Today (March 1) is the 70th anniversary of the #Bravo Test, the largest nuclear weapon test ever conducted by the US, on #Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It was a radiological disaster that resulted in the irradiation and forced displacement of whole communities.
Here is an article I wrote about how Bravo put the word #fallout into our lexicon.
"The Bravo Test and the Death and Life of the Global Ecosystem in the Early Anthropocene"
Selecting the irradiated (one of the chapter titles of my book):
The US conducted 1,054 nuclear weapon tests.
88% were conducted inside the US at the Nevada Test Site.
8% were conducted in the Marshall Islands.
This chart shows that the US concentrated the much larger hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, and that the 8% of tests there released far more blast, heat and radiation than the domestic tests.
Today is the 78th anniversary of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on Earth, the Trinity Test in New Mexico in 1945, three weeks before the nuclear attacks on Japan.
There will be many images posted of the mushroom cloud today, but here is what mattered more, the fallout cloud. Dozens of homes and communities were blanketed with fallout, which which also contaminated fields as far away as Illinois and Indiana.
Castle Bravo (1 Mar 1954) was the first hydrogen bomb exploded atmospherically at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The fallout cloud (that they said they couldn't predict) irradiated four atolls inhabited by Marshall Islanders. They knew. It was a deliberate attempt to study the effects of irradiation across several generations. The US govt has always maintained that it was an accident, but given the perfect case study they managed to cobble together it is clear they experimented on the islanders.
> By 2030, #solar and #wind (backed by battery storage) are forecast by #RMI (a non-profit independent organization that was founded as the Rocky Mountain Institute) to supply over one-third of all global electricity, up from around 12% today.
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> That means the #COP28 goal to triple renewables capacity globally by 2030 is now within reach […]
"$59 Million, Gone: How Bikini Atoll Leaders Blew Through U.S. Trust Fund"
Lines like this: "Recognizing the damage its testing caused, the U.S. government established two trust funds in the 1980s to help pay for Bikinians’ health care, build housing and cover living costs."
Clearly there are problems, and many are tied to post-colonial social disruptions along with permanently irradiated homelands, but this article is an example of victim blaming.