For the 40 or so ageing Bikini islanders, it was a rare but bittersweet visit to their former home this week to mark the 50th anniversary of the hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific atoll they evacuated more than half a century ago.
On March 1, 1954, H-bomb "Bravo" exploded across Bikini with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs and the contaminated area remains off limits except for brief visits.
Some 58 years after being evacuated ahead of the US test, it was hard for the former islanders to have to depart again after just a few hours on their atoll.
"It's hard for the elders who've been away for so many years to come here just for one day," Bikini Mayor Eldon Note said at a brief ceremony in the graveyard on the main island.
"We're marking two events this week," said Bikini Senator Tomaki Juda, who was just four when the US Navy removed him and his 166 fellow islanders from Bikini in 1946.
"It's the 50th anniversary of the Bravo test and the 58th anniversary of the evacuation of the people from Bikini."
Jamodre Aitap, 83, said not many of the 167 original Bikinians moved off in 1946 were still alive.
"I don't have a lot of hope of returning home," he said, adding: "If the Americans tell me that Bikini is safe, I will return immediately."
On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated Bravo to demonstrate its H-bomb capabilities to the then Soviet Union. Washington denies it ignored warnings that winds were blowing toward inhabited islands.
The US tested 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, a string of 1,200 islands just north of the equator in the mid-Pacific. "The United States made promises 58 years ago to return us safely home," Juda said. "But they haven't been kept. We hope that we wont have to wait another 50 years to meet our goal of returning home."
President Kessai Note, who joined the trip to Bikini, said that in 1978, when the decision was made to evacuate Bikinians a second time because of high radiation levels, it was difficult to get the older people to leave Bikini because of their love for the land.
"They didn't want to go," he recalled.
"It took several days of negotiations to get them to leave."
They wanted to stay so badly that they said didn't care if the island was radioactive, he said.
The group of about 100 Bikinians then living on Bikini flatly refused to return to Kili, which they described as a "prison island," Note said. Their refusal to return to Kili led to the establishment of the Bikini community on Ejit Island in Majuro, the capital atoll.
Bikinians sacrificed their islands and their way of life for the US and the world, Note said.
"They have to be taken care of because their sacrifice was so great," he said.
Speaking to a group that included US ambassador Greta Morris, Note said "We need to know what the United States thinks of our request (for more compensation).
"If they don't want to give the money needed to correct the problem, we need to know. Weve been waiting a long time."
Morris responded by expressing the US government's "appreciation for the sacrifices and hardships that the Bikini people made during the Cold War." These sacrifices helped to bring peace and freedom to many countries, she said.
She expressed "deep regret" at the damage the people of Bikini experienced from the nuclear test program.
Morris said the US and Marshall Islands had a close relationship, pledging "this won't be the end of our dialog".