Emlyn Hughes:

In the 1940s and 1950s, the United States tested sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, including the detonation of the largest US thermonuclear weapon (fifteen megatons), named Castle Bravo on March 1, 1954. Decades later, the impact of these tests on the Marshallese people is still apparent. The more recent challenge of rising sea levels, coupled with the remaining nuclear waste stored on low lying islands represents a particularly chilling problem.

In the summers of 2015, 2017, and 2018, we commissioned an advanced scuba diving ship and traveled to the northern Marshall Islands to perform numerous environmental assessments of the radiological contamination to these islands coming from the US nuclear weapons testing program. Our results were submitted for publication on March 1, 2019 (65th anniversary of the Bravo bomb) and recently published in a series of three papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) on July 15, 2019.

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