Fallout Radiation on Unsuspecting Pacific Territories

After unleashing hell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States embarked on numerous thermonuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in response to increased Soviet bomb activity. They were intended to be a secret affair. However, this secrecy would fail.

Detonated in 1954 over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Castle Bravo was the most powerful nuclear device the US ever set off. What they didn't expect was for the fallout from the blast to inadvertently be blown upwind onto nearby residents of other islands. The suffering included birth defects and radiation sickness. The effects were greater felt in later years when many children whose parents were exposed to the fallout developed thyroid cancer and neoplasms.

This created Project 4.1, a study to examine the effects of radiation fallout on human beings. Essentially,it was the latest in a long string of studies where humans act as guinea pigs without giving consent and a project remembered by the US as a way to gather data that would otherwise be unobtainable. The US moral standard that history best remembers is that even though the radiation fallout on the people of the Marshall Islands was an accident, it might as well have been intended.

In addition, perhaps as nature's way of adding insult to injury, a Japanese fishing boat was caught in the fallout. The fishermen all fell ill and one died, making the Japanese livid that the US was still affecting them with nuclear devices.