WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — As a young boy growing up on Bikini Atoll, Alson Kelen spent idyllic days playing on the beach and fishing.

His grandfather built canoes and his father tended the land. With fewer than 150 people on the remote Pacific island it was a close community, he says, with few signs of the former U.S. nuclear testing program other than the concrete bunkers he was told to avoid and the sunken ships in the lagoon.

But in 1978, when Kelen was 10, officials evacuated everybody. It turned out they’d been premature in declaring the Marshall Islands atoll safe again for humans. Radiation levels were still dangerously high.

More than 70 years after the first tests, the atoll remains contaminated today. It’s part of a troubling nuclear legacy that continues to affect islands and people across the Pacific long after the U.S., Britain and France stopped their testing programs there.

As nuclear tensions rise in the Asia-Pacific region, Kelen and others are reflecting on that legacy anew