On 1 July 1946, nearly a year after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States detonated an atomic bomb over a fleet of surplus warships anchored in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Twenty-four days later, a second bomb was exploded underwater beneath the same fleet. Known collectively as…
When Operation Crossroads concluded at Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946, military planners believed they had successfully measured the effects of atomic weapons against a fleet of warships. Battleships had been damaged, aircraft carriers battered and submarines subjected to unprecedented forces. Thousands of instruments had recorded blast pressures, thermal radiation, underwater shock waves and…
Leaving Iran I was born in Tehran in 1982, in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. My mother, Zohreh, and my father, Abbas, as well as one (perhaps two?) of my mother’s brothers, in addition to two of my father’s brothers, were all members of a group called Mujahedin-e Khalq-e Iran (MEK), or…
