Before becoming the popular fishing travel destination it is today, Kiritimati was the location of multiple hydrogen bomb tests. Under Operation Grapple, the United Kingdom conducted nine atmospheric nuclear tests in 1957-8 in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony – today, the Republic of Kiribati.
US and French nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands and Murorua and Fangataufa atolls in Tahiti feature regularly in discussions about the environmental and social legacy of Pacific nuclear testing. But author Nic McLellan says the fallout of Britain’s hydrogen bomb tests at Kiritimati island in Kiribati isn’t as well documented.
