Castle Bravo was a United States thermonuclear test at Bikini Atoll in 1954. Its yield was far larger than expected, spreading radioactive fallout across inhabited Marshallese atolls and fishing vessels. The event became a major symbol of nuclear colonialism and environmental injustice in the Pacific.

Pacific poets and activists have used nuclear testing as a source of elegy, protest, and oceanic witness. Marshallese and wider Oceanian writing turns reef, lagoon, coconut, body, and fallout into images of violated homeland and enduring resistance.