Pacific Nuclear Tomb Fractures: Radioactive Leakage Threatens Marshall Islands

In 1958, the United States detonated an 18-kiloton nuclear device known as the “Cactus” test on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands. It left behind a crater that would later become one of the Pacific’s most unsettling landmarks. Some decades later, that crater was filled with more than 120,000 tons of radioactive debris and sealed under a concrete cap. Today, the whole nuclear pile is collectively known as the Runit Dome.