Before America tests another nuclear weapon, it must face the devastation it already caused

President Donald Trump has indicated the United States will resume explosive nuclear testing after the practice was stopped 30 years ago. For many communities around the globe, however, the painful reverberations of U.S. nuclear testing never ended.

It is March 1, 1954. White flakes descend in delicate flurries over the Marshall Islands. Having never seen snow on the tropical Rongelap Atoll, eager Marshallese children run outside to play in the particles, giggling as they feel the specks dissolve on their tongues and tickle their skin. Parents cannot help but smile at their children’s joyous expressions, puzzled by the peculiar precipitation, but unalarmed.

By nightfall, the laughs turn to screams. Agonizing lesions, relentless nausea and vomiting, and watery, irritated eyes plague the islands’ inhabitants. Within days, their hair begins to fall out in clumps while blisters emerge in the very places graced by the touch of the white matter from the sky. Within years, the Marshallese people suffer from thyroid tumors and cancers, miscarriages and stillbirths, and various congenital deformities, including babies born with no bones and translucent skin.

Of course, the “snow” wasn’t snow at all — it was radioactive contamination. That day in March, a hundred miles away, the United States had just tested a thermonuclear weapon, one a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bombs used in World War II. In fact, this weapon was the largest one ever detonated by the US, its explosive yield exceeding even the predictions of those who built it. The atmospheric test, dubbed “Castle Bravo,” vaporized more than 10 million tons of sand, coral, and water over the Marshall Islands, creating a 100-mile-wide fallout cloud raining radioactive debris on the islands’ people, flora, and fauna.

Realizing the risk of severe harm to local inhabitants, the U.S. Navy evacuated residents of Rongelap, the worst-impacted area, to a neighboring island for emergency medical treatment — three days later. By then, radiation had long enveloped their communities, polluted their waters, and seeped into their bodies. After three years of treatment and refuge, with reassurance that radiation levels had become harmless, American troops sent the Marshallese victims back to their homes. Families returned in cheerful relief, believing the worst of their troubles were finally behind them. In reality: Rongelap was still dangerously contaminated, and the American authorities knew it.

Repatriating the Marshallese people to the still-irradiated Rongelap turned out to be a deliberate move as part of Project 4.1, a government directive designed to study the long-term effects of radiation on human beings. Despite U.S. officials neither seeking nor obtaining Marshallese consent for serving as subjects in such an experiment, internal communications reveal the United States believed there was an “ethical imperative to take advantage of the unique opportunity” presented by the fallout from Castle Bravo.

Over the next several years, American scientists visited the islands regularly to study the impact of chronic radiation: drawing blood, photographing burns, cataloging lesions, and documenting miscarriages and birth defects. Children were assessed for growth delays and congenital anomalies; adults were monitored for thyroid abnormalities, cancers, and reproductive issues. Data collection often included invasive procedures, such as removing teeth or tissue, without affording victims a clear explanation due to language and communication barriers. These studies formed the basis of Project 4.1’s official reports on health effects of fallout exposure while leaving the Marshallese in a radioactive wasteland.

Under the guise of scientific research, the U.S. intentionally repatriated innocent and uninformed families to a region they privately called “the most contaminated place in the world.” The Marshallese, meanwhile, had no idea they’d been sentenced to generations of displacement, disease, and death.

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Many people believe the only explosions of nuclear weapons occurred during World War II, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are mistaken. Since 1945, there have been more than 2,000 documented explosions around the world for nuclear testing, which is the practice of detonating a nuclear warhead to measure its explosive yield, validate warhead design, or signal technological superiority to other states. The U.S., for its part, conducted roughly half of all explosive nuclear tests worldwide.

But for every technical insight to be gained from explosive nuclear testing, the humanitarian and environmental consequences are tenfold. Nuclear tests have poisoned water and air, rendered once-fertile lands uninhabitable, and scarred generations of people exposed to radiation. Even underground testing, now the only type of testing permitted under international law, risks dangerous consequences: contaminating groundwater with radiation; triggering seismic disturbances and inducing earthquakes; and venting radioactive gases into the atmosphere, exposing local communities to radiation.

Today, more than 70 years after Castle Bravo, victims of U.S. nuclear testing around the Marshall Islands continue to suffer high rates of thyroid cancer, leukemia, and reproductive disorders. And, while the U.S. established the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the 1980s to compensate survivors, it was severely underfunded, awarding more than $2 billion in damages to Marshallese victims but paying out only a small fraction before its funds were exhausted.

In light of the substantial harm inflicted by U.S. nuclear testing and the failure to provide adequate justice or compensation, President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that the U.S. plans to resume tests after a 33-year halt is deeply troubling. Before the United States ever considers reinitiating explosive nuclear tests, it must first reckon with — and atone for — the harmful legacy its nuclear weapons have imprinted on communities both at home and abroad.

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As James Baldwin once wrote, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers.” As a nuclear policy researcher and aspiring filmmaker myself, that conviction — that art can expose what analysis alone cannot — has guided my professional pursuits. If policy seeks to answer, then art constantly reminds us of what we are asking and why.

My own why, in fact, was initially discovered after watching a single film. While a WWII documentary captivated my high school history class, one question shot from my lips as the reality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks resonated with me for the first time: These were attacks on civilians? Low chuckles reverberated around the classroom, as if this were common knowledge, as if I should have known. 

Of course I’d known, the same way most American teens know — as a matter of fact. But it was one thing to read about the U.S. dropping two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in a high school textbook or on a PowerPoint slide; it was another to watch with my own eyes hundreds of thousands of innocent lives be incinerated in an instant, leaving no trace but an evanescent mushroom cloud of smoke and human ashes. In that classroom, I realized the power of visual storytelling, a moment that marked the beginning of my life’s quest to investigate and communicate the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons.

My latest short film, The Shape I Love You With, aims to lay bare the real consequences beneath policy discussions on renewed nuclear testing, using real, archival U.S. military footage from the Marshall Islands. The film serves as a reminder that any conversation about new nuclear tests must begin with an acknowledgment of those still enduring the never-ending fallout of the past.

Kylie Elise Jones (2024 cohort) is pursuing a master’s degree in international policy with a concentration in international security at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. An academic and artist, she seeks to utilize nontraditional modes of telling policy stories, such as art and film, to galvanize change to today’s perilous nuclear status quo.

Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.