Caption: A 15 megaton TNT hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, 1954 Mar01.

We've long forgotten where an innocent word for beach-wear came from and why.

The explosion was the Castle Bravo test. It was the first test of a dry-fuel hydrogen bomb.

This kind of thing used to be pretty scary---it still is---they used to blow them up NOT far away at the Nevada Test Site---just 105 km from Las Vegas.

As supernova researcher, yours truly used to sometimes see Stirling Colgate (1925--2013) who did a lot of hydrogen bomb research in the 1950s---but he said he quit when stopped blowing them up above ground. No more atmospheric nuclear bomb tests, nuclear bomb air blasts, or bomb pulse---we hope.

Credit/Permission: US Department of Energy (DOE), 1954 Mar01 (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by User:Fastfission~commonswiki, 2005) / Public domain.
Image link: Wikimedia Commons: File:Castle Bravo Blast.jpg.
Local file: local link: explosion_1954_bikini.html.
File: Nuclear file: explosion_1954_bikini.html.