Before the 1970s, the United States and other nuclear-armed countries conducted more than 500 atomic weapons tests in the atmosphere.

During these tests, radioactive debris and gases were flung up into the atmosphere and traveled around the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated that people around the world have had exposure to radioactive fallout from these nuclear tests. Even today, radioactive fallout is present in many parts of the world, but in small amounts.

In the early 2000s, the CDC released a global radioactive fallout report and found that any person living in the US since 1951 has been “exposed to some radioactive fallout, and all of a person’s organs and tissues have received some exposure.”

The costs associated with nuclear tests for any country have been quite devastating for surrounding communities. Take, for instance, the Enewetak Atoll, a large coral atoll of 40 islands in the Pacific Ocean, where the U.S. government detonated 30 megatons of weapons – equivalent to 2,000 Hiroshima blasts – between 1948 and 1958.

In total, sixty-seven nuclear bombs detonated on Enewetak Atoll and Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Beginning in 1977, more than 8,000 people worked to clean up the Marshall Islands, shifting 110,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris into a blast crater.

This thirty-foot-deep crater is called the Runit Dome, on Enewetak Atoll, also called “Cactus Dome” or locally “The Tomb.”

The dome of death spans 350-feet across with an 18-inch concrete cap covering radioactive debris from 12-years of U.S. government nuclear tests.

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