u/PuppiesAndClassWar

Too good not to post on its own

“As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn’t been touched by the war and blew it to hell.” - Bob Hope, Operation Crossroads by Jonathan M. Weisgall, Naval Institute Press, 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads

https://atthebrink.org/podcast/marshall-islands/

https://www.downwinders.com/2025/08/08/how-bikini-atoll-nuclear-testing-has-impacted-generations/

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-crossroads-atomic-bomb-aftermath

https://nukewatch.org/new-and-updated-item/worlds-most-nuclear-contaminated-island-where-people-can-never-return-to-live/

The Bikini inhabitants relocated several times, at some points literally starving because the alternative atolls and islands could not sustain them. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson declared the Bikini atoll fit for repopulation, based on an Atomic Energy Commission analysis. That analysis tragically underestimated the radiation contamination by a factor of 100, so that residents who returned to the atoll wound up leaving by 1978.

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”