1 July 2026
80 Years Since Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands (1 July 1966)
This year on 1 July 2026 will be 80 years since the United States detonated its first post-war nuclear weapon above Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, launching what it called Operation Crossroads.
Eighty years ago, the US military asked the 167 people living there to leave their ancestral home. There was no honest account of what was about to happen. There was no real choice.
On 7 March 1946, the Bikinian community boarded a Navy landing craft and were transported 125 miles to Rongerik Atoll, an uninhabited island a sixth the size of their home, with inadequate food and water.
They were promised they could return.
That promise was never kept.
On 1 July 1946,under the name ‘Operation Crossroads’, the US detonated a 23-kiloton nuclear bomb dropped from a B-29 over a fleet of 95 target ships assembled in Bikini lagoon, some carrying live animals as test subjects. On 25 July, Shot Baker was detonated 90 feet underwater, sending two million tons of radioactive seawater into the air.
The contamination was so severe that a planned third test had to be cancelled. Operation Crossroads was staged for an invited press audience and billed as a demonstration of American power. The Bikinian people were not invited to watch what was being done to their home.
This was only the beginning.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests across the Marshall Islands, 23 at Bikini Atoll alone.
The 1954 Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test was 1,000 times more powerful than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima. Its fallout blanketed nearby atolls. Children on Rongelap played in what looked like snow. They didn't know it was radioactive ash.
Thyroid cancer. Leukaemia. Severe birth defects. Forced relocation after forced relocation. And the severing of a people from the land that is not just their home but their identity, their culture, their spiritual foundation.
Eighty years later, Bikini Atoll remains uninhabitable. A United Nations rapporteur has described the contamination as "near-irreversible." Radiation levels remain well above the threshold considered safe for human habitation. Food, water, and marine life are still unsafe for consumption. Most Bikinians alive today have never seen their home island. The compensation paid by the United States has fallen catastrophically short of what is owed -- covering only four atolls, far fewer than the actual reach of the fallout.
The United States has never apologised.
This is not history. This is radioactive violence, ongoing and intergenerational. The people of the Marshall Islands did not choose to host the nuclear weapons programme of a colonial power.
On this 80th anniversary, we stand with the Marshallese people in their demand for genuine accountability, full and fair reparations, environmental remediation, and the recognition of what was done to them, and what continues.
The Nuclear Truth Project stands with affected communities in the Māʻohi Nui and across the Pacific in demanding rights, respect, and reciprocity. Walk with us.