Today is the 78th anniversary of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on Earth, the Trinity Test in New Mexico in 1945, three weeks before the nuclear attacks on Japan.
There will be many images posted of the mushroom cloud today, but here is what mattered more, the fallout cloud. Dozens of homes and communities were blanketed with fallout, which which also contaminated fields as far away as Illinois and Indiana.
Castle Bravo (1 Mar 1954) was the first hydrogen bomb exploded atmospherically at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The fallout cloud (that they said they couldn't predict) irradiated four atolls inhabited by Marshall Islanders. They knew. It was a deliberate attempt to study the effects of irradiation across several generations. The US govt has always maintained that it was an accident, but given the perfect case study they managed to cobble together it is clear they experimented on the islanders.