Health and environmental effectsĪ review of the dosimeters worn by servicemen during “routine” nuclear tests found radioactive exposition doses of up to 600 mSv during a two week mission. By that time, high amounts of radioactive strontium-90 had been found in children’s teeth a strong indication of the extent to which the entire world population had been irradiated by nuclear weapons testing. More than 400 nuclear tests were conducted worldwide before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 put an end to atmospheric testing. Nuclear fallout reached halfway across the globe – from Australia to the U.S. – more than 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
The most devastating was the 15 megaton “Castle Bravo” hydrogen bomb test in 1954, the largest nuclear yield ever achieved by the U.S. As decontamination was unsuccessful, many of the ships were scuttled in the Pacific.Īltogether between 19, the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls were host to 67 nuclear explosions with a total yield of about 214 megatons. Sailors were ordered to scrub the fallout from the decks, exposing them to high doses of radioactivity. Of the 78 vessels, 5 were sunk and 14 destroyed one third of the animals, which had been placed on the ships, died from the blast. On July 1, 1946, after evacuating all islanders, “Test Able” was detonated over a fleet of captured ships in order to test the effect of a nuclear bomb on enemy navies. for the first nuclear explosion after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atolls of Bikini and Enewetak are part of the Marshall Islands and were occupied during WWII first by Japanese and later by U.S. Nuclear testing on the Bikini and Enewetak atolls left entire islands uninhabitable, exposed thousands to high levels of radioactivity and contributed to global nuclear fallout.
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