#bikini atoll

[mapsontheweb]

Bikini Atoll nuclear test sites, 1946-1958.

by SouthCrossMaps/twitter

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

It's well-known among Godzilla fans that the 1954 Castle Bravo H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll, which irradiated the crew of the Lucky Dragon No. 5, was a major influence on the monster's original film. But that was just one of the 67 nuclear weapons the U.S. tested in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958, blasts which still reverberate. The radiation they released has left Bikini Atoll uninhabitable to this day, and continues to affect residents' health.

Godzilla has visited the Marshall Islands before. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah reveals that he lived on the fictitious Lagos Island as an ordinary dinosaur and stumbled into a World War II battlefield before an H-bomb test mutated him. (Well, he was mutated a different way after the Futurians altered the timeline, but let's not get into that.) The Monsterverse reimagines the Castle Bravo test as a covert attempt to kill him, as shown in Godzilla (2014), Godzilla: Awakening, and (soon) Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. The Marshallese themselves, however, are absent from King Ghidorah and appear only fleetingly in the Monsterverse tales.

What I'm getting at is that we're long overdue for a Godzilla story that centers the Marshall Islands, and ideally comes from the Marshall Islands. Japan and the U.S. have had him to themselves for too long; it's time Toho let the other country involved in his birth take a turn. The low-lying Marshall Islands face a very real "minus one" scenario as climate change causes the sea to rise—and potentially breach a massive concrete dome there that's full of American nuclear waste. Godzilla might be the perfect vessel to carry that story, and the U.S.'s nuclear legacy there, to a wider audience. After all, how many of us would know about the Lucky Dragon without him?

[askquarantinedredheart]

Here it is! With original posts, morning/evening reblogs, and random shitposts taken into account, it's Post #100 of Quarantined Redheart! Also, it's safe to say that the way that Red looks here is a sign of things to come for Volume 1...

[jadeseadragon]

Salvador Dalí, The Three Sphinxes of Bikini, 1947, Morohashi Museum of Modern Art, Fukushima, Japan.

[lonestarbattleship]

"USS Arkansas (BB-33) being loaded with equipment to be transported to Bikini Atoll. Army ground forces equipment which is to be exposed to atomic blast during the Bikini experiments being moved from West Coast ports. The USS Arkansas is shown being loaded with equipment to be transported to Bikini.

Note: the contrast between the 12-inch rifles of the Arkansas and the slender but lethal guns of the M26 Heavy Tank (at left of the naval rifles) and the 90mm. gun Motor Carriage (at right)."

Date: spring 1946

Battleship North Carolina Archives: 1981.011.0130

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb.

Diana Vreeland

The origins of contemporary bikini day may be traced back to a French engineer, a Parisian exotic dancer, a nuclear testing site in the United States, and a postwar fabric shortage.

In 1946, Western Europeans joyously greeted the first war-free summer in years, and French designers came up with fashions to match the liberated mood of the people. Two French designers, Jacques Heim and Louis Réard, developed competing prototypes of the bikini. Heim called his the “atom” and advertised it as “the world’s smallest bathing suit.”

French fashion designer Louis Reard was determined to create an even more scandalous swimsuit. Réard's swimsuit, which was basically a bra top and two inverted triangles of cloth connected by string, was in fact significantly smaller. Made out of a scant 30 inches of fabric, Réard promoted his creation as “smaller than the world’s smallest bathing suit.”

Réard claimed that the bikini was named for Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear tests by the United States in the Pacific Ocean.

Louis Réard's bikini was so little that he couldn't find anyone brave enough to wear it. After being rejected by a number of fashion models, he came across Micheline Bernardini. She was a 19-year-old nudist at the Casino de Paris who consented to be the first to try on his daring bikini. Michelle Bernardini debuted this revealing costume at the Piscine Molitor in Paris during a poolside fashion show, and it revolutionised swimwear on 5 July 1946. The bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.

Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy passed measures prohibiting bikinis on public beaches but later capitulated to the changing times when the swimsuit grew into a mainstay of European beaches in the 1950s. Réard's business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini mystique alive by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn’t a genuine bikini “unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.”

But it really took when what we would call cultural influencers took to it. It was in 1953, thanks to Brigitte Bardot, that the bikini became a "must-have" and the history of the bikini became historic, when she was photographed wearing one on the Carlton beach at the Cannes Film Festival. She also wore one in 1956, in the film "Et Dieu… créa la femme".

The United States also caught on to the trend, as it was only two years later that Ursula Andress posed in a white bikini on the poster for the James Bond film, Dr. No. The poster created a considerable marketing coup, and women adopted the bikini. According to a study by Time, 65% of younger women adopted the bikini in 1967.

There is no question the bikini is hardly modern. Many think they date back to ancient Roman times because of the murals uncovered in excavated ruins in Sicily. This isn’t really true.

Despite the celebrated images from the mosaics in Piazza Armerina, of the ancient Roman girl wearing what looks like a bikini, the answer is, “not really”.  The ancient Roman girls weren’t even first to wear what to our eyes looks like a bikini. However, the fact that we seem to find “bikinis” in ancient depictions should make us rethink our hubristic bias that we in modern times have invented everything and that people in ancient times didn’t know how to live.

Archaeologists have found evidence of bikini-like garments that date to as far back as 5600 BC. That’s roughly 5000 years before the Romans did so. In the Chalcolithic era of around 5600 BC, the mother-goddess of Çatalhöyük, a large ancient settlement in southern Anatolia, was depicted astride two leopards while wearing a bikini-like costume.

Two-piece garments worn by women for athletic purposes are depicted on Greek urns and paintings dating back to 1400 BC. In fact, even just the notion that women participated in sports in the ancient world should make us sit up and take notice.

Today we tend to imagine women in the ancient world as being practically sequestered in their homes, spinning, weaving and having babies. But this is a gross oversimplification of their role.

Active women of ancient Greece wore a breast band called a mastodeton or an apodesmos, which continued to be used as an undergarment in the Middle Ages. While men in ancient Greece abandoned the perizoma, partly high-cut briefs and partly loincloth, women performers and acrobats continued to wear it.

In the famous mosaics to be found at Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, the girls who seem to be wearing the “bikini” are Roman and the so-called bikini had already been around for at least 5,000 years by then. In the artwork “Coronation of the Winner” done in floor mosaic in the Chamber of the Ten Maidens (Sala delle Dieci Ragazze) in Sicily the bikini girls are depicted weight-lifting, discus throwing, and running.

The bikini was gradually done away as Christianity became more influential as the centuries wore on. Christian attitudes towards swimming restricted the clothing of women for centuries, the bikini disappeared from the historical record after the Romans until the early 20th century with Louis Beard’s re-invention of the two piece bathing suit as the ‘bikini’.

Photos: In 1956 Emilio Pucci designed this bikini inspired by the mosaics of the Villa Romana Del Casale in Sicily.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

The atomic bomb fueled the theory of Mutual assured destruction (MAD)

Castle Romeo nuclear test (yield 11 Mt) on Bikini Atoll. It was the first nuclear test conducted on a barge. The barge was located in the Castle Bravo crater.

[putting-ragatha-in-places]

put her in the bikini atoll nuclear testing site

ragatha in bikini atoll nuclear testing site

[thunderstruck9]

Jim Shaw (American, 1952), No Bikini Atoll, 2022. Oil and acrylic on muslin, 48 x 80 in.

[nickysfacts]

All hail Godzilla and more importantly remember the nightmare he is based on!

🇯🇵☢️🐟

[princess-paige-place-of-fun]

Mermay 2024 - Inkling White Zalgo Pagie

Another Mermay 2024 drawing, featuring White Zalgo Pagie as an inkling and him in his demon inkling form, enjoying the view of the sea at Bikini Atoll in the day and at night.

[tyrianwanderings]

Bomb at Bikini

[vexillavixvisa]

Bikini Atoll

Ralik Chain, Marshall Islands

Although appearing bizarre and ugly at first, the flag of Bikini Atoll makes a sad reflection on the history of the island and its people, with glimmers of local traditions and culture trying to bleed through an immovable American façade.

Bikini Atoll's entrance into darkness came less than a century ago, when American nuclear scientists sought an adequate place for testing atomic bombs, ending up at the Marshallese reefs. Unaware of the true devastation to come, the Bikinian leader agreed to pass the island to the U.S. Army, being exiled to other islands with inadequate food sources. After the detonation of the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb in 1954, the islands became a wasteland, still uninhabitable to this day.

The flag is a defaced American flag, with 23 stars in its canton to mirror the number of islands belonging to the atoll. The three black stars in the north fly pay homage to the three islands obliterated during the nuclear testing; the two other black stars symbolise the islands to which the Bikinians were relocated, symbolically distanced from the canton's stars to reflect both the islands' far-off location from Bikini Atoll and the large gap in quality of life. The phrase below the canton translates to 'Everything is in the hands of God', the Bikinian leader's response to America's request.

This flag is not just that of a desolate contaminated atoll, but a banner under which every displaced Bikinian rallies angrily against the United States - reminder to them that they owe an extortionate debt.

[pissanddie]

Julian Charrière, Able – First Light, Installation view: First Light, Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz, Switzerland, 2016. More info

[nelc]

USS Independence (CVL-22), a light aircraft carrier of WWII, was one of the ships moored at Bikini Atoll during the atomic tests of Operation Crossroads. The first detonation, Test Able, was an airburst 500 metres away from Independence, and damaged her severely, but did not sink her.

The now-radioactive Independence was towed to the Farrallon Islands, near San Francisco, and used for radiological studies by the University of California Radiation Laboratory as the radiation decayed, until the decision was made to scuttle her in 1951, together with some contaminated materials transferred there.

[makingcontact]

The Shadow of Nuclear Colonialism

The text “The Shadow of Nuclear Colonialism” superimposed on an image of the explosion at 9.0 seconds after the Trinity detonation on July 16, 1945. (Photo illustration byLucy Kang; background image via United States Department of Energy) The film Oppenheimer has reignited public interest in the Manhattan Project, the WWII-era secret program to develop the atomic bomb. But the movie leaves out…