Nuclear testing displaced six Marshall Islands groups beyond just Bikini

Evidence

Meanwhile, back on Bikini, the Navy conducted sixty-eight atomic and hydrogen bomb tests between 1946 and 1958. On March 1, 1954, the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test spread a cloud of radiation over 7,500 square miles of ocean, leaving Bikini Island “hopelessly contaminated” and covering the inhabitants of the Rongelap and Utirik Atolls. The Navy ultimately displaced people from six island groups in the Marshalls in addition to Bikini, including Ailinginae, Enewetak, Lib, Rongelap, and Wotho. In addition to deaths and disease directly linked to radiation exposure, the Navy’s evictions led to a veritable catalog of societal ills for the displaced, including declining social, cultural, physical, and economic conditions, high rates of suicide, poor infant health, and the proliferation of slum housing, among other debilitating effects. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 194

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The radiation cloud, displacement scale, and downstream social harms (suicide, infant health, slum housing) fit directly alongside the article on ritual sacrif­ice-as-stabilizer themes—an entire populated region was sacrificed to weapons testing.
• XREF: connects to: Nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands delivered slow-exposure harms out of sight — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 30; Nuclear test sites worldwide are sited on lands of marginalized nomadic micro-minorities — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1172