Post #676196 by bigbrotiki on Wed, May 1, 2013 2:03 AM

The difficult thing with these claims of "in operation" is that it can mean anything, as in "opened as a bar (in whatever theme)" .
And bar proprietors are A.) not primarily historians B.) often not the original owners, knowing a date only from hearsay.

Yet in this case the date seems possible when looking at the history of the term:

The atoll, however, has always been called Bikini by the native Marshall Islanders, from Marshallese "Pik" meaning "surface" and "Ni" meaning "coconut". The name was popularized in the United States not only by nuclear bomb tests, but because the bikini swimsuit was named after the island in 1946. The two-piece swimsuit was introduced within days of the first nuclear test on the atoll, when the name of the island was in the news