Bikini Atoll

Its serial number was 44-61999, and it was an American reconnaissance aircraft belonging to the United States Air Force.

In 1946, it had been involved in Operation Crossroads, the American nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Its role was to photograph the tests, and this is where its name, Overexposed, came from.

The aircraft had also participated in the Berlin Airlift in 1948.

I

didn't pollute the waters of Bikini.

No.

You sat in a snug office 8,000 miles away.

Gojira?

The USA does nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.

It was so jarring in the theater to suddenly be hearing English.

Yeah, right? I will say, like, it was so funny to, like, whoa, hello.

No, this was, I mean, either they found actors who had really, really, really good American accents, or they just found Americans.

Maybe expats living in Japan.

So we're back to that direct relationship of the Bikini Atoll Tess mutated Godzilla.

Godzilla grows big.

A group of people on Wrangell have had been exposed to the biggest test of all, a bomb that was a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima.

On March the 1st, 1954, the U.S. detonates a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll.

It's codenamed Bravo.

They had no warning.

According to the U.S. Embassy in the Marshall Islands, over the course of 12 years between 1946 and 1958, a total of 67 nuclear tests were conducted over the islands.

Specifically, the Inuitak and Bikini Atolls were dedicated for official testing, their populations being relocated and Uprooted for the cause the beautiful Marshall Islands and two people once again pawns for larger players in the game As military generals know, there is no second place when it comes to war.

If you're not the strongest force on the field, you lose.

There's no participation trophy here.

not from an artillery barrage but from less than a kilogram of uranium two hundred thirty five splitting apart in a chain reaction that physicists had until then only ever simulated on paper the first flash was blinding white then violet then it swelled into a fireball that swallowed the very air on it the heat at the centre in that blink was enough to fuse the sand on the roadways into glass the pressure wave came down on the wooden houses like an invisible hand sweeping six square kilometres of a city clean in seconds tens of thousands of people vanished in that very moment the number doubled then tripled in the months that followed as wounds radiation sickness and hunger placed their final marks on the lives still remaining hiroshima entered history not only as a destroyed city but as a unit of measurement from that day on whenever human beings needed to describe an amount of energy too vast to imagine an asteroid strike a solar storm a star detonating at the far end of the milky way they did not speak of jewels or kilotons they spoke of one hiroshima bomb that unit appears in no international system of measurement but it resides somewhere far deeper in the collective memory of the human race it is the measure of pure unfiltered horror and that is precisely why when climate scientists needed the world to actually listen they had no choice but to translate the dry arithmetic of physics into that language of flesh and bone In the decades after Hiroshima, humanity entered the era history calls the nuclear arms race.

Mushroom clouds sprouted over the Nevada desert, over Bikini et al., over the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

The superpowers stockpiled tens of thousands of warheads, each enough to erase civilization many times over.

yet in the middle of that whirlwind one detail went almost unnoticed the most fearsome nuclear weapons ever built all turned out to be embarrassingly small when set against something else a typical tropical cyclone the kind the world watches on television and promptly forgets releases energy equivalent to dozens of Hiroshima bombs for every hour it runs.

I still have them out there somewhere.

But one was a picture of the nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll, which basically blew that island off the face of the map, which was, I think, in 46 or 47, something like that.

And then above it, there was a picture of the creation image of the hand of God and Adam.

But instead of the hand of God, it was a robot.

It was a U.S. so-called nuclear weapons I really dislike the term tests because these were full-blown nuclear explosions.

This was done in the Bikini Aptol in the Marshall Islands.

I'll talk a little more about the Marshall Islands and what happened there cumulatively in just a moment, but for the moment, I just want you to recognize that the Bravo bomb which was the largest US nuclear explosion ever, was the equivalent of a thousand Hiroshima bombs in terms of energy.

The mushroom cloud that you're looking at is 25 miles or 40 kilometers high.

His name was Ben Wyatt.

He went to the the Marshall Islands.

The Marshall Islands were a protectorate of the United States and they went to the Atoll of Bikini.

They went to the people of Bikini on Bikini Island and Ben Wyatt said, we need you to move away for the good of mankind and to end all wars.