Bikini Atoll Beach

Bikini is an atoll in the Ralik chain of the Marshall Islands, twenty-three islands around a lagoon of some six hundred square kilometres. The beaches are white coral sand and the water is clear, and almost nobody has lived there since 1946.

The United States conducted twenty-three nuclear tests at Bikini between 1946 and 1958, including Castle Bravo in 1954 — a fifteen-megaton detonation, the largest the US ever tested, whose yield was two and a half times what was predicted and whose fallout reached inhabited atolls downwind. The 167 Bikinians were moved off the atoll in 1946 on the understanding that they could return. Attempts to resettle them in the 1970s were reversed when caesium levels in the people who had gone back proved unsafe. They remain displaced.

The lagoon holds the target fleet: the aircraft carrier Saratoga, the battleship Nagato that launched the Pearl Harbor attack, the Prinz Eugen and around a dozen more, sunk in the 1946 tests and lying largely intact. It is regarded as one of the great wreck dives in the world, and diving it means diving a place people were removed from — which is the ethical question the register states rather than resolves. The name entered the language in 1946, when a French designer named a swimsuit after the tests, which is a fact about the world rather than about the atoll.

Bikini and Enewetak were inscribed by UNESCO in 2010, the first World Heritage site listed for its association with nuclear testing. Access requires permission from the Bikini local government and there is no regular transport. Majuro, the capital atoll eight hundred kilometres south, is where any expedition starts, and Enewetak at the other end of the chain holds the Runit dome.

Bikini is beautiful and it is a monument. The lagoon holds the fleet sunk to test the weapons that removed its people, and those people have not been able to return. Anyone diving it should know that before they get in the water, and the register would rather say so than describe the sand.