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| The "Baker" Explosion, Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, 1946 |
Sixteen months later, the explosion of Castle Bravo on Bikini atoll marked the beginning of a second series of thermonuclear tests staged with the express purpose of creating a much smaller "deliverable" thermonuclear weapon in the megaton range.
On the Ruin of Rongelap offers an account of the events surrounding those tests, and describes the human and environmental consequences of such immense violations from the perspective of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands.
This post offers both an audio presentation and a substantive essay detailing the events leading up to and following on from the nuclear weapon testing program conducted by the US in the Marshall Islands from June 1946 to August 1958. Special attention is given to the effects of Castle Bravo, the first of six thermonuclear tests that were conducted as part of Operation Castle between 1st March and 22nd April 1954.
The Ruining of Rongelap can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 audio file is also available for download here.
Production Notes
Voices
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Archival recording
Holly Barker: Interview with Mick McCormick, February 2012 (Radio4All)
Tony de Brum: "Atomic Testing in the Marshall Islands" (Youtube)
Steve Osborn: Interview with Dori Smith, March 2004 (Radio4All)
Martini Gotje: Interview with Shirin Brown, July 2010 (Internet Archive)
Vincent Di Stefano: Commentary
Music
A. Coe, "Now I am Become Death" (Jamendo)
Alexander Sitnikov, "Downfall" (Internet Archive, MixGalaxy Collection)
Steve Kahn and Rob Mounsey, "Mahana"
Dead Can Dance, "Black Sun"
Doc and Lena Selyanina, "Steppe" (Internet Archive, Netlabels Collection)
Dead Can Dance, "As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins"
Archie Roach, "There is a Garden"
Poetry
Steve Osborn: "The Day of the Two Sunrises"
Effects
Ryansnook: "Nuclear Explosion" (Freesound)
Production
Vincent Di Stefano
Effects
Ryansnook: "Nuclear Explosion" (Freesound)
Production
Vincent Di Stefano
WHEN PROTECTORS BECOME DESTROYERS
Within one second of that infernal
detonation, an immense fireball 7 kilometres in diameter had formed. In less
than a minute, the fireball had risen to a height of 14 kilometres. Eight
minutes later, the fiery cloud had billowed out to a height of 40 kilometres
and had spread out over a distance of 100 kilometres. Even so, it continued
expanding outwards at a rate of more than six kilometres a minute. Beneath this
unearthly fury, the Bikini atoll had been riven in two by a gaping crater two
kilometres wide and nearly 200 feet deep. The clever men who had worked so hard to
create such a weapon were well pleased. The 80,000 inhabitants of the Marshall
Islands, in which the Bikini atoll was situated, were to suffer for generations
to come.
Rongelap atoll lies 170 kilometres to the
east of Bikini. On the morning of March 1st 1954, the sky lit up as it had
never lit up before. The atoll shuddered as from an earthquake and a horrific
roar filled the air. Soon after, white flakes began to fall from the sky
covering everything on the atoll with a layer of ash up to two centimetres
thick. The sky had turned a ghastly grey, and families gathered together
wondering what had happened. The children played with the strange “snow” fallen
from the heavens. Some even tasted it to see what it might be.
Some Americans arrived by
boat the next day. They were wearing full protective clothing and proceeded to take a number
of measurements with their Geiger counters. According to the islanders, they
came and went within 20 minutes and did not speak to any of them during that
time. A number of US navy boats returned a day later - more than 48 hours after
the initial blast - and began to evacuate the islanders.
Even before the Americans arrived, most of
the inhabitants of Rongelap had developed symptoms. Many were vomiting and had
developed diarrhoea. Within a few days, their skin started itching and burning
and began to develop black-pigmented areas that became ulcerated and infected.
Within a fortnight, most of their hair had fallen out, and blood tests showed
significant abnormalities. This was but the beginning of a tribulation that
continues to sear the lives of three generations of Marshall Islanders.
Further afield, the radioactive plume from
the Castle Bravo atomic test had settled on numerous inhabited islands in the
Marshall Islands archipelago, exposing many thousands of their inhabitants to
varying levels of radioactivity.
Dark Seeds
Hiroshima was the first triumph for a group
of new Prometheans intent on unleashing undreamed of destructive power in the
service of the forces of war. The first atomic explosion in human history,
not-so-cryptically named Trinity, had lit up the morning skies of the New
Mexico desert in July 1945. That awesome event inspired J. Robert Oppenheimer,
the director of the Manhattan Project, to ecstatically sing Vishnu's chant of power
from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
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| The Ruins of Hiroshima, August 1945 |
Within a year of the atomic slayings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the US military had claimed the Marshall Islands as their secret
testing ground for nuclear weapon development. As a result of backroom negotiations, the
United Nations formally handed over the Marshall Islands to the US as a Protectorate in
July 1947. But in June 1946, a full year before the UN handover, the US Navy had already exploded a 23-kiloton atomic bomb above Bikini atoll. Three weeks later, they
detonated a similar device 90 feet below the atoll. The Promethean Games had
begun in earnest.
At the end of World War II, Stalin made sure that the Soviets would not be left behind in the race for
nuclear supremacy. Armies of engineers and scientists were put to work and
within four years had constructed a replica of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
The Soviet version was detonated in August 1949 and had an explosive power of
22 kilotons - the equivalent of 22,000 tons of TNT.
The Soviet detonation
drove US military planners into a frenzy of renewed activity. They soon enlisted
the support of Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller, who even while working on
the Manhattan Project through the early 1940s, was dreaming of the feasibility of producing a fusion
bomb based on deuterium and tritium, the isotopes of hydrogen. He understood
that theoretically, there was no limit to the explosive power of such a weapon.
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| Edward Teller |
Many of the nuclear physicists who had
worked on the Manhattan Project were contacted. Soon after, a group of
20 scientists calling themselves “The Matterhorn Gang” were furiously working
up mathematical formulae to track the progression of a man-made thermonuclear fusion reaction. The calculations proved so formidable, that IBM programmers
in New York, the entire computation department of the University of
Pennsylvania, and the operators of the large experimental computers owned by
the US government were brought into the project. Most of the available computing
power in the United States at the time was given over to the scientists at Los
Alamos.
Work began soon after on the
construction of an industrial-scale heavy water nuclear reactor at Savannah River in
South Carolina. This facility was to produce the tritium that eventually enabled the
production of a massive arsenal of thermonuclear weapons by the US over the
next forty years.
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| Ivy Mike |
Despite the fact that Teller had driven the process from the start, he chose not to join the audience of over 10,000 observers - mainly military - gathered around Bikini Atoll to witness the event. Instead, he chose to monitor the explosion on a seismograph in a Californian laboratory. He reasoned that if the detonation was successful, its shock waves would be easily detectable on the US West Coast, 8,000 km away. He had reasoned correctly. Long before word of the event could arrive through the usual channels, Teller had jubilantly reported the success of the operation to his colleagues at Los Alamos, and to his political sponsors in Washington.
The blast exploded with a force of 10.4
megatons - the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT. It completely vaporised
the structure in which the bomb was housed leaving a crater more than a mile
wide and forming an immense mushroom cloud 160 kilometers wide and 40 kilometers in
height. The blast destroyed all life on the immediately surrounding islands.
Well-satisfied with this first effort, Teller and his group immediately set to
work on building a new bomb that would be “deliverable” by air to any nominated
target. In the subsequent design, the liquid deuterium used in the first
thermonuclear explosion was replaced by solid lithium deuteride. This could be
detonated in such a way as to split the lithium atoms into heavy isotopes of
hydrogen, thereby providing the necessary fuel for a thermonuclear fusion
process. This new design formed the basis of the weapon that was exploded on
Bikini atoll on March 1st 1954.
Darker Fruits
Despite their most careful calculations,
Teller and his group seriously underestimated the explosive power of their
second more portable version. They had predicted a yield of five megatons, but
when their baby burst forth into the world, it thundered out at an astonishing 15
megatons – a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -
and spewed millions of tons of radioactive debris throughout the region.
Stalin and his scientists had been watching these developments with great interest. On August 12th
1953, nine months after Ivy Mike, the Soviets themselves exploded their first thermonuclear bomb. It came in at 400 kilotons, nearly 30 times more powerful than the bomb
used in Hiroshima. Unlike the first US hydrogen bomb however, the Soviets had
from the outset produced a useable weapon that could easily be dropped from a plane. Two years
later, the Soviets exploded a more respectable 1.6-megaton hydrogen bomb at
Semipalatinsk in northeast Kazakhstan.
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| Tsar Bomba Detonation, 1961 |
Teller had been correct in his conjectures.
There was in fact no limit to the explosive power that could be released in
thermonuclear detonations.
Writing from Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky a
year after the Tsar Bomba explosion, Cistercian monk Thomas Merton reflected:
“Up to now (August 1962) there have been 106 nuclear tests since testing began again (almost a year). Thirty-one of these by the USSR, seventy-four by the USA, and one by Britain, in the USA (Nevada). The USA has made twenty-nine atmospheric tests, twenty-six in the South Pacific and three in Nevada. The USA has also made forty-four underground tests and one in the stratosphere. Total of all nuclear tests since the beginning: USA 229, USSR 86, UK 22, France 5.Grand total: 342 tests, of which 282 were in the atmosphere.Nice going, boys!” (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966, p. 229)
Unfortunately, it was not such nice going for the
people of the world, and more particularly, for the people of the Marshall
Islands who had in the 12 years between 1946 and 1958, weathered the fallout of
67 atmospheric tests conducted by the US military. Within a decade of the Castle Bravo test,
90% of the children who were under 12 years of age on Rongelap Island at the time of the test had developed thyroid tumours. Marshall Islanders continue to have
one of the world’s highest rates of thyroid abnormalities.
Many of the women from the island of Rongelap suffered
stillbirths and miscarriages in the years after Castle Bravo. Beverley Keever,
author of “News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb” describes the experiences of Ainri, a young 18 year old woman who was pregnant with her first
child at the time of the 1954 test:
“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 regimnen 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 to be 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 (2004) appeared there.”
There is a more sinister dimension to the
experience of the Marshall Islanders that has only recently come to light. In November 1953, four months before the Castle Bravo explosion, a research document was circulated. It was entitled "Project 4.1. Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons." The final version, re-titled "Operation Castle - Final Report Project 4.1. Study of Response of Human Beings Accidentally Exposed to Significant Fallout Radiation" was released a year later, in October 1954.
What had been observed after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was but a prelude. More data was needed and the Marshall Islands,
being at a suitable remove from the US mainland, provided an opportunity for further “information” to be gathered. Those who oversaw the “management” of
the Marshallese affected by the atomic tests must have had some awareness of the consequences of both their actions and their inactions.
Delay and Prevarication
It took a full three days after the Castle Bravo explosion for the irradiated inhabitants of Rongelap to be evacuated. They, their children, and their grand-children have been monitored
on and off ever since. In 1957, they were returned to the island by US
authorities. During their three-year absence, the US continued to carry out
both atomic and thermonuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands. A further
11 thermonuclear tests had been conducted on Bikini atoll, while an additional
eight atomic and three thermonuclear tests had been carried out on Eniwetok atoll.
No attempt was ever made to clear Rongelap
Island of the immense amounts of fallout to which it had been exposed. The people of Rongelap
were simply reassured that it was safe for them to return to their ancestral
lands. They were, however, advised to avoid the more northern islands in their
fishing expeditions. It was also suggested to them that they should eat mainly
imported canned food.
In 1956, the year before their repatriation
to Rongelap, Merril Eisenbud, a prominent member of the Atomic Energy Commission,
had this to say about the “data” being gathered for Project 4.1:
“They had been living on that Island [Utrick Atoll - further downwind from Rongelap]: now that Island is safe to live on but is by far the most contaminated place in the world and it will be very interesting to go back and get good environmental data, how many per square mile; what isotopes are involved and a sample of food changes in many humans through their urines, 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 the way westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless true that they are more like us than the mice.”
After the irradiated inhabitants had been returned to
Rongelap, Dr Robert Conard, head of the Atomic Energy Commission medical
surveillance team wrote in his 1957 annual report:
“The habitation of these people on Rongelap Island affords the opportunity for a most valuable ecological radiation study on human beings. . . . The various radionuclides present on the island can be traced from the soil through the food chain and into the human being.”
During the 1970s, the inhabitants of
Rongelap became increasingly distrustful of reassurances by US government
representatives about the safety of their land. A number of children had been
born with birth defects and others had been diagnosed with leukaemia and
thyroid tumours. They began to seek independent advice.But it was difficult to get any information.
In 1983, the people of Rongelap were finally provided with copies of a translation of a US Department of Energy
document prepared in 1978. The document stated conclusively that many parts of
the island they had lived on since 1957 had a contamination rating of Level 3,
the same as that deemed for both Bikini and Eniwetok atolls where all human
habitation was forbidden. Their worst fears were realised.
They
immediately approached the US authorities and asked to be evacuated from the
island. Their request was summarily refused and they were again reassured by
the US Department of Energy that Rongelap was “safe” and that there was no
cause for concern.
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| Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Auckland 1985 |
Two months later, the Greenpeace yacht was resting at the bottom of Auckland Harbour after having been torn apart by two bombs
planted by agents of the French government.
Cold Comfort
By 1988, the US government was forced to
publically acknowledge the extent of the contamination of Rongelap declaring parts of the
island group “forbidden territory” and in the words of Beverley Keever, “recommending
that the remaining part would be safe only if inhabitants ate imported food for
the next 30 to 50 years” (italics in original). During the 28 years from 1957
and 1985, the inhabitants of Rongelap had been continuously and knowingly
exposed to dangerous levels of Caesium 137, Strontium 90 and a hellish
cauldron of long-lived radioactive isotopes that had settled everywhere.
In the time since their relocation by the
Rainbow Warrior, some reparations have been made through the US Nuclear Claims Tribunal.
Over 1,800 Marshall Islanders received some financial compensation from the US
government for the leukaemia, cancers of the oesophagus, stomach, small
intestine, pancreas and bone, and severe growth retardation due to thyroid
damage that they have suffered. But Keever notes: “46% of affected islanders
died before they were fully paid for their injuries.”
Clean-up operations on Rongelap began in
1999, 45 years after the Castle Bravo test. Huge quantities of potassium were shipped to the island and
added to the soil in order to decrease the uptake of radioactive caesium by
plants. Despite the horrendous damage that has been done to their lands,
the people of Rongelap are looking forward to soon returning to the islands
that they have inhabited for over 4,000 years.
Lengthening Shadows
The story of Rongelap is not an isolated
event in the sordid history of nuclear adventurism. Between 1945 and 1998, the
US has conducted a total of 1,054 nuclear tests, over 330 of which were
atmospheric. The Soviets have detonated over 700 nuclear weapons during the
same period. Between 1966 and 1996, the French have carried out nearly 200
nuclear detonations - both atmospheric and underground - in Moruroa and
Fangataufa atolls in Polynesia. China has conducted 45 tests, as has the UK,
while India, Pakistan and North Korea have between them exploded 14 nuclear
devices.
The world has been irremediably altered by
the nuclear tests conducted during the latter half of the twentieth century, a
time in which we have also come to see the creation of a massively expensive
medical system to treat a world-wide epidemic of childhood cancers and
so-called “diseases of civilisation.” What we are witnessing at present is and expression of
the dehumanised dimension of scientific and technical endeavour. This
is not a peculiar feature of twentieth century civilisation, but was early evident in
the calls of Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century to extract “nature’s
secrets” by whatever means we could muster. This attitude toward the natural world was
furthered by Rene Descartes in his declaration that life was in essence
a clockwork mechanism subject to the demands and manipulations
of the res cogitans, the sphere of human thought and will.
The free expression of the seemingly
limitless power of human rationality has come at the cost of distancing the
human heart and human feeling from the determinations and practices of so-called value-free science. The present over-reach has brought in
its train its own inherent breakdown. Our failure
to reflect on the consequences of our projection of power in
the material world is itself a reflection of our alienation from the sustaining forces that have
enabled such projections to begin with. We are both in the world and of the
world and as the air, earth, fire and water within which we live, move and have
our being become progressively more deranged and more toxic, so too ourselves.
Within the sweep of history, the fate of
the people of Rongelap is but another small stain in the wash of blood and
grief that reaches far beyond the vast charnel grounds of time and empire.
The gift of human intelligence has yet to
be informed by the greater gift of human wisdom. The great power of
human will has yet to be infused by the greater power of divine
love.
Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.
Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.
Further Sources
1. Beverley Keever’s important paper
“Suffering, Secrecy, Exile. Bravo 50 years later” published by Nuclear Age
Peace Foundation describes many of the hidden dimensions of the plight of the
Marshallese since the Castle Bravo detonation.
2. Glenn Alcalay’s brief overview “Atomic Atolls” published March 12, 2010 by CommonDreams.org offers the perspective of an
American anthropologist who served as a Peace Corps volunteer on in the
Marshall Islands during the 1970s.
3. For the more masochistically inclined,
there is fascinating insight to be gained regarding the mindset of the
scientists involved in the creation of both the atomic and thermonuclear
weapons at Los Alamos in a series of video remembrances by Edward Teller
recorded in June 1996.
