Castle Bravo was a real 'eyeopener'ĭespite the devastation caused by Castle Bravo, the US military continued to conducting nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. "And those consequences have been very severe" and long lasting, he added. "There were real implications for people living on surrounding islands," Kristensen said. Photo by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images) Castle Bravo alone was responsible for nearly all of the radiation doses in the country's northern atolls.Ī 2019 report by the Republic of the Marshall Islands' National Nuclear Commission said nuclear weapons testing - like Castle Bravo - had a catastrophic impact on the country's environment, and some individuals still fear on a daily basis how their long-term exposure to the radiation might impact their health.Ĭastle Romeo was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of American thermonuclear tests, beginning in March 1954 at Bikini Atoll The National Cancer Institute found that some cancers in residents who were alive during the years-long period of nuclear testing may be attributed to radiation exposure. The fallout led to serious health effects among the residents of the Marshall Islands, although its unclear exactly how many people were impacted by testing. "Fallout was expected to be significant in any case. "What happened after Bravo, of course, was that a lot of the radioactive fallout was greatly amplified and drifted over a much larger area than it was anticipated," Kristensen said. But when a bomb produces a greater explosive yield than anticipated, these prior assumptions about safety can be compromised, Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, told Insider. Whenever the military readied for a nuclear test, it set up an safety zone in preparation for the radioactive fallout that ensued after the device was detonated. The 23,500-pound device caused a mushroom cloud that reached an altitude of 130,000 feet and left a crater that was 250 feet deep and over 6,500 feet wide. The radioactive fallout produced by the blast was much worse than anyone anticipated and was an eyeopening incident that raised questions about the development of atmospheric testing, a nuclear weapons expert told Insider.Ĭastle Bravo was the first of six weapons to be tested as part of a weeks-long series experimenting with large-yield thermonuclear devices - also known as Operation Castle - that stretched from March 1 to May 31, 1954. On Maexactly 69 years ago Wednesday - the military detonated this bomb at Bikini Atoll, a small coral reef in the Marshall Islands. The Castle Bravo device was the largest nuclear weapon ever tested by the US. The US military tested dozens of nuclear weapons in the Pacific in the years following World War II, but none of the blasts compared in size to that of the Castle Bravo test - what a nuclear weapons historian once called "the greatest single radiological disaster in American history." Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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