Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Beverly Keever

  • Bravo: 60 Years of Suffering, Cover-Ups, Injustice

    Sixty years ago on March 1 in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, the United States detonated the most powerful nuclear weapon in its history.

    Codenamed Bravo, the 15-megaton hydrogen bomb was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima nine years earlier. The Bravo blast “represented as revolutionary an advance in explosive power over the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb had over the conventional weapons of World War II,” historian-lawyer Jonathan Weisgall notes.

    Castle Bravo Nuclear ExplosionAlso unlike Hiroshima’s A-bomb, Bravo was laced with plutonium, a most toxic element with a radioactive existence of half a million years that may be hazardous to humans for at least half that time.

    And, unlike the atomic airburst above Hiroshima, Bravo was a shallow-water ground burst.  It vaporized three of the 23 islands of tiny Bikini Atoll, 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii, and created a crater that is visible from space.

    A fireball nearly as hot as the center of the sun sucked unto itself water, mud and millions of tons of coral that had been pulverized into ash by the incredible explosion; these clung to tons of radioactive uranium fragments.  The fireball swooshed heavenwards, forming a shimmering white mushroom cloud that hovered over the proving grounds of Bikini and Enewetak atolls, whose inhabitants had earlier been evacuated.

    Wafting eastward, the cloud powdered 236 islanders on Rongelap and Utrik atolls and 28 U.S. servicemen. The islanders played with, drank and ate the snowflake-like particles for days and began suffering nausea, hair loss, diarrhea and skin lesions when they were finally evacuated to a U.S. military clinic.

    These islanders had become a unique medical case. As scientist Neal Hines explains, “Never before in history had an isolated human population been subjected to high but sublethal amounts of radioactivity without the physical and psychological complexities associated with nuclear explosion.”

    Bravo bequeathed the world a new word: fallout.  Even before Bravo, experts—but not the public–knew that the radioactive dust of atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions was invisibly powdering the continental U.S. and touching others worldwide. But Bravo for the first time revealed to the world a new kind of invisible menace, a danger that could not be smelled, seen, felt or tasted.  Bravo exposed radioactive fallout as, what Weisgall calls, “a biological weapon of terror.” It visibly ushered in the globalization of radioactive pollution.

    For these islanders, Bravo also ushered in 60 years of sufferings and a chain reaction of U.S. cover-ups and injustices, as detailed below.  Over the decades, their pleas for just and adequate compensation and U.S. constitutional rights they had been promised were rejected by the U.S. courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, by Congress and by executive-branch administrations headed by presidents of either party.

    SNUBBED BY “AMERICA’S FIRST PACIFIC PRESIDENT”

    The silence by today’s administration of President Obama is acutely embarrassing, given that shortly after his election he described himself as “America’s first Pacific president,” and promised to “strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.”

    Since then, Obama has initiated a “pivot” to the Pacific by beefing up and re-positioning U.S.  military units in the region.  But he failed to acknowledge or recognize that these remote Pacific atolls had served after World War II as proving grounds vital for U.S. superpower status today.  They provided sites for nuclear-weapons tests too powerful and unpredictable to be detonated in the 48 contiguous states and for tests enabling the transition in nuclear delivery systems from conventional bombers to intercontinental missiles—Star-War-like tests that still continue.

    More recently, also ignoring the moral implications undergirding Marshallese pleas, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called on U.S. military leaders to better instill ethics in their services so as to ensure “moral character and moral courage.”

    He issued his instructions for more accountability in the wake of investigations into cheating scandals on proficiency and training tests given to nuclear-related personnel in the Navy and Air Force. The Pentagon is also investigating possible illegal drug violations by 11 Air Force officers, including some responsible for launching America’s deadly nuclear missiles.

    U.N. CRITICIZES U.S. ON HUMAN RIGHTS

    If U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific is un-remembered by the American government, it has not been forgotten internationally.  While the U.S. regularly castigates the governments of China and Russia for human rights abuses or violations, a special United Nations report urges the U.S. government to remedy and compensate Marshall Islanders for its nuclear weapons testing that has caused “immediate and lasting effects” on their human rights.

    “Radiation from the testing resulted in fatalities and in acute and long-term health complications,” according to the report presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in September 2012 by Special Rapporteur Calin Georgescu.  “The effects of radiation have been exacerbated by near-irreversible environmental contamination, leading to the loss of livelihoods and lands.  Moreover, many people continue to experience indefinite displacement.”

    The report also urged the U.S. to provide more compensation and to consider issuing a presidential acknowledgment and apology to victims adversely affected by its tests.

    The international community and the U.N. “has an ongoing obligation to encourage a final and just resolution for the Marshallese people,” the report reads, because they placed the Marshallese under the U.S.-administered strategic trusteeship for 40-plus years from 1947 until 1990. These international groups might consider a more comprehensive compilation of scientific findings “on this regrettable episode in human history.”

    As the sole administrator for the U.N.-sanctioned trust territory, the U.S. government pledged in 1947 “to protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources.”  Instead, the U.S. from 1946 to 1958 conducted 67 atomic and hydrogen tests in the Marshall Islands, with a total yield of 108 megatons, which is 98 times greater than the total yield of all the U.S. nuclear tests conducted in Nevada and is equivalent to 7,200 Hiroshima-size bombs.  That works out to an average of more than 1.6 Hiroshima-size bombs per day for the 12 years.

    In addition, the U.S. as the trust administrator was obliged “to protect the health of the inhabitants.” But the Bravo blast, more than any other single detonation, made visible to the world the adverse health and environmental effects these islanders suffered.  Bravo was the first  U.S. hydrogen device that could be delivered by airplane and was designed to catch up with the Soviets who had six months earlier exploded their aircraft-deliverable hydrogen bomb.

    A CHAIN REACTION OF COVER-UPS & “ASHES OF DEATH”

    A U.S. cover-up began just hours after the Bravo weapon was detonated.   Hardly a “routine atomic test” as it was officially described, Bravo initially created a radioactive, leaf-shaped plume that turned into a lethal zone covering 7,000 square miles—that is, the distance from Washington to New York. Then, radioactive snow-like particles began descending 100 to 280 miles away over lands, lagoons and inhabitants of Rongelap and Utrik atolls.  Within three days, 236 islanders were evacuated to a U.S. Navy clinic.

    The U.S. had hoped to keep the evacuation secret but a personal letter from Corporal Don Whitaker to his hometown newspaper in Cincinnati shared his observations of the distraught islanders arriving at the clinic.  The U.S. then issued a press release saying the islanders were “reported well.”  But gripping photographs taken at the time and later published in the Journal of the American Medical Association documented a 7-year-old girl whose hair had tufted out and a 13-year-old boy with a close-up of the back of the head showing a peeling off of the skin, a loss of hair and a persistent sore on his left ear. Others had lower blood counts that weaken resistance to infections.  Decades later, in 1982, a U.S. agency described Bravo as “the worst single incident of fallout exposures in all the U.S. atmospheric testing program.”Just days after the Cincinnati newspaper expose, another surprise stunned the U.S. government and the world. News accounts reported 23 crew members of a Japanese tuna trawler, the No. 5 Fukuryu Maru (the “Lucky Dragon”) had also been Bravo-dusted with what is known in Japan as shi no hai, or “ashes of death.”

    When the trawler reached home port near Tokyo two weeks after the Bravo explosion, the crews’ radiation sickness and the trawler’s radioactive haul of tuna shocked U.S. officials and created panic at fish markets in Japan and the West Coast. The Japanese government and public described the Lucky Dragon uproar as “a second Hiroshima” and it nearly led to severing diplomatic relations.

    A U.S. doctor dispatched by the government to Japan predicted the crew would recover within a month.  But, six months later, the Lucky Dragon’s 40-year-old radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died.  The New York Times described him as “probably the world’s first hydrogen-bomb casualty.”

    The U.S. cover stories for Bravo’s disastrous results plus subsequent official cover-ups at the time—and continuing today–were that the might of the Bravo shot was greater than had been expected and that the winds shifted at the last minute unexpectedly to waft radioactivity over inhabited areas.  Both cover stories have since been rebutted by revelations in once-secret official documents and by testimonies of two U.S. servicemen who were also Bravo-dusted on Rongerik Atoll.

    A STRING OF UNENDING INJUSTICES

    Within days after the Bravo shot, the U.S. cover-up had secretly taken a more menacing turn.  In an injustice exposing disregard for human health, the Bravo-exposed islanders were swept into a top-secret project in which they were used as human subjects to research the effects of radioactive fallout.

    A week after Bravo, on March 8, at the Navy clinic on Kwajalein, E.P. Cronkite, one of the U.S. medical personnel dispatched there shortly after the islanders’ arrival, was handed a “letter of instruction” establishing “Project 4.1.” It was titled the “Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons.” To avoid negative publicity, the document had been classified as “Secret Restricted Data” until 1994, four years after the end of U.S. responsibilities for its trusteeship at the U.N. and when the Clinton Administration began an open-government initiative.
    It would be 40 years before islanders learned the true nature of Project 4.1.  Documents declassified since 1994 show that four months before the Bravo shot, on November 10, 1953, U.S. officials had listed Project 4.1 to research the effects of fallout radiation on human beings as among 48 experiments to be conducted during the test, thus seeming to indicate that using islanders as guinea pigs was premeditated. However, an advisory commission appointed by President Clinton in 1994 indicated “there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate intentional human testing on Marshallese.”

    For this human-subject research, the islanders had neither been asked nor gave their informed consent—which was established as an essential international standard when the Nuremberg code was written following the war crimes convictions of German medical officers.

    Under Project 4.1, the exposed Rongelapese were studied yearly and so were the Utrik Islanders after thyroid nodules began appearing on them in 1963. The islanders began complaining they were being treated like guinea pigs in a laboratory experiment rather than sick humans deserving treatment.  A doctor who evaluated them annually came close to agreeing when he wrote 38 years after Bravo, “In retrospect, it was unfortunate that the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], because it was a research organization, did not include support of basic health care of populations under study.”

    During this time, Bravo-dusted islanders developed one of the world’s highest rates of thyroid abnormalities; one third of the Rongelapese developed abnormalities in the thyroid, which controls physical and mental growth, and thus resulted in some cases of mental retardation, lack of vigor and stunted development. Islanders complained of stillborn births, cancers and genetic damage.

    Seven weeks after Bravo, on April 21, Cronkite recommended to military officials that exposed Marshallese generally “should be exposed to no further radiation” for at least 12 years and probably for the rest of their natural lives.

    Yet, three years later, U.S. officials returned the Rongelapese to their radioactive homeland after they had spent three months at the Kwajalein military facility and at Ejit Island.  Besides being Bravo-dusted, their homeland by 1957 had accumulated radioactivity from some of the 34 prior nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands.  Utrik Islanders were returned home by the U.S. shortly after their medical stay on Kwajalein.

    For 28 years the Rongelapese lived in their radioactive homeland until 1985.  Unable to get answers to their questions, they discounted U.S. assurances that their island was safe.  Failing to provide the Rongelapese “information on their total radiation condition, information that is available, amounts to a coverup,” according to a memo dated July 22, 1985 written by Tommy McCraw of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Safety.

    In mid-1985, when the U.S. refused to move them, 300 Rongelapese persuaded the environmental organization Greenpeace to transport them and 100 tons of their building materials 110 miles away to Majetto Island. Many of them have since stayed there because they fear their homeland is still too radioactive even though the U.S. has funded resettlement facilities.

    NEW AGREEMENTS BUILT ON U.S. SECRECY

    In 1986, President Reagan signed the Compact of Free Association with related agreements after its ratification by the central government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and the U.S. Congress, thus ending bilaterally America’s trusteeship arrangement, which was continued by the U.N. Security Council until 1990.

    The Compact recognizes RMI as a sovereign, self-governing independent nation in terms of internal management and international relations but with significant U.S. economic aid and services and continues to reserve to the U.S. government sole military access to RMI’s 700,000 square miles used still for long-range missile tests.

    Yet, during the Compact negotiations, the U.S. government failed to disclose material information about its testing program to the Pacific Islanders.  Not until 1994 did the U.S. government respond favorably to RMI’s Freedom of Information Act request for details about the total number of nuclear tests conducted in its territories as well as the kind and yield of each test.  Newly declassified information then also revealed that more islanders were exposed to radiation than previously admitted by the U.S.  As late as June 2013 the U.S. gave RMI officials 650-plus pages detailing freshly declassified fallout results of 49 Pacific hydrogen-bomb blasts with an explosive force equal to 3,200 Hiroshima-size bombs conducted in only two years–1956 and 1958.

    While the Marshallese were kept in the dark during negotiations about material information, the U.S. crafted Compact agreements that included a provision prohibiting those inhabitants from seeking future legal redress in the U.S. courts and dismissing all current court cases in exchange for a $150 million compensation trust fund to be administered by a Nuclear Claims Tribunal.

    However, that trust fund is now depleted. That fund proved inadequate to pay $14 million in monies already awarded for personal health claims and 712 of those granted awards (42%) have died without receiving their full payments. The nuclear-weapons tests are presumed by the U.S. to have afflicted many Marshallese with various kinds of cancers and other diseases. A Congressional Research Service Report for Congress in March 2005 indicates that “as many as 4,000 claims may have yet to be filed among persons alive during testing.”

    A Marshallese petition sent to the House Speaker and President Bush on Sept. 11, 2000 states that circumstances have changed since the initial agreements and the Marshallese government demands far more in just and adequate compensation for health and property claims.  But those demands for justice have thus far gone unanswered.

    March 1 will be solemnly remembered in Asia and the Pacific.  In the Marshall Islands flags are flown at half-mast during the Nuclear Memorial and Survivors Remembrance Day. Last year on the anniversary of the Bravo shot, Marshallese President Christopher J. Loeak described March 1 as “a day that has and will continue to remain in infamy in the hearts and minds of every Marshallese.” He renewed his call for President Obama and the U.S. government for justice.

    This year President Loeak is scheduled in February for a state visit to Japan. He will meet with Emperor Akhito and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and journey to the Hiroshima Peace Park and Memorial Museum.

    With the approaching 60th anniversary of the Bravo blast, Loeak might also visit a pavilion exhibiting the hull of the ill-fated Lucky Dragon fishing trawler and a marker commemorating its 450 tons of radioactive tuna that touched off worldwide alarms.

    The Lucky Dragon and Hiroshima beseech “America’s first Pacific president” and the world to reflect on the catastrophic horror of nuclear weapons and to rectify their bitter legacy of lingering injustices.

    Beverly Deepe Keever is author of News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb and of Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting.

  • The Fallout from Nuclear Secrecy

    More than a half century after U.S. nuclear tests shattered the tranquility of Pacific Ocean atolls — rendering parts of them uninhabitable – the U.S. government has quietly released secret fallout results from 49 Pacific hydrogen-bomb blasts with an explosive force equal to 3,200 Hiroshima-size bombs.

    The U.S. government turned over to the Republic of the Marshall Islands 650-plus pages of newly declassified documents that include four reports detailing fallout results of 49 tests it conducted in Operation Redwing in 1956 and Operation Hardtack in 1958 at Bikini and Enewetak atolls, according to a three-paragraph press release posted on the web site of the U.S. Embassy in the capital city of Majuro on June 12.

    U.S. Ambassador Thomas Armbruster presented the previously classified nuclear documents detailing fallout results to the President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), Christopher  Loeak, and his Cabinet, The Marshall Islands Journal reported. The Journal also indicated that RMI officials are now reviewing these documents, which they had requested. Several documents listed in the press release had been extracted and declassified in the 1980s though they received little public notice.

    Before the nuclear tests, the U.S. government removed all atoll inhabitants; some are still exiled from their radioactive ancestral homelands. All 49 hydrogen-bomb tests were laced with plutonium, one of the deadliest elements known to humankind with a radioactive existence of half a million years.

    From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. government conducted 66 nuclear weapons tests from and near the two atolls of Bikini and Enewetak, when the U.S. administered the Marshall Islands under a U.N.-sanctioned trust arrangement. The reports provide technical and scientific data on results of these second and third most destructive nuclear-weapons operations the U.S. ever conducted and the last ones it exploded in the Marshall Islands and the surrounding waters.

    The reports detail instruments and procedures used to capture and measure fallout from experiments conducted on the atolls, underwater or in the atmosphere. Included are diagrams of flight patterns flown to capture fallout in the clouds, tables listing each detonation, maps showing blast locations plus graphs and charts detailing measurements of old and new radioactive products that were collected by using technical instruments such as spectrometers, aerial radiation detectors or telemeters.

    Not until 1993 did the U.S. declassify information on the explosive force or magnitude of 44 of the 66 nuclear weapons tests conducted at Bikini and Enewetak atolls so as to inform Marshallese and U.S. test personnel. Now, the newly declassified U.S reports give Marshallese and others more fallout results of those explosions.

    The fallout from the 49 explosions in Redwing and Hardtack is hard to comprehend. In 1994, when the U.S. government released details about its 1,054 nuclear tests worldwide from 1945 to its last one in 1992, the data showed the yield – the explosive force – of Operations Redwing and Hardtack at more than 48,846 kilotons, or the equivalent of about 3,200 Hiroshima-size bombs.

    Operation Redwing included tests to assess military effects. Hardtack centered on developing missile warheads and high-yield strategic hydrogen bombs. The next-to-last test in the Redwing series, codenamed Tewa, was launched from a reef at Bikini and packed a yield of 5,000 kilotons — which equates to 333 Hiroshima-size bombs.

    “Tewa was so powerful it lit up the sky in Hawaii,” a U.S. serviceman identified as Carl Duncan is quoted as saying in  describing that blast 2,500 miles from Honolulu. Tewa’s fallout was about 30 percent of its total yield of 5,000 kilotons and contaminated 43,500 nautical miles of ocean, according to “Operation Redwing: Fallout Location and Delineation by Aerial Surveys,” as first declassified in 1988. The U.S. gave a newly declassified version of this report to RMI officials.

    “Eniwetak was hit by very heavy fallout that lasted for days,” Michael Harris, a 22-year-old Army draftee who experienced 12 of the 17 Redwing blasts, wrote, in adding italics on days. “And Carl and Berko (and the rest of the men) were exposed to seven and a half times more radiation than they received from all the other” blasts. (The spelling of Eniwetak has since been changed.)

    The Tewa fallout on the Enewetak base camp did lead to dusting servicemen there with fallout exceeding the maximum permissible exposure, according to a 454-page report titled “Operation Redwing,” dated 1956 and declassified in 1982. However, that report indicated, “The highest exposures were recorded by Air Force flight officers whose aircraft penetrated the nuclear clouds.” The U.S. gave to RMI officials a report focusing on U.S. Air Force operations to collect fallout data titled “Final Report of the Commander Task Group 7.4 Operation Redwing.”

    “Eniwetak was still receiving heavy fallout from the Tewa cloud,” when the next blast, codenamed Huron (each blast was named after a Native American tribe), was detonated the following day, Harris recounted. The Huron blast of 250 kilotons equates to 16 Hiroshima-size bombs. In contrast, the Eisenhower administration at the time disclosed that the Redwing series had powdered Enewetak with only “light” radioactive fallout.

    When a Soviet diplomat delegated to the U.N. Trusteeship Council asked whether these islands must be “lost forever,” the U.S. official in 1956 replied that Bikini and Enewetak might be uninhabitable for at least two generations. Today Bikini and parts of Enewetak are still too radioactive to be safely inhabited.

    As the Redwing tests continued, radiation badges were handed out, which Harris described as “small rectangular plastic discs three inches by an inch and a half.” Even with these, Harris wondered about the future impact of the radiation: “Had our genetic code been compromised? Would we get leukemia or some other form of cancer?”

    His answer came decades later. Those present at Operations Redwing or Hardtack or for six months afterward who succumb to one of 19 primary cancers are eligible for $75,000 compensation made available by Congress.

    At the time of Operation Redwing in 1956, the U.S. government under President Dwight Eisenhower released very little information. This secrecy was politically significant because it kept voters in the dark during the presidential election campaign in which Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson advocated stopping the H-bomb tests being conducted by the Eisenhower administration.

    During the election year, U.S. officials announced only two of the 17 blasts in the Redwing series. This virtual blackout hid from U.S. voters over 77 summertime days during the presidential election campaign Redwing’s 20,820 kilotons of explosive force — or the equivalent of 1,388 Hiroshima-size bombs. That tonnage is the equivalent of 18 Hiroshima-size bombs per day over 77 days.

    Seven Redwing tests received no public notice and the remaining eight blasts were disclosed by Japanese scientists in news articles datelined Tokyo. Thus the fastest and most accurate information about U.S. Redwing testing was disclosed from Tokyo by Japanese, an immense irony given that only a decade earlier, U.S. atomic bombs had contributed to Japan’s surrender by destroying two of its cities. Eisenhower handily won re-election.

    The more powerful 32 detonations in Operation Hardtack were launched in 1958 as the U.S. and the Soviets raced toward declaring a moratorium on such experiments and the U.S. accelerated testing missile warheads. Washington disclosed only nine of the 32 blasts that produced a total yield of 28,026 kilotons, or the equivalent of 1,868 Hiroshima-size bombs – an average of 35 per week in 1958 or five per day. That was the lowest disclosure rate of any U.S. Pacific testing operation.

    Even more ironic than the Japanese disclosures in 1956 were the Soviet ones about the 1958 Hardtack detonations. The Soviets charged that the U.S. had concealed most of the tests being conducted, which even U.S. officials deemed accurate.

    In doing so, the Soviets made huge propaganda gains as they announced their initiative of stopping their nuclear testing that year. Surprisingly, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that “the United States, which pamphleteered its way to independence and elevated advertising and other arts of persuasion into a national cult, should be unable to hold its own in the battle for the headlines of the world.”

    Samples made during several Hardtack tests showed that fractions of the radioactive elements of strontium and cesium were dispersed over distances of more than 4,000 miles, according to a report titled “Operation Hardtack: Fallout Measurements by Aircraft and Rocket Sampling” dated 1961 and declassified in 1985. The U.S. gave a newly declassified version of this report to RMI officials.

    That 4,000-miles range means the radioactive elements could have descended on San Francisco and other West Coast areas.  Both radioactive elements pose serious health problems.

    The decades-long delay in receiving a full accounting of these fallout results helps to substantiate the contention of the RMI that its negotiators were denied vital information when they agreed in 1986 with President Ronald Reagan to form an independent nation, thus ending the American administration of the U.N.-sanctioned trust territory established in 1947.

    Kept in the dark about the fallout results, the Marshallese agreed to terms so insufficient that a U.S.-financed $150 million nuclear-claims trust fund is now penniless, unable to compensate fully Marshallese for health and property damages presumed to have resulted from the tests. RMI’s appeals to Congress, the U.S. courts and the Bush administration have been turned back and the Obama administration has yet to help them.

    Last September, Special Rapporteur Calin Georgescu of the United Nations reported to its Human Rights Council that the U.S. government should:

    –Remedy and compensate Marshall Islanders for its nuclear weapons testing that has caused “immediate and lasting effects” on their human rights,

    –Open up still-secret information and records regarding the environmental and human health effects of past and current U.S. military use of the islands,

    –Grant Marshallese full access to their  medical and other records, and

    –Consider issuing a presidential acknowledgment and apology to victims adversely affected by the 66 weapons tests it conducted when it administered the Marshall Islands as a U.N. strategic trust territory.

    Over the decades, the Marshallese have not been alone in wanting more information about the nuclear tests. In 1954, the Association of State Health Officials voted to ask the federal government to give health officials with security clearances access to classified atomic energy information so as to prevent health hazards.

    From 1945 to 1992, the United States carried out 1,054 nuclear tests worldwide.

    Beverly Deepe Keever is the author of News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb and the newly released Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting.

  • Nuclear Guinea Pigs

    This article was originally published by Honolulu Weekly.


    In the old-timey section of Kalihi, tucked between auto repair shops and boarded-up storefronts, Maza Attari, a Marshall Islander, lived with four family members in a one-bedroom apartment barely bigger than a ping-pong table. When visited by this reporter last summer, Attari had been unable to find steady work since being flown to Honolulu 12 years ago for back surgery that had left him with a severe limp and weakened muscles.


    Attari’s circumstances exemplify the far-reaching impacts of nuclear testing upon irradiated, exiled or dislocated Marshall Islanders. From 1946 to 1962, their home atolls served as experimental grounds where the US detonated nuclear weapons and tested delivery systems in the transition from conventional to intercontinental bombers. In all, the US exploded 86 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, which are situated 3,000 miles west of Honolulu. Those 86 bombs equated to 8,580 Hiroshima-size bombs–or 1.4 weapons per day for 16 years.


    A one-time magistrate and mayor on Utrik, Attari said last summer that he doubted he would be able to return there, prophesying instead, “I’m going to stay here until I die.” He died in September of this year, without ever receiving the reparations that he and other nuclear victims have claimed.


    The Debt


    It is a debt that is not only owed them, but that has compounded over time. Because these nuclear weapons experiments were too dangerous and unpredictable to be conducted on the US mainland, Attari and other Marshallese are part of the reason for America’s superpower status today. A half-century later, the Marshall Islands continue to serve as a crucial part of an outer defense periphery for the US heartland–6,000 miles away. That periphery includes the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, where for more than three decades missiles fired from 4,000 miles away (at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California) have crashed near Kwajalein Atoll, horribly frightening the indigenous inhabitants and leaving them unsure of where the debris will fall.


    A Child Out of Time


    Attari was 7 years old and living on Utrik Island on March 1, 1954, when the US unleashed the most destructive weapon in its history–the 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, code-named Bravo. It was early in the morning, and his family members leaped up when they heard a deafening noise. “Everyone was surprised,” he explains. Radioactive fallout contaminated the uncovered cement containers used for drinking water and local food. “Too bad,” US officials said when they arrived days later to begin evacuating 239 sickened inhabitants of Utrik and Rongelap atolls to the Kwajalein naval base.


    Snow-like radioactive particles fell 100 to 125 miles away on property and persons on these atolls, who had not been evacuated beforehand or alerted about precautions to take.


    The British government, between 1957 and 1958 conducted nine atmospheric tests, yielding the equivalent of about 12,000,000 tons of TNT, and the French carried out 193 Pacific nuclear tests yielding the equivalent of about 13,500,000 tons beginning in 1962 and ending on Jan. 27, 1996. The British and French data were recently gleaned from hard-to-find sources and compiled by University of Hawaii botany professor Mark Merlin and graduate student Ricardo Gonzalez, enabling them to reveal for the first time a pathbreaking, half-century panorama of the environmental consequences of Pacific nuclear testing conducted by all three nations.


    The Things They Carried


    As a result, many exposed Islanders have since suffered from or been operated on for abnormalities of the thyroid, which can lead to stunted growth, mental retardation and cancer. Like many on Utrik, Attari said, his sister died of cancer and three brothers with thyroid abnormalities have also died. Attari had not been subjected to surgery but he medicated his thyroid by daily taking US-supplied white, pea-size tablets called levothyroxin. He continued to be monitored at least twice a year by US Department of Energy medical teams who study Bravo-exposed islanders in a program kept secret for 40 years.


    After three months on Kwajalein, Attari and other Utrik residents were returned home. But it was three years before the more severely contaminated Rongelapese, who suffered skin burns, vomiting, hair loss and diarrhea, were returned to their ancestral island. US photographers extensively documented the move–labeled “Rongelap Repatriation”–that included mug shots of the returnees.


    The Pain of Exile


    It caused some Marshallese to endure the pain and suffering of a long list of verified diseases and exiled them from their ancestral homelands where they had maintained their way of life and a self-sufficient livelihood. It contaminated their islands and marine life, in some cases for decades, if not centuries. It vaporized some of their precious lands and moonscaped others, as shown by the bombing craters on Enewetak.


    The Bikini islanders, for example, were uprooted in 1946 so that their atoll could serve as a Pacific proving ground for the first US nuclear test and are still exiled today. That first test at Bikini inspired creation of the two-piece swimsuit that has ever since populated Waikiki and beaches worldwide. But Bikinians are ignored in their petition for more funding from the US government for land damages and numerous other claims that exceed earlier payments. The testing prompted one irradiated Rongelap woman to exclaim, Americans “are smart at doing stupid things.”


    An Almost-Forever Poison


    The Bravo H-bomb was l,000 times more powerful than the bomb detonated above Hiroshima and it was laced with plutonium, one of the planet’s most deadly substances with a radioactive existence of half a million years that may be hazardous to humans for at least half that time. In addition, Bravo and other US Pacific tests were launched in the atmosphere or underwater, which spewed radioactive mist, pulverized coral and snow-flake-like particles high into the air and, most disastrously, across the Pacific, landing on peoples and soils where it could be absorbed or inhaled for decades and will continue as hazards for a near-eternity.


    Unwittingly and unknowingly, Attari and other Pacific islanders had been thrust from an oral culture into the atomic age; without a vocabulary word for radioactivity, they began calling it a poison and to describe themselves as poisoned people. Attari and the other Bravo–contaminated Marshallese entered history as the first-ever examples of the effects of radioactive fallout on humans who had escaped a nuclear explosion. Unlike the wartime victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic-weapons explosions, a historian notes, Pacific Islanders who experienced the peacetime tests are important because “they have already lived in what might be our common future.”


    APEC and Forgotten Islanders


    Attari and other Marshallese have battled for more than a decade in the US courts, before Congress and with the Bush administration for more funds to pay greater-than-anticipated costs of their health care, property damages, resettlement, cleanup, and compensation for their vaporized islands. A 1995 study by the Congressional Research Service advised Congress that the Marshallese health-related claims and loss-of-land methodologies were reasonable and appropriate but their multi-billion-dollar estimates needed more analysis. The islanders are still awaiting a favorable nod from President Obama, in town this week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference.


    Leaders joining President Obama this week hail from 21 countries including the Russian Federation, People’s Republic of China, Japan, Indonesia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, New Zealand and Hong Kong. But missing will be the voices and concerns of many peoples of the so-called Small Island States, scattered amidst about 25,000 atolls, islets and islands, that experienced the economic havoc and uniquely violent history that have transformed the Pacific region during half a century. Nor is the Marshallese multi-billion-dollar petition now confronting Obama and Congress on the agenda of APEC leaders, despite its relevance to the continuing controversy cast by Fukushima’s nuclear disaster.


    Long before the fears of drifting contamination seeded by Chernobyl and Fukushima, Bravo and the other shots in the H-Bomb era produced radioactive components that encircled the globe, settling silently from the heavens. One exhaustive study titled “Atomic Audit” concluded that fallout and other residual radioactivity from atmospheric nuclear testing by all nations have caused or will cause through infinity an estimated 3 million premature cancer deaths. As a result, University of Hawaii scientist John Harrison explained, all organisms, including humans, carry the watermark of the nuclear era woven into their bodies, thus changing “the chemical signature of our bones.”


    Guinea Pigs


    Not until 1994, 40 years after Bravo’s fallout, did Attari and other exposed islanders learn they were used as human subjects to research the effects of radioactive fallout and of livin. Within days after Bravo, while still at the naval base to which they had been evacuated, Rongelap and Utrik Islanders were incorporated into Project 4.1. They were neither asked for nor gave their informed consent, nor were told the risks of the studies for which they gained no benefit.


    Titled the “Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons, the document was classified “Secret Restricted Data.”


    Seven weeks after Bravo, on April 21, the lead US doctor examining them, Dr. E.P. Cronkite, recommended to military officials in Honolulu that these Marshallese should probably be exposed to no more radiation for the rest of their “natural lives.” Despite this recommendation, after three years, US officials in 1957 assured the Rongelapese that their radioactive homeland was safe and returned them there. Rongelapese remained in their radioactive homeland for 28 years. They were shocked to learn that a 1982 US Department of Energy report indicated that parts of Rongelap, where some were living, “were as contaminated as those forbidden to humans.” As a result, in 1985, the islanders beseeched US officials to move them. The US refused. So 70 islanders were removed by the Greenpeace environmental organization. During those years on Rongelap, they lived in an environment that had been contaminated not only by Bravo and five other shots in 1954 but also by the residue from 17 shots in 1956 and 32 shots in 1958. Data on radiation levels from tests in 1956 and 1958, when combined yield greater than Bravo, have been requested by the Marshallese government but almost 50 years later US officials had yet to disclose them.


    During these years, many Marshallese lost their lives or loved ones as exemplified by John Anjain, the mayor of Rongelap in 1954. Because of the fallout, he and four members of his family were operated on for thyroid tumors. His wife’s tumor killed her. His son, who was one year old at the time of Bravo, had a thyroid tumor removed when he was 12 and died seven years later from leukemia. The elder Anjain died in Honolulu’s Straub Hospital in 2004 at age 83.


    Denying the Experiment


    Anjain had accused US officials of using the islanders as “guinea pigs” for regularly monitoring their health for decades without providing them medical treatment. But in October 1995 an advisory committee appointed by President William Clinton “found no evidence that the initial exposure of the Rongelapese or their later relocation constituted a deliberate human experiment.”


    Since being rescued by Greenpeace, Rongelapese have been living 100 miles away on Majetto Island, sustained by US aid. The US has provided $45 million to establish a Rongelap Resettlement Trust Fund that has led to cleaning up soil on parts of the main island but not on all of the 60 or so islets in the atoll that are used for food gathering. Some houses, a church, power plant, water-making equipment and paved roads now dot parts of Rongelap Island.


    US officials are vowing this autumn to cut US aid to those electing to remain at Majetto rather than to repatriate home.


    Rongelapese are reluctant to return. “Resettling the people of Rongelap under rules severely restricting their ability to move about their homeland, or to gather food from their traditional sources, does not constitute sensible repatriation,” Marshallese Sen. Michael Kabua, a member of the Rongelap Atoll Local Government Council, told a US House subcommittee on May 20, 2010. The people do not want to return, he said, “to a land where the future well-being of their children will be in jeopardy, and where they themselves cannot be assured of safety and security,” and where “they will remain as strangers in their own home.” And they remember the sad history of the Americans repatriating islanders to their heavily radioactive homelands on the assurance they were safe only to learn otherwise decades and heartbreaks later.

  • Suffering, Secrecy, Exile Bravo 50 years later

    Almira Ainri was 10 years old when she was catapulted into the atomic age.

    In June of 1946, as the U.S. Navy readied the first atomic bomb in peacetime – just the fourth in history – Ainri and about 100 other inhabitants of Rongelap Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, were sent south by ship to Lae Atoll, where it was thought they would be safe from the effects of the explosion 100 miles away, at Bikini Atoll.

    Eight years later, in 1954, Ainri and other Rongelapese weren’t as lucky.

    Then, on March 1 on Bikini Atoll, the U.S. detonated the Bravo shot, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb it dropped on Hiroshima.

    The most powerful bomb in U.S. nuclear history, Bravo had a radioactive cloud that plumed over 7,000 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey. A hundred or so miles downwind, near-lethal fallout powdered at least 236 inhabitants of the Rongelap and Utrik atolls, contaminating their ancestral homelands. The Bravo-dusted islanders entered history as unique examples of the effects of radioactive fallout on humans.

    Ainri, who now lives in Honolulu, is one of 118 survivors of the Bravo shot. For her and other islanders, the bomb’s detonation set off a chain reaction of events over the last half century. They became unwitting subjects in secret U.S. research on the effects of nuclear fallout and ultimately were forced to leave their idyllic homeland, which remains uninhabitable to this day due to radioactivity.

    Archeological finds on Bikini Atoll suggest that the first Micronesians likely arrived in the Marshall Islands between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago. Germany annexed the islands in 1885. Japan captured them in 1914. Allied forces captured and occupied them in World War II; the war’s end left them in U.S. hands. The U.S. began nuclear testing there the next year.

    The Marshall Islands were declared a Trust Territory by the United Nations in 1947, with the U.S. as the administrator, an arrangement that did not end until 1991. The following treatment of the irradiated islanders raises doubts about the behavior of the U.S. government:

    • U.S. officials failed to evacuate Ainri and other islanders before the Bravo shot and then delayed their removal for more than 50 hours after the fallout.
    • On March 7, 1954, six days after the Bravo shot, Project 4.1, “Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons,” established a secret U.S. medical program to monitor and evaluate islanders exposed to radiation, turning them into experimental human subjects without their consent.
    • Ainri and other islanders were allowed to return to their irradiated homeland in 1957. It was later deemed unsafe for human habitation.
    • Marshall Islanders were injected with or fed radioactive tracers without their consent, contrary to medical recommendations made by U.S. medical officers six weeks after the Bravo shot that the islanders should receive no more exposure to radioactivity in their lifetimes.

    The research projects arising from Bravo were begun just seven years after war crimes tribunals convicted German medical officers for their horrific experiments with concentration camp inmates during World War II. Those tribunals led to the Nuremberg Code, an international standard for experiments involving human subjects, which stipulated that the voluntary consent of the subject “is absolutely essential.” The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission established similar standards, requiring the consent of human subjects and the expectation that an experiment would benefit the subject, but they had little distribution or effect in the U.S. bureaucracy.

    Did U.S. bureaucratic bungling and operational obstacles cause the mistreatment of the islanders or, as so many islanders and others say, did U.S. officials make the islanders guinea pigs to study the effects of radioactivity?

    ‘Like needles over my whole body’

    At about 6 a.m. on March 1, 1954, Almira Ainri was awakened by the brightness and noise of an inferno as hot as the core of the sun. Ainri was 18 then, married, and pregnant with her first child.

    The island shook, she recalled. The air was gray. Snowlike particles fell from the sky.

    A day later, U.S. soldiers with Geiger counters arrived and found people of Rongelap weak and vomiting. Fifty hours and more after Bravo’s detonation, the 236 inhabitants on or near Rongelap and Utrik atolls were evacuated to the military clinic at Kwajalein Atoll. There, they were scrubbed every day with special soaps. The pressure of the water on Ainri’s blistered skin felt “like needles over my whole body,” she said – “like I was burning.”

    After the blast, Ainri gave birth to a son, Robert. His thyroid glands were so damaged that he became dwarfed. The glands were later removed, consigning him to a lifelong regimen of medication. Ainri got pregnant again and gave birth, she said, to “a bunch of grapes, that had to be pulled out of me.” Twice more Ainri got pregnant, she said, and gave birth to children who appeared normal but died several days later. Another son, Alex, survived, but again with damaged thyroid glands. Ainri herself has thyroid problems; two new growths recently appeared there.

    The suffering of Ainri and her family is hardly unique. Within a decade of the Bravo shot, more than 90 percent of the children who were under 12 years old at the time of the explosion developed thyroid tumors. Today, Marshall Islanders have one of the world’s highest rates of abnormalities of the thyroid, which often result in cases of retardation, cretinism and stunted development.

    For these and other conditions that a special U.S.-Marshallese tribunal presumes were caused by nuclear weapons testing, the U.S. pays compensation. Those with leukemia or cancer of the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas or bone are awarded $125,000. Islanders with severe growth retardation due to thyroid damage get $100,000.

    By the end of 2002, a U.S. trust fund had paid about $79 million to 1,808 islanders, but because the trust fund could not cover all its obligations, 46 percent of affected islanders died before they were fully paid for their injuries.

    Rongelap Atoll comprises 61 islets with a combined land mass of about three square miles and a lagoon of 388 square miles. Because it is still too radioactive for humans, its former residents are scattered. In Honolulu, Ainri lives in a home where her pandanus floor mats mingle with a caller-I.D. phone and a television set.

    Under a 1996, $45-million agreement with the U.S., projects are underway to prepare for the return of Rongelapese to the five southernmost, least-contaminated islets of the atoll. A glisteningly white church has been refurbished, complete with striking lapis trim. An airstrip, desalinization plant, field station, power plant and docks have been constructed or installed. Phase 2 calls for the construction of 50 four-bedroom homes, a dispensary and a hospital, school building, residences for doctors and teachers, a library, a town hall and a municipal building. All that is missing is a date when the resettlement will occur.

    The three surprises

    Corporal Don Whitaker hardly could have imagined the worldwide surprise his letter home would create. Writing to his hometown newspaper, in Cincinnati, in March 1954, Whitaker told of seeing distraught Marshall Islanders arrive at a navy clinic on Kwajalein after the Bravo shot. It was one of three surprises that shocked the world, and members of President Eisenhower’s administration.

    The first surprise was the magnitude of the Bravo bomb’s blast. Its 15-megaton yield was more than twice what U.S. officials had expected. Set off from Bikini Atoll, it vaporized three of the atoll’s 23 islets. The test was expected, however.

    Whitaker’s letter was the next surprise. In it, he revealed the evacuation of islanders that U.S. officials had tried to keep secret. Published March 9, eight days after the blast, Whitaker’s letter prompted the Atomic Energy Commission to issue a press release the next day, masking the magnitude of the Bravo shot and its radioactive effects with a bland announcement. But Bravo was hardly the “routine atomic test” the release described, and the phrase “some radioactivity” did not come close to describing the islanders’ dosage, which was the equivalent of the amount received by Japanese citizens less than two miles from Ground Zero at Hiroshima, lawyer-historian Jonathan M. Weisgall writes.

    Twenty-eight years later, the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency would call the Bravo shot “the worst single incident of fallout exposures in all the U.S. atmospheric testing program.”

    The third surprise came just days after the AEC had assured the public that the irradiated islanders were fine. A Japanese tuna trawler, the No. 5 Fukuryu Maru(“Lucky Dragon”), was 112 miles east of Bikini Atoll at the time of the Bravo explosion, well outside the danger zone announced by U.S. officials. Yet Bravo’s staggering detonation powdered the boat’s 23 crew members with what is known in Japan as shi no hai – “ashes of death.” When the Fukuryu Maru reached its home port of Yaizu, about 120 miles south of Tokyo, on March 14, the crew was suffering from a radiation sickness that stunned the world.

    The crewmen’s sickness and the subsequent panic over radioactive tuna in the U.S. and Japanese fish markets led to an international furor. The Japanese government and people dubbed it “a second Hiroshima” and it nearly led to severing diplomatic relations. A U.S. government doctor dispatched to Japan blamed the Japanese press for exaggerating the condition of the fishermen, who, he predicted, would recover completely in about a month.

    Six months later, Aikichi Kuboyama, the 40-year-old radio operator of theFukuryu Maru , died. He was “probably the world’s first hydrogen-bomb casualty,” said The New York Times .

    It was this triple-play of surprises – Bravo’s tremendous force, Whitaker’s letter and the plight of the Fukuryu Maru – that chinked the U.S. government’s usual policy of secrecy. Instead, the word fallout entered the world’s lexicon. For the first time, people in Japan and Russia, London and Bonn, New York and Milwaukee, were aware of a danger that could not be smelled, seen, felt or heard.

    ‘The sun rising in the west’

    The Bravo shot was the first U.S. hydrogen device that could be delivered by airplane. It was designed to catch up with the Soviets who, in August 1953, had exploded their first hydrogen bomb deliverable by aircraft.

    The Bravo shot was so dangerous that it could not be detonated in the continental United States. Nor could it be set off at Enewetak Atoll, where the U.S. conducted nuclear blast tests from 1948 to 1958, for fear it would wipe out the extensive U.S. equipment and installations there. So it was tested at Bikini Atoll.

    Even before the Bravo shot, experts knew that the radioactive dust of atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions was invisibly and unknowingly powdering the continental United States and touching others worldwide. The U.S. government’s failure to move the Rongelap and Utrik Islanders in advance of the Bravo shot is painfully ironic because Almira Ainri and other Rongelapese had been moved before the first peacetime atomic test, in 1946 – and Bravo was 1,000 times more powerful. Yet the islanders were not moved in 1954 because of “the high cost and logistic problems. in supporting such an operation,” according to U.S. medical officers.

    Six hours before Bravo, U.S. officials knew that the winds had shifted, putting Rongelap and Utrik Islanders in the path of fallout, but they proceeded with the detonation anyway. That knowledge, coupled with the lag of several days after the detonation before islanders were evacuated, led to speculation that the U.S. deliberately used the islanders as guinea pigs.

    A month after the Bravo shot, Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss told reporters that allegations that the evacuation of the Marshall Islanders had been deliberately delayed were “utterly false, irresponsible and gravely unjust to the men engaged in this patriotic service.” He also said that he had just visited the islanders at the Kwajalein clinic and they “appeared to me to be well and happy.”

    Bravo was detonated at 6 a.m. Within four hours, the 28 U.S. weathermen on Rongerik Atoll, in the Marshall islands, saw a mist from the blast. Seven hours later, the needle of their radiation-measuring instrument went off the scale. They were evacuated the next day.

    Clouds of snowlike particles moved over Alinginae, Rongelap, Utrik and Ailuk atolls. The clouds deposited radioactive fallout on the people below and irradiated them with doses of “cloud shine,” radiation produced by the blast itself, which Rongelapese described as being like “the sun rising in the west.”

    About two-thirds of the Rongelapese were nauseated for two days, according to a U.S. medical officer who examined them a week after Bravo. Roughly one in ten were vomiting and had diarrhea. Some had itching, burning skin that turned into black-pigmented areas and lesions, some of which became ulcerated and infected. Hair fell out. Blood counts fell.

    The Bravo-dusted islanders disappeared from the news for the next year, because of the AEC’s clampdown on information. But if they were not making news, they were making medical history.

    Guinea pigs

    Within days of the Bravo shot, irradiated islanders were unwittingly swept into a top-secret effort to research the effects of radioactive fallout on humans. “Never before in history had an isolated human population been subjected to high but sub-lethal amounts of radioactivity without the physical and psychological complexities associated with nuclear explosion,” said scientist Neal O. Hines. Islanders would not learn the true nature of the experiment for 40 years, until 1994, when President Clinton ordered thousands of documents declassified in the wake of a national scandal involving human radiation experiments.

    Four months before the Bravo shot, a then-secret U.S. document listed research Project 4.1 among 48 tests to be conducted during and after the explosion. “(D)ue to possible adverse publicity reaction, you will specifically instruct all personnel in this project to be particularly careful not to discuss the purposes of this project and its background or its findings with any except those who have a specific ‘need to know,’” the document said.

    The purpose of Project 4.1 was to study the effects of fallout radiation on human beings.

    Three days after Bravo, Project 4.1 began to unfold in Washington, D.C., where top medical officials decided that the victims of its hazardous debris would be appropriate research subjects. A week after the blast, 25 officials of the AEC’s medical program arrived at Kwajalein Atoll. Six weeks after the blast, Project 4.1 workers recommended a lifelong study of the affected islanders. Rongelapese were studied annually, as were Utrik islanders after thyroid nodules were detected in 1963.

    Islanders began to complain that they were being treated like guinea pigs rather than sick humans needing treatment. A doctor who evaluated them annually came close to agreeing when he wrote, 38 years after Bravo, “In retrospect, it was unfortunate that the AEC, because it was a research organization, did not include support of basic health care of populations under study.”

    Return to Rongelap

    In 1957, U.S. officials assured Rongelapese that their homeland was safe and returned them there. Upon their return, U.S. medical officers shifted the emphasis of their study to what researchers who studied the documents released in the 1990s described as “the formation of an integrated long-term human environmental research program to document the bioaccumulation of fallout and the human effects of this exposure.” In sum, U.S. officials knew they were placing the Rongelapese in a radioactive environment, even though the islanders had already sustained more than a lifetime’s worth of radiation.

    A 1982 U.S. Department of Energy report indicated that some inhabited areas of Rongelap were as contaminated as the parts forbidden to humans. It was the first report prepared for the Rongelapese in their own language and it shocked them. “All we needed to see was the center fold-out and our worst fears were confirmed!” Marshall Islands Senator Jeton Anjain told the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1991.

    Rongelap, their principal island of residence since their 1957 return, had been assigned a level “3” of contamination, meaning it was unsafe for human habitation.

    In 1984, Rongelapese representatives asked the U.S. to evacuate them. The U.S. refused.

    The next year, the Rongelapese left anyway. “It was by no means an easy decision, for our people knew that it might mean they and their children would never again know life on their ancestral homeland of the last 4,000 years,” Anjain told the U.S. Senate committee.

    “But the safety of our children and the unborn was more important.”

    After living on radioactive Rongelap for 28 years, 70 islanders were moved by Greenpeace to Majetto Island, 100 miles away. Confirming their fears, a 1988 study authorized by the U.S. government and subsequent official testimony recommended that part of Rongelap Atoll be considered “forbidden” territory and that the remaining part would be safe only if inhabitants ate imported food for the next 30 to 50 years .

    ‘The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany’

    Residents of Rongelap and Enewetak atolls were also used in human radiation experiments involving radioactive tracers of tritiated water and chromium-51 injections, Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Phillip Muller told the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1996.

    The U.S. Department of Energy withheld critical information about the adverse effects of U.S. weapons tests from the U.S. Congress and Marshallese officials, Muller said, and medical research without the consent of Marshallese subjects continued.

    Marshallese Senator Tony de Brum told the committee that U.S. doctors 50 years ago pulled healthy as well as unhealthy teeth of islanders without their consent, for use in cesium, strontium or plutonium studies. Even in the mid-1990s, islanders were unsure whether they were being cared for or studied by U.S. medical personnel, de Brum said.

    In 1999, Muller’s allegations of human radiation experiments were confirmed by the Department of Energy, the successor agency of the Atomic Energy Commission. Declassified documents showed that U.S. officials included the irradiated islanders under the umbrella of its extensive biological program. Its worst known cases included irradiation of the male organs of Oregon and Washington state prisoners, feeding radioactive fallout materials to university students, giving small doses of radioactive iron to pregnant women and feeding Quaker Oats laced with radioactive traces of iron and calcium to supposedly mentally retarded boys in a Massachusetts state home. Upon first learning about these kinds of experiments in 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary exclaimed, “The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.”

    Who will pay?

    Under the U.N. Trusteeship, the U.S. government was to prepare the people of the Marshall Islands for self-government. In 1986, President Reagan signed the Compact of Free Association after its ratification by the Marshall Islands government and Congress. Its provisions expired in 2001. New provisions for the compact were agreed upon earlier this year, but they are silent on U.S. funding that has since become inadequate to cover the spiraling claims of those harmed by U.S. nuclear weapons testing, including Bravo’s fallout.

    There may be a ray of hope for the Marshallese, however. The compacts say that nuclear testing damages to persons or property discovered after the original 1986 agreement can be covered in a new request to the U.S. Congress with documentation that circumstances have changed.

    One changed circumstance is that the U.S. government did not disclose to the Marshallese government the yield of 44 of the 66 U.S. nuclear weapons tests detonated in its republic until 1993. The next year, a comprehensive list of 1,054 U.S. nuclear weapons tests worldwide and their yields was made public by the Department of Energy. It shows that the yield of 82 tests in the U.S.-administered Bikini, Enewetak and Johnston Atolls and Pacific waters from 1946 to 1962 was at least 128,704 kilotons. That’s the equivalent of 8,580 Hiroshima-sized bombs, or 1.47 such bombs per day for 16 years.

    A second changed circumstance is that the personal-injury and property claims arising from nuclear weapons testing have exceeded the capacity of the $150 million trust fund established to pay them.

    The people of Enewetak and Bikini have been awarded just over $1 billion for property damages, radiological cleanup, loss of use and hardship and suffering, but as of the end of 2002, less than one percent of that money could be paid. And class-action damage claims for the people of Rongelap and Utrik are still pending.

    About 5,000 claims seeking a combined $5.75 billion for radiation-related damages arising from U.S. weapons testing in the Pacific have been pressed. The U.S. has paid $759 million through 1998, researchers Arjun Makhijani and Stephen I. Schwartz wrote in their landmark volume titled Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 . .

    In 2000, invoking the “changed circumstances” provision of the compact, the Marshallese government asked the U.S. Congress for more funds and services to meet health costs and property damages. (Its petition can be viewed online atwww.rmiembassyus.org – click “nuclear” and then “petition.”)

    In November 2001, the Marshallese government’s petition was resubmitted to a new U.S. Congress and President Bush. As of early this month, the U.S. has yet to take any action.

    This article has been adapted from University of Hawai`i Professor Beverly Deepe Keever’s forthcoming book News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb.

  • Un-Remembered Origins of “Nuclear Holocaust”: World’s First Thermonuclear Explosion of Nov. 1, 1952

    National and media anniversaries of signal events like Sept. 11th are important in helping to form the collective memory that over time and across generations shapes what a society remembers — or what it forgets. An anniversary that serves as a news peg for journalists re-ignites powerful emotional connections for those who lived through the event, communication scholar Jill Edy writes, and may be even more influential for those who did not live through the event because it “creates a world they never experienced.” Even more important, Edy notes, anniversary journalism “impacts whether we remember our past at all.”

    An un-remembered part of the U.S. past occurred on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 3,000 miles west of Honolulu and 4,800 miles from the West Coast. On Nov. 1, 1952, at 7:15 a.m., the U.S. government detonated the world’s first thermonuclear device, codenamed “Mike,” the most powerful man-made explosion in history up to that time. In layperson’s terms, it was the prototype for the “hydrogen bomb.”

    Mike unleashed a yield of 10.4 megatons, an explosive force 693 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that had annihilated Hiroshima in 1945 and the fourth most powerful shot of the 1,054 acknowledged nuclear tests in U.S. history. Ushering in the thermonuclear era, the Mike shot raised to a new level the capacity for mass destruction that had been inaugurated by humans with atomic weapons only seven years earlier. Because of this new dimension in the power of nuclear weapons, President Eisenhower observed in 1956, “Humanity has now achieved, for the first time in its history, the power to end its history.”

    The Mike shot was controversial. Debate raged within the scientific community over detonating the so-called super bomb. One camp warned that the atmospheric chain reaction from the thermonuclear explosion would immolate the entire planet, the University of Hawaii’s environmental coordinator John Harrison reports; or “drive the radioactive dust into outer space!,” health and environmental scientist Merril Eisenbud notes. Calling such fears farfetched, those in the second camp, led by influential physicist Edward Teller, prevailed. The public was not told about the shot at the time for fear that it would influence the presidential election held just three days later. Sixteen days after the Mike shot, U.S. officials announced a thermonuclear experiment, but provided no details.

    Mike was a proto-bomb; in fact, it was more like a building, Harrison explains as he studies a sepia-toned photograph of the cylindrical Mike device, about 20 feet in height and eight to 10 feet in diameter. Weighing 82 tons and standing vertically like the shiny innards of a giant thermos bottle, the cylinder dwarfs in the photo a scrawny, shirt-less man sitting in a chair, elbows cocked on his knees, and staring at the earth on Elugelab Island of Enewetak Atoll. The cylinder is attached to king-size tubes to keep its contents of hydrogen fuel, liquid deuteride, refrigerated below its boiling point of -417.37 degrees fahrenheit.

    More than 11,000 civilians and servicemen worked on or near Enewetak to prepare for the blast. They left Enewetak by ship before the Mike device was remotely detonated on the earth’s surface from 30 miles away. The energy from the splitting of atoms with heavy nuclei like plutonium produced temperatures on the order of those at the core of the sun that were necessary to kick-start the fusion of the liquid deuteride with other lightweight hydrogen nuclei. This fusion produced even greater energy, so much that, as physicist Kosta Tsipis writes, “An exploding nuclear weapon is a miniature, instantaneous sun.”

    The Mike test vaporized the island of Elugelab. Researcher Leona Marshall Libby wrote at the time that Mike’s detonation created a fireball that swooshed outward and upward for three miles in diameter and turned millions of gallon of lagoon water to steam. It left behind a 1.2-mile-wide crater and a deeply fractured reef platform. Harrison notes that in the aftermath of a subsequent, adjacent thermonuclear test — the Koa shot in 1958 — the weakened seaward wall of the reef next to the Mike crater cleaved away and plummeted into the ocean depths.

     

    EPIPHANY OF A “NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST”

    Harrison, who lived at Enewetak for five years beginning in 1978 while serving as a UH administrator and senior research scientist there, says the destructiveness of the Mike shot defies human comprehension. He recalls the scores of times he guided his outboard motorboat across segments of the choppy aquamarine waters of Enewetak’s 388-acre lagoon encircled by the 42 made-by-coral islands so pristine and lovely “they are God’s gift to the entire world.” His boat would slice into the shallower turquoise waters that overlay the close-in reefs and “then all of a sudden into the deeper, more cloudy waters that delineated or that filled this enormous, enormous round circle that was the Mike crater.”

    Each time Harrison made that journey, he says, “it changed my life.” The experience overwhelmed his senses every time he crossed that threshold into the darker, murkier blue waters within the crater. He would struggle to understand the cataclysm of that instant that had transformed an island into a massive hole in the reef. “Then and now and to the day I die,” he says, “I could not, I can not and I will never wrap my mind around the significance of that.”

    “There is no way that the mind can grasp that amount of force,” he elaborates. “We have nothing to compare it with.” Even so, once in the middle of the Mike crater, he sensed that he had experienced “the ultimate epiphany of what a nuclear holocaust is all about.”

    A rare snapshot of the havoc caused by the Mike shot is provided by a before-and-after survey made of Enewetak by a scientific research team from the University of Washington and written up in a one-of-kind report archived by Harrison. Just eight days after the Mike shot, the team found water, plankton, sponges, starfish, snails, clams and 22 kinds of fish contained much more radioactivity than samples collected before the Mike shot on Oct. 21-28, with the highest levels found in those collected closest to Ground Zero. After the Mike shot, the few live rats found were “ill and lethargic” and the sole bird found on one islet “had been blown to bits by the shock wave,” suggesting that animals had little chance to survive the blast. The report notes, “A large number of dead and dying fish were seen in and close to the turbid water flowing from the target area westward inside the lagoon.” The greatest radioactivity in fish was later found to be concentrated in the digestive tract, followed by the liver and muscle; in rats and some birds radioactivity was concentrated in bones. Even algae that had been scrubbed with a brush and detergent retained “specks” of fallout, the report says, indicating most of the “radioactivity is actually present within the alga.” Lastly, spotlighting the significance of color in absorbing the heat of the fireball, the team notes, “Birds with dark colored feathers were burned more severely than were the white fairy terns.”

    A 1978 study of 476 Enewetak rats by environmental scientists from Bowling Green State University, M. Temme and W. B. Jackson, noted possible genetic effects caused by radiation. They hypothesized that radiation effects may have caused deformations in an important inherited marker of some rats — the ridge of the roof of the mouth. The scientists described these ridges as exemplifying “expressions of genes affecting development.” Since 1978, Jackson told Honolulu Weekly on Oct. 21, followup studies have supported the notion of possible radiation-induced genetic effects.

    HIDING 8,580 HIROSHIMA-SIZE BOMBINGS IN 16 YEARS

    Most of the atmospheric testing on the U.S. side was conducted in the Pacific, but the full extent of these tests has become clear only in the past decade with the lifting of official secrecy. Only since December 1993 has the explosive force of 44 of the 66 U.S. nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands been revealed to Marshallese officials and others.

    In 1994 the most relevant, comprehensive list of all 1,054 U.S. nuclear weapons tests worldwide was made public, allowing scholars to calculate for the first time the full extent of the entire U.S. nuclear testing program that ceased in 1992. These documents show that nearly three-quarters of the yield of all 1,054 U.S. nuclear tests worldwide occurred during only 82 tests conducted in the U.S.-administered Pacific Islands or the Pacific waters during the 16 years of the U.S. Pacific nuclear testing from 1946 to 1962. This prolonged secrecy, even beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union, hid for decades the yield of Pacific tests amounting to at least 128,704 kilotons during the 16-year period, a destructive force equal to detonations of 8,580 Hiroshima-size bombs.

    The atolls of Bikini, Enewetak and Johnston plus Pacific waters served as sites for nuclear weapons experiments far too powerful and unpredictable to be conducted on the U.S. mainland. The yield of what the New York Times described as the mightiest nuclear explosion within the continental United States, which was the explosion of the first hydrogen device in Nevada in 1962, was but .0069 of the magnitude of the most powerful Pacific test, later disclosed as the 15-megaton Bravo shot of 1954. In serving as sites for such immense infernos, these Pacific atolls and their people contributed enormously to U.S. superpower status today. And, they contributed to restraint, and the retreat from overt nuclear hostilities during decades of the most dangerous political confrontation in history, the Cold War. Recent revelations regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis are chillingly reflective of that nuclear brink.

    OMIT “THERMONUCLEAR” FROM PRESS RELEASES

    Ten months after the Mike detonation, in August 1953, U.S. officials detected the first Soviet hydrogen explosion and announced the event to the world. The Eisenhower Administration then set up a deliberate policy to confuse the public about the escalating order of magnitude in destructiveness between atomic and thermonuclear weapons, Jonathan Weisgall writes in his pathbreaking book titled Operation Crossroads. “Keep them confused,” Eisenhower told the Atomic Energy Commission. “Leave ‘thermonuclear’ out of press releases and speeches. Also ‘fusion’ and ‘hydrogen.’” The agency complied. Only decades later, in 1979, did the public learn of this obfuscation.

    Six months after the Soviet H-bomb, on March 1, 1954, U.S. bomb-makers caught up by unleashing from Bikini Atoll a deliverable hydrogen weapon, code-named Bravo, its 15 megatonnage making it nearly one and a half times the yield of the Mike shot. Bravo was the most powerful U.S. bomb ever detonated and one equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs, according to U.S. government documents released in 1994. Weisgall observes, “Hiroshima paled in comparison to Bravo, which represented as revolutionary an advance in explosive power over the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb had over the conventional weapons of World War II.”

    NUCLEAR VICTIMIZATION OF “OUR OWN PEOPLE”

    Bravo also introduced the word fallout to everyday language worldwide when snow-like radioactive particles dusted 236 residents of nearby Rongelap Island, 28 U.S. servicemen and 23 crewman of a Japanese fishing trawler. In fact, the thermonuclear era produced radioactive components and fallout that encircled the globe, settling silently from the heavens. Beginning particularly with the Mike shot, “the chemical signature of our bones changed,” Harrison told Honolulu Weekly last month. The atmospheric weapons tests that proliferated in scale with the Mike shot dispersed radioactive forms of iodine, cesium, strontium and other elements. As a result, Harrison notes, all organisms, including humans, carry the watermark of the nuclear era woven into their tissues.

    The Mike shot marked an acceleration of the man-made proliferation and escalation of mass destruction and the ensuing nuclear age transformed the planet and its inhabitants. As award-winning journalist Eileen Welsome writes in her book The Plutonium Files: “The radioactive debris found its way into starfish, shellfish, and seaweed. It covered alfalfa fields in upstate New York, wheat fields in North Dakota, corn in Iowa. It seeped into the bodies of honeybees and birds, human fetuses and growing children. The atom had split the world into ‘preatomic’ and ‘postatomic’ species.”

    Moreover, the “postatomic” species must live with the effects of the nuclear age for centuries and generations to come. Environmental radioactivity derived from some nuclear weapons components like plutonium will persist for up to 500,000 years and may be hazardous to humans for at least half that time.

    Fallout and other residual radioactivity from atmospheric nuclear testing conducted by all nations have caused or will cause through infinity an estimated three million cancer fatalities, researchers Arjun Makhijani and Stephen I. Schwartz wrote in the Brookings Institution’s 1998 monumental study titled Atomic Audit. That number of casualties is nearly five times the 617,389 U.S. servicemen killed in World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War combined.

    In 1980 a Congressional oversight committee report titled “The Forgotten Guinea Pigs” concluded, “The greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that the only victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.” The House report included in its conclusion — but only in an obscure footnote — mention of Pacific Islanders, whose ancestral homelands had sustained the most U.S. nuclear firepower.

    EXODUS AND A 33-YEAR EXILE

    U.S. Pacific nuclear testing that began in July 1946 required U.S. officials to evacuate 170 Bikinians and 142 Enewetakese, thus transforming them into so-called “nuclear nomads,” which the Bikinians remain today.

    The Enewetakese, when evacuated from their homeland in December 1947, were told by a senior official, Capt. John P.W. Vest, that they would be able to return to their atoll within three to five years. Instead, for the next 33 years they were exiled on the smaller, desolate Ujelang Atoll, 150 miles to the southwest.

    Other official U.S. commitments made then are contained in documents once classified as top secret that attorney Davor Pevec uses in representing these islanders. The Enewetakese “will be accorded all rights which are the normal constitutional rights of the citizens under the Constitution, but will be dealt with as wards of the United States for whom this country has special responsibilities,” according to a memorandum from the Atomic Energy Commission attached to President Truman’s Directive of Nov. 25, 1947 to the Secretary of Defense.

    The Enewetakese on Ujelang suffered greatly because of logistical problems, inclement weather, bureaucratic negligence and the island’s desolation. Even the Department of Interior, in a letter dated Jan. 13, 1978, acknowledged that during their 33-year exile on Ujelang the Enewetakese “have suffered grave deprivations, including periods of near starvation.”

    An anthropologist who lived among them on Ujelang and spoke Marshallese, Laurence M. Carucci, wrote that the stories of this period told to him over and over by elders focused on famine and hunger, near starvation and death from illness, poor fishing conditions, epidemics of polio and measles and rat infestation.

    One Enewetak woman in her forties told Carucci in 1978 about these difficult days. She described the stomachs of children as being “stuck out like they were bloated and you would never think they were hungry,” but in fact they were. Then, she continued: “They would get hot fevers, then cold chills; hot fevers, then cold and sweaty. And then, in just a moment, they would be gone. Dead, they would never move again. Their life was gone. And, in those days, the wailing across the village was constant.”

    Their hardship was so severe that in 1969 they commandeered a supply ship and demanded they be returned home. Their ancestral atoll was too contaminated with radioactivity for their return, but the U.S. government did begin an extensive clean-up and rehabilitation so that on Oct. 1, 1980 some islanders returned home.

    Upon their return, they found a far different Enewetak. The Mike shot and 42 other detonations had devastated Enewetak so severely that more than half of the land and pockets of the lagoon today remain contaminated by radiation. The islanders who do reside there cannot live off of much of their land but must rely on imported food.

    THE MOONSCAPING OF ENEWETAK

    The Mike shot was the eighth of 43 nuclear weapons tests at Enewetak that transformed a placid atoll into a moonscape. Its people are still pleading with the U.S. government for $386 million in land and hardship damages and other compensation awarded to them two years ago by an official panel established by the U.S. and Marshallese governments.

    This panel ruled in April 2000 that after serving as Ground Zero for 43 weapons tests and receiving fallout from other shots, Enewetak:

    • was uninhabitable on 49 percent of its original land mass, or 949.8 acres of l,919.49 acres
    • was habitable on only 43 percent of its land area or 815.33 acres
    • was vaporized by eight percent or 154.36 acres.

    The lingering effects of U.S. Pacific nuclear tests are visible today in the numerous kinds of cancers and other diseases and the degraded homelands that are determined by an official panel established by the U.S. and Marshallese governments to result from the U.S. experiments of decades ago. Compensation for these damages is paid for from a $150 million trust fund that is now too depleted to pay fully current personal and property claims. Since 1946, researchers write in Atomic Audit, the U.S. government has paid at least $759 million in nuclear-related compensation to the Marshallese. But medical, cleanup and resettlment costs continue to mount, and Marshallese want more U.S. funding.

    The Marshallese prospects for immediate help from U.S. officials in Washington seem dim, Congressional sources in Washington, D. C. told Honolulu Weekly. Enewetak’s $386 million in land claims is not included in the budget Congress is considering for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 2002. Nor are funds for a medical program that in 2001 ceased to address Marshallese health needs that are urgent enough to warrant sending a six-person delegation to Washington last month to plead with Congressional leaders and staff. Provisions of the Compact of Free Association set to definitely expire next year are being negotiated with the Bush Administration but any agreement must then be acted on by Congress, which is soon to adjourn. Arguing that U.S. assistance provided in past agreements is “manifestly inadequate,” Marshallese officials in September 2000 petitioned Congress for increased U.S. medical and other assistance to meet the mounting costs of damages to persons and property presumed to be caused by U.S. nuclear testing; that petition is still being studied by the Bush Administration and no Congressional measure on it is pending.

    FROM CRATER TO CRYPT

    Much of the plutonium-contaminated soil removed in the operation to clean up Enewetak was dumped into one of the atoll’s smaller craters on Runit Island and then encrypted into a massive dome-like structure. This crater was created May 5, 1958, during the 18-kiloton test shot code-named Cactus. The crater, 30-foot-deep and 350-foot-wide, was filled with about 111,000 cubic yards of radioactive soil and other materials and then entombed beneath a dome of 358 concrete panels, each 18 inches thick. Researchers in Atomic Audit calculate that the unprecedented job, completed in 1980, took three years and about $239 million.

    Soon afterward, a delegation from the National Academy of Sciences inspected the dome and, Harrison recalls, issued a report noting the inadequacies of the dome, specifically that the predicted longevity of the containment structure was at best 300 years. Yet, the plutonium-laced debris encased in the dome will remain radioactive for 500,000 years and hazardous to humans for at least 250,000 years.

    The Runit Island entombment is of special interest because a nuclear-waste crypt is now being finished 800 miles from Honolulu to bury plutonium-laced materials under a cap of coral soil at Johnston Island, where four failed nuclear-tipped missile shots in 1962 showered the atoll and waters with radioactive debris.

    From test site to dump site, the Runit Island crypt eerily symbolizes the legacy of the thermonuclear age that has caused the Marshallese to suffer greatly and continue to suffer disproportionately in adverse health, environmental and cultural conditions.

    The Mike shot of Nov. 1, 1952 and its aftermath begs for reflection from a nation so riveted on a purported nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea that it ignores the era of mass destruction introduced by the United States on Enewetak with the world’s first thermonuclear explosion.