President Donald Trump’s name for the United States to resume testing of nuclear weapons final week has consultants scratching their heads.
What did he really mean – exploding a warhead or testing supply programs? Does he understand how nuclear weapons work? How will US nuclear adversaries react?
And some consultants warning that the testing of nuclear warheads – creating precise nuclear explosions – hurts people and can have lasting penalties for generations.
Few individuals know the hurt nuclear testing can do higher than inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, a nation of 1,200 islands and atolls in the Pacific, which was a US-administered belief territory of the United Nations from 1947 to 1986.
As it developed its nuclear arsenal post-World War II, the US exploded 67 nuclear bombs there between 1946 and 1958.
Those detonations had the explosive equal of 1 Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb daily for 20 years, in accordance with a 2025 report from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).
The radiation results have been ruinous, in accordance with US authorities studies cited by the Atomic Heritage Foundation, which mentioned the testing was chargeable for 55% of cancers on a few of the islands’ northern atolls.
And the impact has been extra widespread than in the islands. Scattered by winds in the environment, the nuclear fallout from these checks has resulted in about 100,000 extra most cancers deaths worldwide, in accordance with the IEER research. Fallout hotspots have been detected as far-off as Sri Lanka and Mexico.
Related ailments come from isotopes in the nuclear fallout that can penetrate the human physique and trigger mutations in DNA, in accordance with a 2024 paper from the American Society of Clinical Oncology Journal.
The isotopes can stay in the surroundings years after testing, afflicting these uncovered with cancers together with lung, leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid and breast, the paper says.
And the US previous nuclear checks weren’t confined to the Pacific islands. The Nevada Test Site in the Mojave Desert noticed 100 atmospheric checks from 1951 to 1962, and 828 underground checks, the final of these being in 1992.
Though underground testing is taken into account safer, 32 of these checks in Nevada resulted in fallout escaping into the environment, in accordance with a 1993 UN report.
“We know that nuclear testing has devastating consequences on communities and ecosystems throughout the United States, many of whom are still seeking reparations for harms caused by US nuclear testing during the Cold War,” mentioned Matt Korda, affiliate director at the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
“Resuming testing would almost certainly inflict new harms on those groups,” Korda instructed NCS.
In the Marshall Islands, the wounds of nuclear testing are nonetheless uncooked.
“This isn’t fiction, nor the distant past. It’s a chapter of history still alive through the environment, the health of communities, and the data we’re collecting today,” Greenpeace activist Shaun Burnie wrote after visiting the islands earlier this yr.
The environmental group staged a voyage to the Marshall Islands from March to April this yr to doc their state and to take scientific samples that may go into a coming report on the islands.
On tiny Runit Island, a part of Enewetak Atoll, sits “the dome,” a construction 377 ft (115 meters) in diameter, fabricated from concrete about half-a-meter thick. Underneath it lies 85,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste gathered in a Nineteen Seventies effort to wash up the islands, in accordance with Greenpeace.
Because the crater beneath the dome will not be lined, as newer nuclear waste disposal websites are, “these substances are not only confined to the crater – they are also found across the island’s soil, rendering Runit Island uninhabitable for all time,” Burnie wrote after the group’s go to.
The island “may be one of the most radioactive places in the world,” he mentioned.
And with local weather change, rising sea ranges now threaten the structural integrity of the getting old dome. No one’s actually positive how far the results of that waste may unfold.
“That dome is the connection between the nuclear age and the climate change age,” activist Alson Kelen mentioned in a 2018 report from the Australian NGO Safeground.
Burnie mentioned the radiation in the surroundings has modified the lives of the 300 present residents of the total Enewetak Atoll. It’s been taken up by the roots of their coconut palms, contaminating the fruit, making it unmarketable.
“The radioactive legacy has robbed them of income and opportunity,” Burnie mentioned of the islanders.
It’s not simply agriculture that’s been affected, in accordance with the IEER report. As their lifestyle has deteriorated, conventional expertise have been misplaced, comparable to the talent to navigate the open ocean, a necessity for commerce and even copy.
“Reading the waves was ‘indispensable as the sole means of collecting food, trading goods, waging war and locating unrelated sexual partners,’” the IEER report says, quoting a 2016 New York Time Magazine report on island mariners.
Speaking to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2024, UN Deputy High Commissioner Nada Al-Nashif mentioned the legacy of testing has disconnected indigenous Marshallese from their tradition.
“The human rights impacts of the nuclear legacy are not limited to what is known and easily quantifiable. They are also rooted in pain that cannot be measured and facts that remain unknown,” she mentioned.
Castle Bravo and Bikini Atoll
About 200 miles to the east of Enewetak is Bikini Atoll, the web site of the largest nuclear weapons check ever performed by the US. Known as Castle Bravo, it was a thousand instances extra highly effective than the Hiroshima bomb.
In 1946, Bikini Atoll had 167 residents. Before the Castle Bravo check, US Navy officers persuaded them to depart their properties, “for the good of mankind.”
“He explained that they were a chosen people and that perfecting atomic weapons could prevent future wars,” and that someday they’d be allowed to return, an Atomic Heritage Foundation historical past says.
Today, Bikini is uninhabited, spare a few caretakers. Radiation ranges stay too excessive for full-time habitation, one thing that was decided after Bikinians have been allowed to return in 1969 and commenced struggling radiation-related diseases. The island was closed once more in 1978.
“Most of the new generations of Bikinians have never seen their home island,” Greenpeace’s Burnie wrote.
Greenpeace’s ultimate cease on its island tour this yr was Rongelap Atoll, which was blanketed by ash from the Castle Bravo check on Bikini, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) to the northwest.
In a 2024 report, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) talked about the results of that ash – known as “Bikini snow” – on the inhabitants.
“It burned their skin and eyes, and they quickly developed symptoms of acute radiation sickness,” the report mentioned.
And the results lingered.
“For many years after the checks, ladies in the Marshall Islands gave beginning to severely deformed infants at unusually excessive charges. Those born alive hardly ever survived greater than a few days. Some had translucent pores and skin and no discernible bones. They would seek advice from them as ‘jellyfish babies,’ for they might scarcely be recognised as human beings, the ICAN report mentioned.
Wanting aid from the results, Rongelap residents evacuated the island in 1985 with the assist of Greenpeace, resettling on two islands in Kwajalein Atoll, each simply a handful of miles from the US navy’s lively Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, which it says helps nuclear-capable missile testing in addition to intercepts.
While the Marshall Islands hasn’t seen a nuclear check since 1958 – the present US check web site is underground in Nevada – the final check in the Pacific was in 1996, by France, one in every of 193 checks Paris performed at South Pacific atolls over 30 years.
Approximately 110,000 individuals suffered from radiation diseases from the French checks, in accordance with a 2021 report from the French investigative journalism web site Disclose, Princeton University and Norwegian NGO Interprt.
“Leukemia, lymphoma, cancer of the thyroid, lung, breast, stomach … In Polynesia, the experience of French nuclear tests is written in the flesh and blood of the inhabitants,” the report says.
That final French check, on January 27, 1996, resulted in massive worldwide protests and a boycott of French items.
A day later, then French President Jacques Chirac introduced his nation would not check nuclear weapons.
At the finish of July 1996, China examined a nuclear machine at its Lop Nur web site in distant northwestern Xinjiang. It could be the final check by a main nuclear energy.
In September 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) opened for signature. It obligates signees “not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.”
The US, Russia and China shortly signed it however haven’t ratified it. Still, the three powers have abided by it, regardless that it stays unenforceable because it nonetheless wants the ratification of 9 states.
The solely nuclear checks recognized to have been performed worldwide since 1996 are by India (two in 1998), Pakistan (two in 1998) and North Korea (six from 2006 to 2017). None of these nations had signed the treaty.
Trump’s social media put up on Thursday calling for the US to start testing once more is elevating fears of a new nuclear arms race – and extra devastating penalties for the individuals of the planet.
“This is a perilous moment,” learn a assertion from the anti-nuclear group Ploughshares, calling the US president’s announcement “reckless, needless and dangerous.”
As the US would check its weapons underneath the Nevada desert, the Marshall Islands is extremely unlikely to see one other nuclear explosion inside its borders.
But the islands will forever have a testomony to the results of nuclear weapons.
The radioactive half-life of plutonium-239, one in every of the remnants of US nuclear testing there, is 24,110 years.