from the Mike shot.]]Operation Ivy was the eighth series of American nuclear tests, coming after Tumbler-Snapper and before Upshot-Knothole. The purpose of the tests 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 the Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshall Islands. The first device, codenamed Mike, was notable for being the first successful test of a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon design (the Teller-Ulam design), usually considered the world's first hydrogen bomb test. It used liquid deuterium as its fusion fuel, kept cold with an expensive and cumbersome cryogenic system. Too unwieldy to be deployed as a weapon, it was built to demonstrate the power and possibility of using nuclear fusion as a principle for larger-yield nuclear weapons than previously possible. It was detonated on Elugelab Island in the Eniwetok atoll of the Marsh

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