Bikini island nuclear tests

The nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll program was a series of 23 nuclear weapons detonated by the United States between and at seven test sites on the reef itself, on the sea, in the air, and underwater. The United States was engaged in a Cold War nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union to build more advanced bombs from until The second was Baker and was suspended under a barge. It produced a large Wilson cloud and contaminated all of the target ships. Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg was the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and he called the second test "the world's first nuclear disaster.

Part of the intense cold war nuclear arms race, the megatonne Bravo test on 1 March was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It exposed thousands in the surrounding area to radioactive fallout. Bikini islanders and their descendants have lived in exile since they were moved for the first weapons tests in When US government scientists declared Bikini safe for resettlement some residents were allowed to return in the early s. But they were removed again in after ingesting high levels of radiation from eating foods grown on the former nuclear test site. People returned to live on Rongelap in but fled again in amid fears, later proved correct, about residual radiation. US nuclear experiments in the Marshall Islands ended in after 67 tests.

The atoll's inhabitants were relocated in , after which the islands and lagoon were the site of 23 nuclear tests by the United States until Three families were resettled on Bikini island in , totaling about residents. But scientists found dangerously high levels of strontium in well water in May , and the residents were carrying abnormally high concentrations of caesium in their bodies. They were removed in

Operation Crossroads, which had its first big event—the dropping of a nuclear bomb—on July 1, , was just the beginning of the nuclear testing that Bikini Atoll would be subjected to. When the first bomb of the tests dropped, it was the first time since the attacks on Japan that a nuclear weapon had been deployed. Here are three things you might not know about the infamous tests:.