went on to lose the match.


title: David Otunga

text: Cena was later forced to join The Nexus, as a result of losing to Barrett at Hell in a Cell. At the following pay-per-view, Bragging Rights on October 24, Otunga and Cena teamed together to win the WWE Tag Team Championship from Cody Rhodes and Drew McIntyre. The next night on "Raw" Otunga and Cena lost the Tag Team Championship to fellow Nexus members Justin Gabriel and Heath Slater when Barrett ordered Otunga to allow Slater to pin him. On November 5, Otunga, who had been questioning Barrett's leadership in the past weeks, led Nexus, minus Barrett and Cena, to an invasion of "SmackDown". Barrett did not approve of Otunga's decision to lead The Nexus to "SmackDown" and as a result forced him to defend his spot in the group a week later. On the November 12 episode of "SmackDown", Otunga defeated Edge in a lumberjack match, after Kane interfered, to keep his spot in Nexus. About a month later, Otunga started to rebel against Barrett with the rest of Nexus behind him. After the group disobeyed direct orders and walked away from Barrett, Otunga told Barrett to rehire Cena the following week or be banished from Nexus.


title: David Otunga

text: In January 2011, Barrett was exiled from Nexus and CM Punk took over his spot as the leader of the group. While Justin Gabriel and Heath Slater chose not to follow Punk's orders and left Nexus, Otunga agreed to take his initiation test, a beating from the Big Show, and remain with the group. In late February, it was announced that Punk would face Randy Orton at WrestleMania XXVII, with each member of The Nexus facing Orton to win the right to accompany Punk to the ring in the weeks leading up to WrestleMania. Otunga faced Orton on the March 7 episode of "Raw", but lost. Following the match, he was punted in the skull by Orton. Otunga was absent from television for over a month, returning on the April 11 episode of "Raw" with the other New Nexus members, and preventing Orton from earning a WWE Championship match.


title: David Otunga

text: On the May 23 episode of "Raw", Otunga teamed with fellow Nexus member Michael McGillicutty to win the WWE Tag Team Championship from Kane and The Big Show with the help interference from fellow New Nexus members Mason Ryan and Punk. They made their only successful title defense against The Usos on the July 29 episode of "SmackDown". After CM Punk left the New Nexus when his WWE contract expired on July 17, Otunga and McGillicutty competed against Santino Marella and Zack Ryder on the August 1 episode of "Raw" without any Nexus gear or armbands, and with all Nexus logos removed from their TitanTron, effectively signaling the end of the New Nexus. On the August 22 episode of "Raw", Otunga and McGillicutty lost the Tag Team Championship to Air Boom (Kofi Kingston and Evan Bourne).


title: David Otunga

text: After a minor feud with Jerry Lawler, Otunga and McGillicutty's team quietly disbanded. Otunga then started a new storyline, focusing on his law background, as John Laurinaitis advised him to help disgruntled wrestlers plan a lawsuit against Triple H, WWE's chief operating officer. He also started carrying a Starbucks thermos. On the September 30 episode of "SmackDown", Otunga and Laurinaitis sat down with Dolph Ziggler, Jack Swagger, Cody Rhodes, Alberto Del Rio, Christian, and Vickie Guerrero to discuss the matter. The following week on "Raw", Otunga walked out on Triple H with other wrestlers, Divas, and referees after a "vote of no confidence" for Triple H as General Manager of Raw. He returned to in-ring action on the November 29 "SmackDown Holiday Special" where he was defeated by Randy Orton in a Miracle on 34th Street Fight match. On the December 23 episode of "SmackDown" he cancelled a #1 Contender's match between The Big Show and Mark Henry due to the latter's leg injury; he was knocked out by Show as a result. Otunga faced The Big Show on the December 26 episode of "Raw" and the December 30 episode of "SmackDown", but lost both matches. He obtained his first win since returning to singles competition on the January 13, 2012, episode of "SmackDown", defeating Santino Marella. He captured back-to-back wins against Ezekiel Jackson on the February 20 episode of "Raw" and the February 21 episode of "Super SmackDown". On the March 12 episode of "Raw", it was announced that Otunga would be the captain of Laurinaitis' team for the battle for control 12-man Tag Team match at WrestleMania. Team Johnny was victorious at WrestleMania XXVIII. On the April 16 episode of "Raw", Otunga unsuccessfully challenged Santino Marella for the United States Championship. Otunga took leave from WWE television from April 23 to May 14 to be with his fiancé, Jennifer Hudson, during the murder trial of William Balfour in Chicago.


title: David Otunga

text: At No Way Out, Otunga lost to Brodus Clay via count out. The next night on "Raw", Otunga teamed with Big Show and John Laurinaitis in a 3 on 1 handicap match. Before the match started, Big Show walked out on Otunga and Laurinaitis. Otunga walked out as well during the match, because Laurinaitis had refused to tag himself in, allowing John Cena to make Laurinaitis submit. The next week on "SmackDown", Otunga delivered a low blow to Brodus Clay as Clay was fighting Big Show. He returned to "Raw" on August 20 to confront General Manager AJ Lee. He was put into a match against Big Show, which he lost. On September 3, Otunga was seen with Alberto Del Rio, who told Matt Striker that his client (Del Rio) won't talk to him. On the September 7 episode of "SmackDown", he represented Alberto Del Rio and Ricardo Rodriguez to win the case to ban Sheamus' finishing move, the "Brogue Kick", just as Otunga was facing Sheamus at the night's main event, although the Brogue Kick was later reinstated. He managed Alberto Del Rio at Night of Champions in his match with Sheamus for the World Heavyweight Championship which Del Rio lost, At Survivor Series, Otunga was made a part of Team Ziggler, filling in for the injured Cody Rhodes. He was eliminated by Daniel Bryan. Otunga competed in the 2013 Royal Rumble match entering at #9 but was eliminated by Sheamus. His last singles match was a loss to Ryback. Since then, he has been doing promotional work for WWE backstage. Otunga returned on October 28 when he conducted an interview for WWE.com after Big Show sued WWE and Triple H for defamation, discrimination and wrongful termination of contract.


title: David Otunga

text: Otunga returned on April 6, 2014 in the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal at WrestleMania XXX and was eliminated by Big E. Otunga did not make any WWE appearances again until he returned to live events on January 9, 2015. His last match was on July 5, 2015 on a WWE Live SummerSlam Heatwave Tour where he lost to R-Truth.


title: David Otunga

text: Otunga returned to television on February 2, 2015, doing the "Raw Pre-Show". Following this, he offered his legal services to his former tag team partner Curtis Axel regarding his Royal Rumble 2015 controversy. Now rarely an in-ring performer, Otunga replaced Alex Riley as one of the hosts of the weekly "Raw" pre-show on the WWE Network.


title: David Otunga

text: In June 2016, Otunga left his position on the "Raw" pre-show panel, where he joined the commentary team alongside Tom Phillips for both "Superstars" and "Main Event". On the June 23 episode of "SmackDown", Otunga temporarily replaced Jerry Lawler on the commentary team, after Lawler was suspended by WWE. Following the 2016 WWE draft, Otunga was announced to join the "SmackDown" commentary team on a full-time basis, alongside Mauro Ranallo and John "Bradshaw" Layfield, where he served as the babyface color commentator in contrast to JBL's heel color commentary.


title: David Otunga

text: On April 11, 2017, it was reported that Otunga was traded to the "Raw" brand for Byron Saxton as part of the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up. However, due to his acting career, he was replaced by Booker T on "Raw" for six weeks. Upon Otunga's return, Booker remained "Raw" color commentator while Otunga became a pre-show panelist. He has occasionally appeared on commentary since.


title: David Otunga

text: Seven months after meeting singer and actress Jennifer Hudson, Otunga proposed marriage on Hudson's 27th birthday in 2008. On August 10, 2009, Hudson gave birth to the couple's first child, their son David Daniel Otunga Jr. In November 2017, Otunga and Hudson split after being in the process of separation for several months.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: Ip Man is a series of Hong Kong martial arts films based on the life events of the Wing Chun master of the same name. The progenitor of the series was "Ip Man" (2008), which was followed by two sequels – "Ip Man 2" (2010), "Ip Man 3" (2015), the spin-off "" (2018) and the final instalment "" (2019). All four main films were directed by Wilson Yip, written by Edmond Wong and produced by Raymond Wong. Ip Man, Ip Man 2, Ip Man 3, and Ip Man 4: The Finale star Donnie Yen. Mandarin Films released the first two films in Hong Kong, which earned more than $37 million with a budget of around $24.6 million. Donnie Yen has mentioned each film has a unique theme, that the first "Ip Man" film was about "survival", "Ip Man 2" focuses on "making a living and adaptation", while "Ip Man 3" focuses on "life" itself.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: "Ip Man" was directed by Wilson Yip and written by Edmond Wong. It was Raymond Wong's idea to develop a biographical film about Wing Chun master Ip Man. Principal photography began in Shanghai in March 2008 and ended in August. The film was released in Hong Kong on 18 December 2008 by Mandarin Films, and earned around US$21.8 million against the US$11.7 million budget. Donnie Yen portrayed the role of Ip Man in the film, set in the 1930s, focuses on events in Ip's life in the city of Foshan during the Sino-Japanese War.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: The sequel is set in 1949, when Ip Man moved to Hong Kong and attempts to promote Wing Chun in the region. It was intended to focus on the relationship between Ip Man and his most famed disciple Bruce Lee. The film was directed by Yip and written by Edmond Wong, while Raymond Wong produced the film and was released in Hong Kong on 29 April 2010 by Mandarin Films. The film grossed more than $50 million against the budget of $12.9 million.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: Principal photography began in Shanghai on 25 March 2015, which Yip is again directing the film based on the script by Wong. Donnie Yen is again portraying the role of Ip Man, along with him Mike Tyson is also playing a role of a street fighter. Bruce Lee's character was initially supposed to be featured in CGI, because the producers could not find an actor who could portray Lee convincingly, but Danny Chan was eventually cast in the role.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: Principal photography for "Ip Man 3" began on 25 March 2015, and the film was released in Hong Kong on 24 December 2015.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: Max Zhang reprises his role as Cheung Tin Chi from "Ip Man 3" in this spin-off film. Directed by Yuen Woo-ping, it also stars Tony Jaa, Dave Bautista and Michelle Yeoh.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: On 30 September 2016, Yen announced via Facebook that he and Wilson Yip would continue the franchise with "Ip Man 4". The film began production in April 2018 and ended in July of the same year. It was released on 20 December 2019, and portrays Ip Man traveling to San Francisco to secure a spot for his son at a local school. Meanwhile, he crosses paths with his student, Bruce Lee, who had set up a Wing Chun school there.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: In April 2019, it was reported that Max Zhang is set to reprise his role in a sequel to "Master Z: Ip Man Legacy". The sequel is reported to be taking a budget cut, down to $13 million, from the first film's budget of $28 million.


title: Ip Man (film series)

text: "Ip Man Trilogy", a Blu-ray compilation that features the first three films in the series, was released by Well Go USA in November 2016. The Blu-ray also includes special features such as deleted scenes, "behind-the-scenes" featurette and interviews with Donnie Yen and Mike Tyson.


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: Suleika Jaouad ( ; ) is an American writer, advocate, and motivational speaker. She is the author of the "Life, Interrupted" column in "The New York Times" and has also written for "Vogue, Glamour", NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Women's Health". Her 2021 memoir "Between Two Kingdoms" was a "New York Times" Best Seller.


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: When Jaouad was diagnosed with a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, doctors said she had only a 35% chance of surviving. She survived and has written and spoken extensively about her medical experiences. Her Emmy Award-winning column, "Life, Interrupted" was part of the "New York Times" Well blog. In December 2021, Jaouad announced her cancer had returned and that she had undergone a second bone marrow transplant.


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: Jaouad was born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother. Her father Hédi taught French at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her mother Anne was an artist. She attended the Juilliard School's pre-college program, where she studied the double bass.


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: She graduated from Princeton University in 2010, and earned a MFA from Bennington College in writing and literature. Jaouad travels around the U.S. teaching writing and wellness workshops and she speaks at high schools, universities, hospitals, corporations, fund-raisers and professional events. Jaouad has been featured on NPR's "Talk of the Nation", NBC's "Weekend Today", CBS News, "The Paris Review", the "Los Angeles Times" and "Darling" magazine, among others. Her TED Talk titled "What almost dying taught me about living" was released in June 2019.


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: Jaouad is married to musician Jon Batiste, with whom she has been in a relationship since 2014. According to a 2012 New York Times wellness article, "Life, Interrupted", which she chronicled her experiences as a young adult with cancer on a weekly basis, Jaouad wrote she first met Batiste as a teenager in band camp. In April 2022, the couple revealed in a television interview that they had been secretly married in February 2022.


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: "Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted" is a memoir published in 2021 by Random House that discusses her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. The title of the book comes from a line in Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor:" "Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick."


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: In the book, Jaouad revisits her life before and after her cancer diagnosis "to forge a path forward after remission. Drawing on journals, medical records, letters, e-mails and interviews with many of those who appear across its pages, Jaouad's memoir details her early symptoms, initial diagnosis and then, in great detail, the physical, mental and emotional toll cancer takes on her and those around her."


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: The book was generally well received by critics, including starred reviews from "Booklist," "Library Journal," and "Publishers Weekly".


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: Writing for "Library Journal", Barrie Olmstead wrote, "Jaouad does a beautiful job of writing from this place of 'dual citizenship,' where she finds pain but also joy, kinship, and possibility." "Publishers Weekly" called the book "a stunning memoir, well-crafted and hard to put down," while "Booklist"'s June Sawyer said it was "[b]oldly candid and truly memorable."


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: "Between Two Kingdoms" also received positive reviews from "Kirkus Reviews", "Los Angeles Times", "NPR", and "Shelf Awareness". "Kirkus Reviews" called the book "[m]emorable, lyrical, and ultimately hopeful: a book that speaks intently to anyone who suffers from illness and loss." According to NPR Heller McAlpin, "Jaouad's book stands out not only because she has lived to parse the saga of her medical battle with the benefit of hindsight, but also because it encompasses the less familiar tale of what it's like to survive and have to figure out how to live again." "Shelf Awareness" explained, Though heavy, Jaouad's story is steeped in a wry optimism. This is in part because readers know Jaouad will survive to write this book, but it is also a testament to what makes "Between Two Kingdoms" so compelling: Jaouad's uncanny ability to reach into her pain and turn it into something else. She does not deny or gloss over the challenges of her diagnosis or the gut-wrenching torture of some of her treatments, yet she reckons with ways these impossible years of her life forged her into the woman she has since become.The "Los Angeles Times" also commended Jaouad's honesty, saying it's the key to the book.


title: Suleika Jaouad

text: "Booklist" also provided a positive review for the audiobook, noting, "Jaouad, reading her own work, is a sympathetic and appealing narrator. Although she tells a difficult and painful story, her thoughtful tone never wavers toward anger or bitterness. Instead, she describes difficult subjects patiently, only adding emphasis to conversations to convey the truly fraught nature of their subjects."


title: Konami Code

text: The Konami Code (, "Konami Komando", "Konami command"), also commonly referred to as the Contra Code and sometimes the 30 Lives code, is a cheat code that appears in many Konami video games, as well as some non-Konami games. In the original code, the player has to press the following sequence of buttons on the game controller to enable a cheat or other effects:


title: Konami Code

text: The code has also found a place in popular culture as a reference to the third generation of video game consoles, and is present as an Easter egg in a number of websites.


title: Konami Code

text: The Konami Code was first used in the release of "Gradius" (1986), a scrolling shooter for the NES and was popularized among North American players in the NES version of "Contra." The code is also known as the "Contra Code" and "30 Lives Code", since the code provided the player 30 extra lives in "Contra." The code has been used to help non-experts players to progress through the game.


title: Konami Code

text: The Konami Code was created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto, who was developing the home port of the 1985 arcade game "Gradius" for the NES. Finding the game too difficult to play through during testing, he created the cheat code, which gives the player a full set of power-ups (normally attained gradually throughout the game). After entering the sequence using the controller when the game was paused the player received all available power-ups. The code was meant to be removed prior to publishing, but this was overlooked and only discovered as the game was being prepared for mass production. The developers decided to leave it there, as removing it could result in new bugs and glitches. The sequence was easy enough to remember for testers and simultaneously sufficiently hard to enter accidentally during the gameplay for unsuspecting users.


title: Konami Code

text: The Konami Code was thus included in the series' other sequels and spin-offs, with some key differences. The code has been subsequently re-used in a large number of other games and other computer programs.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Operation Crossroads was a pair of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946. They were the first nuclear weapon tests since Trinity in July 1945, and the first detonations of nuclear devices since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The purpose of the tests was to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The Crossroads tests were the first of many nuclear tests held in the Marshall Islands, and the first to be publicly announced beforehand and observed by an invited audience, including a large press corps. They were conducted by Joint Army/Navy Task Force One, headed by Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy rather than by the Manhattan Project, which had developed nuclear weapons during World War II. A fleet of 95 target ships was assembled in Bikini Lagoon and hit with two detonations of Fat Man plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapons of the kind dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, each with a yield of .


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The first test was "Able". The bomb was named "Gilda" after Rita Hayworth's character in the 1946 film "Gilda", and was dropped from the B-29 Superfortress "Dave's Dream" of the 509th Bombardment Group on July 1, 1946. It detonated above the target fleet and caused less than the expected amount of ship damage because it missed its aim point by .


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The second test was "Baker". The bomb was known as "Helen of Bikini" and was detonated underwater on July 25, 1946. Radioactive sea spray caused extensive contamination. A third deep-water test named "Charlie" was planned for 1947 but was canceled primarily because of the United States Navy's inability to decontaminate the target ships after the "Baker" test. Ultimately, only nine target ships were able to be scrapped rather than scuttled. "Charlie" was rescheduled as Operation Wigwam, a deep-water shot conducted in 1955 off the coast of Mexico (Baja California).


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Bikini's native residents were evacuated from the island on board the "LST-861", with most moving to the Rongerik Atoll. In the 1950s, a series of large thermonuclear tests rendered Bikini unfit for subsistence farming and fishing because of radioactive contamination. Bikini remains uninhabited , though it is occasionally visited by sport divers. Planners attempted to protect participants in the Operation Crossroads tests against radiation sickness, but one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months. The "Baker" test's radioactive contamination of all the target ships was the first case of immediate, concentrated radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called "Baker" "the world's first nuclear disaster."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The first proposal to test nuclear weapons against naval warships was made on August 16, 1945, by Lewis Strauss, future chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. In an internal memo to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Strauss argued, "If such a test is not made, there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned." With very few bombs available, he suggested a large number of targets widely dispersed over a large area. A quarter century earlier, in 1921, the Navy had suffered a public relations disaster when General Billy Mitchell's bombers sank every target ship the Navy provided for the ship-versus-bomb tests. The Strauss test would be designed to demonstrate ship survivability.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Nine days later, Senator Brien McMahon, who within a year would write the Atomic Energy Act and organize and chair the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, made the first public proposal for such a test, but one designed to demonstrate the vulnerability, rather than survivability, of ships. He proposed dropping an atomic bomb on captured Japanese ships and suggested, "The resulting explosion should prove to us just how effective the atomic bomb is when used against the giant naval ships." On September 19, the Chief of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), General of the Army Henry H. Arnold, asked the Navy to set aside ten of the thirty-eight captured Japanese ships for use in the test proposed by McMahon.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Meanwhile, the Navy proceeded with its own plan, which was revealed at a press conference on October 27 by the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, Fleet Admiral Ernest King. It involved between 80 and 100 target ships, most of them surplus U.S. ships. As the Army and the Navy maneuvered for control of the tests, Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Peterson observed, "To the public, the test looms as one in which the future of the Navy is at stake ... if the Navy withstands [the tests] better than the public imagines it will, in the public mind the Navy will have 'won.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The Army's candidate to direct the tests, Major General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project which built the bombs, did not get the job. The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that because the Navy was contributing the most men and materiel, the test should be headed by a naval officer. Commodore William S. "Deak" Parsons was a naval officer who had worked on the Manhattan Project and participated in the bombing of Hiroshima. He was now the assistant to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Special Weapons, Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy, whom he proposed for the role. This recommendation was accepted, and on January 11, 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed Blandy as head of Army/Navy Joint Task Force One (JTF-1), which was created to conduct the tests. Parsons became Deputy Task Force Commander for Technical Direction. USAAF Major General William E. Kepner was Deputy Task Force Commander for Aviation. Blandy codenamed the tests Operation Crossroads.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Under pressure from the Army, Blandy agreed to crowd more ships into the immediate target area than the Navy wanted, but he refused USAAF Major General Curtis LeMay's demand that "every ship must have a full loading of oil, ammunition, and fuel." Blandy's argument was that fires and internal explosions might sink ships that would otherwise remain afloat and be available for damage evaluation. When Blandy proposed an all-Navy board to evaluate the results, Senator McMahon complained to Truman that the Navy should not be "solely responsible for conducting operations which might well indeed determine its very existence." Truman acknowledged that "reports were getting around that these tests were not going to be entirely on the level." He imposed a civilian review panel on Operation Crossroads to "convince the public it was objective."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Pressure to cancel Operation Crossroads altogether came from scientists and diplomats. Manhattan Project scientists argued that further testing was unnecessary and environmentally dangerous. A Los Alamos study warned "the water near a recent surface explosion will be a witch's brew" of radioactivity. When the scientists pointed out that the tests might demonstrate ship survivability while ignoring the effect of radiation on sailors, Blandy responded by adding test animals to some of the ships, thereby generating protests from animal rights advocates.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who a year earlier had told physicist Leo Szilard that a public demonstration of the bomb might make the Soviet Union "more manageable" in Europe, now argued the opposite: that further display of U.S. nuclear power could harden the Soviet Union's position against acceptance of the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan, which discussed possible methods for the international control of nuclear weapons and the avoidance of future nuclear warfare. At a March 22 cabinet meeting he said, "from the standpoint of international relations it would be very helpful if the test could be postponed or never held at all." He prevailed on Truman to postpone the first test for six weeks, from May 15 to July 1. For public consumption, the postponement was explained as an opportunity for more Congressional observers to attend during their summer recess.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: When Congressmen complained about the destruction of $450 million worth of target ships, Blandy replied that their true cost was their scrap value at $10 per ton, only $3.7 million. Veterans and legislators from New York and Pennsylvania requested to keep their namesake battleships as museum ships, as Texas had done with , but the JTF-1 replied that "it is regretted that such ships as the cannot be spared."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: A series of three tests was recommended to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships, equipment, and materiel. The test site had to be in territory controlled by the United States. The inhabitants would have to be evacuated, so it was best if it was uninhabited, or nearly so, and at least from the nearest city. So that a B-29 could drop a bomb, there had to be an airbase within . To contain the target ships, it needed to have a protected anchorage at least wide. Ideally, it would have predictable weather patterns, and be free of severe cold and violent storms. Predictable winds would avoid having radioactive material blown back on the task force personnel, and predictable ocean currents would allow material to be kept away from shipping lanes, fishing areas, and inhabited shores. Timing was critical because Navy manpower required to move the ships was being released from active duty as part of the post-World War II demobilization, and civilian scientists knowledgeable about atomic weapons were leaving federal employment for college teaching positions.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: On January 24, Blandy named the Bikini Lagoon as the site for the two 1946 detonations, "Able" and "Baker". The deep underwater test, "Charlie", scheduled for early 1947, would take place in the ocean west of Bikini. Of the possible places given serious consideration, including Ecuador's Galápagos Islands, Bikini offered the most remote location with a large protected anchorage, suitable but not ideal weather, and a small, easily moved population. It had come under exclusive United States control on January 15, when Truman declared the United States to be the sole trustee of all the Pacific islands captured from Japan during the war. The Navy had been studying test sites since October 1945 and was ready to announce its choice of Bikini soon after Truman's declaration. On February 6, the survey ship "Sumner" began blasting channels through the Bikini reef into the lagoon. The local residents were not told why.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The 167 Bikini islanders first learned their fate four days later, on Sunday, February 10, when Navy Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, United States military governor of the Marshall Islands, arrived by seaplane from Kwajalein. Referring to Biblical stories which they had learned from Protestant missionaries, he compared them to "the children of Israel whom the Lord saved from their enemy and led into the Promised Land." He also claimed it was "for the good of mankind and to end all world wars." There was no signed agreement, but he reported by cable "their local chieftain, referred to as King Juda, arose and said that the natives of Bikini were very proud to be part of this wonderful undertaking." On March 6, Wyatt attempted to stage a filmed reenactment of the February 10 meeting in which the Bikinians had given away their atoll. Despite repeated promptings and at least seven retakes, Juda confined his on-camera remarks to, "We are willing to go. Everything is in God's hands." The next day, LST-861 moved them and their belongings east to the uninhabited Rongerik Atoll, to begin a permanent exile. Three Bikini families returned in 1974 but were evacuated again in 1978 because of radioactivity in their bodies from four years of eating contaminated food. As of 2022, the atoll remains unpopulated.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: To make room for the target ships, of dynamite were used to remove coral heads from Bikini Lagoon. On the grounds of the David Taylor Model Basin outside Washington, DC, dress rehearsals for "Baker" were conducted with dynamite and model ships in a pond named "Little Bikini." A fleet of 95 target vessels was assembled in Bikini Lagoon. At the center of the target cluster, the density was 20 ships per square mile (7.7 per km), three to five times greater than military doctrine would allow. The stated goal was not to duplicate a realistic anchorage, but to measure damage as a function of distance from the blast center, at as many distances as possible. The arrangement also reflected the outcome of the Army/Navy disagreement about how many ships should be allowed to sink.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The target fleet included four obsolete U.S. battleships, two aircraft carriers, two cruisers, thirteen destroyers, eight submarines, numerous auxiliary and amphibious vessels, and three surrendered German and Japanese ships. The ships carried sample amounts of fuel and ammunition, plus scientific instruments to measure air pressure, ship movement, and radiation. The live animals on some of the target ships were supplied by the support ship , which brought 200 pigs, 60 guinea pigs, 204 goats, 5,000 rats, 200 mice, and grains containing insects to be studied for genetic effects by the National Cancer Institute. Amphibious target ships were beached on Bikini Island.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: A support fleet of more than 150 ships provided quarters, experimental stations, and workshops for most of the 42,000 men (more than 37,000 of whom were Navy personnel) and the 37 female nurses. Additional personnel were located on nearby atolls such as Eniwetok and Kwajalein. Navy personnel were allowed to extend their service obligation for one year if they wanted to participate in the tests and see an atomic bomb explode. The islands of the Bikini Atoll were used as instrumentation sites and, until "Baker" contaminated them, as recreation sites.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Radio-controlled autopilots were installed in eight B-17 bombers, converting them into remote-controlled drones which were then loaded with automatic cameras, radiation detectors, and air sample collectors. Their pilots operated them from mother planes at a safe distance from the detonations. The drones could fly into radiation environments, such as "Able's" mushroom cloud, which would have been lethal to crew members. All the land-based detonation-sequence photographs were taken by remote control from tall towers erected on several islands of the atoll. In all, Bikini cameras took 50,000 still pictures and of motion picture film. One of the cameras could shoot 1,000 frames per second.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Before the first test, all personnel were evacuated from the target fleet and Bikini Atoll. They boarded ships of the support fleet, which took safe positions at least east of the atoll. Test personnel were issued special dark glasses to protect their eyes, but a decision was made shortly before "Able" that the glasses might not be adequate. Personnel were instructed to turn away from the blast, shut their eyes, and cradle their arm across their face for additional protection. A few observers who disregarded the recommended precautions advised the others when the bomb detonated. Most shipboard observers reported feeling a slight concussion and hearing a disappointing little "poom".


title: Operation Crossroads

text: On July 26, 2016, the National Security Archive declassified and released the entire stock of footage shot by surveillance aircraft that flew over the nuclear test site just minutes after the bomb detonated. The footage can be seen on YouTube.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: "Able" and "Baker" are the first two letters of the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet, used from 1941 until 1956. "Alfa" and "Bravo" are their counterparts in the current NATO phonetic alphabet. "Charlie" is the third letter in both systems. According to eyewitness accounts, the time of detonation for each test was announced as H or "How" hour; in the official JTF-1 history, the term M or "Mike" hour is used instead.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: There were only seven nuclear bombs in existence in July 1946. The two bombs used in the test were Fat Man plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapons of the kind dropped on Nagasaki. The "Able" bomb was stenciled with the name "Gilda" and decorated with an "Esquire" magazine photograph of Rita Hayworth, star of the 1946 movie, "Gilda". The "Baker" bomb was "Helen of Bikini." This femme-fatale theme for nuclear weapons, combining seduction and destruction, is epitomized by the use in all languages, starting in 1946, of "bikini" as the name for a woman's two-piece bathing suit.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: At 9:00 on July 1, "Gilda" was dropped from the B-29 Superfortress "Dave's Dream" of the 509th Bombardment Group. The plane, formerly known as "Big Stink", had been the photographic equipment aircraft on the Nagasaki mission in 1945. It had been renamed in honor of Dave Semple, a bombardier who was killed during a practice mission on March 7, 1946. "Gilda" detonated above the target fleet, with a yield of 23 kilotons. Five ships were sunk. Two attack transports sank immediately, two destroyers within hours, and one Japanese cruiser the following day.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Some of the 114 press observers expressed disappointment at the effect on ships. "The New York Times" reported, prematurely, that "only two were sunk, one capsized, and eighteen damaged." The next day, the "Times" carried an explanation by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal that "heavily built and heavily armored ships are difficult to sink unless they sustain underwater damage."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The main cause of less-than-expected ship damage was that the bomb missed its aim point by . The ship the bomb was aimed at failed to sink. The miss resulted in a government investigation of the flight crew of the B-29 bomber. Various explanations were offered, including the bomb's known poor ballistic characteristics, but none was convincing. Images of the drop were inconclusive. The bombsight was checked and found error free. Pumpkin bomb drops were conducted, but were accurate. Colonel Paul W. Tibbets believed that the miss was caused by a miscalculation by the crew. The mystery was never solved. There were other factors that made "Able" less spectacular than expected. Observers were much farther away than at the Trinity test, and the high humidity absorbed much of the light and heat.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The battleship , the only battleship to get underway at the Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, had been designated as the aim point for "Able" and was painted orange, with white gun barrels and gunwales, to make her stand out in the central cluster of target ships. There were eight ships within of it. Had the bomb exploded over the "Nevada " as planned, at least nine ships, including two battleships and an aircraft carrier, would likely have sunk. The actual detonation point, west-northwest of the target, was closer to the attack transport , in much less crowded water.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: In addition to the five ships that sank, fourteen were judged to have serious damage or worse, mostly due to the bomb's air-pressure shock wave. All but three were located within of the detonation. Inside that radius, orientation to the bomb was a factor in shock wave impact. For example, ship #6, the destroyer , which sank, was farther away than seven ships that stayed afloat. "Lamson" was broadside to the blast, taking the full impact on her port side, while the seven closer ships were anchored with their sterns toward the blast, somewhat protecting the most vulnerable part of the hull.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The only large ship inside the radius which sustained moderate, rather than serious, damage was the sturdily built Japanese battleship , ship #7, whose stern-on orientation to the bomb gave her some protection. Unrepaired damage from World War II may have complicated damage analysis. As the ship from which the Pearl Harbor attack had been commanded, "Nagato" was positioned near the aim point to guarantee her being sunk. The "Able" bomb missed its target, and the symbolic sinking came three weeks later, five days after the "Baker" shot.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Serious damage to ship #10, the aircraft carrier , more than from the blast, was due to fire. For test purposes, all the ships carried sample amounts of fuel and ordnance, plus airplanes. Most warships carried a seaplane on deck, which could be lowered into the water by crane, but "Saratoga" carried several airplanes with highly volatile aviation fuel, both on deck and in the hangars below. The fire was extinguished and "Saratoga" was kept afloat for use in the "Baker" shot.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: As with Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki), the Crossroads "Able" shot was an air burst. These were purposely detonated high enough in the air to prevent surface materials from being drawn into the fireball. The height-of-burst for the first nuclear explosion Trinity, in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, was ; the device was mounted on a tower. It made a crater deep and wide, and there was some local fallout. The test was conducted in secret, and the world at large learned nothing about the radioactive fallout at the time. To be a true air burst with no local fallout, the Trinity height-of-burst needed to be . With an air burst, the radioactive fission products rise into the stratosphere and become part of the global, rather than the local, environment. Air bursts were officially described as "self-cleansing." There was no significant local fallout from "Able".


title: Operation Crossroads

text: There was an intense transitory burst of fireball radiation lasting a few seconds. Many of the closer ships received doses of neutron and gamma radiation that could have been lethal to anyone on the ship, but the ships themselves did not become radioactive. Neutron activation of materials in the ships was judged to be a minor problem by the standards of the time. One sailor on the support ship was found to be "sleeping in a shower of gamma rays" from an illegal metal souvenir he had taken from a target ship. Fireball neutrons had made it radioactive. Within a day nearly all the surviving target ships had been reboarded. The ship inspections, instrument recoveries, and moving and remooring of ships for the "Baker" test proceeded on schedule.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Fifty-seven guinea pigs, 109 mice, 146 pigs, 176 goats, and 3,030 white rats had been placed on 22 target ships in stations normally occupied by people. 35% of these animals died or were euthanised in the three months following the explosion: 10% were killed by the air blast, 15% were killed by radiation, and 10% were killed by the researchers as part of later study. The most famous survivor was Pig #311, which was reportedly found swimming in the lagoon after the blast and was brought back to the National Zoo in Washington, DC. The mysterious survival of Pig #311 caused some consternation at the time and has continued to be reported in error. However, an investigation pointed to the conclusion that it had neither swum in the ocean nor escaped the blast; it had likely been safely aboard an observation vessel during the test, thus "absent without leave" from its post on "Sakawa" and showing up about the same time other surviving pigs were captured.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The high rate of test animal survival was due in part to the nature of single-pulse radiation. As with the two Los Alamos criticality accidents involving the earlier demon core, victims who were close enough to receive a lethal dose died, while those farther away recovered and survived. Also, all the mice were placed outside the expected lethal zone in order to study possible mutations in future generations.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Although the "Able" bomb missed its target, "Nevada", by nearly half a mile (800 m), and it failed to sink or to contaminate the battleship, a crew would not have survived. Goat #119, tethered inside a gun turret and shielded by armor plate, received enough fireball radiation to die four days later of radiation sickness having survived two days longer than goat #53, which was on the deck, unshielded. Had "Nevada " been fully manned, she would likely have become a floating coffin, dead in the water for lack of a live crew. Two years later she was finished off by an aerial torpedo 65 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor on 31 July 1948. In theory, every unprotected location on the ship received 10,000 rems (100 Sv) of initial nuclear radiation from the fireball. Therefore, people deep enough inside the ship to experience a 90% radiation reduction would still have received a lethal dose of 1,000 rems. In the assessment of the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists":


title: Operation Crossroads

text: In "Baker" on July 25, the weapon was suspended beneath landing craft "LSM-60" anchored in the midst of the target fleet. "Baker" was detonated underwater, halfway to the bottom in water deep. How/Mike Hour was 08:35. No identifiable part of "LSM-60" was ever found; it was presumably vaporized by the nuclear fireball. Ten ships were sunk, including the German heavy cruiser "Prinz Eugen", which sank in December, five months after the test, because radioactivity prevented repairs to a leak in the hull.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Photographs of "Baker" are unique among nuclear detonation pictures. The searing, blinding flash that usually obscures the target area took place underwater and was barely seen. The clear image of ships in the foreground and background gives a sense of scale. The large Wilson cloud and the vertical water column are distinctive "Baker" shot features. One picture shows a mark where the 27,000-ton battleship was.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: As with "Able", any ships that remained afloat within of the detonation were seriously damaged, but this time the damage came from below, from water pressure rather than air pressure. The greatest difference between the two shots was the radioactive contamination of all the target ships by "Baker". Regardless of the degree of damage, only nine surviving "Baker" target ships were eventually decontaminated and sold for scrap. The rest were sunk at sea after decontamination efforts failed.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The German heavy cruiser , ship #36, survived both the "Able" and "Baker" tests but was too radioactive to have leaks repaired. In September 1946 she was towed to Kwajalein Atoll, where she capsized in shallow water on December 22, 1946, five months after "Baker". She remains there today, with starboard propeller blades in the air.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The submarine was the only sunken ship successfully raised at Bikini. She was towed to California and sunk again, as a target ship off the coast, two years later.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Three other ships, all in sinking condition, were towed ashore at Bikini and beached: attack transport , ship #25; destroyer , ship #27; and submarine , ship #24. "Dentuda", with a skeleton crew aboard, being submerged (thus avoiding the base surge) and outside the circle, escaped serious contamination and hull damage and was successfully decontaminated, repaired, and briefly returned to service.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The "Baker" shot produced so many unusual phenomena that a conference was held two months later to standardize nomenclature and define new terms for use in descriptions and analysis. The underwater fireball took the form of a rapidly expanding hot gas bubble that pushed against the water, generating a supersonic hydraulic shock wave which crushed the hulls of nearby ships as it spread out. Eventually it slowed to the speed of sound in water, which is one mile per second (1,600 m/s), five times faster than that of sound in air. On the surface, the shock wave was visible as the leading edge of a rapidly expanding ring of dark water, called the "slick" for its resemblance to an oil slick. Close behind the slick was a visually more dramatic, but less destructive whitening of the water surface called the "crack".


title: Operation Crossroads

text: When the gas bubble's diameter equaled the water depth, , it hit the sea floor and the sea surface simultaneously. At the bottom, it started digging a shallow crater, ultimately deep and wide. At the top, it pushed the water above it into a "spray dome", which burst through the surface like a geyser. Elapsed time since detonation was four milliseconds.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: During the first full second, the expanding bubble removed all the water within a radius and lifted two million tons of spray and seabed sand into the air. As the bubble rose at , it stretched the spray dome into a hollow cylinder or chimney of spray called the "column", tall and wide, with walls thick.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: As soon as the bubble reached the air, it started a supersonic atmospheric shock wave which, like the crack, was more visually dramatic than destructive. Brief low pressure behind the shock wave caused instant fog which shrouded the developing column in a "Wilson cloud", also called a "condensation cloud", obscuring it from view for two seconds. The Wilson cloud started out hemispherical, expanded into a disk which lifted from the water revealing the fully developed spray column, then expanded into a doughnut and vanished. The "Able" shot also produced a Wilson cloud, but heat from the fireball dried it out more quickly.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: By the time the Wilson cloud vanished, the top of the column had become a "cauliflower", and all the spray in the column and its cauliflower was moving down, back into the lagoon. Although cloudlike in shape, the cauliflower was more like the top of a geyser where water stops moving up and starts to fall. There was no mushroom cloud; nothing rose into the stratosphere.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Meanwhile, lagoon water rushing back into the space vacated by the rising gas bubble started a tsunami which lifted the ships as it passed under them. At 11 seconds after detonation, the first wave was from surface zero and high. By the time it reached the Bikini Island beach, away, it was a nine-wave set with shore breakers up to high, which tossed landing craft onto the beach and filled them with sand.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Twelve seconds after detonation, falling water from the column started to create a tall "base surge" resembling the mist at the bottom of a large waterfall. Unlike the water wave, the base surge rolled over rather than under the ships. Of all the bomb's effects, the base surge had the greatest consequence for most of the target ships, because it painted them with radioactivity that could not be removed. Tactical nuclear warfare advocates described the base surge as generation of very high sea states (GVHSS) disregarding radiation to emphasize the physical damage capable of disabling communication and radar equipment on warship superstructures.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: "Arkansas" was the closest ship to the bomb other than the ship from which it was suspended. The underwater shock wave crushed the starboard side of her hull, which faced the bomb, and rolled the battleship over onto her port side. It also ripped off the two starboard propellers and their shafts, along with the rudder and part of the stern, shortening the hull by .


title: Operation Crossroads

text: She was next seen by Navy divers, the same year, lying upside down with her bow on the rim of the underwater bomb crater and stern angled toward the center. There was no sign of the superstructure or the big guns. The first diver to reach "Arkansas" sank up to his armpits in radioactive mud. When National Park Service divers returned in 1989 and 1990, the bottom was again firm-packed sand, and the mud was gone. They were able to see the barrels of the forward guns, which had not been visible in 1946.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: All battleships are top-heavy and tend to settle upside down when they sink. "Arkansas" settled upside down, but a 1989 diver's sketch of the wreck shows hardly any of the starboard side of the hull, making it look like the ship is lying on her side. Most of the starboard side is present, but severely compacted.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The superstructure has not been found. It either was stripped off and swept away or is lying under the hull, crushed and buried under sand which flowed back into the crater, partially refilling it. The only diver access to the inside is a tight squeeze through the port side casemate, called the "aircastle." The National Park Service divers practiced on the similar casemate of the battleship , a museum ship, before entering "Arkansas" in 1990.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Contrary to popular belief, "Arkansas" was not lifted vertically by the blast of the weapon test. Forensic examination of the wreck during multiple surveys since the test conclusively show that structural failure of hull plating along the starboard side allowed rapid flooding and capsized the ship.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: "Saratoga", placed close to "Baker", sank 7.5 hours after the underwater shock wave opened up leaks in the hull. Immediately after the shock wave passed, the water wave lifted the stern and the bow , rocked the ship side to side, and crashed over her, sweeping all five moored airplanes off the flight deck and knocking the stack over onto the deck. She remained upright and outside the spray column, but close enough to be drenched by radioactive water from the collapsing cauliflower head as well as by the base surge. Blandy ordered tugs to tow the carrier to Enyu island for beaching, but "Saratoga" and the surrounding water remained too radioactive for close approach until after she sank. She settled upright on the bottom, with the top of her mast below the surface.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: "Baker" was the first nuclear explosion close enough to the surface to keep the radioactive fission products in the local environment. It was not "self-cleansing." The result was radioactive contamination of the lagoon and the target ships. While anticipated, it caused far greater problems than were expected.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The "Baker" explosion produced about of fission products. These fission products were thoroughly mixed with the two million tons of spray and seabed sand that were lifted into the spray column and its cauliflower head and then dumped back into the lagoon. Most of it stayed in the lagoon and settled to the bottom or was carried out to sea by the lagoon's internal tidal and wind-driven currents.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: A small fraction of the contaminated spray was thrown back into the air as the base surge. Unlike the Wilson cloud, a meteorological phenomenon in clean air, the base surge was a heavy fog bank of radioactive mist that rolled across all the target ships, coating their surfaces with fission products. When the mist in the base surge evaporated, the base surge became invisible but continued to move away, contaminating ships several miles from the detonation point.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Unmanned boats were the first vessels to enter the lagoon. Onboard instruments allowed remote-controlled radiation measurements to be made. When support ships entered the lagoon for evaluation, decontamination, and salvage activities, they steered clear of lagoon water hot spots detected by the drone boats. The standard for radiation exposure to personnel was the same as that used by the Manhattan Project: 0.1 roentgens per day. Because of this constraint, only the five most distant target ships could be boarded on the first day. The closer-in ships were hosed down by Navy fireboats using saltwater and flame retardants. The first hosing reduced radioactivity by half, but subsequent hosings were ineffective. For most of the ships, reboarding had to wait until the short-lived radioisotopes decayed; ten days elapsed before the last of the targets could be boarded.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: In the first six days after "Baker", when radiation levels were highest, 4,900 men boarded target ships. Sailors tried to scrub off the radioactivity with brushes, water, soap, and lye. Nothing worked, short of sandblasting to bare metal.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Only pigs and rats were used in the "Baker" test. All the pigs and most of the rats died. Several days elapsed before sailors were able to reboard the target ships where test animals were located; during that time the accumulated doses from the gamma rays produced by fission products became lethal for the animals. Since much of the public interest in Operation Crossroads had focused on the fate of the test animals, in September Blandy asserted that radiation death is not painful: "The animal merely languishes and recovers or dies a painless death. Suffering among the animals as a whole was negligible." This was clearly not true. While the well-documented suffering of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin as they died of radiation injury at Los Alamos was still secret, the widely reported radiation deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been painless. In 1908, Dr. Charles Allen Porter had stated in an academic paper, "the agony of inflamed X-ray lesions is almost unequalled in any other disease."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The "Baker" explosion ejected into the environment about twice as many free neutrons as there were fission events. A plutonium fission event produces, on average, 2.9 neutrons, most of which are consumed in the production of more fission, until fission falls off and the remaining uncaptured neutrons escape. In an air burst, most of these environmental neutrons are absorbed by superheated air which rises into the stratosphere, along with the fission products and unfissioned plutonium. In the underwater "Baker" detonation, the neutrons were captured by seawater in the lagoon.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Of the four major elements in seawater – hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and chlorine – only sodium takes on intense, short-term radioactivity with the addition of a single neutron to its nucleus: common sodium-23 becomes radioactive sodium-24, with a 15-hour half-life. In six days, its intensity drops a thousandfold, but the corollary of short half-life is high initial intensity. Other isotopes were produced from seawater: hydrogen-3 (half-life 12 years) from hydrogen-2, oxygen-17 (stable) from oxygen-16, and chlorine-36 (half-life about 300,000 years) from chlorine-35, and some trace elements, but due to low abundance or low short-term intensity (long half-life) they were considered insignificant compared with sodium-24.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Less than one pound of radioactive sodium was produced. If all the neutrons released by the fission of of plutonium-239 were captured by sodium-23, of sodium-24 would result, but sodium did not capture all the neutrons. Unlike fission products, which are heavy and eventually sank to the bottom of the lagoon, the sodium stayed in solution. It contaminated the hulls and onboard salt water systems of support ships that entered the lagoon, and the water used in decontamination.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The of plutonium which did not undergo fission and the of fission products were scattered. Plutonium is not a biological hazard unless ingested or inhaled, and its alpha radiation cannot penetrate skin. Once inside the body it is significantly toxic both radiologically and chemically, having a heavy metal toxicity on a par with that of arsenic. Estimates based on the Manhattan Project's "tolerance dose" of one microgram of plutonium per worker put 10.6 pounds at the equivalent of about five billion tolerable doses.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Plutonium alpha rays could not be detected by the film badges and Geiger counters used by people who boarded the target ships because alpha particles have very low penetrating power, insufficient to enter the glass detection tube. It was assumed to be present in the environment wherever fission product radiation was detected. The decontamination plan was to scrub the target ships free of fission products and assume the plutonium would be washed away in the process. To see if this plan was working, samples of paint, rust, and other target ship surface materials were taken back to a laboratory on the support ship "Haven" and examined for plutonium. The tests showed that the plan was not working. The results of these plutonium detection tests, and of tests performed on fish caught in the lagoon, caused all decontamination work to be abruptly terminated on August 10, effectively shutting down Operation Crossroads for safety reasons. Tests conducted on the support ship in November indicated the presence of of plutonium, which represented 2000 tolerance doses.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The program termination on August 10, sixteen days after "Baker", was the result of a showdown between Dr. Stafford Warren, the Army colonel in charge of radiation safety for Operation Crossroads, and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Special Weapons, Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy. A radiation safety monitor under Warren's command later described him as "the only Army colonel who ever sank a Navy flotilla."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Warren had been Chief of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Project, and was in charge of radiation safety at the first nuclear test, "Trinity", in New Mexico, as well as of the on-ground inspections at Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. At Operation Crossroads, it was his job to keep the sailors safe during the cleanup.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: A total of 18,875 film badge dosimeters were issued to personnel during the operation. About 6,596 dosimeters were given to personnel who were based on the nearby islands or support ships that had no potential for radiation exposure. The rest were issued to all of the individuals thought to be at the greatest risk for radiological contamination along with a percentage of each group who were working in less contaminated areas. Personnel were removed for one or more days from areas and activities of possible exposure if their badges showed more than 0.1 roentgen (R) per day exposure. Experts believed at the time that this radiation dose could be tolerated by individuals for long periods without any harmful effects. The maximum accumulated dose of 3.72 R was received by a radiation safety monitor.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The cleanup was hampered by two significant factors: the unexpected base surge and the lack of a viable cleanup plan. It was understood that if the water column fell back into the lagoon, which it did, any ships that were drenched by falling water might be contaminated beyond redemption. Nobody expected that to happen to almost the entire target fleet. No decontamination procedures had been tested to see if they would work and to measure the potential risk to personnel. In the absence of a decontamination protocol, the ships were cleaned using traditional deck-scrubbing methods: hoses, mops, and brushes, with water, soap, and lye. The sailors had no protective clothing.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: By August 3, Colonel Warren concluded the entire effort was futile and dangerous. The unprotected sailors were stirring up radioactive material and contaminating their skin, clothing, and, presumably, their lungs. When they returned to their support ship living quarters, they contaminated the shower stalls, laundry facilities, and everything they touched. Warren demanded an immediate halt to the entire cleanup operation. He was especially concerned about plutonium, which was undetectable on site.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Warren also observed that the radiation safety procedures were not being followed correctly. Fire boats got too close to the target ships they were hosing and drenched their crews with radioactive spray. One fire boat had to be taken out of service. Film badges showed 67 overdoses between August 6 and 9. More than half of the 320 Geiger counters available shorted out and became unavailable. The crews of two target ships, and , moored far from the detonation site, had moved back on board and become overexposed. They were immediately evacuated back to the United States.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Captain L. H. Bibby, commanding officer of the apparently undamaged battleship "New York", accused Warren's radsafe monitors of holding their Geiger counters too close to the deck. He wanted to reboard his ship and sail it home. The steadily dropping radiation counts on the target ships gave an illusion that the cleanup was working, but Warren explained that although fission products were losing some of their gamma ray potency through radioactive decay, the ships were still contaminated. The danger of ingesting microscopic particles remained.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Blandy ordered Warren to explain his position to 1,400 skeptical officers and sailors. Some found him persuasive, but it was August 9 before he convinced Blandy. That was the date when Blandy realized, for the first time, that Geiger counters could not detect plutonium. Blandy was aware of the health problems of radium dial painters who ingested microscopic amounts of radium in the 1920s, and the fact that plutonium was assumed to have a similar biological effect. When plutonium was discovered in the captain's quarters of "Prinz Eugen", unaccompanied by fission products, Blandy realized that plutonium could be anywhere.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The following day, August 10, Warren showed Blandy an autoradiograph of a fish, an x-ray picture made by radiation coming from the fish. The outline of the fish was made by alpha radiation from the fish scales, evidence that plutonium, mimicking calcium, had been distributed throughout the fish, out to the scales. Blandy announced his decision, "then we call it all to a halt." He ordered that all further decontamination work be discontinued. Warren wrote home, "A self x ray of a fish ... did the trick."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The decontamination failure ended plans to outfit some of the target ships for the 1947 "Charlie" shot and to sail the rest home in triumph. The immediate public relations problem was to avoid any perception that the entire target fleet had been destroyed. On August 6, in anticipation of this development, Blandy had told his staff that ships sunk or destroyed more than 30 days after the "Baker" shot "will not be considered as sunk by the bomb." By then, public interest in Operation Crossroads was waning, and the reporters had gone home. The failure of decontamination did not make news until the final reports came out a year later.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Testing program staff originally set test "Charlie" for early 1947. They wanted to explode it deep under the surface in the lee of the atoll to test the effect of nuclear weapons as depth charges on unmoored ships. The unanticipated delays in decontaminating the target ships after test "Baker" prevented the required technical support personnel from assisting with "Charlie" and also meant that there were no uncontaminated target ships available for use in "Charlie". The naval weapons program staff decided the test was less pressing given that the entire U.S. arsenal had only a handful of nuclear weapons and canceled the test. The official reason given for canceling "Charlie" was that the program staff felt it was unnecessary due to the success of the "Able" and "Baker" tests. The deep ocean effects testing that "Charlie" was to have performed were fulfilled nine years later with "Operation Wigwam".


title: Operation Crossroads

text: All ships leak and require the regular operation of bilge pumps to stay afloat. If their bilge pumps could not be operated, the target ships would eventually sink. Only one suffered this fate: "Prinz Eugen", which sank in the Kwajalein lagoon on December 22. The rest were kept afloat long enough to be deliberately sunk or dismantled. After the August 10 decision to stop decontamination work at Bikini, the surviving target fleet was towed to Kwajalein Atoll where the live ammunition and fuel could be offloaded in uncontaminated water. The move was accomplished during the remainder of August and September.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Eight of the major ships and two submarines were towed back to the United States and Hawaii for radiological inspection. Twelve target ships were so lightly contaminated that they were remanned and sailed back to the United States by their crews. Ultimately, only nine target ships were able to be scrapped rather than scuttled. The remaining target ships were scuttled off Bikini or Kwajalein Atolls, or near the Hawaiian Islands or the California coast during 1946–1948. ex- was retained at Hunters Point Shipyard until 1951 to test decontamination methods.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The support ships were decontaminated as necessary and received a radiological clearance before they could return to the fleet. This required a great deal of experimentation at Navy shipyards in the United States, primarily in San Francisco at Hunters Point. The destroyer required "sandblasting and painting of all underwater surfaces, and acid washing and partial replacement of salt-water piping and evaporators."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Finally, a formal resurvey was conducted in mid-1947 to study long-term effects of the Operation Crossroads tests. According to the official report, decontamination efforts "revealed conclusively that removal of radioactive contamination of the type encountered in the target vessels in test "Baker" cannot be accomplished successfully."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: On August 11, 1947, "Life" summarized the report in a 14-page article with 33 pictures. The article stated, "If all the ships at Bikini had been fully manned, the Baker Day bomb would have killed 35,000 crewmen. If such a bomb were dropped below New York's Battery in a stiff south wind, 2 million people would die."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The contamination problem was not widely appreciated by the general public until 1948, when "No Place to Hide", a best-selling book by David Bradley, was serialized in the "Atlantic Monthly", condensed by the "Reader's Digest", and selected by the Book of the Month Club. In his preface, Bradley, a key member of the Radiological Safety Section at Bikini known as the "Geiger men", asserted that "the accounts of the actual explosions, however well intended, were liberally seasoned with fantasy and superstition, and the results of the tests have remained buried in the vaults of military security." His description of the "Baker" test and its aftermath brought to world attention the problem of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: All Operation Crossroads operations were designed to keep personnel from being exposed to more than 0.1 roentgen (R) per day. At the time, this was considered to be an amount of radiation that could be tolerated for long periods without any harmful effects on health. Since there was no special clothing or radiation shielding available, the protection plan relied on managing who went where, when, and for how long.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Radioactively "hot" areas were predicted, and then checked with Geiger counters, sometimes by remote control, to see if they were safe. The level of measured gamma radiation determined how long personnel could operate in them without exceeding the allowable daily dose. Instant gamma readings were taken by radiation safety specialists, but film-badge dosimeters, which could be read at the end of the day, were issued to all personnel believed to be at the greatest radiological risk. Anyone whose badge showed more than 0.1 R per day exposure was removed for one or more days from areas and activities of possible exposure. The maximum accumulated exposure recorded was 3.72 R, received by a radiation safety specialist.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: A percentage of each group working in less contaminated areas was badged. Eventually, 18,875 film-badge dosimeters were issued to about 15% of the total work force. On the basis of this sampling, a theoretical total exposure was calculated for each person who did not have a personal badge. As expected, exposures for target ship crewmen who reboarded their ships after "Baker" were higher than those for support ship crews. The hulls of support ships that entered the lagoon after "Baker" became so radioactive that sleeping quarters were moved toward the center of each ship. Of the total mass of radioactive particles scattered by each explosion, 85% was unfissioned plutonium which produces alpha radiation not detected by film badges or Geiger counters. There was no method of detecting plutonium in a timely fashion, and participants were not monitored for ingestion of it.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: A summary of film badge readings (in roentgens) for July and August, when the largest number of personnel was involved, is listed below:


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Service members who participated in the clean up of contaminated ships were exposed to unknown amounts of radiation. In 1996, a government-sponsored mortality study of Operation Crossroads veterans showed that, by 1992, 46 years after the tests, veterans had experienced a 4.6% higher mortality than a control group of non-veterans. There were 200 more deaths among Operation Crossroads veterans than in the similar control group (12,520 vs. 12,320), implying a life-span reduction of about three months for Operation Crossroads veterans. Veterans who were exposed to radiation formed the non-profit National Association of Atomic Veterans association in 1978 to lobby for veterans benefits covering illnesses they believed were due to their exposure.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Legislation was passed in 1988 that removed the need for veterans to prove a causal link between certain forms of cancer and radiation exposure due to nuclear tests. Incidence of the main expected causes of this increased mortality, leukemia and other cancers, was not significantly higher than normal. Death by those diseases was tabulated on the assumption that if radiation exposure had a life-shortening effect it would likely show up there, but it did not. Not enough data were gathered on other causes of death to determine the reason for this increase in all-cause mortality, and it remains a mystery. The mortality increase was higher, 5.7%, for those who boarded target ships after the tests than for those who did not, whose mortality increase was only 4.3%.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The 167 Bikini residents who were moved to the Rongerik Atoll prior to the Crossroads tests were unable to gather sufficient food or catch enough fish and shellfish to feed themselves in their new environment. The Navy left food and water for a few weeks and then failed to return in a timely manner. By January 1947, visitors to Rongerik reported the islanders were suffering malnutrition, facing potential starvation by July, and were emaciated by January 1948. In March 1948 they were evacuated to Kwajalein, and then settled onto another uninhabited island, Kili, in November. With only one third of a square mile, Kili has one sixth the land area of Bikini and, more important, has no lagoon and no protected harbor. Unable to practice their native culture of lagoon fishing, they became dependent on food shipments. Their four thousand descendants today are living on several islands and in foreign countries.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Their desire to return to Bikini was thwarted indefinitely by the U.S. decision to resume nuclear testing at Bikini in 1954. During 1954, 1956, and 1958, twenty-one more nuclear bombs were detonated at Bikini, yielding a total of , equivalent to more than three thousand "Baker" bombs. Only one was an air burst, the 3.8 megaton Redwing "Cherokee" test. Air bursts distribute fallout in a large area, but surface bursts produce intense local fallout. The first after Crossroads was the dirtiest: the 15 megaton "Bravo" shot of Operation Castle on March 1, 1954, which was the largest-ever U.S. test. Fallout from "Bravo" caused radiation injury to Bikini islanders who were living on Rongelap Atoll.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The brief attempt to resettle Bikini from 1974 until 1978 was aborted when health problems from radioactivity in the food supply caused the atoll to be evacuated again. Sport divers who visit Bikini to dive on the shipwrecks must eat imported food. The local government elected to close the fly-in fly-out sports diving operation in Bikini lagoon in 2008, and the 2009 diving season was canceled due to fuel costs, unreliable airline service to the island, and a decline in the Bikini Islanders' trust fund which subsidized the operation. After a successful trial in October 2010, the local government licensed a sole provider of dive expeditions on the nuclear ghost fleet at Bikini Atoll starting in 2011. The aircraft carrier is the primary attraction of a struggling, high-end sport diving industry.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Following test "Baker" decontamination problems, the United States Navy equipped newly constructed ships with a Countermeasure Wash Down System (CMWDS) of piping and nozzles to cover exterior surfaces of the ship with a spray of salt water from the firefighting system when nuclear attack appeared imminent. The film of flowing water would theoretically prevent contaminants from settling into cracks and crevices.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: The juxtaposition of half-naked islanders with nuclear weapons that had the power to reduce everyone to a primitive state provided some with an inspirational motif. During Operation Crossroads, Paris swimwear designer Louis Réard adopted the name "Bikini" for his minimalist swimsuit design which, revolutionary for the time, exposed the wearer's navel. He explained that "like the bomb, the bikini is small and devastating". Fashion writer Diana Vreeland described the bikini as the "atom bomb of fashion". While two-piece swimsuits have been used since antiquity, it was Réard's name of the "Bikini" that stuck for all of its modern incarnations.


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Artist Bruce Conner made Crossroads (1976 film), a video assembled from the official films, with an audio collage fashioned by Patrick Gleeson on a Moog synthesizer and a drone composition performed on an electric organ by Terry Riley. A commentator at the New York Review of Books called the experience of watching the video the "nuclear sublime."


title: Operation Crossroads

text: Films and TV shows have also used archive footage of the test "Baker" explosion in a fictitious capacity. In the animated comedy series "SpongeBob SquarePants", the footage is used in the season 2 episode "Dying For Pie", appearing when the character Squidward Tentacles is hit in the face by an exploding pie. One film example, TriStar Pictures' "Godzilla" from 1998, uses the "Baker" test footage in the film's opening to depict the atomic bomb responsible for the creation of the titular monster.


title: Partial differential equation

text: In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a multivariable function.


title: Partial differential equation

text: The function is often thought of as an "unknown" to be solved for, similarly to how is thought of as an unknown number to be solved for in an algebraic equation like . However, it is usually impossible to write down explicit formulas for solutions of partial differential equations. There is, correspondingly, a vast amount of modern mathematical and scientific research on methods to numerically approximate solutions of certain partial differential equations using computers. Partial differential equations also occupy a large sector of pure mathematical research, in which the usual questions are, broadly speaking, on the identification of general qualitative features of solutions of various partial differential equations, such as existence, uniqueness, regularity, and stability. Among the many open questions are the existence and smoothness of solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations, named as one of the Millennium Prize Problems in 2000.


title: Partial differential equation

text: Partial differential equations are ubiquitous in mathematically oriented scientific fields, such as physics and engineering. For instance, they are foundational in the modern scientific understanding of sound, heat, diffusion, electrostatics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, elasticity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics (Schrödinger equation, Pauli equation, etc). They also arise from many purely mathematical considerations, such as differential geometry and the calculus of variations; among other notable applications, they are the fundamental tool in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture from geometric topology.


title: Partial differential equation

text: Partly due to this variety of sources, there is a wide spectrum of different types of partial differential equations, and methods have been developed for dealing with many of the individual equations which arise. As such, it is usually acknowledged that there is no "general theory" of partial differential equations, with specialist knowledge being somewhat divided between several essentially distinct subfields.


title: Partial differential equation

text: Ordinary differential equations form a subclass of partial differential equations, corresponding to functions of a single variable. Stochastic partial differential equations and nonlocal equations are, as of 2020, particularly widely studied extensions of the "PDE" notion. More classical topics, on which there is still much active research, include elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations, fluid mechanics, Boltzmann equations, and dispersive partial differential equations.


title: Partial differential equation

text: One says that a function of three variables is ""harmonic"" or "a solution of "the Laplace equation"" if it satisfies the condition


title: Partial differential equation

text: Such functions were widely studied in the nineteenth century due to their relevance for classical mechanics, for example the equilibrium temperature distribution of a homogeneous solid is a harmonic function. If explicitly given a function, it is usually a matter of straightforward computation to check whether or not it is harmonic. For instance


title: Partial differential equation

text: is not. It may be surprising that the two given examples of harmonic functions are of such a strikingly different form from one another. This is a reflection of the fact that they are "not", in any immediate way, both special cases of a "general solution formula" of the Laplace equation. This is in striking contrast to the case of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) roughly similar to the Laplace equation, with the aim of many introductory textbooks being to find algorithms leading to general solution formulas. For the Laplace equation, as for a large number of partial differential equations, such solution formulas fail to exist.


title: Partial differential equation

text: The nature of this failure can be seen more concretely in the case of the following PDE: for a function of two variables, consider the equation


title: Partial differential equation

text: It can be directly checked that any function of the form , for any single-variable functions and whatsoever, will satisfy this condition. This is far beyond the choices available in ODE solution formulas, which typically allow the free choice of some numbers. In the study of PDE, one generally has the free choice of functions.