Lemeyo Abon recalls preparing her family's breakfast when a flash of light eclipsed the morning sun. 'It was March 1, 1954,' says the 68-year-old grandmother, 'and a few hours later dust began to drift down on us like snow. We were simple islanders. How could we have known it was radioactive fallout from the largest nuclear bomb the United States ever detonated?'
From 1946 to 1958, the US undertook 67 nuclear tests in the remote Marshall Islands, having persuaded the inhabitants that the sacrifice of their land for the development of atomic weapons was 'for the good of mankind and [would] end all world wars'.
'How we wish we'd turned the soldiers and scientists away,' says Jack J. Ading, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) finance minister and senator of Enewetak, the atoll on which the US conducted 43 of those tests.
'Average out the yields, and the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs was detonated each and every day of that entire 12-year period,' Ading adds, anger flashing in his eyes.
The islands' remote location in the western Pacific Ocean made them highly attractive to the US as a nuclear proving ground. But it has also hindered the islanders' ability to communicate the appalling legacy of the tests to the outside world. Operation Castle Bravo, witnessed by Abon from her home on Rongelap atoll that morning, is a case in point. It remains one of the worst radiation disasters in history yet is scarcely remembered by the international community.
Castle Bravo was the first deliverable hydrogen bomb - 'Ivy Mike', its predecessor, was the size of a house. So experimental was the device that its power was underestimated by about 250 per cent. The enormous explosion vaporised three islands in Bikini atoll, leaving a crater more than 1.5km wide and 60 metres deep. As well as contaminating Bikini and Rongelap, the inhabitants of Utirik and Ailinginae were also exposed.
Abon's warm, weathered face tells of a life lived but not of the anguish. 'First, there were lots of miscarriages among the women,' she says. 'Soon afterwards came the deformed babies - the 'jelly babies' or the 'octopus babies' we called them.
