Operation Fishbowl was a series of high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 that were carried out by the United States as a part of the larger Operation Dominic nuclear test program.

The Operation Fishbowl nuclear tests were originally to be completed during the first half of 1962 with three tests named Bluegill, Starfish and Urraca.

The first test attempt was delayed until June. Planning for Operation Fishbowl, as well as many other nuclear tests in the region, began rapidly in response to the sudden Soviet announcement on August 30, 1961, that they were ending a three-year moratorium on nuclear testing. The rapid planning of very complex operations necessitated many changes as the project progressed.

All of the tests were to be launched on missiles from Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean north of the equator. Johnston Island had already been established as a launch site for United States high-altitude nuclear tests, rather than the other locations in the Pacific Proving Grounds. In 1958, Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, opposed doing any high-altitude tests at locations that had been used for earlier Pacific nuclear tests. 

His opposition was motivated by fears that the flash from the nighttime high-altitude detonations might blind civilians who were living on nearby islands. Johnston Island was a remote location, more distant from populated areas than other potential test locations. To protect residents of the Hawaiian Islands from flash blindness or permanent retinal injury from the bright nuclear flash, the nuclear missiles of Operation Fishbowl were launched generally toward the southwest of Johnston Island so that the detonations would be farther from Hawaii.

Urraca was to be a test of about 1 megaton yield at very high altitude (above 1000 km). The proposed Urraca test was always controversial, especially after the damage caused to satellites by the Starfish Prime detonation, as described below. Urraca was finally canceled, and an extensive re-evaluation of the Operation Fishbowl plan was made during an 82-day operations pause after the Bluegill Prime disaster of July 25, 1962, as described below.

A test named Kingfish was added during the early stages of Operation Fishbowl planning. Two low-yield tests, Checkmate and Tightrope, were also added during the project, so the final number of tests in Operation Fishbowl was five. Tightrope was the last atmospheric nuclear test conducted by the United States, as the Limited Test Ban Treaty came into effect shortly thereafter.

Operation Dominic was a series of 31 nuclear test explosions ("shots") with a 38.1 Mt (159 PJ) total yield conducted in 1962 by the United States in the Pacific. This test series was scheduled quickly, in order to respond in kind to the Soviet resumption of testing after the tacit 1958–1961 test moratorium. Most of these shots were conducted with free fall bombs dropped from B-52 bomber aircraft. Twenty of these shots were to test new weapons designs; six to test weapons effects; and several shots to confirm the reliability of existing weapons. The Thor missile was also used to lift warheads into near-space to conduct high-altitude nuclear explosion tests; these shots were collectively called Operation Fishbowl.

Operation Dominic occurred during a period of high Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, since the Cuban Bay of Pigs Invasion had occurred not long before. Nikita Khrushchev announced the end of a three-year moratorium on nuclear testing on 30 August 1961, and Soviet tests recommenced on 1 September, initiating a series of tests that included the detonation of the Tsar Bomba. President John F. Kennedy responded by authorizing Operation Dominic. It was the last atmospheric test series conducted by the U.S., as the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow the following year.

The operation was undertaken by Joint Task Force 8.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) performed Operation DOMINIC II, an atmospheric nuclear test series, at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) from July 7 to 17, 1962. The test series included four low-yield shots, three of which were near-surface detonations and one a tower shot. Exercise IVY FLATS included one of the near-surface shots, fired from a DAVY CROCKETT rocket launcher.

Former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said President Donald Trump inquired about shooting protesters amid the unrest that took place after George Floyd's murder in 2020. He recounts that incident, and many others, in a wide-ranging interview with NPR's Michel Martin on All Things Considered.

Esper said he stayed in the administration because he worried that if he left, the president would more easily implement some of his "dangerous ideas."

The former Defense chief also said he hopes Trump does not seek the presidency in 2024.

"We need leaders of integrity and character, and we need leaders who will bring people together and reach across the aisle and do what's best for the country. And Donald Trump doesn't meet the mark for me on any of those issues."

Esper said he and other top officials were caught off guard by Trump's reaction to the unrest in the summer of 2020.

"The president was enraged," Esper recalled. "He thought that the protests made the country look weak, made us look weak and 'us' meant him. And he wanted to do something about it.

"We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, 'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?' ... It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air."

As a young Army captain in the mid-1990s, Esper said he saw the office occupied by the Defense secretary as hallowed ground, a place he hardly dared imagine himself. Yet, there he was 21 years later, serving as President Trump's secretary of Defense; facing challenges he also never imagined.

He wrote about those challenges in a new book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times. In it, Esper describes Trump as a volatile, ill-informed leader obsessed with power and self image.

Esper also detailed in his book a campaign by the former president and his then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to deny a promotion to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, whose congressional testimony led to Trump's first impeachment.

Vindman, a Ukraine expert and former official with the National Security Council, testified that he was present during a now-infamous phone call between the former president and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which Trump tried to blackmail Zelenskyy for political dirt on Joe Biden and his family. That allegation helped ignite the impeachment effort against Trump.

Esper said he worries about the fallout from Trump's political tactics.

"It became much more than Alexander Vindman at that point when you have this behavior going on. It became a test of, were we going to allow political influence in our promotion systems and in how we assign people? And that's a hard red line for me and others in the Pentagon that we weren't going to allow that to happen, let let alone a vendetta against a single individual who was doing the right thing."

About Christian Persecution in Nigeria

Sadly, Nigeria has become known as the world’s center of Christian martyrs. In any given year, the number of Christians killed by extremist groups is rarely less than 4,000—often more than in the rest of the world combined.

Violence against the Nigerian Christian population is significantly localized in the north, where twelve Muslim-majority states declared sharia law in 1999, resulting in huge numbers of Christians experiencing daily discrimination. But it was the rise of an extremist movement called Boko Haram, which first started its murderous attacks in 2009, that resulted in Christians experiencing unprecedented violence.

According to an April 2023 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, at least 52,250 persecuted Christians have been killed in the past fourteen years, simply for the crime of being Christian. In the past five years, violence has spread southwards to the middle belt of Nigeria, with radicalized Fulani herdsmen killing Christians to steal their land.

Boko Haram has now been joined by another extremist group operative in the area, called the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and both seek the eradication of Christianity from the northern states.

The violence has resulted in refugees now numbering over four million, mostly Christian farmers. The government of Nigeria has proved unwilling to condemn the levels of violence, which some call genocidal, or inept in its attempts to engage and neutralize extremist movements.

Rising Death Toll of Christians in Nigeria

Death Toll: The death toll among Christians killed in Nigeria has been staggering. With more than 50,000 Christians killed, Central Nigeria has seen an increase in attacks, spreading beyond the northern regions. The Christian community faces relentless violence from extremist groups that target them for their faith. The central government’s failure to counteract this violence continues to fuel the crisis.

Tensions Between Christians and Muslims

Parts of Nigeria: In parts of Nigeria, particularly in the north, tensions between Christians and Muslims have escalated due to extremist activity. Christian persecution has worsened as groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP wage campaigns of terror against Christian communities.

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History of Christian Persecution in Nigeria

An influential and often controversial Black religious leader, Louis Farrakhan has since 1978 been the leader of the Nation of Islam, an African American movement that combines elements of Islam with Black nationalism.

Early life

Born Louis Eugene Walcott on May 11, 1933, in the Bronx, New York, he was raised in Boston by his mother, Sarah Mae Manning, an immigrant from St. Kitts and Nevis. His biological father was Jamaican-born Percival Clark. However, he was named after a man with whom his mother was involved after a separation from Clark.

Deeply religious as a boy, the young Louis Walcott became active in the St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church in his Roxbury neighborhood, where he was influenced by the resident priest, Black liberation writer Nathan Wright. He graduated with honors from the prestigious Boston English High School, where he played the violin and was a member of the track team.

Walcott attended the Winston-Salem Teachers College (now Winston-Salem State University) in North Carolina from 1951 to 1953 but dropped out to pursue a career in music. Known as “The Charmer,” he performed professionally on the Boston nightclub circuit as a singer of calypso and country songs. In 1953 Farrakhan married his high-school sweetheart, Khadijah (née Betsy Ross), with whom he had nine children.

Involvement in the Nation of Islam

In 1955 Walcott joined the Nation of Islam. He replaced his surname with an “X,” following a custom among Nation of Islam followers who considered their family names to have originated with white slaveholders. Louis X first proved himself at Temple No. 7 in Harlem, where he emerged as the protégé of Malcolm X, the minister of the temple and one of the most prominent members of the Nation of Islam. Louis X was given his Muslim name, Abdul Haleem Farrakhan, by Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan was appointed head minister of Boston Temple No. 11, which Malcolm X had established earlier.

After Malcolm X’s break with the Nation in 1964 over political and personal differences with Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan replaced Malcolm X as head minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 and as the national representative of the Nation, the organization’s second-in-command. Like his predecessor, Farrakhan was a dynamic, charismatic leader and a powerful speaker with the ability to appeal to a broad swath of the African American public.

When Elijah Muhammad died in February 1975, the Nation of Islam fragmented. The Nation’s leadership chose Wallace Muhammad (now known as Warith Deen Mohammed), the fifth of Elijah Muhammad’s six sons, as the new supreme minister. Disappointed that he was not named Elijah Muhammad’s successor, Farrakhan led a breakaway group in 1978, which he also called the Nation of Islam and which preserved the original teachings of Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan disagreed with Wallace Muhammad’s attempts to move the Nation to orthodox Sunni Islam and to rid it of Elijah Muhammad’s radical Black nationalism and separatist teachings, which stressed the inherent wickedness of whites. Beginning his new iteration of the Nation of Islam in Chicago with only a few thousand adherents, Farrakhan soon reestablished a national movement with tens of thousands of followers. In 1979 he began publishing the periodical The Final Call, which remains the primary media outlet within the Nation of Islam. In 1988 he purchased Elijah Muhammad’s former mosque in Chicago and refurbished it as the new headquarters of the Nation of Islam.

As the movement grew foreign branches of the Nation were formed in Ghana, London, Paris, and the Caribbean islands. In order to strengthen the international influence of the Nation, Farrakhan established relations with Muslim countries, and in the 1980s he cultivated a relationship with the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi.

In 1995 the Nation of Islam sponsored the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., to promote African American unity and family values. In his speech there, Farrakhan asserted that “The real evil in America is the idea that undergirds the setup of the Western world, and that idea is called white supremacy.” Estimates of the number of marchers, most of whom were men, ranged from 400,000 to nearly 1.1 million, making it, at the time, the largest gathering of its kind in American history. Under Farrakhan’s leadership, the Nation of Islam established a clinic for AIDS patients in Washington, D.C., and helped to force drug dealers out of public housing developments and private apartment buildings in the city. It also spoke to gang members in Los Angeles and across the country to curb violence and “stop the killing” within Black communities. Meanwhile, the Nation has continued to promote social reform in African American communities in accordance with its traditional goals of self-reliance and economic independence.

Later life

After a near-death experience in 2000 resulting from complications from prostate cancer (he was diagnosed in 1991), Farrakhan toned down his racial rhetoric and attempted to strengthen relations with other minority communities, including Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Farrakhan also moved his group closer to orthodox Sunni Islam in 2000, when he and Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, the leading American orthodox Muslim, recognized each other as fellow Muslims. In the early 21st century the core membership of Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam was estimated to be between 10,000 and 50,000.

Ongoing health issues forced Farrakhan to reduce his role in the Nation of Islam in the early 21st century. He nevertheless maintained a fairly high profile, giving online sermons in addition to his public speeches. In 2010 he publicly embraced Dianetics, a practice of Scientology in which the mind is cleared of “engrams,” mental images of past experiences that produce negative emotional effects in one’s life. Farrakhan also said that he wanted all Nation of Islam members to become “auditors,” practitioners of Scientology’s one-on-one counseling process that is meant to facilitate individuals’ handling of their engrams. In 2019 Facebook banned Farrakhan from its site, citing his “dangerous” views; however, he maintained a following on other social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter). In 2023 he filed lawsuits against the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center for describing him as anti-Semitic.