correction
Due to incorrect information provided by Getty Images, an earlier version of this column incorrectly used a photo depicting a French nuclear test at Fangataufa Atoll in 1970 rather than the U.S. test at Bikini Atoll in 1954. The column has been updated to remove the incorrect image.
Walter Pincus, a former Post reporter and columnist and author of “Blown to Hell: America’s Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders,” writes for the Cipher Brief.
March 1 was Remembrance Day, a national holiday in the Marshall Islands.
On the morning of that date in 1954, the United States carried out Castle Bravo, the first-ever trial of a deliverable hydrogen bomb, on a man-made island in Bikini Atoll in the mid-Pacific Marshall Islands. It was 6:45 a.m. Sunrise.
