And for a while it seemed this project would remain top secret—except that an army corporal named Don Whitaker glimpsed a group of the evidently very sick islanders in their hastily built camp on Kwajalein and wrote to tell his relatives in Cincinnati, who were sufficiently horrified by his letter to pass it to the local paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer. The letter was published on March 9, a little more than a week after the blast. The news then spread rapidly, and it backed the U.S. government into a corner. It was forced to admit that, yes, there had been a nuclear test; that, yes, some islanders had been briefly exposed; but that they were being treated and that all was well.
The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, angrily denied that the islanders were being regarded as guinea pigs, or that their evacuation had been deliberately delayed during those first two days so that their now unique biologies might be studied. Any suggestions otherwise were “utterly false, irresponsible and gravely unjust to the men engaged in this patriotic service,” he declared. Moreover, he had taken the trouble to fly out to Kwajalein and see the islanders, and they “appeared to me to be well and happy.”9
The people of Rongelap were not alone; there were other casualties. Most notably, a Japanese tuna fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon Five, happened to be innocently fishing in the waters near Rongelap that day; she was quite drenched in radiation.
Twenty-three men were aboard. The wooden hundred-footer had sailed from the southern Japanese port of Yaizu some five weeks previously, and after an expedition off Midway Island from which the pickings were extremely slim, the skipper decided to try his luck down in the Marshalls. He knew the dangers, he was well aware of the various Notices to Mariners about testing, and when the western sky lit up with a blinding white flash and then a huge orange fireball on that March 1 morning, he knew very well what had happened. Seven minutes later came the unmistakable Godzilla-rumble of the detonation; all aboard knew it was time to head north, to get as far away as possible.
But the men had to haul up their nets, and while they were engaged in this laborious task, the ash started falling. It was made up of great white flakes of scorched Bikini coral, quite tasteless—one crewman licked an especially large piece—odorless, cold. It fell incessantly, like snow mixed with cotton candy; after three hours, the men were covered with the stuff, their hair was matted, their bare brown shoulders were gray with grit. And very soon after these sea-weathered fisherman had stowed their gear and begun to chug away from the danger zone, they started to fall sick: nausea, burns, headaches, hair loss, stomach problems.
The irony is that these men, all victims of a hydrogen bomb, were Japanese, and were quickly diagnosed back at their home port as suffering from acute radiation sickness. The diagnosis was made so swiftly for the bleakest of reasons: after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese doctors knew all too well—by the way that this unique, newfound, and one might say American-made ailment presented itself—exactly what they were dealing with.
For weeks the men were terribly ill, bedridden, and dangerously vulnerable to infection. The American authorities did little to ease their medical misery, by declining, at least at first, to explain fully what isotopes had so contaminated them, since to do so might reveal something of the bomb’s internal design.
Lewis Strauss, the AEC chairman who had already issued such trenchant denials about the alleged ill-treatment of the Rongelapese, now found himself performing similarly robust damage control over the Lucky Dragon Five. The boat, he suggested mendaciously, may well have been in the pay of the Soviet Union, and was spying. The burns on the men’s skin were no more than a chemical reaction to the lime in the calcined coral. And their boat, in any case, had had no business fishing inside the danger zone. Mr. Strauss also suggested that the tuna caught both by this ship and others known to be in the danger zone was uncontaminated and harmless—though he said nothing when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later placed severe limits on the importation of Japanese fish, which had the effect on the Yaizu fishing community of adding economic insult to radiation injury.
One of the crewmen, the ship’s radio operator, died six months later,10 leaving behind a note suggesting that he be regarded by history as the first fatality caused by a hydrogen bomb.
These are all episodes in a sad and shameful saga, and a story without a visible or imaginable end. Many Pacific peoples have suffered the unhappiest of fates, and to no obvious advantage. There is the fate of the contaminated Rongelapese, now all exiled, irradiated, sick, with sickly offspring and terminated pregnancies and tumors and mysterious growths and varying other legacies of florid illness and early death. There are the more casually forgotten islanders from the other test atoll of Enewetak, now home to the huge crater from the so-called Cactus test of 1958, which is currently entombed under a bizarre stadium-size dome of thick and leaking cement. There are the surviving crew members from the Lucky Dragon Five, most of them now living miserably far from home, self-scattered anonymously around Japan. Shame is still attached in Japan to the so-called hibakusha, “explosion victims,” because some people are still scared that radiation sickness is contagious and can be spread, like leprosy. So the fishermen are exiled, too, victims until they die.
Underpinning all, most infamously, is the fate of the Bikinians. Though some remain on the congested islet of Kili, most of the 400 known members of the group (children, mostly, of the original 167 exiled inhabitants) are scattered, too, many now far afield. They are to be found all around the Pacific, their ancestral homes irradiated, their health compromised, their understandably querulous attitudes found tiresome by some—and, with their layers of lawyers, involved in interminable disputes about their compensation.
Unsurprisingly, Washington has dealt with its nuclear polluting of the modern Pacific mainly by paying out uncountable millions in taxpayer money and hoping the problem will go away. “Bombing Bikini Again,” read the headline in a newspaper article in 1994: “This Time with Money.” Trust funds, compensation, claims, payouts, investments—these days such words pepper the language of the Bikinians: “In all our meetings now,” said a former Peace Corps volunteer who now acts as liaison with the U.S. government, “it’s just money, money, money.”
One means of gathering money for the islanders these days is by promoting the sunken ships of Bikini Atoll, catnip for the world’s richest and most elite deep-sea divers. So even though the local Marshall Islands airline has only one plane, and it is almost always grounded, tourists who are willing to go by charter ship make their way to the atoll to dive down onto the superstructure of the USS Saratoga and to swim alongside sharks and to enjoy the bragging rights of having visited one of the best-known, least-seen places on earth. A place now declared by UNESCO to be worthy of designation on the list of World Heritage Sites, to be a place of “outstanding universal value,” an outstanding example of a nuclear test site, associated with “ideas and beliefs . . . of international significance.”
The divers who visit the lagoon occasionally do take their dinghies across to land, where they can poke around under the new-growing palm trees, stroll past the abandoned bunkers of rust-stained concrete, imagine much about the atoll’s explosive recent past. But they will see precious little to remind them of Bikini’s more ancient history,