In August 1968, there seemed a chance that matters might come back to normal. President Lyndon Johnson ordered that the people of Bikini be allowed to enjoy the comfort of their own homes once again. His scientists had told him, and he was now telling the world, that it was safe for everyone to return. Everyone, he said, should go do so.
On the night of the president’s announcement, the Bikinians who still lived in shacks down south on Kili, the tiny, prison-like speck that had been their exile home for the previous twenty years, rejoiced. At last, they thought, their great national sacrifice was over and they could resume the peaceful rhythms of their former lives of fishing and copra making, and of voyaging in their outriggers to spend time with island neighbors of the western Pacific seas. So more than a hundred of them went off home, exuberant, relieved. An image from the time shows a group of island elders disembarking onto the coral shore, wearing shirts and ties, and so turning their homecoming into a formal event, an episode suffused with the proper dignity.
But the scientists had been wrong. “We goofed,” one of the AEC officials said, with that breezy detachment of language that has marked so much of the official accounting of the saga. “The radioactive intake in the plant food chain had been significantly miscalculated.” It turned out there was still a great deal of radiation deep down in the Bikini soil. The vegetables the islanders grew were contaminated, lethally so.
Congress then had to be asked for a further fifteen million dollars to take the islanders away again. They all left in 1978 and are now back on Kili, or have spread themselves around to other places in the world that will have them. “We were so heartbroken,” an islander named Pero Joel told an interviewer in 1989. “We were so heartbroken we didn’t know what to do.”
Where they and their ancestors had once lived had, during the twelve years from 1946 to 1958, seen the explosion of twenty-three atomic bombs, with the combined force of forty-two million tons of conventional explosives. Everything the islanders had known had been obliterated: their homes and boats destroyed, their soil and the seawater contaminated, and their lives changed and spoiled forever. And for what purpose? To what end?
The blue Pacific now churns ceaselessly each present day along Bikini Atoll’s quite deserted coral beaches. The palm trees lean into the breeze, unclimbed. There are no sails out in the lagoon, no sounds of chanting as the fishermen pull in their nets, no villagers gathering to chatter under the coconut groves. Bikini is today a place of a strangely deadened silence—a terrible, unnatural emptiness that compels any visitor to turn somewhere, to try to face the eternally invisible perpetrators of all this, and demand of no one and of everyone: just why?
1 Interestingly, the 1899 treaty never specifically mentioned the Marshall Islands, leaving some to argue about their legal status still today—arguments that, considering the amount of money involved for aid and compensation, are of more than mere historic interest.
2 Or, according to one Internet source, Waffle Nose. He had a remarkable similarity to the actor Karl Malden.
3 This evacuation was to be echoed two decades later, in the Indian Ocean, when the Pentagon wanted to use the British colonial possession Diego Garcia as a military base. Denis (later Lord) Greenhill wrote in an infamous memo that there were just “a few Tarzans or Men Fridays” living there. In fact, a vibrant community of more than two thousand people was shipped off against its will to Mauritius. It has been fighting for compensation ever since.
4 A number of weapons were also exploded on the nearby atoll of Enewetak, an atoll that suffered similarly but that for many reasons has never attracted quite the same attention. “A Pacific Isle,” a New York Times headline read in 2014, “Radioactive and Forgotten.”
5 The countdown and explosion were relayed by radio around the country and world. The BBC broadcast the test on the Light Programme, a station usually reserved for music and soap operas, but it was late at night in Britain, and static interference made the entire event well-nigh inaudible, with only “one word in ten” able to be understood.
6 When the German crew finally left their ship at Panama, the American sailors discovered they couldn’t work the Prinz Eugen’s boilers. Tugs had to be ordered, and the eighteen-thousand-ton ship had to be towed across the Pacific, bound for this vain attempt to destroy her.
7 The first true hydrogen bomb, code-named Ivy Mike, had been successfully detonated on the nearby Enewetak Atoll sixteen months before. But the hydrogen in that experiment had to be supercooled, making the combined bomb—it had to have a Nagasaki-like Fat Man bomb as a trigger—truly massive. It weighed sixty-two tons, so it was far too big to be used as a weapon. Castle Bravo, by contrast, used solid fuels and weighed in at only ten tons, and the success of the test convinced both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force that H-bombs could now be made in sizes that could be delivered by aircraft or missiles.
8 The very first Soviet A-bomb had been exploded in 1949, more than four years after the first U.S. test in New Mexico. But Moscow’s first thermonuclear H-bomb test came in August 1953, just nine months after the United States’ Ivy Mike fusion bomb on Enewetak.
9 Whether this was a deliberate employment of economy with the truth can never be known. But it is worth remembering that Strauss famously and wrongly predicted that nuclear fusion would allow for the generation of electricity “too cheap to meter,” and that he was also largely responsible for destroying the postwar career of the Manhattan Project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, suspecting him, also quite wrongly, of being a Soviet spy.
10 The man who licked the falling dust lived into his eighties, and opened a dry-cleaning business, while another opened a tofu restaurant. All received the 2015 equivalent of five thousand dollars in compensation, once the United States formally took responsibility. The ship was hauled out of the water and now stands in a museum—not as a local monument in Yaizu, but in Tokyo, where she still gets national attention.
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This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen.
—LANCELOT HOGBEN, Science for the Citizen, 1938
It was piercingly hot in Canada in the late summer of 1955—so hot, the newspapers said, that apples in Ontario were baking on the trees. Indoors it was sweltering, and those who came home from work and wished to listen to the evening news or learn how their local lacrosse teams were faring found it necessary to keep their windows open, crank up the radio’s volume, sit out on the