July 1, 2026
BIKINI: BLASTED AND FORGOTTEN FOR 80 YEARS
Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
The first Bikini nuclear bomb test on July 1 1946, 80 years ago, marks the start of the nuclear arms race that threatens humanity more than ever today. Why have we forgotten and failed to learn any lessons from it? To my knowledge this radio show, BIKINI hosted by Metta Sopencer on Peace Radio, Toronto, on July 1 2026 is the only commemoration.
A very concise history: No protections at all were taken against nuclear radiation at the first nuclear bomb test, at Alamogordo in New Mexico. My grandfather, photographer of the Manhattan Project Theoretical Physics Team was on ground zero as soon as it was cool enough to walk on, with General Leslie Groves, head of the US Army bomb development team, and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Physics team. They wore only thin cotton socks over their shoes to avoid getting dust on them. Since it worked, two more were dropped in quick succession on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II. When thousands of survivors of the physical impacts of the bomb and firestorms started dying of what appeared to be nuclear radiation-induced cancer, the US first denied that there were any radiation effects, and claimed the Japanese were just making it up.
For General Groves it was crucial to know if these effects were real, because his goal had been to have a tactical nuclear weapon to use in field battles against the nazis, but they had surrendered before the bomb was ready to be tested, turning Japan into the alternate target. His goal was to drop many smaller tactical nuclear bombs on enemy troops, military facilities, and cities, and then march US troops right over the ruins, but if the entire landscape were toxic, that would be deadly to his own troops. He needed a place to blow up the biggest bombs ever made to see if toxic nuclear radiation was a real problem, so he looked at a map of the Pacific on the wall and saw the furthest small speck of island the US now controlled across the entire Pacific Ocean: Bikini Atoll. It was convenient because it was reachable a few hours flight from Kwajalein, the largest atoll in the Pacific, where the US had expanded a large bomber base captured from the Japanese.
Bikini was so isolated that the World Wars had passed them by. Master mariners of the Pacific, they had lived there for 3,500 years, according to archaeological records. But they were not isolated, their boats, incomparably faster than European boats, could sail much closer to the wind, backward or forward, so they could sail as far as they could carry enough coconuts to eat and drink while catching fish.
The Bikini people were ordered to leave, given a few days to pack up all their belongings. They were told they would be fed and housed by the US Government for an extended holiday but would soon be able to come back home. They left their chickens behind. They were dumped with some cans of spam and bottles of water on a small uninhabited island, uninhabited because it was too small to have groundwater for coconuts and breadfruit, and as an isolated island had no protected lagoon for fishing. They were soon forgotten by Groves, and began starving, still believing American promises that they would be fed and taken care of.
More than 50,000 Americans moved into the islands that had fed a few hundred Bikinians. First, they dynamited the corals that rose 200 feet from the bottom of the lagoon, so the corals wouldn’t accidentally and prematurely sink the captured Japanese fleet and irreparably disabled American ships they planned to bomb. Then they built a city to house the soldiers and sailors preparing for the big day, building film recording towers on the small islands all around the perimeter of the atoll to film the blast in the center, using most of the high-speed film existing on earth at the time. These were classified for 75 years, only recently released, and can be seen in the film NUKED, by Andrew Nisker. The soldiers and sailors had unlimited beer, hot dogs, and time on the beach.
My grandfather was the Official Photographer of Operation Crossroads, the first three bomb blasts: Able, Baker, and Charlie. He documented the physical impacts of the blasts, and also the biological ones, the effects of nuclear radiation on the goats, sheep, pigs, white rats who were deliberately exposed to nuclear radiation. He spent his spare time photographing the birds, plants, crabs, sea urchins, and went underwater to photograph the coral reefs.
Groves’ goal was to salvage all the ships that did not sink, so they could be quickly refitted for combat. As soon as the spray had cooled sailors were ordered on board the still floating vessels with buckets of soapy water and scrub brushes, and ordered to scrub the boats clean of radioactivity. My grandfather was with them when the medical radiation expert, Dr. Nolan, climbed up the ladder, immediately saw his radiation badge instantly turned black from overexposure, and began yelling at the men to leave the boat immediately. The commanding naval officer, screamed louder at the men to ignore the pesky doctor, ordered them to keep on scrubbing until all was shiny, and ordered the doctor off the boat. Doctor Nolan went back down the ladder, straight to headquarters, showed his badge, and finally convinced superior officers to get the sailors removed, saving the lives of many including my grandfather, though many, perhaps most, later died from the cancers and tumors that my grandfather photographed in all the exposed experimental animals (see attached: What Science learned at Bikini, LIFE Magazine).
After the second bomb blast, Baker, Groves cancelled the third blast, Charlie, on grounds that nothing more of military value was to be learned, since the ships were obviously too contaminated to be cleaned and reused. Billions of dollars had already been spent to find out. Nevertheless, the Americans did NOT leave and allow the Bikinians to return home, as promised, they stayed on and blew up more than 80 more nuclear bombs on Bikini Atoll. When the American military were finally done having a blast, they declared Bikini free of nuclear radiation and safe for the exiles to return, and they did, only to be forced to leave again, two separate times, after independent measurements by third parties, in one case the United Nations, and in one case a French team, found the islands were dangerously radioactive despite US Government claims.
What of the Bikinians? While they were starving, a major nuclear bomb test was set off on their island that exposed ALL of them to nuclear fallout. It was not intentional, the wind was thought to blow from east to west, leaving the exiled Bikinians, and the thousands of military personnel living on their island, upwind and safe. But the forecast was wrong, the winds that day were blowing in the opposite direction from what was expected. They saw that, but they didn’t want to waste any time, so they blew it up anyway.
On their exiled island the Bikinians saw white flakes fall from the sky on them, their own radioactive pulverized coral reef, and they thought it was snow, something they had seen only in pictures. The children ran out and rubbed it all over themselves. Then their skin and hair began to fall off in patches. Women delivered “jellyfish babies” with transparent skin and no bones, people were sick from poisoning, starving, and developing cancers when an American plane happened to pass by and drop off some bottles of water and cans of spam to the starving, irradiated survivors.
The Americans living on Bikini were irradiated far more strongly, and thousands must have died after from cancer, but they were sworn to secrecy and were systematically denied any legal compensation for radiation exposure, because the limit for compensation for nuclear radiation was set for periods only a few days more than they served there! My father was one, he led the coral reef, marine ecology, carbon, oxygen, and ocean acidity studies in the 1947 Bikini Scientific Resurvey, led by Commander Roger Revelle (of whom more below), and died at 45 from radiation-caused cancer.
The Americans finally evacuated the starving, sick Bikinians to the bomber base at Kwajalein, where they were kept in tents right alongside the main runway for nearly a year, with plenty of spam and water, and then dumped on another uninhabited and even more remote island, Kili. Kili is big enough to have groundwater, and since it is wetter than Bikini, more can be grown, but it is an isolated island with no atoll, and too rough and exposed to get into the water to fish, so exiled Bikinians must live on imported white rice, white bread, white flour, spam, and frozen chicken necks and backs from Arkansas, the diet that is killing from diabetes a people adapted to fish and coconuts for thousands of years. Since there is no protected landing, it can take months before a supply ship can land, if the supply boat is working at all, and then people go hungry. Most Bikinians are effectively in prison in Kili, but since they must go to the capital atoll, Majuro, if they need medical attention, high school education, or paying jobs, a large part of the exiled Bikinians live on Ejit, a tiny island on Majuro Atoll, where they can reach town stores and services by wading across three tidal passes when the tide is low. Majuro Atoll is polluted and overfished, so they must live on the dole, and die largely from diabetes or cancer.
Ejit and Kili, and indeed all the islands in the Marshall Islands and all the atolls around the world, are flooding more and more with seawater because of global sea level rise. In King Tides people walk ankle or knee deep through sea water, which has contaminated the groundwater so all their fruit and breadfruit trees have died, and finally, the coconuts. This is getting worse and worse as sea level rise accelerates. 2026 and 2027 may have record sea levels because of the ongoing El Niño. The coral reefs surrounding the atolls that grew the beaches and islands are almost entirely dead, killed by global warming, now they are crumbling and falling apart instead of growing upwards to match sea level rise.
The same is true on Bikini, and Enewetak, the second Marshall Island bomb target, where radioactive waste was bulldozed by American soldiers and sailors into pits, buried under dredged up coral reefs, and covered with cement. The reinforced cement caps are crumbling as rising sea level floods them and rusts the steel bars, cracking the concrete. Abandoned radioactive materials litter the bottom, next to the 200 foot high corals they dynamited in 1946. Bikini was one of the last places in the world to suffer catastrophic high temperature coral bleaching, but the 2016 bleaching killed the major coral species in the Marshall Islands atoll reefs and isolated islands. And now on Bikini, oil slicks arise from the blasted ships sent to the bottom in 1946, yet there is no systematic monitoring or management plan for Bikini Atoll, a UNESCO World Heritage Site marking the start of the nuclear age.
Navy Commander Roger Revelle, who supervised all oceanographic aspects of Operation Crossroads, including tide and wave measurements, then led the Bikini Scientific Resurvey the following year. This brought the finest marine scientists available, and laid the foundation for modern oceanography, including long term studies of global climate, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and ocean acidity, which Revelle asked my father to work on at Bikini. Revelle saw that fundamental science needed to understand how the ocean and climate worked had no source of funding, because there was no public funding for science in the US, only funding for Military weapons research.
Revelle set up the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to fund all areas of fundamental marine science, but quickly found that the Navy wanted to fund only weapons research, and had no interest in basic science or the coral reef research my father and grandfather had started at Bikini. So Revelle then set up the National Science Foundation, the mechanism for public funding of fundamental science that led to the entire prosperity of the US since World War II. It is sad to note that this enlightened foundation has been destroyed in the “War Against Science” of the last few years, a new Dark Ages for US science after nearly 80 years of unparalleled success. After eight decades, marine science progress will now rely on other countries who step into the lead.
Bikini set the stage on experimental blasts for endless nuclear proliferation, hundreds of tests to build bigger bombs in a mad, boys with toys show, begun by General Leslie Groves, and continued by testerone-fueled admirals, generals, politicians, and religious or ideological fanatics of all stripes, an endless race to become more deadly and destructive in order to be able kill everybody else first in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
So why does everybody choose to forget Operation Crossroads blasting Bikini 80 years ago, including those who need to learn the most? There has been no commemoration of the importance of this 80th anniversary by those who should be concerned: the United States Government and Military, the United Nations (founded after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, specifically tasked to prepare a global treaty to PREVENT nuclear testing and weapons development), the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Physicians Against Nuclear War, the Union of Concerned Scientists, or even the elected government of the Bikini Kili Ejit people in exile.
Am I the last to remember? If we all lurch forward in amnesia without remembering the past, we will never learn from our worst mistakes! A longer, more-detailed, illustrated history will be given in my chapter in the forthcoming book: T. J. F. Goreau, Long term effects of nuclear bomb testing in Bikini Atoll, in Ana Penteado, David Price, Althaf Marsoof (Editors), Nuclear Weapons and Beyond, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature Switzerland AG Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland