Early in the morning of March 1, 1954, the United States detonated what was then the most powerful nuclear bomb in history at Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. Known as Castle Bravo, the test ignited a four-mile-wide fireball, vaporized entire islands, contaminated more than seven thousand square miles of ocean, and spread radioactive fallout across continents.

Almost seventy years later, the fallout from this explosion and dozens of others conducted nearby is still doing damage to the health and livelihood of the Marshallese people. According to a statement written by several concerned members of Congress in late January, the State Department is trying to shirk the economic and infrastructural obligations that America promised to this tiny island nation after its nuclear onslaught.

The maintenance of the United States’ imperial project requires the subjugation of less powerful nations all over the world. The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) is no exception. The nominal provisions that America has made to repay the people whose lives were destroyed in service of this imperial project — the same provisions that the Joe Biden administration is quietly trying to do away with — have never come close to addressing the horrors of the islands’ colonial past or guaranteeing its people a survivable future.

A Nuclear Test That Proved Disastrous

The United States formally took possession of the Marshall Islands in 1944 after ousting the Japanese, who had controlled them since World War I. Almost immediately, the islands — which occupy a total area about the size of Washington, DC, spread over an ocean area larger than Alaska — became a strategic American military stronghold in the Pacific. The United States built a base that’s still active today on Kwajalein Atoll, and by 1946, the United States was using the country’s northern waters as a nuclear testing ground.

Over the following twelve years, the military tested a total of sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. The most famous and most devastating of these was Castle Bravo, which remains the most powerful artificial explosion ever generated by the United States. Bravo exploded with a yield three times greater than predicted by its engineers and a thousand times greater than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.