Fair that the cities were worse, but the islands were not uninhabited. The people there were evacuated (they were told temporarily) and the place they were evacuated to was still within the fallout zone. A lot of people died pretty much immediately and they're still dealing with increased cancer and birth defects today.

This was when these weapons were fairly new, and what little information we had about them was not given to the people of these people before they were pressured into allowing their islands to be testing grounds.