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Kent Weekly (SS/DSV) (DBF), EMCS
to remember
Ashworth, Frederick Lincoln (Dick), VADM USN(Ret).
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Contact Info
Home Town Beverly, MA
Last Address Santa Fe, NM
Date of Passing Dec 03, 2005
Location of Interment Santa Fe National Cemetery (VA) - Santa Fe, New Mexico
Vice Adm (Ret) Frederick Lincoln Ashworth, born January 24, 1912Beverly, MA. Graduate OF U.S. Naval Academy 1933 and career Navy Officer. During WWII was Deputy Commander & Operations Officer of Manhattan Project. Was Weaponeer on Nagasaki Attack, August 9, 1945. Other Commands included: Executive Officer-USS MIDWAY, Commands USS CORSON and USS FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Admiral of U.S. NAVAL 6TH Fleet as well as Commandant of Midshipmen, U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY. Retired 1968 to Santa Fe where he helped found Hondo Hills Fire Station, later moving to Lincoln, NM briefly before returning to Santa Fe in the early 1990s. He is survived by widow, Ercie Bell Ashworth; three sons, Frederick L. Ashworth, Jr. and wife, Dawn, Jr. David B. Ashworth, Stephen W. Ashworth and wife, Wendy; and three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
Description 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.
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, each with a yield of 23 kilotons of TNT (96 TJ).
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 520 feet (158 m) above the target fleet and caused less than the expected amount of ship damage because it missed its aim point by 2,130 feet (649 m). The second test was Baker. The bomb was known as Helen of Bikini and was detonated 90 feet (27 m) 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 California coast.
Bikini's native residents agreed to evacuate the island, and were evacuated 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 as of 2015, 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."
