
What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today - sohkamyung
https://medium.com/stanford-magazine/stanford-research-on-effects-of-radioactivity-from-bikini-atoll-nuclear-tests-on-coral-and-crab-dna-48459144020c
======
ryandrake
> “It’s equivalent to 216 Empire State Buildings being blown into the sky,”
> Palumbi says.

> the armada of sunken warships, including the USS Saratoga, an aircraft
> carrier the length of a Manhattan avenue block that lies on the lagoon’s
> bottom.

Ughh, More "Journalist-SI units of measurement." Would it kill him to actually
describe the mass displaced in kg or lb, and say the actual length of the
warship? I get that he's trying to to dumb down measurements so they are
understandable to people who don't know what pounds and feet are, but by using
Manhattan-specific units, he even fails for people outside of NYC. Further,
he's using one of his JSI units incorrectly: "Empire State Building" is
typically used as a unit of height rather than mass. So much fail, avoidable
by just using standard units of measurement!

~~~
yiyus
Totally agree. You are more than ten football stadiums right.

------
kbutler
Nuclear disaster sites become unacceptable to human life, thus becoming havens
for wildlife. See also Chernobyl.

So at what point do eco-terrorists seek to cause nuclear incidents with the
intent of causing less harm than human development and presence would cause?

(This has probably been explored in a Tom Clancy/Michael Crichton -type
novel...)

~~~
munin
> (This has probably been explored in a Tom Clancy/Michael Crichton -type
> novel...)

This is the plot of Rainbow Six, where a scheming group of evil
environmentalists plan to unleash a weaponized strain of Ebola on the world to
wipe out 99.99% of the global population so that the ecosystems will survive.
Other comically evil things the environmentalists do include experimenting on
homeless people abducted from the street and provoking/funding acts of terror
worldwide as part of some hazy cover up for their activities.

It all ends in tears for the environmentalists though, at the hands of an all-
American red-blooded special forces hero and his multi-national above-the-law
and above-Top-Secret counter-terrorism task force.

Not really Clancy's finest hour, IMO, but a good look into the conservative
id.

~~~
sliverstorm
What a world we live in, where _environmentalists_ are the scariest ghost
around for the all-American red-blooded special forces hero to go chasing.

~~~
Lazare
> What a world we live in

Well that's the thing: The book comes from a different world. More precisely,
it came from 1998, when the Soviet Union (Tom Clancy's traditional antagonist
of choice) was long gone, but Islamic terror wasn't yet the obvious
replacement. He wrote a string of books with odd antagonists (eg, Japanese
nationalists) during the period.

~~~
Wohlf
There were even some acts of environmental terrorism at the time, so it was
probably an idea ripped from the headlines.

------
Waterluvian
I had to see the rows of trees for myself. This is what I could find:
[https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Bikini+Atoll/@11.5262428,16...](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Bikini+Atoll/@11.5262428,165.5602711,2175m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x644c2180a24fadbf:0x4c3f21ce9753a027!8m2!3d11.6065142!4d165.3768099)

~~~
mojoe
Nice, thanks! Interestingly, I could only see the grid pattern on Bikini and
Enyu.

~~~
antongribok
On the other side, I believe this is the Bravo Crater:

[https://goo.gl/maps/jrev6tnbCqE2](https://goo.gl/maps/jrev6tnbCqE2)

~~~
Joakal
[https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Tzar+Bomb+Crater/@73.718067...](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Tzar+Bomb+Crater/@73.7180675,54.1901984,317m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x44f9c51245a79fe7:0x4874a3fe7e947789!8m2!3d73.718066!4d54.192387)

This one is the biggest bomb ever detonated. I can't find any ground pictures
of the site though. Anyone find one that's not airborne?

~~~
arethuza
It was detonated at 4kn high and the fireball didn't touch the gound so no
real crater was formed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)

------
cyberferret
So it appears that nature can actually recover quite well from severe nuclear
explosions and contamination (viz research from the Atolls and Chernobyl
etc.). At least upon surface level examination. Deformities in new born living
creatures seems to revert back to near normal levels within 2 or 3
generations. Trees and vegetation manage to eke out an existence and grow
again.

Hollywood producers who rely on the post armageddon 'nuclear winter wasteland'
will have to go back to the drawing boards.

Yet, I wonder what other long term genetic corruption will have occurred even
in the surviving and supposedly thriving flora and fauna. Are we subtly
developing life forms that will be able to better withstand any sort of
nuclear holocaust and thrive once we are long gone?

EDIT: I am thinking the downvoters are reading the first paragraph of my post
and not really getting to the last bit and getting the gist of what I am
saying... ;)

~~~
jfoutz
I was distracted by the middle. It's not really the bomb, it's the fires.
Setting a hundred cities on fire in an afternoon, each one pushes soot up into
the upper atmosphere. sunlight gets absorbed there rather than down on the
surface. It's really all about scale.

The wiki article is interesting
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter)

~~~
ghostcluster
That's not true. People said the same thing about the potential Kuwaiti Oil
Fires in the first gulf war, and yet hundreds of wells and lakes of oil burned
for months and caused no winter scenario.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War)

Nuclear Winter is a case of scientists running personal social activism and
using their cover as scientists to implant a false narrative.

> Even Dr. Richard P. Turco, the physicist who coined the phrase ''nuclear
> winter,'' discounts the idea.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-
the...](http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-theorists-
pull-back.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
toomanybeersies
But volcanos can cause a volcanic winter:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter)

So why not a nuclear exchange?

~~~
ghostcluster
The models justifying the "nuclear winter" scenario are wrong, and "nuclear
winter" relies on politically motivated rhetoric to push a social agenda that
is at odds with similar events in magnitude. The Kuwaiti Oil fires are a great
example, as are events where forests the size of nation-states have burned,
and caused no signifiacant cooling.

It's hyped exaggeration using rhetoric for political effect.

~~~
jfoutz
I don’t know why you are getting downvotes. Odds are you are right. People are
getting emotionally attached to nuclear winter I guess.

~~~
ghostcluster
I provided a link from the NYTimes with the scientists from the original 1983
Nuclear Winter paper retracting their original prediction as well.

Well done, HN.

~~~
pjc50
I suspect its your use of the phrase "social agenda", as if nuclear war might
be a thing that it was unreasonable to be against.

~~~
ghostcluster
It is unreasonable to make up fake models and rhetoric, and then push it in
the media under the auspices of science. How can you be trusted in the future?

------
Fej
Bravo was an interesting fuckup. Yield was far higher than anticipated. The
volume of the resulting fallout was also far higher than anticipated, which
created an international controversy and eventually led to the Non-
Proliferation Treaty.

~~~
extide
Lithium-7 is some exotic stuff, folks.

Anyways, it's funny that this thing was way bigger than expected, yet less
than 1/3 the size of Tzar Bomba, which itself was down rated by 50%!

------
SapphireSun
I was very interested to see this first person perspective. I recently wrote
an article that might serve as a historical companion to this one, based on
public documents rather than on the ground reporting if you're interested:
[https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/3-nuked-sinking-
the...](https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/3-nuked-sinking-the-
beautiful-marshall-islands-were-violated-by-the-u-s-and-world-6fb088479518)

------
antongribok
I found this History of the People of Bikini Atoll to be a very interesting
and depressing read:

[http://www.bikiniatoll.com/history.html](http://www.bikiniatoll.com/history.html)

------
hartror
A more critical look at what effect the US nuclear program had on the Marshall
Islands and its ongoing impact on its residents.

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/the-dome-runit-
island-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/the-dome-runit-island-
nuclear-test-leaking-due-to-climate-change/9161442)

------
cproctor
Have you seen the Runit Dome?
[https://goo.gl/maps/55YfnL15iWN2](https://goo.gl/maps/55YfnL15iWN2)

It's mesmerizing to scroll around looking for circles in the ocean. And then
to spend all night reading depressing wikipedia articles about past behavior
of the US government.

~~~
averagewall
It's present behaviour is no better, and that's something you, if you're an
American, can actually influence.

------
rplnt
Was there any actions taken against US for this? Was the original idea to just
destroy the place or was it an important point in the pacific side of the war?
Either way, while reparations are a bit sensitive, this should have been easy,
considering the relative scale of both countries.

~~~
vilhelm_s
The Bikinians sued, and there are some reparation payments.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atoll#Compensation_and_reparations)

------
pgl
Remarkably few pictures for a post titled "What <x> Looks Like".

------
is0tope
Is it possible to currently visit any of these islands? It might sound
ridiculous, but I've always thought that "nuclear tourism" was fascinating in
a dark way.

Ive seen articles with people walking on top of the "cactus" dome, so clearly
some people have managed it at some point.

~~~
FabHK
Continental operates the island hopper [1,2] from Hawaii to Guam, which stops
in Majuro and Kwajalein (Marshall Islands), and Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk
(Federated States of Micronesia). So, it's relatively straightforward to get
to the country (Marshall Islands). However, from Majuro to the Bikini Atoll is
still another 800 km (500 miles) of ocean, and there is no easily available
scheduled transport, from what I gather.

FWIW, Young Pioneer Tours (no affiliation, but I've been with them to North
Korea and Iran, and can recommend them) offers guided tours of Chernobyl (and
also the "least visited countries" tour [3], including Marshall Islands, but
not the Bikini Atoll yet).

[1]
[http://gmbhome.com/micro05/Islandhop.htm](http://gmbhome.com/micro05/Islandhop.htm)

[2] [http://www.jasonaroundtheworld.com/2011/10/the-
continental-i...](http://www.jasonaroundtheworld.com/2011/10/the-continental-
island-hopper-from-honolulu-to-guam-with-4-stops/)

[3] [http://www.youngpioneertours.com/tour/least-visited-
countrie...](http://www.youngpioneertours.com/tour/least-visited-countries-
tour/)

------
yters
Just how apocalyptic is an all out nuclear war, really? I know the Hollywood
scenario is essentially cessation of life on earth, but is this truly what
would happen if all nukes were unleashed?

~~~
crooked-v
Well, the real danger in a "launch every nuke" scenario would be the resulting
nuclear winter. The radiation itself would cause a lot of unpleasant cancers,
but the existential danger would be the debris thrown into the atmosphere
causing global famine from the combined results of ruined crop yields and
massively damaged ecosystems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#2014](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#2014)

~~~
yters
Solution to global warming?

~~~
blkhawk
Just as a bullet to the head is a solution to a headache.

------
CamperBob2
_“It’d be wrong of us to forget that we dropped 23 atomic bombs on a coral
reef to see what would happen, displaced all those people and created scars on
the planet that will never heal,” he says. “Can we please not forget what we
did here?”_

Of course, the whole article amounts to a description of how the island _has_
healed, but let's not let that get in the way of a good finger-wagging
exercise.

~~~
averagewall
This "finger wagging" is chronic in any article related to some kind of
environmental change made by people. There's really no disaster here. Far more
nuclear bombs were exploded in California. Far more rocks and soil were
disturbed for construction, land reclamation, mining, canal digging, farming,
etc. all over the world. There's nothing sacred about the ground which says we
should feel sad or shameful about modifying it. I would say blowing up some
islands just to see what would happen is fantastic for both fun and science.

People displaced? Being displaced isn't, on its own, a tragedy. I'm sure those
islanders didn't become some stateless, homeless street urchins. They probably
did just fine in their new home. I will probably never be able to live in my
childhood neighborhood because I've been priced out of the property market.
That's a common story, but so what? I have no complaints at all about it and
wouldn't want to suppress other people's economic activity just so I can feel
familiar about my surroundings.

~~~
7952
If people experience it as a tragedy then it is a tragedy. Just because
something isn't bad in some situations does not mean that it is ok in all
situations.

~~~
averagewall
In this case, it turns out the relocation did cause problems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atoll#Relocation_issues)

------
spraak
That aside, it's interesting to see Stanford on Medium. Maybe Medium is doing
better financially?

------
jlebrech
so the cold war nearly saved the planet, imagine the planet being mostly
radioactive, wildlife would thrive.

~~~
coldcode
Not us however.

~~~
jlebrech
that's the point. we're the planet's disease.

------
jlebrech
we could move rhinos and elephants there, it would guarantee being free of
poaching.

