In February 1946 the United States asked the 167 inhabitants of Bikini Atoll to leave their island “temporarily”, “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars”.
Eighty years later they still cannot go back.
They were moved to Rongerik, an atoll nobody lived on for a reason (no reliable water, toxic fish). By 1948 they were starving and were moved again, to Kwajalein, then to Kili: a tiny island with no lagoon, which for a people whose whole culture was sailing and lagoon fishing was, their word, a prison.
Meanwhile the US detonated 23 nuclear devices on their atoll. The worst was Castle Bravo in 1954: the calculations said 6 megatons, it delivered 15, about a THOUSAND Hiroshimas, the biggest bomb the US has ever set off. The fallout snowed on inhabited atolls and on a Japanese fishing boat.
In 1968 they were told Bikini was safe again. Around 150 people went back, and by 1978 they carried the highest cesium-137 levels ever measured in a human population: it was in the coconuts and the well water. They were evacuated again. Nobody has lived there since; the atoll is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, as a monument to the nuclear age.
In 2001 a tribunal awarded them 563 million dollars in damages. It has never been paid: the fund ran dry and the US did not refill it.
Seriously.
Postscript: the swimsuit is named after these tests. Louis Réard baptized it in July 1946, days after the first blast, hoping for an “explosive” effect.