- Nuclear Test on Bikini Island | notice the ships in the base of the ring and about to get hit by the blast –

In the late 40′s and early 50′s the American Military carried out twenty-three separate nuclear bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, an island located in far N. East corner of the Marshall Islands. This included Operation Castle Bravo – the US’s largest nuclear test ever executed, which ended up carrying a 15-Megaton yield. An explosion which formed a mushroom cloud 40km (130,000 feet) high and 100km (62 miles) in diameter, the explosion was one thousand times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and two-and-a-half times what the scientists had originally anticipated it to be. At the bottom of this post is a two minute video documenting the teat.

There is a dark history associated with the Bikini Atoll Test Site. Motivated by the cold war arms race and their need to find a secluded test location, the US descended upon the island and forced the inhabitants to relocate. During the Castle Bravo test a Japanese fishing boat was caught in the middle of the Nuclear Fallout, upon returning to Japan with signs of radiation sickness and the entire crew were diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. One of the crew died shortly after from excessive radiation exposure, before passing away he was quoted as saying “I pray that I am the last victim of an atomic or hydrogen bomb.” The fisherman’s death spawned a huge anti-nuclear weapons movement in the country and is said to even inspire the movie “Godzilla”.

In the 1970′s the US declared the Island as being safe and habitable. They relocated the Bikini Island refugees and monitored their health while on the atoll. Some have gone so far as to calling this a human experiment, as that the population soon started to show signs of radiation poisoning like birth defects, still-borns, and a significant rise in infant mortality. The locals were once again relocated off the island after a French group of scientists declared them as having high levels of deadly nuclear isotopes in their bodies.

Surprisingly I just came across an article discussing how the lagoons on Bikini are now teeming with Coral life. Most specifically the the crater that the Castle Bravo explosion caused. Scientists vising the nuclear test site were suprised to find that the island is now home to some of the largest species of Coral they had ever scene. These experts are attributing this phenomenon to lack of human activity in the area and liken it to a similar ‘Nuclear Green Space’ – the forests surrounding Chernobyl. An area that too was evacuated as a result of Nuclear contamination and is now rich in wildlife as a result of the lack of human infringement.