Bikini Atoll

There is no ferry to Bikini. There’s barely a way in at all — the only realistic access is a liveaboard dive boat out of Majuro, a journey of a day and a half across open ocean to reach an atoll that the United States evacuated its entire Marshallese population from in 1946 and then detonated twenty-three nuclear devices on and around over the next twelve years, including Castle Bravo, the largest weapon the US ever tested, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. I went in with a small group of wreck-diving obsessives who’d been planning the trip for two years. I’m still not sure I fully processed what I saw until I was back on dry land writing about it.

The lagoon floor holds what divers call the “ghost fleet” — a collection of warships, including the captured German cruiser Prinz Eugen and the American aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, deliberately anchored here as target vessels for the 1946 Operation Crossroads tests, then sunk by the blasts and left exactly where they settled. The Saratoga is close to 270 meters long and sits almost fully intact on the lagoon floor, its flight deck, control tower, and aircraft still recognizable eighty years later. Diving it is unlike any wreck dive I’ve done — the scale is disorienting, the visibility exceptional, and the entire time you’re aware, in a way you can’t quite set aside, of exactly why this ship is sitting where it is.

Radiation levels in the lagoon and on the water itself are now considered safe for diving and short visits, monitored continuously, though the land on Bikini Island remains uninhabited — the coconut crabs and produce still carry contamination levels too high for the Bikinian community, still displaced today across other Marshallese islands and in the US, to safely return home to eat what grows there. Our dive guide, whose own family traces back to Bikini, spoke about it plainly and without performance: this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site precisely because of what it represents, not despite it, and diving here means sitting with that history rather than around it.

When to go: Liveaboard trips run roughly April through November, weather-dependent, and require advanced open water certification at minimum given the wreck depths. Spots fill a year or more in advance — this is a trip you plan, not one you improvise.