Bikini Atoll’s tragic history involves U.S. nuclear testing, which not only destroyed the island’s environment but also forced its inhabitants into exile, creating a haunting legacy that endures.

In July 1946, at the remote Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the United States conducted two of the earliest nuclear explosion tests. Codenamed Operation Crossroads, the project aimed to study ...

Editor’s note: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists presents here, from its September 1946 issue, an eyewitness account of the first atomic bomb test in the Marshall Islands. In it, the author not ...