Rongelap Atoll

Rongelap is an atoll in the northern Marshall Islands whose people were exposed to radioactive fallout from the 1954 Castle Bravo hydrogen-bomb test at nearby Bikini, forcing repeated evacuations. Long uninhabited because of contamination, it has become a symbol of the human cost of Cold War nuclear testing in the Pacific. Its lagoon and reefs are pristine from decades of absence, but the atoll's story is defined by displacement and the slow, contested effort to resettle it.