Hello again. I took a long break. Now I’m back, with more interesting issues raised in the news. I hope you will join the Big Conversation.
CONGRATULATIONS to ‘Oppenheimer’ for winning so many Oscars. They are well deserved. It’s a story about the creation of something that affects us all, possibly forever.
There is another part of the nuclear bomb story which has been documented many times but never on the same scale as a major, Oscar winning, Hollywood mega movie like ‘Oppenheimer’. Yet this less told story is worthy of a reminder amid the glitter and glamour of Oscar night.
In 1947, a year after President Truman ordered two atomic bomb attacks against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. was already in a nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union and needed a new testing area. The U.S. chose the remote Pacific atol of Bikini in the Marshall Islands region (southwest of Hawaii), which were captured from the Japanese in 1944.
Two things happened at Bikini in the 1940s and 50s: The development of bigger U.S. nuclear bombs and the destruction of an entire island society by radiation poisoning. The effects of this chapter of the nuclear bomb continue to impact thousands of Bikinians today. If any of them were watching the Oscars they had to see it from other islands in the Pacific. They can probably never go home again.
This is a seldom sold story of sacrifice and unending drama in exile
Jack Niedenthal, an expert on Bikini History and an old friend of mine, went to the Marshall Islands many years ago while he was in the Peace Corps. He stayed, raised a family there and helped the islanders cope with the little publicized results of what happened just after atom bomb developed by the Oppenheimer team in Los Alamos ended WW11. Here is an excerpt from Jack’s excellent and highly recommended Short History of the People of Bikini Atoll.
“In February of 1946 Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, the military governor of the Marshalls, traveled to Bikini. On a Sunday after church, he assembled the Bikinians to ask if they would be willing to leave their atoll temporarily so that the United States could begin testing atomic bombs for "the good of mankind and to end all world wars." King Juda, then the leader of the Bikinian people, stood up after much confused and sorrowful deliberation among his people, and announced, "We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”
(Photo) Chief Judah (left), island magistrate from Rongerik Atoll, with one of his subchiefs, August 1947
(Photo) Members of the Seabees' 53rd Naval Construction Battalion build camera towers prior to atomic bomb testing on Bikini Atoll, July 1946.
The U.S. exploded 24 nuclear weapons at Bikini between 1946 and 1958, most of them hydrogen bombs.
On March 1st, 1954, Bikini was pounded again, this time by a new kind of nuclear device - Castle Bravo, (photo below) America’s first high yield thermonuclear weapon, also know as a hydrogen bomb, designed with the help of Edward Teller, the nuclear scientist who you may recall from the ‘Oppenheimer’ movie.
(Wiki) “The size of the Castle Bravo test on March 1, 1954 far exceeded expectations, causing widespread radioactive contamination. The fallout spread traces of radioactive material as far as Australia, India, and Japan, and even to the United States and parts of Europe. It was organized as a secret test, but it quickly became an international incident, prompting calls for a ban on the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices.”[1]
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(Wiki). “Authorities had promised the Bikini Atoll's residents that they would be able to return home after the nuclear tests. A majority of the island's family heads agreed to leave the island, and most of the residents were moved to the Rongerik Atoll and later to Kili Island. Both locations proved unsuitable to sustaining life, and the United States provides residents with on-going aid. Despite the promises made by authorities, these and further nuclear tests (Redwing in 1956 and Hardtack in 1958) rendered Bikini unfit for habitation, contaminating the soil and water, making subsistence farming and fishing too dangerous. The United States has paid more than $300 million into various trust funds to compensate the islanders and their descendants.[7] A 2016 investigation found radiation levels on Bikini Atoll as high as 639 mrem yr−1 (6.39 mSv/a), well above the established safety standard for habitation.[8][9] However, Stanford University scientists reported "an abundance of marine life apparently thriving in the crater of Bikini Atoll" in 2017.”10
These days, most Bikini Islanders are too young to have ever lived at home. Today they receive American government funds to be permanently displaced on other islands far from Bikini. Bikini still has radio active soil, so food has to be around in by boat or plane to the hand full of support staff who maintain the island.
In 1998 I went there to see for myself.
Here is my ABC News Video report, on the modern day use of Bikini atol as a scuba diving site.
Since I filed that piece in 1998 things have gotten even more dire for the people of Bikini Island. Not only do they remain dispersed on other Islands within the Marshalls, because their soil is still radioactive, they are in danger of loosing the ‘resettlement’ trust fund set up by the U.S. government. When writing this catchup blog,I reached out to former Bikini official Jack Niedenthal, who still lives in the Marshall Islands with his Bikinian wife and children. The basic problem, he says, is that that during the Trump administration the U.S. government stopped placing limits upon how much of the trust fund could be withdrawn each year. As a result, says Niedenthal, the money is running out so fast that future generations will be destitute.
Below is an except from Niedenthal’s impassioned plea to the U.S. Congress in 2018, in which he pleads for the U.S. Department of Interior to restore yearly spending limits until the Bikini trust fund, so that it does not disappear and throw Bikinians into yet another crisis.
Since that 2018 Congressional hearing, according to Jack Niedenthal, not even the Biden administration has set a yearly budget for the Bikini people. Here’s how he sums up what has happened to that 1946 promise to always take care of the people of Bikini, who gave up their homeland so that Americans could use it to help build the ultimate weapon of destruction.
(Jack Niedenthal, Bikini advisor) “Doug Domenich, then the Asst Sec of Interior under Trump, allowed a bizarre “rescript” of the trust fund rules that had been in use for decades by telling the Bikinians they could spend the $71 million left in the trust any way they wanted to. That Congressional hearing (the 2018 video clip above) took place after this ruling and was an attempt to get Congress to step in to prevent this from happening. They didn’t step in. So the money was spent wildly during Trump and during Biden and is now gone, just as I predicted it would be in the hearing, in fact, everything I predicted would happen in that hearing to the trust fund monies, did.
“Biden’s Asst Sec. (Carmen Canter) wasn’t even aware there was an issue until March of last year --after the money suddenly stopped flowing in January of last year-- when I emailed her asking basically why weren’t they requesting annual budgets and other things they should have been doing under the remaining DOI requirements under the trust, but weren’t. There was no really good answer and numerous Congressmen have been asking the same thing of DOI, and now there is an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General, but the money is gone.
There are no limits because the money from the Resettlement Trust is gone. The only money we can get now is money from the Bikini Claim Trust ($28 million) for small compensation payments, which now suddenly has strict rules being enforced after half that trust fund disappeared.”
I know that this is not happy reading, and that it is not the sort of post that makes us want to hear more. But there is a big lesson here which can help us better look after our tax money and our democracy. Elected American official have tremendous powers to do good, or not. They are suppose to be our eyes and ears; not only protectors of our tax spending but also protectors of our promises and commitments made in the pursuit of national security; in this case the destructive use of someone’s land to test nuclear weapons. No one is suggesting that the people off Bikini Island deserve a perpetual blank check. But they do deserve the financial version of tough love: better supervision of that trust fund.
By the way, on a lighter note…
…Why would someone name such a tragic island after a skimpy swim suit? No one did. The swimsuit is instead named after the island, and was created in the 1950s by French fashion designers who were enraged over nuclear testing. They wanted something shocking to draw attention to the explosions. Almost all lady swim suits in those days were one piece outfits. The little two piece ‘Bikini’ got a lot of attention in those days, but eventually the public lost track of how the swim suit it got its name.
See you soon.
Mike (profile)