![]() During this period, obliterated geology would become radioactive particles, carried on the wind to then fall on nearby communities. Others, like the USS Saratoga and the HIJMS Nagato – storied flagships of the US and Japanese navies – eventually sank to the bottom, where their rusting hulks remain today. Another threw a fleet of 70 captured and decommissioned WW2 battleships – some of them up to 250 metres long – up into the air. The force of one of these, codenamed Castle Bravo, was enough to vaporize two islands and gouge a massive crater – measuring 2000 metres in diameter – out of the primordial reef. ![]() During this period, American bombs delivering a combined fission yield of 42.2 megatons were detonated. Between 19, 23 of the most powerful manmade explosions in history occurred there. For the last sixty years it has been a veritable ghostland. It would take three days of swell, on the beam – rolling seas and stomachs – before we would reach its lagoon.īikini lies at the outer fringes of collective imagination – on the horizon of military-industrial endeavor, colonial excess and contemporary infrastructure. ![]() Upon arriving in Majuro, first town past the international date line, we boarded a refitted pearl-diving boat and set sail for Bikini Atoll. We travelled to the Marshall Islands, a constellation of atolls some four thousand kilometers south-west of Hawaii, spread over 37,000 square km of the remote Pacific. In the final weeks of the US election, as the world chewed fingernails and the nights grew longer, Julian Charrière and I jumped ship. ![]()
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