Narrative

This edition of Narrative features an interview from StoryCorps, an oral history project that collects the voice of our time. At the StoryCorps mobile booth in Columbia in 2016, Dean Byrd talked with his father Willard Byrd, a veteran of the Korean War. Willard had a unique role with the army. He was stationed in the Marshall Islands, where he worked as a machinist. He was also witness to something few people have seen. Here, Dean Byrd asks his dad to tell the story of seeing the first test of a Hydrogen Bomb, known as Ivy Mike, on November 1, 1952. More on This Story... On November 1st 1952, Willard Byrd witnessed the detonation of the first ever hydrogen bomb on the USS Estes, 25 miles from ground zero on Enewetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. At the time, the bomb was the largest explosion in human history, 700 times more powerful than the devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. While Willard Byrd shared that he and his brother never suffered illnesses from the tests,