Walter Pincus on Blown to Hell

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus exposes the darkest secret in American nuclear history. How sixty-seven nuclear tests in the South Pacific’s Marshall Islands decimated a people and their land. Unknown to many people, the most important place in American nuclear history is the Marshall Islands. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war years. It was here that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. And it was here that a native people became unwilling test subjects in the first large scale study of nuclear radiation fallout when the ashes rained down on villagers, contaminating the land they loved and forever changing a way of life. On this episode of Leonard Lopate at Large join us for a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus on his book, Blown to Hell, in which tells for the first time the tragic story of the Marshallese people caught in the crosshairs of American nuclear testing.