One of the atolls of the Republic of the
Marshall Islands in the Central
Pacific. The
United States bombed the hell out of the area in the 1940's and 1950's with
nuclear bombs and
hydrogen bombs.
Operation Crossroads vaporized three of the islands (Bokonijien, Aerokojlol, and Nam) and displaced all of the civilian population.
On March 1, 1954, the Bravo test ignited the first hydrogen bomb, with a 15 megaton blast. A thousand times more powerful than the weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and five times more powerful than most scientists' estimates, the blast scattered radiation for hundreds of miles, killing fisherman and soldiers. The test made the islands uninhabitable, and the Bikinians signed an agreement (with no legal representation present) for a mere $325,000 in reparations.
Although there have been great struggles to resettle the islands since 1967, it was only in the late 1990's that radiation lessened enough to support limited tourism and living conditions. It's possible to scuba dive the reefs, and many old warships that were sunk during nuclear tests remain in the atoll. Experienced scuba divers can explore several American and Japanese ships, including the USS Saratoga carrier and the Japanese flagship Nagato.