It seems inconceivable now, but there was a time when hydrogen bombs were routinely tested right out in the open — monstrously menacing mushroom clouds, radioactive shroud and all. After a while tests were driven underground and, under a series of treaties which began in 1963, testing was banned almost entirely.
But in 1946, when U.S. nuclear bomb testing began in what was called Operation Crossroads in this remote Pacific location, memories were still fresh of the atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which effectively ended World War II. The end of the war also ended the convenient alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world’s only superpowers, whose faceoff in the Cold War would define geopolitics for the next half century
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