"At first, I did not know what it was, but then I understand it was a big bomb."
"It was the first time I saw the sun rise in the West," recalls Lemyo Enob, age 14 at the time.
Radioactive fallout spread quickly, drifting toward Rongelap, an inhabited island nearby. A small fleet of ships, including the USS Saratoga and the Nagato, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto's flagship, were engulfed in the nuclear explosion and plunged to the bottom of the lagoon. The hurricane-force winds generated by the blast stripped the branches and coconuts from Bikini's remaining trees. Code-named Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb detonated on Bikini Atoll, producing an intense fireball followed by a 20-mile-high mushroom cloud. But on March 1, 1954, it became ground zero during the Cold War.Ī half century ago on Monday, the United States conducted its largest nuclear test. Bikini Atoll in the Washington Post 3/1/04ĥ0 Years Later, Nuclear Blast Felt on Bikini AtollīIKINI ATOLL, Marshall Islands (Reuters) - At first glance, it looks like a tropical paradise: an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where palm trees encircling a pristine blue-green lagoon sway in the breeze.īut to the native islanders, Bikini Atoll is more like an exhausted, scorched wasteland, where they eke out an existence in a place that today is forgotten by much of the world.