Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Bikini Atoll

  • For Marshallese, Hawaii Is the Only Home We Have Left

    I am Marshallese and today is the Republic of the Marshall Island’s Independence Day. I am one of the ladies you see with the handmade dresses that looks like a muumuu but not quite. Mine is one of three Pacific Island countries that the United States government signed an international agreement with inviting us to live and work legally in the United States. The other countries are the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau. These are all different countries with different languages, cultures and institutions.

    Many newspaper articles over the last year claim that the U.S. invited us to live and work here as a way to make up for the permanent and devastating damage that the United States did to our islands from 1946-1958 when they used my homelands for nuclear bombing tests. That is only part of the story. The United States also keeps this agreement with our countries so that our governments will continue to allow the U.S. military to build and operate massive military bases on our islands.

    My family is from Bikini Atoll. This is where the United States concentrated most of its nuclear bomb testing. In fact, the largest nuclear explosions ever conducted by the U.S. military, much larger than the Hiroshima bomb, were tested in and around my family’s villages. These were mostly atmospheric tests, so the contaminated spread far and wide. Some of those nuclear tests were so powerful that entire islands were vaporized.

    The U.S. military evacuated my family twice due to the nuclear bomb testing; the first evacuation came before the nuclear bomb tests started, the second evacuation came after the U.S. military realized that they had not moved our families far enough away to keep us safe. In 1968, the United States Atomic Energy Commission announced that it was safe to resettle parts of Marshall Islands, but the International Atomic Energy Commission disputed those findings in 1994 and the families that had moved back home had to be relocated once again. The IAEA provides a good account of this history on its website.

    Even today, 55 years after the nuclear tests were stopped, many scientists and nuclear safety organizations report that it is unsafe to eat crops grown on the land there and fish from the local waters. More than a dozen of my aunties and sisters gave birth to deformed babies after the nuclear tests. This is heartbreaking for families. My family and I have given up our dream of ever returning to our ancestral village.

    But we are working hard to make a home here in Hawaii. It is hard, because many of us, especially those who faced evacuations and the devastating effects of the nuclear tests, came here with nothing but medical conditions and the will to live. Luckily, I attended a church school when I was young, so I learned English from a young age. This has helped my family through the turmoil of moving to a new country, getting a good job and helping my kids with school work.

    Like many of the immigrant groups in Hawaii, even those of us who were teachers and principals and government employees in our home country can only get the lowest, most entry level jobs when we get the United States.

    Those of us from Marshall Islands, Micronesian and Palau know that we are not yet accepted in Hawaii. We know that some people don’t like our traditional dresses and skirts, call us all “Micros” and think that we don’t know how to fit in. We are trying. We are trying hard to get an education for our kids, get medical care for our elders, and jobs that will allow us to be self-sufficient.

    So today I am celebrating my home country’s Independence Day, and on July 4 I will celebrate the U.S. Independence Day. Parts of the American National Anthem remind me a lot of home, “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” sound a lot like the stories my people tell of the bombings of our islands.

    Many of our kids are born and raised here in Hawaii and as a mother and grandmother, I pray every day that our kids will be accepted here and be able to live healthy, productive lives. We are working hard to learn the language and cultures here, please also learn a little about us so that we can all understand and accept each other.

    I hear people say sometimes, “why are there so many of them here? Why do they dress like that? Why don’t they just go home?” Many of us have no home left, so we are doing the best we can.

    Litha Joel Jorju is a founding member of the Maui Marshallese Women’s Club, part of Faith Action for Community Equity Maui.

  • Standing Together for Our Common Future

    David Krieger delivered these remarks at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 29th Annual Evening for Peace on October 21, 2012.


    David KriegerI want to begin with a poem.  I wrote this poem for the International Day of Peace, but I think it works well for our Evening for Peace.



    On this day, like any other,
    soldiers are killing and dying,
    arms merchants are selling their wares,
    missiles are aimed at your heart,
    and peace is a distant dream.


    Not just for today, but for each day,
    let’s sheathe our swords, save the sky
    for clouds, the oceans for mystery
    and the earth for joy. 


    Let’s stop honoring the war makers
    and start giving medals for peace.


    On this day, like any other,
    there are infinite possibilities to change
    our ways. 


    Peace is an apple tree heavy with fruit,
    a new way of loving the world.


    Our theme tonight is “Standing Together for Our Common Future.”  We all share in the responsibility for our common future.  Our challenge is to stand together to assure the best possible future for our children and grandchildren.  This is a global challenge; and it should be a universal desire.


    The Nuclear Age is just 67 years old.  During this short time, we humans have created, by our technological prowess, some serious obstacles to assuring our common future.  Climate change, pollution of the oceans and atmosphere, modern warfare and its preparations, and nuclear dangers are at the top of any list of critical global problems.  None of these dangers can be solved by any one country alone.  It no longer takes just a village.  It takes a world.  And within that world it takes, if not each of us, certainly far more of us.


    Let me share with you how Archbishop Tutu, a Foundation Advisor and one of the great moral leaders of our time, describes nuclear weapons.  He says, “Nuclear weapons are an obscenity.  They are the very antithesis of humanity, of goodness in this world.  What security do they help establish?  What kind of world community are we actually seeking to build when nations possess and threaten to use arms that can wipe all of humankind off the globe in an instant?”


    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we work to abolish nuclear weapons –  insanely destructive weapons that cannot be used, or even possessed, without violating the most basic legal and moral precepts.  Nuclear weapons threaten civilization and our very survival as a species.  And yet, 50 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the US and Russia still keep some 2,000 of these weapons on high-alert, ready to be fired in moments of an order to do so. 


    The weapons have not gone away, nor have the dangers they pose to humanity.  There are still 19,000 of them in the world.  Ninety-five percent of these weapons are in the arsenals of the US and Russia.  The remaining five percent are in the arsenals of seven more nuclear weapon states.


    Nuclear weapons do not protect us. Nuclear weapons are not a defense; they are only good for threatening retaliation or committing senseless acts of vengeance.


    The use of nuclear weapons is beyond the control of any country.  Let me illustrate this by telling you about Nuclear Famine.  Scientists modeled a relatively small nuclear war in which India and Pakistan were to use 50 nuclear weapons each on the other side’s cities.  The result of this war would be to put enough soot from burning cities into the upper stratosphere to reduce warming sunlight to the point that we would experience the lowest temperatures on Earth in 1,000 years. This would result in shortened growing seasons and crop failures, leading to starvation and Nuclear Famine killing hundreds of millions of people, perhaps a billion, throughout the world. 


    Let me emphasize that this would be the consequence of a small nuclear war using less than half of one percent of the world’s nuclear explosive power.  And, it would be a regional nuclear war, over which the US could not exert any control.  It would nonetheless be a war with global consequences for all of us.
     
    All of this is serious and sobering.  But, you may ask, what can we do about it?


    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we are focusing on collective action and collective impact, in which the whole – each of us standing together – is greater than the sum of its parts. 


    We are also pursuing legal action related to breaches of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by the US and other nuclear weapon states parties to the treaty. The treaty calls for the pursuit of negotiations in good faith for effective measures related to a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date, to nuclear disarmament and for a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control. 


    Since the Treaty entered into force in 1970, it would be hard to argue 42 years later that there has been a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date.  Nor has there been serious nuclear disarmament or a treaty on general and complete disarmament. 


    Our current education and advocacy work reaches and mobilizes our 57,000 members who join in taking action for our common future.  We plan to expand this number exponentially across the world.  We hope that you will all join us in this mission to assure the human future.


    Tonight we stand together with the people of the Marshall Islands, a country that was part of the Trust Territory of the United States after World War II.  The Marshall Islanders are easygoing and friendly people. They put their trust in the United States, but we abused that trust by testing nuclear weapons on their territory.  We began that atmospheric nuclear testing in 1946, when we were the only country in the world with nuclear weapons, and we continued testing there for 12 years until 1958. 


    We tested 67 times in the Marshall Islands, using powerful nuclear and thermonuclear weapons – the equivalent explosive power of having tested 1.7 Hiroshima bombs each day for 12 years.  On March 1, 1954, we tested our largest nuclear bomb ever, code-named Bravo, which had the power of 15 million tons of TNT. 


    We irradiated many of the people of the Marshall Islands, causing them death, injury and untold sorrow.  Many had to leave their home islands and live elsewhere.  Many have suffered cancers and leukemia, and the illness and death has carried over into the children of new generations of Marshall Islanders.


    These are the tragic effects of a world that maintains, tests and relies upon nuclear weapons.  In this world, our human rights are threatened and abused by nuclear weapons, as the Marshallese have experienced first-hand.


    As a traditional island nation, the Marshallese enjoyed a self-sufficient sustainable way of life before nuclear weapons testing.  Now, they struggle to uphold basic human rights:



    • to adequate health and life.
    • to adequate food and nutrition.
    • to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.
    • to enjoyment of a safe, clean and healthy sustainable environment.

    In September of this year, the Foundation’s representative in Geneva spoke to the UN Human Rights Council on behalf of the Marshall Islanders.  He stated: “NAPF aligns itself with the UN Special Rapporteur’s suggestion that the international community, the United States, and the Government of the Marshall Islands must develop long-term strategic measures to address the effects of the nuclear testing program and specific challenges in each atoll.  As such, it is imperative that the U.S. government and the international community implement human rights measures to provide adequate redress to the citizens of the Marshall Islands.” 


    In other words, it is the responsibility of the United States and other nuclear weapon states to clean up the radioactive trail of dangerous debris and redress the suffering and human rights abuses they have left behind in their pursuit of ever more powerful and efficient nuclear arms.


    The man we honor tonight, Senator Tony de Brum, was a child when the US nuclear testing was taking place in his islands.  Born in 1945, he personally witnessed most of the detonations that took place, and was nine years old when the most powerful of those explosions, the Bravo test, took place. 


    He went on to become one of the first Marshall Islanders to graduate from college and focused on helping his people to extricate themselves from the legacy of US nuclear testing in his island country.  He has dedicated his life to helping his people and to working to assure they are fairly compensated for the wrongs done to them by nuclear testing.  He has served his people in many ways – as a parliamentarian and former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister for Health and the Environment.  He currently represents Kwajalein in the Parliament and is the Minister in Assistance to the President.


    Like others who have suffered and witnessed the suffering caused by nuclear weapons, he has a larger vision: that what happened to his people should not happen again to any other people or country.  I’ve known Tony de Brum for many years.  He is an untiring leader of his people, deeply engaged in seeking justice.  He is a man with a vision of creating a more decent and peaceful future for all humanity. 


    Senator Tony de Brum is a dedicated Peace Leader, and tonight we are pleased to stand with him and the people of the Marshall Islands as we honor him with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2012 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.

  • The Legacy of Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands

    This article was originally published on Common Dreams.

    The radiological legacy of U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands remains to this day and will persist for many years to come. The most severe impacts were visited upon the people of the Rongelap Atoll in 1954 following a very large thermonuclear explosion which deposited life-threatening quantities of radioactive fallout on their homeland. They received more than three times the estimated external dose than to the most heavily exposed people living near the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. It took more than two days before the Rongelap people were evacuated after the explosion. Many suffered from tissue destructive effects, such as burns, and subsequently from latent radiation-induced diseases.

    In 1957, they were returned to their homeland even though officials and scientists working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) determined that radiation doses would significantly exceed those allowed for citizens of the United States. The desire to study humans living in a radiation-contaminated environment appeared to be a major element of this decision. A scientist in a previously secret transcript of a meeting where they decided to return the Rongelap people to their atoll stated an island contaminated by the 1954 H-Bomb tests was “by far the most contaminated place in the world.” He further concluded that,

        “It would be very interesting to go back and get good environmental data… so as to get a measure of the human uptake, when people live in a contaminated environment…Now, data of this type has never been available. …While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”

    By 1985, the people of Rongelap fled their atoll, after determining that the levels of contamination were comparable to the Bikini atoll where numerous nuclear devices were detonated. The Bikini people were re-settled in 1969 but had to evacuate their homes in1978 after radiation exposures were found to be excessive. The Rongelap people fled for good reason. In 1982, a policy was secretly established by the energy department during the closing phase of negotiations between the United States and the nascent Republic of the Marshall Islands over the Compact of Free Association to eliminate radiation protection standards, so as to not interfere with the potential resumption of weapons testing. This resulted in a sudden and alarming increase in radiation doses to the Rongelap people eating local food.

    These circumstances were subsequently uncovered in 1991 by the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. As a result, the U.S. Congress terminated DOE’s nuclear test readiness program in the Pacific and in 1992 the U.S. Departments of Energy and Interior entered into an agreement with the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Local Rongelap Government that re-established radiation protection standards as a major element for the re-settlement of Rongelap.

    Apparently, this was not done for the southern islands of the atoll where local food is obtained. Despite the long and unfortunate aftermath of nuclear testing in the Marshalls, it appears that this critical element of safety was lost in the shuffle.

    As it now stands, if forced to return to their homeland the Rongelap people could receive radiation doses about 10 times greater than allowed for the public in the United States.

    Until the U. S. Government can assure that steps to mitigate doses to the same levels that are protective of American people are demonstrated, efforts to force the Rongelap people back to the home by Members of the U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration is unjustified and unfairly places the burden of protection on the Rongelap people. It appears that DOE and Interior have quietly crept away from the 1992 agreement, without verifying that its terms and conditions to allow for safe habitability will be met.

    Over the past 20 years, the U.S. Congress has enacted legislation to compensate to residents living near DOE’s Nevada Test Site uranium miners, nuclear weapons workers, and military personnel for radiation-related illnesses. These laws provide for a greater benefit of the doubt than for the people of the Marshall Islands where 66 nuclear weapons were exploded in the open air. In 2005, the National Cancer Institute reported that the risk of contracting cancer for those exposed to fallout was greater than one in three.

    The people of the Marshall Islands had their homeland and health sacrificed for the national security interests of the United States. The Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress should promptly correct this injustice.

  • Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day

    March 1st is Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day (‘Bikini’ Day) which marks the anniversary of the US ‘Bravo’ nuclear bomb detonation at Bikini Atoll [*] in 1954.  The explosion gouged out a crater more than 200 feet deep and a mile across, melting huge quantities of coral which were sucked up into the atmosphere together with vast volumes of seawater. The resulting fallout caused widespread contamination in the Pacific.

    Powdery particles of radioactive fallout landed on the island of Rongelap (100 miles away) to a depth of one and a half inches in places, and radioactive mist appeared on Utirik (300 miles away). Radiation levels in the inhabited atolls of Rongerik, Ujelang and Likiep also rose dramatically. The US navy did not send ships to evacuate the people of Rongelap and Utirik until three days after the explosion. The people in the Marshall Islands, and elsewhere in the Pacific, were used as human guinea pigs in an obscene racist experiment to ‘progress’ the insane pursuit of nuclear weapons supremacy.

    Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day is a day to remember that the arrogant colonialist mindset which allowed, indeed encouraged, the horror mentioned above continues today – the Pacific remains neither nuclear free nor independent.

    It is a day to think about the many faces of colonisation – physical, cultural, spiritual, economic, political, nuclear, military – past and present; the issues of independence, self-determination and sovereignty here in Aotearoa New Zealand and the other colonised countries of the Pacific; and the ability of Pacific peoples to stop further nuclearisation, militarisation and economic globalisation of our region.

    It is a day to acknowledge and remember those who have suffered and died in the struggle for independence around the Pacific; those who have opposed colonisation in its many forms and paid for their opposition with their health and life; and those who have suffered and died as a result of the nuclear weapons states’ use of the Pacific for nuclear experimentation, uranium mining, nuclear weapons testing and nuclear waste dumping.

    It is a day to celebrate the strength and endurance of indigenous Pacific peoples who have maintained and taken back control of their lives, languages and lands to ensure the ways of living and being which were handed down from their ancestors are passed on to future generations.

    It is the day to pledge your support to continue the struggle for a nuclear free and independent Pacific, as the theme of the 8th Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Conference said: No te parau tia, no te parau mau, no te tiamaraa, e tu, e tu – For justice, for truth and for independence, wake up, stand up !

    – Peace Movement Aotearoa

    [*] In 1946, a military officer representing the US government asked the people of Bikini if they would be willing to leave their atoll temporarily so that the United States could begin testing atomic bombs for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars”. They have been prevented from returning to their home ever since because of the level of radioactive contamination remaining there.

    In April 2006, together with the people of Enewetak, they filed a lawsuit against the US government in the US Court of Federal Claims. The lawsuit sought compensation for the taking of their property, and damage claims resulting from the US government’s failure and refusal to adequately fund the orders of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal. In 2000 and 2001 the Tribunal awarded compensation totaling around $948 million for loss of the islands, clean-up and resettlement costs, and personal injury and hardship. So far the Tribunal has only paid out about $3.8 million.

    On 29 January 2009, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against the people of Bikini and Enewetak, saying an agreement between the governments of the United States and Marshall Islands in 1986 is a settlement that is beyond judicial review – affirming the US Court of Federal Claims ruling on 2 August 2007. The decision of the Court of Appeals is available at http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions/07-5175.pdf with the people of Bikini’s response to the 2007 Court of Federal Claims ruling at http://www.bikiniatoll.com/Appellate%20brief%20reply%20final%204-25-08.pdf A history of Bikini Atoll and the people’s struggle for justice is at http://www.bikiniatoll.com/history.html

  • 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.