Operation Ivy

All Music Guide:

One of the first bands to fuse revivalist ska with the energy and aggression of post-hardcore punk rock (after the Mighty Mighty Bosstones), Operation Ivy were also one of the few ska-punk bands to earn critical acclaim. Part of the reason was that they were one of the genre's innovators, possessed of a freshness that many of their imitators lacked, but their lyrics were often more intelligent and substantive as well. Thanks to their early breakup (the group was only together for two years), Operation Ivy became an enduring, even legendary influence in the neo-punk underground, especially after half of the band went on to hit it big in a new group, Rancid.

Operation Ivy were formed in Berkeley, CA, in May 1987 out of the ashes of several local bands. Lead singer Jesse Michaels, guitarist Lint (born Tim Armstrong), bassist Matt McCall (born Matt Freeman, renamed after the hero of the TV series The Equalizer), and drummer Dave Mello began playing extensively at the famed Gilman Street club, a center of the Bay Area's burgeoning punk revival scene. (Initially, they had no horn section, though sax player Paul Bae would later join them on selected recordings.) They quickly signed with the local punk label Lookout, and appeared on two compilations by the end of the year: the label sampler The Thing That Ate Floyd, and the Maximum Rock'n'Roll magazine sampler Turn It Around. In 1988, they released an EP titled Hectic and toured the country, playing small-scale punk venues.

With a budding reputation as an excellent live band, EMI offered Operation Ivy a major-label deal. Unsure of how to react to the prospect of success -- both because of their independent politics and local-mindedness -- the band chose to break up rather than compromise their intentions, playing their last show in May 1989. Their debut full-length album, Energy, was released on Lookout several months later, and became a touchstone of the third wave ska revival largely through word of mouth. Michaels went on to sing with Big Rig before leaving music; varying accounts hold that he became either a Buddhist monk or a Central American missionary, and may have returned to the U.S. to work for Lookout. Mello joined Schlong and then reunited briefly with Armstrong and Freeman in Downfall, which released an album on Lookout in 1995. Armstrong and Freeman, reverting to their real names, formed Rancid in 1991; their Clash-inspired punk and ska helped make them one of the most popular bands of the '90s punk revival, after Green Day and the Offspring.

Wikipedia:

Operation Ivy was the eighth series of American nuclear tests, coming after Tumbler-Snapper and before Upshot-Knothole. Its purpose was to help upgrade the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons in response to the Soviet nuclear weapons program. The two explosions were staged in late 1952 at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshall Islands.

The first Ivy shot, Mike, was the first successful full-scale test of a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon ("hydrogen bomb") using the Teller-Ulam design. Unlike later thermonuclear weapons, Mike used deuterium as its fusion fuel, maintained as a liquid by an expensive and cumbersome cryogenic system. It was detonated on Elugelab Island yielding 10.4 megatons, almost 500 times the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. 8 megatons of the yield was from fast fission of the uranium tamper, creating massive amounts of radioactive fallout. The detonation left an underwater crater 6,240 ft (1.9 km) wide and 164 ft (50 m) deep where Elugelab Island had been. Following this successful test, the Mike design was weaponized as either the EC-16 or TX-16, but it was quickly abandoned for solid-fueled designs after the success of the Castle Bravo shot.

The second test, King, fired the largest nuclear weapon to date using only nuclear fission (no fusion nor fusion boosting). This "Super Oralloy Bomb" was intended as a backup if the fusion weapon failed. King yielded 500 kilotons, 25–40 times more than the nuclear weapons dropped during World War II.

Jimmy P. Robinson, a USAF captain, was lost while piloting his F-84G through the mushroom cloud to collect air samples; he ran out of fuel and attempted to land on water but was never found.