Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Marshall Islands

  • Radiation, Japan and the Marshall Islands

    This article was originally published by CounterPunch.


    When the dangerous dust and gases settle and we discover just how much radiation escaped the damaged Fukushima reactors and spent fuel rods, we may never know how many people are being exposed to radiation from the burning fuel rods and reactor cores, and how much exposure they will receive over time. Minute and above-background traces of Iodine-131 are already showing up in Tokyo’s water supply – 150 miles southwest of the leaking reactors – and in milk and spinach [with a dash of Cesium-137] from 75 miles away. The Japanese government has recently warned pregnant women and children to avoid drinking Tokyo tap water, and I-131 levels 1,200 times above background levels were recorded in seawater near the reactors.


    Aside from sharing the dubious distinction of both nations having been at the receiving end of America’s nuclear weapons, Japan and the Marshall Islands now share another dubious distinction. The unleashed isotopes of concern from the damaged Japanese reactors – Iodine-131, Cesium-137, Strontium-90 and Plutonium-239 – are well known to the Marshall Islanders living downwind of the testing sites at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the central Pacific, following sixty-seven A- and H-bombs exploded between 1946-58. In fact, it is precisely these isotopes that continue to haunt the 80,000 Marshallese fifty-three years after the last thermonuclear test in the megaton range shook their pristine coral atolls and contaminated their fragile marine ecosystems.


    In fact, it was the irradiated downwind Marshallese on Rongelap and Utrik in 1954 caught in the Bravo fallout – and I-131 – that taught the world about the thyroid effect from the uptake of radioactive iodine.


    The U.S.’ largest [fusion] hydrogen bomb – Bravo – was 1,000 times the Hiroshima atomic [fission] bomb, and deposited a liberal sprinkling of these and a potent potpourri of 300 other radionuclides over a wide swath of the Central Pacific and the inhabited atolls in the Marshalls archipelago in March 1954 during “Operation Castle.”


    The Rongelap islanders 120 miles downwind from Bikini received 190 rems [1.9 Sv] of whole-body gamma dose before being evacuated. The Utrik people 320 miles downwind received 15 rems [150 mSv] before their evacuation. Many of the on-site nuclear workers at Fukushima have already exceeded the Utrik dose in multiples.


    Also entrapped within the thermonuclear maelstrom from Bravo was the not-so-Lucky Dragon [Fukuryu Maru] Japanese fishing trawler with its crew of twenty-three fishing for tuna near Bikini [see The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon by Ralph Lapp]. As the heavily exposed fishermen’s health quickly deteriorated after Bravo, the radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died of a liver illness six months after his exposure; his is now a household name in Japan and is associated with the “Bikini bomb.”


    Meanwhile, the Japanese fishing industry was rocked when Geiger counters registered “talking fish” [what the Japanese called the clicking sound of the contaminated fish being monitored] from the 800 pounds of tuna catch of the Lucky Dragon in Yaizu and in local fish markets. Much of the Japanese tuna at the time was caught by a fleet of 1,000 fishing boats operating in the fertile tuna waters near the U.S.’ Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshalls.


    In response to the plight and symbolism of the Lucky Dragon, Japanese women collected 34 million signatures on petitions advocating the immediate abolition of both atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1955. Pugwash, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-nuclear organization was founded in 1955 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in response to Bravo. The dangers of radioactive fallout from Bravo inspired Nevil Shute’s classic nuclear dystopia On the Beach, as well as Godzilla.


    To quell the diplomatic furor – whereby the Japanese representative to the U.N. accused the U.S. in March 1954 of “once again using nuclear weapons against the Japanese people” – the U.S. paid two million dollars to the fishing company which owned the Lucky Dragon; each of the 23 fishermen ended up with the princely sum of $5,000 in 1956 and the tuna company kept the rest.


    AEC chair Lewis Strauss (who originally proposed nuclear energy “too cheap to meter” in the post-War Atoms for Peace program) told President Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty in April 1954 that the Lucky Dragon was not a fishing boat at all – it was a “Red spy outfit” snooping on the American nuclear tests.


    The legacy of latent radiogenic diseases from hydrogen bomb testing in the Marshall Islands provides some clues about what ill-health mysteries await the affected Japanese in the decades ahead. Also, the Marshall Islands provide insight about ecosystem contamination of these dangerous radioactive isotopes, and what this means for the affected Japanese.


    Profiles of the four isotopes


    o Iodine-131 [radioactive iodine] has a half life of eight days, and concentrates in the thyroid gland about 5,000 times more efficiently than other parts of the body. Traces of I-131 have been discovered in Tokyo drinking water and in seawater offshore from the reactors. It took nine years for the first thyroid tumor to appear among the exposed Marshallese and hypothyroidism and cancer continued to appear decades later.


    o Cesium-137 has a half life of thirty years and is a chemical analog of potassium; Cs-137 concentrates in muscle and other parts of the body. Rongelap Island has a new layer of topsoil containing potassium to help neutralize the Cs-137 left over from the H-bomb tests, but the Marshallese residents remain unconvinced and suspicious about the habitability of their long abandoned home atoll. Meanwhile, the U.S. is pressuring hard for their repatriation despite the fact that most islands at Rongelap will remain off limits for many decades with strict dietary restrictions of local foods.


    o Strontium-90 has a half life of twenty-eight years, is a chemical analog of calcium and is known as a “bone seeker.” Rongelap and the other downwind atolls have residual Sr-90 in their soils, groundwater and marine ecosystems.


    o Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,000 years, is considered one of the most toxic substances on Earth, and if absorbed is a potent alpha emitter that can induce cancer. This isotope too is found in the soils and groundwater of the downwind atolls from the Bikini and Enewetak H-bomb tests.


    Lessons from the Marshall Islands


    * It took nine years after exposure to the 1954 Bravo fallout for the first thyroid tumor and hypothyroidism to occur in an exposed Utrik woman from the I-131. Several more tumors [and other radiogenic disorders] among the exposed people appeared the following year and every year thereafter. The latency period for thyroid abnormalities and other radiogenic disorders [see below] endures for several decades.


    * Because a child’s thyroid gland is much smaller than an adult’s thyroid, it receives a higher concentration of I-131 than an adult dose. Also, because a child’s thyroid gland is growing more quickly than an adult’s, it requires and absorbs more iodine [and I-131] than an adult thyroid gland. That is, the thyroid effect is age-related.


    * Radioactive Iodine-129 with a half-life of 15 million years and a well-documented capacity to bioaccumulate in the foodchain, will also remain as a persistent problem for the affected Japanese.


    * The Majuro-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established in 1988 to settle all past and future claims against the U.S. for health injury and property loss damages from the nuclear tests. As of 2006, the NCT had paid out $73 million [of the $91 million awarded] for 1,999 Marshallese claimants. There are thirty-six medical conditions that are presumed to be caused by the nuclear tests [http://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com]. Eligibility for Marshallese citizens consists of having been in the Marshall Islands during the testing period [1946-58] and having at least one of the presumptive medical disorders.


    * The sociocultural and psychological effects [e.g., PTSD] of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be long-lasting, given the uncertainty surrounding the contamination of their prefecture and beyond. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton eloquently detailed this uncertain future and fears about “invisible contamination” concerning the Hiroshima and Nagasaki “hibakusha” [“A-bomb survivors”] in his award-winning 1968 magnum opus Death in Life.


    * Noted radiation experts John Gofman [co-discoverer of U-232 and U-233 and author of Radiation and Human Health], Karl Z. Morgan [a founder of health physics] and Edward Radford [Chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR III committee and advisor to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal] stated that there is no threshold dose for low level ionizing radiation:


        Any amount of ionizing radiation – which is cumulative – can pose a health threat for certain individuals, and especially those with compromised immune systems.

  • 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.

  • Think Outside the Bomb

    Ladies and Gentlemen:

    My name is Evelyn Ralpho. I am from Rongelap Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

    On behalf of the People of Rongelap, our Local Government, our Traditional Leaders, I am honored to be here and thank the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the organizers and sponsors of this Conference, and especially my mom, Lijon Eknilang.

    In between 1946 and 1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear weapons on Bikini and Enewetak in the Marshall Islands. The total yield of these tests is equal to exploding one and a half Hiroshima size bombs every day for twelve years.

    The March 1, 1954 hydrogen test, code named Bravo was the most powerful and harmful of the Marshall Island nuclear tests. Bravo was one thousand times as powerful as the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima.

    Bravo caused radioactive fallout to cover the People and Lands of my home.

    The day of Bravo, March 1, 1954 was my mother’s eighth birthday. Like all the residents of Rongelap, my mother was exposed to radiation. The fallout caused radiation burns to all the residents of Rongelap.

    Since that time, my mother has had thyroid surgery. All the Rongelapese who were children at the time of the Bravo explosion have had thyroid surgery.

    Last month, the National Academy of Science released an update on radiation risks. This update, known as BEIR VII, indicates that women are almost 40% more likely to die from radiation cancers, and 50% more likely to have radiation tumors then men. According to BEIR VII, the risks to children are even greater than to women.

    The BEIR VII Report also states that there is no evidence of harm to human offspring from exposure of parents to radiation.

    Having grown up among the Rongelapese, I can attest to the harm that radiation causes to the children of the exposed. As a daughter of Rongelap – the daughter of a survivor, I have personally witnessed the birth problems and birth defects experienced by the women of Rongelap.

    My mother’s health problems are recounted in Dr. Arjun Makajani’s book, Radioactive Heaven and Earth. In that book, she says that she has had seven miscarriages, one of which was severely deformed and had only one eye.

    As bad as the health problems are, recently released documents suggest that the United States scientists conducted human radiation experiments on the Rongelapese. These experiments, known as Project 4.1, were planned before the Bravo blast contaminated my Island. This leads me to believe that the contamination of the Rongelapese was done on purpose.

    After the Bravo test, the Rongelapese were removed from their Island. In 1957, the United States returned my People to Rongelap to live in a highly contaminated environment. The United States scientists came to monitor our uptake of radiation every year.

    Because we no longer wanted to live on a radioactive island, in 1985, the People of Rongelap abandoned our home. We currently reside in exile, scattered throughout the Marshall Islands and the United States.

    Although the United States stopped testing nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, they continue to use it as a military testing ground.

    Kwajalein Atoll, where I grew up on the island of Ebeye, is where the United States currently tests its Star Wars Defense Systems. Missiles fired from the United States are targeted for Kwajalein. Missiles from Kwajalein are launched to intercept the missiles sent from the United States.

    The affects of the Star Wars testing programs on the Marshallese are like the nuclear tests that happened 50 years ago.

    People are displaced from their home islands. Ebeye Island, where the labor force for the Star Wars military base lives, is about 40 acres, and home to about twelve thousand Marshallese.

    On Ebeye, the living conditions are what most Americans would call a slum. Ebeye lacks good sanitation, water, power and medical facilities. The nearby military base has all modern conveniences that are not available to Marshallese citizens.

    The Star Wars tests, like the nuclear tests, continue to contaminate the Marshall Islands with toxic chemicals and depleted uranium.

    The legacy of Bravo and the Marshall Islands nuclear testing lives on in the lives of the children of those who survived exposure to radiation. The disruption that the nuclear testing program caused continues to haunt the lives of the offspring of the survivors of the nuclear testing program.

    As a daughter of Rongelap – a daughter of a survivor, my determination to seek justice on behalf of all people who have been exposed to radiation is strong. My elders sought justice. Now it is time for the sons and daughters of the exposed to seek and fight for justice wherever it may be found.

    That is our quest. That is our goal. That is my promise. With your help, and the help of people everywhere, with the blessing of God, we shall prevail.

    Thank you.

  • Marshallese Neighbors in Washington Attest to Nuclear Devastation

    Most people in the world associate Hiroshima and Nagaski with nuclear devastation. We can imagine the buildings that were leveled, and the incineration of all living things – images we should never forget as they are reminders of the destructive capacity of human nature.

    But here in Washington, some of our neighbors are living reminders that, in the 1940s and 1950s, nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific left a debt that the United States is still not willing to pay. For twelve years, the Marshall Islands experienced the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima-sized bombs every single day. Many people assume that the Islands were deserted during the tests, but the nearly 1,000 Marshallese who settled here in Washington State can tell you differently.

    In terms of radioactive iodine alone, 6.3 billion curies of iodine-131 was released to the atmosphere as a result of the nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands – an amount 42 times greater than the 150 million curies released by the atmospheric testing in Nevada, 150 times greater than the estimated 40 million curies released as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and 8,500 times greater than the 739,000 curies released from Atomic Energy Commission operations at Hanford, Washington.

    After the deployment of atomic weapons during World War II, the United States needed to learn more about the capabilities of its newest weapon – more information than the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagaski provided. The United States decided to make a proving ground out of its small islands in the northern Pacific Ocean that the U.S. acquired as part of a United Nations trust territory following the war. As the trust territory administrator, the U.S. promised to safeguard the well-being of its inhabitants.

    On the atolls of Bikini and Enewetak in the Marshall Islands, the United States detonated 67 atmospheric atomic and thermonuclear weapons from 1946-1958. From nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands, the U.S. learned how its naval fleet would survive a nuclear attack. In 1946, U.S. researchers anchored navy vessels, including the Japanese flagship captured at the end of WWII, the Nagato, in Bikini’s lagoon. Test Baker, an underwater shot, debilitated and sunk many vessels that remain on the bottom of Bikini’s lagoon today.

    Also in the Marshall Islands, the United States detonated its largest weapon ever tested, the Bravo shot of March 1, 1954, the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. Bravo exposed the crew of a Japanese fishing boat near Bikini, Marshallese residents downwind from Bikini, and U.S. servicemen to levels of radiation that caused death, and lifelong illness. Following Bravo, U.S. government researchers evacuated some of the islanders and enrolled them in a secret medical experiment, called Project 4.1, to study the effects of radiation on human beings. Later, the U.S. government resettled the unwitting participants in this program on an island highly contaminated with radiation to learn first-hand how human beings ingest and absorb radiation from their environment.

    During the Cold War, the United States made immeasurable political strides as nuclear superiority guaranteed status as a superpower, and ushered in a period of nuclear deterrence. This political advancement of the United States did not come without a price for the Marshallese, however, whose health and environment continue to display the scars of U.S. achievements.

    Recently the U.S. National Cancer Institute predicted that the Marshallese will experience hundreds more future cancer cases directly linked to the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program. The radiological illnesses from the testing program continue to overwhelm the capabilities of the public health infrastructure in the Marshall Islands. Beyond the participants of Project 4.1, the U.S. government contributes only $7 per patient per month for the communities most affected by the testing program and for people with confirmed radiogenic illnesses, such as cancer.

    Despite the radiation levels released in the Marshall Islands, the indisputable link between cancer and radiation exposure, and the recent NCI predictions, there is no oncologist in the Marshall Islands, no chemotherapy, no cancer registry, and no nationwide screening program for early detection of cancer. This is abhorrent considering that the United States was the only governing authority of the Marshall Islands when it used the islands to test its weapons.

    The Marshall Islands currently has a petition before the U.S. Congress for additional assistance, primarily to create the capacity to respond to the healthcare burdens resulting from the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program. The Senate Energy Committee that Senator Cantwell sits on and the House Resources Committee where Representative Inslee is a member have jurisdiction for the Marshall Islands and are the committees that must consider the petition by the Marshall Islands. Congressman Inslee attended a House hearing about this subject in May. The House hearing was jointly convened by the Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific of the House International Relations Committee of which Adam Smith is a member.

    The Marshallese who live and work here in Washington contribute to our communities through church, school, and service projects – like the Marshallese in Lynnwood who organize to feed the homeless twice each month.

    The people of the Marshall Islands deserve our appreciation for the monumental sacrifices they incurred during the Cold War, as well as our assistance to address the persistent problems caused by radiation exposure. Senator Cantwell, Representative Inslee, and Representative Smith, please extend your leadership to help the people of the former U.S. trust territory who do not have a voice or representative in the U.S. Congress.

    Holly M. Barker, Ph.D. is a Seattle resident, advisor to the government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and a guest lecturer at the University of Washington.

    This article appeared as an guest op-ed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on August 10, 2005.

  • Indigenous Presentation to the Delegates of the Seventh Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty

    It is an honor for me to be able to speak to you today on behalf of indigenous people throughout the world whose lives have been dramatically affected by the proliferation of weapons. I bring you the greetings of the people of the Marshall Islands, and more specifically the paramount leaders of the Ralik chain, Iroijlaplap Imata Kabua, and Iroijlaplap Anjua Loeak, whose domains have borne the brunt of United States military weapons development – from the nuclear bombs of the Cold War to the missiles that carry them today.

    I lived on the island of Likiep in the northern Marshalls for the entire 12 years of the US atomic and thermonuclear testing program in my country. I witnessed most of the detonations, and was just 9-years old when I experienced the most horrific of these explosions, the infamous BRAVO shot that terrorized our community and traumatized our society to an extent that few people in the world can imagine.

    While BRAVO was by far the most dramatic test, all 67 of the shots detonated in the Marshall Islands contributed one way or another to the nuclear legacy that haunts us to this day. As one of our legal advisors has described it, if one were to take the total yield of the nuclear weapons tested in the Marshall Islands and spread them out over time, we would have the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima shots, every day for twelve years.

    But the Marshall Islands’ encounter with the bomb did not end with the detonations themselves. In recent years, documents released by the United States government have uncovered even more horrific aspects of the Marshallese burden borne in the name of international peace and security. US government documents clearly demonstrate that its scientists conducted human radiation experiments with Marshallese citizens. Some of our people were injected with or coerced to drink fluids laced with radiation. Other experimentation involved the purposeful and premature resettlement of people on islands highly contaminated by the weapons tests to study how human beings absorb radiation from their foods and environment. Much of this human experimentation occurred in populations either exposed to near lethal amounts of radiation, or to “control” populations who were told they would receive medical “care” for participating in these studies to help their fellow citizens. At the conclusion of all these studies, the United States still maintained that no positive linkage can be established between the tests and the health status of the Marshallese. Just in the past few weeks, a new US government study has predicted 50% higher than expected incidence of cancer in the Marshall Islands resulting from the atomic tests.

    Although the testing of the atomic and thermonuclear weapons ended 48 years ago, we still have entire populations living in social disarray. The people of Rongelap Atoll, the inhabited island closest to the ground zero locations, remain in exile in their own country. I might also add that although the people of Rongelap were evacuated by the US government for earlier smaller weapons tests, the US government purposefully decided not to evacuate them prior to the detonation of the BRAVO event – a thermonuclear weapon designed to be the largest device ever detonated by the United States. The people of Rongelap were known to be in harms way but were not warned about BRAVO in advance and had no ability or knowledge of how to protect themselves or reduce their exposure.

    Throughout the years, America’s nuclear history in the Marshall Islands has been colored with official denial, self-serving control of information, and abrogation of commitment to redress the shameful wrongs done to the Marshallese people. The scientists and military officials involved in the testing program picked and chose their study subjects, recognized certain communities as exposed when it served their interests, and denied monitoring and medical attention to subgroups within the Marshall Islands. I remember well their visits to my village in Likiep where they subjected every one of us to tests and invasive physical examinations which, as late as 1978, they denied every carrying out. In later years, when I was a public servant for the RMI, I raised the issue requesting that raw data gathered during these visits be made available to us. United States representatives responded by saying that our recollections were juvenile and did not consider the public health missions of the time.

    For decades, the US government has utilized slick mathematical and statistical representations to dismiss the occurrence of exotic anomalies, including malformed fetuses, and abnormal appearances of diseases in so called “unexposed areas,” as coincidental and not attributable to radiation exposure. We have been told repeatedly, for example, that our birthing anomalies are the result of incest or a gene pool that is too small – anything but the radiation. These explanations are offensive, and obviously wrong since these abnormalities certainly did not occur before we became the proving ground for US nuclear weapons. Selective referral of Marshallese patients to different military hospitals in the United States and its territories also made it easier for the US government to dismiss linkages between medical problems and radiation exposure. The several unexplained fires that led to the destruction of numerous records and medical charts for the patients with the most acute radiation illnesses further underscores this point. In spite of all these studies and findings, we were told that positive linkage was still impossible because of what they called “statistical insignificance.”

    I have been a student of the horrific impacts of the nuclear weapons testing program for most of my life. I served as interpreter for American officials who proclaimed Bikini safe for resettlement and commenced a program to repatriate the Bikini people who for decades barely survived on the secluded island of Kili. I accompanied the American High Commissioner of the Trust Territory just a few years later to once again remove the repatriated residents from Bikini because their exposure had become too high for the US government’s comfort. I was also personally involved in the translation of the Enewetak Environmental Impact Statement that declared Enewetak safe for resettlement. I voiced my doubts in a television interview at the time by describing the US public relations efforts associated with the Enewetak clean-up as a dog-and-pony show. Later, during negotiations to end the trust territory arrangement with the United States, we discovered that certain scientific information regarding Enewetak was being withheld from us because, as the official US government memorandum stated, “the Marshallese negotiators might make overreaching demands” on the United States if the facts about the extent of damage in the islands were known to us.

    The outcome of our negotiations was the end of the United Nations Trusteeship and a treaty, which, among other things, provided for the ongoing responsibilities of our former trustee for the communities impacted by the nuclear weapons tests. This assistance provided by the US government for radiation damages and injuries is based on a US government study that purports to be the best and most accurate knowledge about the effects of radiation in the Marshall Islands. Our agreement to terminate our United Nations trusteeship that the US government administered was based largely on those assurances. We have since discovered that even that covenant by the United States was false. Today, not only is the US government backpedaling on this issue but its official position as enunciated by the current administration is to flee its responsibilities to the Marshall Islands for the severe nuclear damages and injuries perpetrated upon them.

    After spending decades of my life trying to persuade the US government to take responsibility for the full range of damages and injuries caused by the testing of 67 atmospheric atomic and thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, a new global arms system arrived at the door of the Marshall Islands. After years of ICBM testing, the Marshall Islands now has the dubious distinction of hosting the US government’s missile shield testing program. The US government shoots Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) at the Marshall Islands. From an area leased by the US Army on Kwajalein Atoll, the Ronald Reagan Missile Defense Test Site, the US launches interceptor missiles at the incoming ICBMs to test the ability of these interceptors to track and destroy incoming missiles. These tests impact every aspect of our lives… from the local people who are relocated from their homes, to the whales, sea turtles, and birds that have lived in harmony with human beings in our region of the world for centuries.

    As history repeats itself in the Marshall Islands, the people of Kwajalein have been removed from their homelands, crowded into unbearable living squalor on a 56-acre island with 18,000 residents called Ebeye. This is the equivalent of taking everyone here in Manhattan and forcing them to live on the ground floor – can you imagine the density of Manhattan if there were no skyscrapers? The US Army base depends on Ebeye for housing its indigenous labor force, but the US Army has also erected impenetrable boundaries keeping the Marshallese at an arm’s length; Marshallese on the island adjacent to the US base are unable to use the world-class hospital in emergencies, to fill water bottles during times of drought, or to purchase basic food supplies when cargo ships are delayed. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to suspect that the lands, lagoon, and surrounding seas of Kwajalein, are being damaged from depleted uranium and other substances. Unfortunately, our efforts to seek a clear understanding of the consequences of the missile testing program – data we need to make informed decisions regarding our future or the prerequisite rehabilitation of our lands before repatriation – have been spurned by the United States government. Perchlorate additives in the missiles fired from Kwajalein have been detected in the soil and the water lenses but to date no real data has become available for meaningful, independent study. The lands leased by the United States military are compensated far below market. Efforts by the Kwajalein leadership to deal with the realities which face them when the current agreement expires in 2016 have been largely ignored as the US openly and callously discusses the uses of our lands beyond 2016 and into 2086…all without our consent. Our Constitution specifically prohibits the taking of land without consent or proper compensation.

    We call upon the international community to extend its hands to assist the people of the Marshall Islands to extricate themselves from the legacy of the nuclear age and the burden of providing testing grounds for weapons of mass destruction. In the countries that produce these weapons we have come together to protest, if a person’s land or resources become contaminated, persons so affected have the option to buy another house and move elsewhere. For indigenous people it is not that simple. Our land and waters are sacred to us. Our land and waters embody our culture, our traditions, our kinship ties, our social structures, and our ability to take care of ourselves. Our lands are irreplaceable.

    When we talk about the importance of non-proliferation of weapons we also must include in our discourse the essential non-proliferation of illness, forced relocation, and social and cultural ills in the indigenous communities that pay disproportionately for the adverse consequences resulting from the process, deployment, and storage of weapons. A relatively few number of world leaders and decision-makers do not have the right to destroy the well-being and livelihood of any society, whether large or small, in the name of global security. Security for indigenous people means healthy land, resources and body – not the presence of weapons and the dangers they engender. Global leaders do not have, nor should they be allowed to assume the right, to take my security away so that they may feel more secure themselves.

    MAY PEACE BE WITH YOU.

    Thank you.

  • The Bravo H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn’t Hide

    “There’s a story I can tell you”, a fellow called Bruno Lat said to me a few years back in Hawaii. “I was 13 at that time. My dad was working with the Navy as a laborer on Kwajalein”, an atoll in Lat’s native Marshall Islands controlled by the US military. “It was early, early morning. We were all outside on that day waiting in the dark. Everybody was waiting for the Bravo.”

    That day was fifty years ago, yesterday. March 1, 1954. Bravo was not the first, or the last, just the worst of America’s nuclear tests in the Pacific, a fission-fusion-fission reaction, a thermonuclear explosion, an H-Bomb, America’s biggest blast. In today’s poverty of expression, it would be called a WMD. Except that it was “ours”, and so real that days after marveling that some strange sun had lighted the western sky with “all kinds of beautiful colors”, young Bruno also took in the sight of refugees from downwind of the blast at Bikini Atoll, miserable and burned and belatedly evacuated to Kwajalein. Their scalp, he recalled, “you could peel it like fried chicken skin”.

    In the standard history of Bravo, much of what happened that morning was “an accident”. That is the term Edward Teller, the bomb’s designer, uses in his memoirs. The Navy said it had anticipated a six-megaton bomb, but Bravo came in at 15. It had anticipated the winds to blow one way, but they blew another. It had not evacuated downwinders in advance because the danger was deemed slight, and anyway the budget that year was tight. It had not expected that a Japanese fishing trawler, the Lucky Dragon, would be out on the sea 87 miles from the blast, or that when it returned home two weeks later its catch would be “hot”, creating a panic in Japanese fish markets. It had not expected reports of radioactive horses in New Zealand, radioactive rain in Sydney. It really had not expected that one of the Lucky Dragon fishermen, hospitalized with radiation sickness for months along with his mates, would die. Officially the US government maintained that the cause of death was hepatitis unrelated to radiation.

    Officially the Atomic Energy Commission also claimed, ten days after the blast, that the Bravo shot had been “routine” and that among those stricken Marshallese at whom Bruno Lat was gaping, “there were no burns. All were reported well.” A month later AEC chairman Lewis Strauss told reporters they were not only well but “happy” too.

    Their medical records from the time tell a story of burns and lesions, nausea, falling hair and weeping sores. Dr. Seiji Yamada of the University of Hawaii Medical School reviewed them in Kwajalein three years ago, and it is a simple matter to find government reports acknowledging same, now that that particular lie is unnecessary.

    The Bravo blast was so immense, so terrible that the typical comparison_”equal to 1,000 Hiroshimas”_seems almost evasive, as if there were a continuum of comprehensibility within which it might fit. The bomb on Hiroshima instantly killed 80,000 people, more or less. By crude mathematics, Bravo had the power to incinerate 80 million. Ten New Yorks? 26,666 Twin Towers, more or less? No one can grasp such numbers, and because they are crude abstractions, the easier thing, for most Americans, has been to forget the whole thing_or at best to regard Bikini as a bit of cold war kitsch, a curio in the attic of memory.

    Perhaps we can imagine a mushroom cloud with a “stem” 18 miles tall and a “cap” 62 miles across, but probably not. That’s a cloud five times the length of Manhattan, vaporizing all beneath it, sucking everything_in Bravo’s case, three islands’ worth of coral reef, sand, land and sea life, millions of tons of it_into the sky, and then moving, showering this common stuff, now in a swirl of radioactive isotopes, along its path.

    The Marshallese on the island of Rongelap, 120 miles from ground zero, had imagined snow only from missionaries’ photographs of New England winters. That March 1 they imagined the white flakes falling from the sky, sticking everywhere but especially to sweaty skin, piling up two inches deep, as some freakish snowstorm. Children played in it, and later screamed with pain. Unlike Bruno Lat, they had not been waiting for Bravo.

    On other islands the “snow” appeared variably as a shower, a mist, a fog. The Navy had a practice of sending planes into the blast area hours after detonation to measure “the geigers”, as radioactivity was colloquially known among sailors, and the early readings over inhabited islands after Bravo are staggering. Scientists didn’t know in 1954 that a radiation dose of 30 roentgens would double the rate of breast cancer in adults, that 90 would double the rate of stomach and colon cancer, that young children were ten times as vulnerable. But they did know that 150 roentgens, noted in one of the earliest military estimates for Rongelap, were catastrophic. Yet the Navy waited two days to evacuate Rongelap and Ailinginae; three days to evacuate Utirik.

    Nine years later thyroid cancers started appearing in exposed islanders who had been children during Bravo, then leukemia. Even in “safe” atolls, babies began being born retarded, deformed, stillborn or worse. In 1983 Darlene Keju-Johnson, a Marshallese public health worker, gave a World Council of Churches gathering this description: “The baby is born on the labor table, and it breathes and moves up and down, but it is not shaped like a human being. It looks like a bag of jelly. These babies only live for a few hours.”

    The Marshallese say that Bravo was not an accident. Decades after the fact, a US government document surfaced showing that weather reports had indeed indicated shifting winds hours before the blast. In 1954 the United States had nine years of data on direct effects of radiation but none on fallout downwind; select Marshallese have been the subject of scientific study ever since.

    In all events, as Alexander Cockburn once put it, “an ‘accident’ is normalcy raised to the level of drama”. Marshall Islanders endured sixty-seven US nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. It has been calculated that the net yield of those tests is equivalent to 1.7 Hiroshima bombs detonated every day for twelve years. A full accounting of the displacements and evacuations, the lies and broken promises, beginning with the Bikini people’s surrender of their land to US officers who vowed “to test this new weapon which is designed to end all wars”, would fill pages. A full accounting of the health impact would fill volumes, and has never been done. Bruno Lat is not an official victim of any test, so his thyroid cancer doesn’t count; the same with his father’s stomach tumors.

    Of the broken culture and broken hearts, there can be no accounting. Never to be sure if the food is poison, if the doctors are honest, if the cancer will get you next; to never know home because however beautifully its white sands shimmer beneath the dome of blue, however energetically its coconut crabs skitter among the palms, living there is lethal; to live a different kind of lethal, in a Pacific ghetto hell, unknown in the region before the displacements and the testing, and to see no way out_we don’t call those things terror. Yesterday, March 1, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bravo, the Marshallese formally petitioning the US Congress to make full compensation for the ruin of their lands and their health. They also want Congress to express “deep regret for the nuclear testing legacy”. Some had wanted an apology, but that, the majority decided, America would never concede.

    *Joann Wypijewski, former managing editor of The Nation, writes about labor and politics for CounterPunch. She can be reached at: jw@counterpunch.org. This article was originally published by CounterPunch on 2 March 2004.

  • 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.

  • The Nuclear History of Micronesia and the Pacific

    “The first shot, Bravo, the largest single nuclear explosion conducted by the United States, with a destructive capability more than one thousand times that of the Hiroshima bomb, was detonated on 1 March 1954. The explosion was so powerful it vaporized several small islands …”

    “…To this day, peoples of Rongelap, Bikini, Enewetak, and many in the Marshall Islands continue to suffer from cancer, miscarriages, and tumors.”

    While it is harrowing that Japanese cities became the ultimate target, Micronesians (Marshallese) and French-Polynesians have never really overcome the disastrous consequences of the nuclear testings that made the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible. In French-Occupied Polynesia, 180 tests were conducted for over 30 years beginning with atmospheric testing in the Tuamotos in 1966. Only sometime later did the testings move underground in the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa; but unlike the Americans, in the case of documentation of test results and effects on environmental and human health, the French have always been and continue to be secretive about their own tests in Polynesia. Tahitians and Marshall Islanders who were exposed, including test site workers, have been dying slow, excruciating deaths. Often they are unable to receive proper medical treatment because French authorities continue to deny officially that the nuclear tests did in fact cause any significant environmental or human damage.

    At the conclusion of World War II after Japan’s defeat, Micronesia was taken by America. In January 1946, the US Naval Military Government selected the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands chain for the first series of nuclear tests–known as Operation Crossroads–which were intended to demonstrate the destructive capacity of the atomic bombs on a fleet of wartime ships (Robie 1989, p.142). In July 1947, the US Government became our “Administering Authority,” with the blessings of the UN. Immediately after the war, eleven territories were under UN supervision. Micronesia became administratively the “Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands,” and consisted of the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands (which included the islands of Kosrae, Pohnpei, Truck/Chuuk, Yap, and Belau), and the Marianas Islands (which include Guam, Saipan and Tinian).

    In Belau (Palau), where I come from, we were spared the harrowing experiences of the atomic testings. Kwajalein, Bikini and Enewetak in the Marshall Islands, however, were chosen for a supply base and a smaller command center, respectively, and which were used for the bomb testings. The Marshall Islands suffered the most from these military occupations and tests. Kwajelein also became a vital link in the supply route for American forces during the Korean War as well as a base for missile tests later. On Saipan, the main island of what is now the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, the Central Intelligence set up a camp which operated a secret training for Chinese nationalist guerillas who were part of an unsuccessful plan to invade the Chinese mainland (Robie p.144).

    Micronesia, therefore, was where the beginnings of important aspects of these US military activities took place. These integral aspects of US military strategy in the western Pacific were the beginnings of a strategic concept at work in U.S. Asia-Pacific policy. Ever since, as Joseph Gerson has written, Micronesia has been shaped and influenced by “the goal of maintaining and increasing U.S. power and advantage in the region.” In the Marshall Islands, the US tested a total of 66 atomic and hydrogen bombs between 1946 and 1958. Six islands were vaporised by nuclear weapons and hundreds of people were irradiated. Today, more than 40 years later, many islands are still uninhabited. Many Bikinians and Rongelapese who were downwind of the bomb explosions remain exiled peoples. (Alexander 1994, pp. 28,30).

    In the book, Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific, David Robie writes,

    …the more than 2000 islands of Micronesia have played a vital role in modern strategic history. Japanese aircraft launched their attack on Peal Harbor from Micronesia, plunging the United States into the Second World War. And it was from Tinian Island in western Micronesia that the Enola Gay took off with its deadly weapons for the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which ended the war and ushered in the nuclear age. The islands of Micronesia have been used by Washington ever since as pawns to enhance its strategic posture (Robie, ibid, p.142).

    This ‘strategic posture’ was largely the result of a Cold War strategy that relied on massive military might. It emerged as well from a rational calculation of the use of deadly power. Cold War strategy, Alexander observed:

    …required an assessment of both the political and military potential of the atomic weapon in a strategic sense. While the political assessment was made in the context of East-West rivalry, the military assessment required taking note of both the strengths and weaknesses of the new weapon. Two of these weaknesses, the scarcity of bombs and the limited range of the only available delivery vehicle, the B-29 bomber, served to govern US strategy in the first years after World War II, and prompted an all-out effort for research and development, including an ambitious testing program. At the same time, US confidence in its ability to maintain its nuclear lead was bolstered by a new-found strength, the efficacy of which had been demonstrated by the Manhattan Project (Alexander, ibid, p.18).

    A comprehensive program of nuclear research appeared necessary; however, there had been concerns within the US Congress about safety issues. After considerations, the US Atomic Energy Commission told Congress in 1953 that tests should be held overseas until it (can) be established more definitely that continental detonations would not endanger the public health and safety (Weisgall 1980, p. 76). Micronesia, which was captured from the Japanese, seemed, to the AEC, as the most natural place. Bikini was chosen as one of over 20 atolls scattered over close to 400,000 square miles of ocean which make up the Marshall Islands to carry Operation Crossroads, the first series of tests which were conducted near the surface of the atoll, in July 1946. These first tests consisted of two 23 kiloton detonations, one named Able and the other, Baker.

    The explosions gouged out a crater 240 feet deep and 6,000 feet across, melted huge quantities of coral, sucked them up and distributed them far and wide across the Pacific. The island of Rongelap (100 miles away) was buried in powdery particles of radioactive fallout to a depth of one and a half inches, and Utirik (300 miles away) was swathed in radioactive mist. Also in the path of the fallout was a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon No 5, and all 23 crew rapidly developed radiation sickness. (Alexander 1994, pp.22,23,24). Jonathan Weisgall, in an article titled “Nuclear Nomads of Bikini” noted that according to one report, “Baker alone left 500,000 tons of radioactive mud in the lagoon” (Weisgall, ibid, p.84.).

    But the “US navy [only] sent ships to evacuate the people of Rongelap and Utirik three days after the explosion. These (and other) Pacific people were used as human guinea pigs in an obscene racist experiment – a particularly sharp snapshot of colonialism and the horrors wrought by the arrogant mindset which goes with it,” as a Peace Movement Aotearoa/New Zealand Action Alert put it (Peace Movement Aotearoa, March 1999).

    These two tests were just two of the total 66 nuclear tests that the Department of Defense announced it conducted between 1946 and 1958, 23 of them at Bikini Atoll and 43 at Enewetak, located in the northern Marshall Islands. Operation Sandstone was the name of the series of tests conducted at Enewetak Atoll between April and May 1948. A 49 kiloton blast code-named Yoke, yielded “an explosion which was more than twice the size of any prior atomic bomb detonation.” There was something significant about Operation Sandstone, as Alexander observed. Partly quoting from Harvey Wasserman’s and Norman Solomon’s book, Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation, Alexander wrote,

    Operation Sandstone was significant in that the tests, conducted jointly by the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, ‘evidently did result in substantial improvements in the efficiency of use of fissile material,’ and according to Herbert York this ‘success’ ‘boosted morale at Los Alamos and helped garner further support for the laboratory in Washington. As a result, the construction of a new laboratory, located nearby on South Mesa (New Mexico), was authorized as a replacement for the wartime facilities which were still being used.’ This response is an example of the way in which the nuclear industry and nuclear strategists developed their own momentum. Each successful explosion not only helped create the mystique of American nuclear preeminence, but also spoke to the possibility of the development of more and more powerful weapons, resulting in greater insecurity not only for the people involved in the tests, but for the entire world (Alexander, ibid., p. 24).

    Other series of tests, Operation Greenhouse, for example, were conducted at Enewetak in April and May 1951. On November 1, 1952, Mike was exploded on the island of Elugelab. Mike was the name of a cylindrical bomb measuring 22 ft in length and 5-1/2 ft in diameter and weighing 23 tons. Mike’s detonation yielded a force of over 10 megatons, nearly one thousand times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The island of Elugelab completely disappeared.

    The US Government listed the Mike explosion as the first detonation of an experimental thermonuclear device (Wasserman and Solomon, pp. 80-84). A total of six islands would simply vanish as a result of further tests of similar magnitude. The Mike bomb paved the way for the development of future hydrogen bombs. Operation Castle tested these bombs between March and May 1954, using Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. The operation included the following detonations: Bravo (15 megaton), Romeo (11 megaton), Union (6.9 megaton), Yankee (13.5 megaton), and Nectar (1.69 megaton).

    Again, according to Alexander:

    The first shot, Bravo, the largest single nuclear explosion conducted by the United States, with a destructive capability more than one thousand times that of the Hiroshima bomb, was detonated on 1 March 1954. The explosion was so powerful it vaporized several small islands and parts of islands in Bikini Atoll and left a hole one-mile deep in diameter in the reef. Years later, some Bikinian leaders would return to Bikini and weep openly at the sight of the sandbars and open water, all that remained of the islands destroyed by the Bravo shot. They would declare that the islands had ‘lost their bones.’

    Bravo coated Rongelap and Utirik Atolls with two inches of radioactive fallout. (Alexander, ibid., 28).

    To this day, peoples of Rongelap, Bikini, Enewetak, and many in the Marshall Islands continue to suffer from cancer, miscarriages, and tumors. Eighty-four percent of those who lived on Rongelap who below 10 years old at the times of the explosions have required surgery for thyroid tumors (Alexander, ibid., p.30).

    Movement for a Nuclear-Free Belau (Palau)

    As someone who is intimately involved in anti-nuclear movements and know of the health consequences of radiation exposure, I grieve today for my Marshallese sisters and brothers. By a kind hand of fate perhaps, my island nation of Belau was spared the harrowing nightmare of nuclear testings. However, we were not spared the full brunt of what is described as nuclear colonialism. By the end of the 1970s, over a decade after the official creation of a larger Micronesian effort to decolonize (Congress of Micronesia), it was clear to us what the monstrous legacy of nuclearism had done just a few thousand miles to the east of us in the Marshall Islands. (Subsequent nuclear catastrophes would contribute to strengthening the anti-nuclear movement). Marshall Islands, the French-Occupied Polynesia, and several places around the world that had been unkindly dealt by nuclearism impressed themselves strongly upon our minds, to say the least.

    In our movement to decolonize, we wrote a Nuclear-Free Constitution in April 1979. Overt and covert American efforts to sidetrack issues and or at the least undermine Belau’s position on anti-nuclearism were unconvincing; via various diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic means, they failed initially to arrest what was quickly becoming a popular movement against what was felt to be outright colonial behavior. The history of the Constitutional Convention that produced the world’s first nuclear-free Constitution offered an explicit rejection of American demands, which were to compel Belau to acquiesce to US military and nuclear requirements. The increasing anti-base movement in the Philippines, where the US maintained its largest foreign military base operation, contributed to the tensions between Belau and America. Belau was always seen as a potential fallback area in the event the Philippine people did successfully evicted the US military. Belau, the Philippines, Guam, Kwajelein and other parts of Micronesia were parts of the network of what was described as a “forward military strategy” which aimed to project US military strength as close as possible to the Asian mainland and throughout the Pacific Ocean. This was part of a grand strategic plan outlined in a US National Security Action Memorandum No. 145 (NSAM-145), signed by John F. Kennedy in April 1962, and designed to formally incorporate all of Micronesia within US’s political and military network in the Pacific.

    NSAM-145 provided the political context in which Kennedy would, over a year later, send a mission to Micronesia to plot the contours of a colonial conspiracy which had been faithfully adhered to by subsequent US administrations. The mission was headed by a Harvard University Business School Professor Anthony M. Solomon. The mission’s report came to bear his name. The Solomon Report, was the blueprint for US neocolonialism in the Pacific [and] provides disturbing reading on American political ambitions (Aldridge and Myers 1990, pp.22, 23). Resisting this grand colonial scheme, we attempted to create a nation-state. The next 15 years proved to be a painful period of radical political and social transformations, as we struggled to preserve our nuclear-free Constitution amidst aggressive US Pentagon attempts to undermine it.

    It is impossible to describe a 15-year movement here in a page or two. I will only refer the reader to the extensive report of the United Nations Visiting Mission to Belau in November 1993. The UN mission was sent there to observe the November 9th 1993 plebiscite on the Compact of Free Association, the treaty negotiated by Belau and the US which details the economic and military conditions of a treaty-relationship between the US and Belau (for more details, refer to UN Trusteeship Council Document T/1978, December 1993). This is the treaty that the United States was adamant in compelling Belau to adopt, and which after 15 years and seven attempts to say NO to it, was finally “approved” in 1993. The treaty has essentially laid to rest the nuclear-free provisions of Belau’s Constitution for 50 years; the US, in return, will give Belau some economic assistance only for 15 years.

    The crucial issues to consider here, or in similar nation-building efforts, are those of democratic principles and military imperatives. Between 1983 and 1993, Belau peoples exercised their democratic right to freely express their common wishes in founding a nuclear-free island nation. In all of these democratic exercises, we said No each time. US military imperatives overrode all of those No’s and undermined democratic practice; but this is not something new. Cultures of militarism and nuclearism are, by nature, cultures of secrecy. They erode openness and democracy and make indispensable a culture of death and terror which legitimizes militarism and production and use of weapons of mass destruction. The theory and practice of nuclear deterrence have been extremely hostile to democratic practice. National military strategies have often required the absence of free democratic thought while, on the other hand, a commitment to nuclear disarmament and demilitarization will allow communities to participate more fully in both the political sphere and civil society” in working to ensure a world free of the nuclear dangers that confront us.

    Belau’s first popularly-elected president, Haruo Remeliik, was assassinated, partly as a result of the intricate web of Compact of Free Association politics and internal power struggles shaped by America’s obstinate military policies.

    As a result of the November 1993 plebiscite, the Compact of Free Association was approved and came into force on October 1, 1994, a day hailed as “Independence Day.” A year later, Belau joined the South Pacific Forum, an organization of Pacific Island Governments. In December of 1995, Belau joined the United Nations. As a result, in the South Pacific Forum and within the United Nations, Belau will assume responsibilities for keeping the issue of nuclear disarmament alive.

    One of the stipulations of the Compact of Free Association which made possible its passage in 1993 was that the United States would only seek to exercise its right to militarize (which implies the stationing of nuclear weapons) “during periods of crisis or hostilities.” To be sure, a May 6, 1993 Letter of Assurances from US Secretary of State Warren Christopher failed to explicitly define what such crisis or hostilities would be. In any event, the stipulations expressed in Secretary Christopher’s letter were incorporated within and legislated into binding Belau law. A greater portion of these assurances would rely on the “good faith” of the United States and the Belau Government, in accordance with the provisions of stated military objectives of the Compact treaty (see Republic of Palau Public Law No. 4-9, Sections 5, 6). Regional peace, we must then conclude, will depend to a greater or lesser extent on the responsibilities of these two nations to decrease (or de-escalate) the potential for actual military conflict or violence.

    It is worth noting that for the basic international legal instrument mandating global nuclear disarmament is the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The NPT forms the integrated network of unilateral, bilateral, regional and multilateral treaties and other standard-setting arrangements that seek to control/curb the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear disarmament is premised on the good faith efforts by nuclear weapon states to take unilateral or multilateral initiatives to achieve disarmament. Highlighted in Article Six of the NPT, such a premise has been a controversial issue because of lack of action to pursue good faith initiatives to disarm. That premise of good faith, however, was reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice in 1996 and remains vital to the trust that must be built within on-going disarmament efforts.

    The nuclear disarmament challenge in Belau would be to compel a good faith compliance to US and Belau laws.For Belau and the United States, respectively, Republic of Palau Public Law No. 4-9 (signed by our president on July 16, 1993), US Public Law 99-658 (approved on November 14, 1986) and US Public Law 101-219 (approved December 12, 1989) are the American legal mandates of the Compact of Free Association. In addition to this July 1993 Belau law which merely restated some interpretations and positions of the Belau Government vis-a-vis the Compact of Free Association as well as subsidiary agreements to it developed in Hawaii and Guam, and authorized what became the final Compact plebiscite, for Belau’s part, we are bound as well by the legal imperatives elaborated in the two US laws referenced above.

    In January 1997, at its regional meeting in Moorea, French-Occupied Polynesia, the Abolition 2000 network passed a resolution denouncing the military/nuclear option of the Belau/US Compact of Free Association, and the undemocratic process within which it was “approved.” More importantly, the Abolition 2000 resolution stated that any attempt to use the option for nuclear purposes would violate the Pacific nuclear-free zone as well as violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and would risk adding to the genetic damage already perpetuated on the Pacific peoples.

    Not to be forgotten, there were British Tests in Australia, Kiritimati (Christmas) and Malden Islands in the Line Islands. Jacqui Katona (Gundjehmi Aboriginal Organization, Mirrar peoples) from Australia has information on these.

    In French-Occupied Polynesia, the French have conducted a total of 153 nuclear weapons tests, in addition to those conducted in 1995. There is a lack of official information about the tests, so no comparison with how the Americans have done in Micronesia is done. Again, Jacqui Katona may be able to provide information about Moruroa and Fangataufa, and the Te Ao Maohi (French-Polynesians) anti-nuclear movement. And Lysiane Alezard, from Le Mouvement de la Paix in Paris, should also be able to share more information about the French tests.

    The French nuclear test site workers face similar problems that all nuclear test site workers elsewhere face. Amidst the difficulties in Tahiti however, Hiti Tau has worked along with peoples from a university in Belgium to gather personal information and testimonies of previous nuclear test site workers, now published in the book Moruroa and Us: Polynesians’ Experiences during Thirty Years of Nuclear Testing in the French Pacific (See De Vries and Seur 1997). Theirs is a narrative of struggle as well as a triumph of collective grassroots action. It speaks as well to the role of networking within the international anti-nuclear information infrastructure, of which this gathering is part.

    What Can We Conclude From All of This?

    Unfortunate as we Micronesians were for being the unwilling hosts to preparations, testings, and launchings of weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations, over the years within our demilitarization and nuclear-free struggles, we have been constantly reminded of our role within the world-wide struggle for demilitarization and denuclearization. While we grieve for the on-going legacy of human and environmental health resulting from nuclear testings, a greater portion of our nuclear-free Pacific struggles has been inspired by what Betty Burkes described in her talk at an Abolition 2000 conference in Northern California in 1997, that we are constantly making inquiry into the culture of war and violence we inhabit, check out how we participate and are organized to acquiesce in our own exploitation (Burkes 1997). At least we have tried to work along with Japanese, Native peoples, and other victims of the Nuclear Age in forging common struggles of resistance against nuclearization and militarization everywhere.

    We recognize the responsibility for tailoring our struggles in ways that inspire peoples in comparable sites of struggle. As far as we have been able, we have sought to wage our struggles non-violently. Being witnesses to the violence and brutality of nuclearism–and the colonialism which legitimizes nuclear violations of our islands in the first place–Pacific Islanders sensed early on that a struggle for genuine justice had to reject the adoption of violence as a means to end the violence we saw around us. Colonialism provided the ruthless infrastructure from which we yearned to be free from political oppression.

    It was owing partly to the nature of Pacific peoples to reject the principle of violence. Violence killed all in its path, and here we were struggling to survive. Instinctively, decisions were made for a nuclear-free Pacific movement to respond accordingly. A friend in Hawaii, Rolf Nordahl, recently reflecting on this tendency, rejects violence as a means to achieving resolution of the sovereignty movement there and commented to our Allies group, “Violence begets more violence and the resulting desire for revenge leads to twisted thinking such as Milosevic explaining that the reason he can conduct ethnic cleansing is because of what happened 600 years ago.” We need to make the connections between the violence of colonialism and a culture of militarism which allows the militarization/nuclearization of colonial outposts, and funnels resources away from more urgent social needs in Western nations. Moreover, we need to constantly question the many justifications for militarism and its role in economic affairs.

    Writing about the role of weaponry in international trade, John Ralston Saul says in his book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West that “We are living in the midst of a permanent wartime economy.” He continues, “The most important capital good produced in the West today is weaponry. The most important sector in international trade is not oil or automobiles or airplanes. It is armaments.” Saul does not necessarily add anything new to what we already know about the trade in weapons; but he does reiterate the backwardness or the lack or higher moral values that ought to influence the trading of goods and services. Among many others, Seymour Melman has been writing about these issues for 20 years; his book The Permanent War Economy is recommended reading. John Stanley and Maurice Pearton, Steven Lydenberg, Robert De Grasse, William Hartung, Carol Evans, James Adams, and Martin Navias also have provided compelling analyses of military spendings and economic waste (there is a list of their books in the Works Cited section at the end). The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute publishes an annual accounting of arms sales, while The Council of Economic Priorities in New York has addressed the subject in a number of reports which hold to the old liberal approach–that arms are a waste of money and that statistics prove it.

    In the preface to their book Resisting the Serpent: Palau’s Struggle for Self-Determination Bob Aldridge and Ched Myers reflect that “For nowhere else are the concrete mechanisms of the military-industrial-academic complex so sanitized, so overlaid with official mystification. How else could the citizenry of the world’s largest debtor nation continue to accept and subsidize such huge levels of military spending? Militarism, to extend the metaphor, has ‘colonized our minds…But our domestication is most troubling when it deludes us to think that militarism, apart from an overt foreign intervention and short of nuclear war, is at best an economic boom and at worst a victimless crime. The fact is, without a strategic missile ever being launched, militarism is wreaking destruction upon human life and culture. Perhaps North Americans might see this more clearly if we suspend our scenarios of what might happen to our world in the event of all-out war long enough to listen to the voice of those whose worlds have already been ravaged” (Aldridge and Myers 1990, p. xx-xxi)

    Beginnings of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement

    The grassroots Pacific anti-nuclear movement was launched at the first Nuclear-Free Pacific conference at Suva [Fiji] in April 1975, backed by the Against Tests on Moruroa (ATOM) committee which had been formed in 1970. It consisted of people from the Pacific Theological College, the University of the South Pacific and the Fiji YWCA. The committee was merged into the Pacific People’s Action Front in the mid-1970s and then the movement went into decline. It surfaced again as the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG) in 1983. Other Pacific anti-nuclear groups existed already but the Suva conference established a Pacific-wide network. This movement proved to be a major factor in persuading Pacific governments to take a stronger nuclear-free stand and shaping public awareness and opinion throughout the region.

    A draft People’s Charter for a Nuclear-Free Pacific was produced at Suva and influenced the then New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk to call for a nuclear-free zone treaty at the 1975 South Pacific Forum–an ideal that took a decade to be realized. After the draft was reaffirmed at a second conference in Pohnpei [the capital of what is now the Federated States of Micronesia] in 1978, the third meeting two years later at Kailua [O’ahu], Hawaii, expanded the group’s identity as the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. Resource centres were set up in Honolulu and Port Vila [Vanuatu].

    The fourth–and biggest–congress was held in Port Vila during 1983 in recognition of the Vanuatu Government’s support of a niuklia fri pasifik, as it is expressed in pidgin (Robie, ibid, p. 146-147). At the opening of this conference in Port Villa, Vanuatu, Deputy Prime Minister Sethy Regenvanu told the delegates that, “We are seeking a Pacific…free of every last remnant of colonialism… [F]reedom and independence will have no meaning if our very existence is threatened by the constant fear of total destruction” (Robie, ibid, p.147).

    In Vanuatu, the People’s Charter for a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific, adopted in Hawaii, was reaffirmed. The Charter’s Preamble declared the following:

    1. We, the people of the Pacific want to make our position clear. The Pacific is home to millions of people with distinct cultures, religions and ways of life, and we refuse to be abused or ignored any longer;

    2. We, the people of the Pacific have been victimised for too long by foreign powers. The Western imperialistic and colonial powers invaded our defenceless region, they took our lands and subjugated our people to their whims. This form of alien colonial political and military domination unfortunately persists as an evil cancer in some of our native territories such as Tahiti-Polynesia, Kanaky, Australia and Aotearoa. Our home continues to be despoiled by foreign powers developing nuclear and other means of destruction, oppression, and exploitation that advance a strategy that has no winners, no liberators and imperils the survival of all human kind;

    3. We, the people of the Pacific will assert ourselves and wrest control over the destiny of our nations and our environment from foreign powers, including Trans-National Corporations;

    4. We note in particular the racist roots of the world’s nuclear powers. We are entitled to and we commit ourselves to the creation of a just and equitable society;

    5. Our environment is further threatened by the continuing deployment of nuclear arsenals in the so-called strategic areas throughout the Pacific. Only one nuclear submarine has to be lost at sea, or one nuclear warhead dumped in our ocean from a stricken bomber, and the threat to the fish and our livelihood is endangered for centuries. The erection of super ports, Nuclear Testing Stations, may bring employment but the price is destruction of our customs, our way of life, the pollution of our crystal clear waters, and brings the ever present threat of disaster by radioactive poisoning into the everyday life of the peoples;

    6. We, the people of the Pacific reaffirm our intention to extract only those elements of Western civilisation that will be a permanent benefit to us. We wish to control our destinies and protect our environment in our own ways. Our usage of our natural resources in the past was more than adequate to ensure the balance between nature and humankind. No form of administration should ever seek to destroy that balance for the sake of a brief commercial gain;

    7. We, the people of the Pacific will strive to be politically, economically, and spiritually self-determining. This includes the right to secede from oppressing nations.

    The Pacific anti-nuclear movement, like the movement of indigenous peoples to assert their rights, was partly a response to the West’s persistent colonial domination in violation of the United Nations Charter’s call for decolonization at that time and the West’s Cold War pretext for use of the Pacific islands for devastating nuclear testing. By that same year, the United Nations Cobo Report [in Geneva] concluded that discrimination against indigenous peoples was due to their lack of self-determination, that imposed assimilation was a form of discrimination, and that the right of indigenous peoples to cultural distinctiveness, political self-determination and secure land resources should be formally declared by the UN (Blaisdell 1998a).

    As a result of previous work then on-going, the UN created, under the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, in order to address, among other things, the continuing abuses of the world’s Indigenous peoples by existing Nation-states. That working group completed, after 12 years of work and intense lobbying in Geneva, the Pacific and around the world, a draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous peoples are still working to get it passed by the United Nations. More significantly, that working group provided an additional forum wherein we attempted to broaden discussions and debate regarding our anti-nuclear struggle, hoping to develop international consensus for final cessation of foreign domination in our homes. We look forward to the future with hope when all the final vestiges of colonialism will have been eradicated.

    Our anti-nuclear movement has been inextricably linked to our struggle to bring about an end to colonialism and neocolonialism. Had Pacific Islanders been able to freely self-determine their political futures–taking serious consideration of informed consent in a climate devoid of fear and economic blackmail–there would absolutely be no doubt we would have rejected hosting the preparations and testing of other foreign countries’ dangerous nuclear bombs in our island homes.

    On July 9, 1999 which was Constitutional Day in my island nation of Belau, we celebrated the full 20 years since we wrote what was once a nuclear-free Constitution! A mere twenty years have taught us much. A grassroots global nuclear abolition movement has been created and continues to grow. Moreover, a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons within the United States has been created and will be formally launched in October 1999.

    The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, issued a legal advisory expressing the general illegality of nuclear weapons. For us in Belau, the struggle was long and painful. Assassinations, killings of innocent civilians, and official involvements (of officials in both the Belau and US governments) in the breakdown of law and order, now vindicate the rightness of the nuclear-free idea, once radical and unrealistic but now chic (See Butler, Edwards and Kirby 1988, “Palau: A Challenge to the Rule of Law in Micronesia,” for a description of the systematic breakdown of law engaged in by “top government officials”). Now a broad spectrum of mainstream organizations and individuals are working to create a nuclear-free world, largely because we have now come to understand the depth of the crisis of relying on weapons of mass destruction to ensure “security.”

    For Micronesians generally, it made sense to do the right thing. For Belau peoples particularly, we must have either been ready and willing to pay the price or crazy enough to stand up to the US Pentagon. Whatever the case may have been, twenty years after we wrote that Constitution, on July 9, 1999, the young peoples of Belau–many of them were the children of those who authored the Constitution as well as our nation’s Founding Fathers–hosted a Constitutional Forum wherein the surviving members of the 1979 Constitution Convention spoke about their experiences during the convention. The Forum addressed the challenges now facing the island nation. With all that we have seen take place in the last twenty years, it was encouraging to know that we had been vindicated.

    In July 1978 however, just a year before we authored our own nuclear-free Constitution, the UN General Assembly was scheduled to hold its 10th Special Session between May 23 to July 1, devoted to disarmament. Surprisingly, and by consensus, the General Assembly adopted a Final Document about 20 days ahead of schedule–something unheard of in current multilateral disarmament forums.

    That Final Document declared:

    Mankind today is confronted with an unprecedented threat of self-extinction arising from the massive and competitive accumulation of the most destructive weapons ever produced. Existing arsenals of nuclear weapons alone are more than sufficient to destroy all life on earth. Failure of efforts to halt and reverse the arms races, in particular the nuclear arms race, increase the danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet the arms race continues. Military budgets are constantly growing, with enormous consumption of human and materials resources. The increase in weapons, especially nuclear weapons, far from helping to strengthen international security, on the contrary weakens it. The vast stockpiles and tremendous build-up of arms and armed forces and the competition for qualitative refinement of weapons of all kinds to which scientific resources and technical advances are diverted, pose incalculable threats to peace. This situation both reflects and aggravates international tensions, sharpens conflicts in various regions of the world, hinders the process of detente, exacerbates the differences between opposing military alliances, jeopardizes the security of all States, heightens the sense of insecurity among all States, including non-nuclear-weapon States, and increases the threat of nuclear war… (United Nations Office of Public Information 1978, pp.4-5).

    An accompanying program of action identified several key actions and proposals for disarmament work to proceed. I recount that 1978 declaration on disarmament in order to highlight the fact that nation-states cannot be trusted. Twenty years is a bit too long to wait on a sincere promise made to halt development of weapons of mass destruction. Arguably, since 1978, the world has witnessed an increase of nuclear arsenals and the threats now facing humanity have increased as a consequence of the arms race conducted since that time. We now only have approximately 20 weeks before the new millennium comes, making it ever so crucial that we join together as representatives of civil society to develop a more progressive grassroots agenda for a nuclear-free world.

    Envisioning/Ensuring Our Future — Abolition 2000

    This is the legacy of what we in the Pacific have been witnesses to: the violence of colonial aggressions and nuclear colonialism, and the resulting effort to re-think the whole basis of planetary security. Thinking along shared responsibilities of caring for our planet compels us to network far and wide with sympathetic allies who inspire us and help us in a common effort to bring sanity, every precious bit of sanity, to the way we live on this planet. Genuine peace can come when we allow a sense of justice to guide our affairs vis-a-vis one another, and more crucially, in the way we relate with our precious Mother Earth. “We are a culture organized around death, war, profit, and violence,” Betty Burkes proclaimed, “where power is based on the principle of power-over others.” She explains that power over [another] is the power of punishment, weapons, competition, the power of annihilation that supports all the institutions of domination. Nuclear weapons serve the preservation and continuance of that culture.However, to realize a secure and livable world for our children and grandchildren and all future generations, the stated goal of Abolition 2000 requires that we make some inquiry into the culture of war and violence we inhabit, check[ing] out how we participate and are organized to acquiesce in our own exploitation (Burkes, ibid.).

    Describing what was at stake at a US nuclear disarmament meeting in Chicago last year when the US Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was being established, Jackie Cabasso, one of Abolition 2000’s founders, wrote in Abolition 2000: Speaking Truth to Power: “We had lots of questions: What exactly does abolition mean. How long would it take?…We recognized that a nuclear weapons free world must be achieved carefully and in a step by step manner, and we spelled out the steps. But we were unyielding in our objective: ‘definite and unconditional abolition of nuclear weapons.’ From the basement of the United Nations in New York we faxed out the Abolition 2000 Statement” (Cabasso 1998, pp.2-3). And the rest is history! Abolition 2000 is now a global movement with more than 1,300 organization members around the world.

    Many individuals who were involved in founding the global Abolition 2000 network have created a US campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. Such a short history, less than 5 years–speaks volumes to what a caring and active grassroots movement can do in 5 years what more than 180 Nation-states cannot do in twenty! But this disparity of action–and excessive amount of rhetoric–on the part of nation-states, must also tell us something fundamental: that there may be an unfortunate lack of concern and or sincerity on the part of governments collectively to achieve anything to reduce the increasing dangers humanity faces. It is up to us then, including all concerned peoples and grassroots movements around the world, to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. Failing to do so and remaining indifferent to this global effort to rid the world of nuclear arms is to participate in a conspiracy of silence that is ultimately deadly.

    I take this issue very personally, as everything that I and my brothers and sisters in Belau and around the Pacific value politically, culturally, spiritually have been and continue to be challenged in the extreme by the arrogance of power, maintained by the ability to threaten to murder the mass of humanity. Threatening to mass-annihilate peoples in order to defend a certain “way of life” should be crimes against humanity. It is the same logic that inspired colonial excursions across the globe in the past 500 years.

    The excessive amount of financial resources used to sustain nuclear arsenals is a larceny of the mass of peoples who toil daily in America to pay taxes that are then diverted from urgent social needs to maintaining ever-increasing arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. It is a moral bankruptcy that is driving all these policies; the bankruptcy knows no boundaries as we are all deeply impacted in many ways. We have, in essence, all returned to the scene of a crime, and we do so largely to find within ourselves the will to live as human beings.

    * Richard Salvador is currently a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, where he lives. He is writing a dissertation on the colonial history of Micronesia and Micronesian decolonization movements. He is also gathering research about Belau (Palau), with the goal of writing about Belau’s effort to produce a nuclear-free Constitution; the American Government’s counter-effort to strike down the nuclear-free provisions of that Constitution; and the subsequent effects of the anti-nuclear movement on society and people. Richard is also active in international anti-nuclear work and currently serves on the coordinating committee of Abolition 2000 representing the Pacific Islands Association of NGOs.

    Works Cited

    “Abolition 2000 Resolution Against the Military/Nuclear Option of the Republic of Palau-United States Compact of Free Association,” (Moorea, Te Ao Maohi, January 20-28, 1997). See website of Abolition 2000: A Global Network for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

    http://www.napf.org/abolition2000/index.html

    Adams, James. Engines of War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990.

    Aldridge, Bob and Ched Myers. Resisting the Serpent: Palau’s Struggle for Self-Determination. Baltimore, Maryland: Fortkamp Publishing Company, 1990.

    Alexander, Ronni. Putting the Earth First: Alternatives to Nuclear Security in Pacific Island States. Honolulu, Hawaii: Matsunaga Institute for Peace, 1994. (ISBN: 9994371576)

    Bailey, Emily, Richard Guthrie, Daryl Howlett and John Simpson, The Evolution of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime, 5th edition. (Programme for Promoting Nuclear Non-Proliferation). Southhampton, UK: The Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, 1999.

    Blaisdell, Kekuni. “The Indigenous Rights Movement in the Pacific: 1998 Marks the Centennial of the U.S. Colonial Expansion in the Pacific and Caribbean,” published by In Motion Magazine, 1998a. Available on the Internet: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/pacific.html

    Blaisdell, Kekuni. “Decolonization: Unfinished Business in the Pacific (Pacific Islands Association of Non-Government Organizations Discussion Paper for the Regional Seminar of the United Nations Decolonization Committee,” Nadi, Fiji, 16-18 June 1998. Published by In Motion Magazine. Available on the Internet: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/fiji1.html

    Butler, William J. and George C. Edwards and Michael D. Kirby. Palau: A Challenge to the Rule of Law in Micronesia: Report of a Mission on Behalf of The International Commission of Jurists and The American Association for the International Commission of Jurists. New York: The American Association for the International Commission of Jurists, 1988.

    Burkes, Betty, “What can one Abolitionist Movement Learn from Another? Comparing Abolition of Nuclear Weapons with Abolition of Slavery,” Text of speech at a Northern California Abolition 2000 Conference, February 22, 1997.

    Jacqueline Cabasso, “Abolition 2000: Speaking Truth to Power,” Text of speech at US nuclear demilitarization campaign planning meeting, October 9-10, 1998. Chicago.

    Churchill, Ward and Winona LaDuke, “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” in M. Annette Jaimes (ed), The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

    De Grasse, Robert, Jr., Military Expansion–Economic Decline. New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1983.

    Evans, Caron. “Reappraising Third World Arms Production,” in Survival (March 1986).

    Joseph Gerson, “U.S. Asia-Pacific Hegemony and Possibilities of Popular Solidarity, Fresh Look: Re-examining the role and impact of US bases in Asia-Pacific Seoul, South Korea,” June 26-27, 1999.

    Hartung, William. The Economic Consequences of a Nuclear Freeze. New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1984.

    Lydenberg, Steven. Weapons for the World. New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1977.

    Melman, Seymour. The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1978.

    Moruroa and Us: Polynesians’ Experiences during Thirty Years of Nuclear Testing in the French

    Pacific, published by the Documentation and Research Centre on Peace and Conflict, Lyon, France, 1997.

    Summary: “‘Moruroa and us’ is the final report about the experiences of the Polynesian test-site workers and islanders who lived in the vicinity of Moruroa and Fangataufa. The report is the result of a sociological research conducted by Hiti Tau and the Eglise Evangélique and supported by Pieter de Vries and Han Seur of the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands.

    To see a longer summary of Moruroa and US, please visit: http://www.antenna.nl/ecsiep/resource/moruroa.html

    Navias, Martin. Ballistic Missile Proliferation in the Third World. London: IISS/Brassey’s, 1990.

    Peace Movement Aotearoa (New Zealand), “Action Alert – Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day,” March 1999.

    Republic of Palau Public Law No. 4-9, Fourth Olbiil Era Kelulau (4th Congress), Third Special Session, May 1993. “An Act to State the interpretations and positions of the Republic of Palau as to the Compact of Free Association between the Republic of Palau and the United States of America…” See especially, Sections 5 and 6.

    Robie, David. Blood on Their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific. Leichhardt, NSW, Australia: Pluto Press, 1989.

    Salvador, Richard N. “Indigenous Peoples Speak Truth to Power: Environmental and Human Health Aspects of the Nuclear Age,” NGO Statement to the Third Preparatory Committee of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 2000 Formal Review, May 10-21, 1999. New York.

    Salvador, Richard N. “Nuclear Colonialism and Environmental Racism: An Indigenous Perspective,” unpublished NGO Statement to the Second Preparatory Committee of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 2000 Formal Review, 27 April to 8 May 1998. Geneva, Switzerland

    Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Toronto and New York: Penguin Books, 1992.

    Stanley, John and Maurice Pearton, The International Trade in Arms. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], 1972.

    The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI], The Arms Trade with the Third World. New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1977.

    Wasserman, Harvey and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation, 1945-1982, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1982.

    Jonathan Weisgall, “The Nuclear Nomads of Bikini,” Foreign Affairs 39, 1980.

    United Nations Office of Public Information, “Final Document of Assembly Session on Disarmament 23 May-1 July 1978,” New York: United Nations Headquarters.

    United Nations Trusteeship Council, “Report of the United Nations Visiting Mission to Palau, Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, 1993.” In Official Records of the Trusteeship Council, Sixtieth Session, Supplement No. 1 (T/1978).