Bikini Atoll, 1954

On March 1, 1954 the United States exploded a hydrogen bomb over the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The blast marked the beginning of a class of “super” weapons that dwarfed the atomic bombs used in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as these earlier nuclear weapons had dwarfed the conventional explosives of World War II. Military teams making the measurements at the coral reef were told to expect a blast of 7 megatons (7 million tons of TNT), the biggest explosion ever. (The bomb on Hiroshima measured 0.02 megatons.) The Bikini device detonated with an actual force of 15 megatons, more than double the yield predicted. The bomb gouged a huge 500 meter chasm in the atoll, blasting tons of coral into powder and sucking tremendous quantities of the radioactive debris high up into the fireball. The fallout heavily contaminated more than 7,000 square miles of the surrounding Pacific ocean. In addition to the military personnel caught in the fallout (who were given some degree of protection and promptly evacuated), radioactive dust and ash descended upon several hundred residents of Rongelap, about 100 miles downwind from the explosion, and other islands near the equator in the Marshalls group. Over 250 of these islanders, under a US-administered “Strategic Trusteeship,” were afflicted with serious thyroid and other illnesses from which they suffer and die to the present day

Atoll · Nuclear weapon · Political science · Reef · Environmental Science · Geology · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law · Oceanography · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies