At the time, it was the most powerful artificial explosion in human history…but it wasn’t supposed to be. On March 1st, 1954, the United States detonated the country’s first thermonuclear or fusion bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a small coral reef and 23 islands almost equidistant from Australia, Japan, and Hawaii. In the days and weeks following the blast, the United States would pay out millions of dollars in settlements, thousands of islanders would be evacuated and re-evacuated, and the Japanese public would deem the test “a second Hiroshima,” a comparison no citizen would dare make lightly.
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