Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site

Paradise and apocalypse share one lagoon at Bikini Atoll. After displacing the islanders in 1946, the United States detonated 67 nuclear devices here through 1958 — among them the first hydrogen bomb in 1952 — with combined power reckoned at about 7,000 times the Hiroshima blast. Warships sunk in the earliest tests rest on the lagoon floor near the immense Bravo crater. UNESCO inscribed the test site in 2010 as the Marshall Islands' first World Heritage listing, a memorial to the dawn of the nuclear age.