March 1st, 1954 , the largest ever nuclear weapons ‘test’ conducted by the United States military

71 years ago, on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a nuclear bomb with the codename “Castle Bravo”, exploded with an energy of 15 megatons. The mushroom cloud reached 40 kilometres into the atmosphere, resulting in thousands of square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean being contaminated by radioactivity. Its explosive yield was 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb; and within four hours of the explosion, radioactive fallout made up of crushed coral, water, and radioactive particles, rained down over inhabited atolls, including Rongelap Atoll, which was 150 kilometres away. A fine white ash landed on the heads and bare arms of people standing in the open, dissolving into water supplies and drifting into houses. Witnesses of the Bravo nuclear fireball described seeing a second sun rising in the west, just before the terrifying shock waves hit them. For the people of the Marshall Islands, that day on March 1 1954 will forever be known as Remembrance Day – the anniversary of Castle Bravo, the largest ever nuclear weapons ‘test’ conducted by the United States military.