How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  The reality wasn’t so clean. “We didn’t know what was going on,”47 remembered Kilon Bauno, one of the Marshallese who was there. “We were very confused … Back then I had no idea what an atomic bomb was. None of us had.” The navy’s film, it turned out, showed not the actual discussion, but an awkwardly staged reenactment.48 After a few tense retakes, Juda stormed off.

  Nevertheless, the Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.

  Réard unveiled the bikini on July 5, 1946. The day before, the Fourth of July, was another historic day: the independence of the Philippines. The high commissioner, in his speech, couldn’t resist spelling out the connection between decolonization and the atomic tests of a few days before. The Philippines was finally independent, he proudly announced. Nevertheless, he reminded, “all nations have yielded some of their independence,49 of their absolute independence, to the airplane, the radio, and the atom bomb.”

  *

  The Bikini Marshallese, removed from their home, were placed on the atoll of Rongerik. Within two months, their food and water started running out. They asked to return home to Bikini.

  Of course, they couldn’t. Not only was their homeland radioactive, but the military had no intention of abandoning its valuable testing site. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-six more nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and the next-door atoll of Enewetak.50 To the proverbial Martian looking on from space, it must have appeared that humanity was for some indiscernible reason waging furious, unrelenting war on a string of sandbars in the middle of the Pacific.

  One such test at Bikini was of a hydrogen bomb, the “Bravo shot” in 1954. Its fifteen-megaton yield was twice as large as expected, and unusually strong winds carried the fallout well beyond the cordoned-off blast zone. Had it detonated over Washington, D.C., it could have killed 90 percent of the populations of Washington,51 Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York within three days.

  On Rongelap, more than a hundred miles from ground zero, islanders watched radioactive white ash fall from the sky like snow. (Eighty suffered from radiation poisoning, and the island had to be evacuated for three years.) A Japanese tuna fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, also outside the blast zone, was engulfed in the fallout. All twenty-three of its crew members got radiation poisoning, and one died.

  The Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson proposed halting open-air bomb testing for fear of the cancer risks (a later study by the National Cancer Institute confirmed that nearby Marshall Islanders had endured cancer-causing levels of radiation exposure).52 Richard Nixon dismissed this as “catastrophic nonsense.”53 Cornelius Rhoads, who by then had moved on from experimenting on Puerto Ricans to become the most prominent cancer researcher in the country, agreed with Nixon. “We have no prudent course except to continue the development and testing of the most modern weapons of defense,”54 Rhoads wrote in a letter cosigned by eleven leading scientists.

  Henry Kissinger, the country’s most esteemed civilian nuclear expert, voiced the prevailing attitude in blunter fashion. “There are only 90,000 people out there,”55 he said, referring to Micronesia. “Who gives a damn?”

  *

  Kissinger was right; few on the U.S. mainland cared about Micronesia. But had he visited Japan, he would have seen a nation that very much gave a damn.56

  When the radiation-sick crew of the Lucky Dragon limped back to port carrying a catch of radioactive tuna, it ignited a media frenzy. Japan was a country with firsthand experience of radioactive fallout. Rumors flew that the irradiated fish had made their way onto the market. The tuna industry briefly collapsed.

  The Japanese government conducted tests of the fallout (something the U.S. government declined to do). It found alarming levels of radioactivity in seawater as far as two thousand miles away from Bikini and strong radioactivity in the rain that fell on Japan.

  The emperor himself began traveling with a Geiger counter.

  Fishmongers and sushi shopkeepers protested the United States’ nuclear testing. Women in the Suginami ward in Tokyo circulated a petition to ban atomic and hydrogen bombs entirely. In a month, they collected more than 260,000 signatures, nearly two-thirds of the population of the ward. In a year and a half, 20 million signed it.

  Among those swept up by the antinuclear movement was a young film producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka. He would later go on to produce such high-end classics of Japanese cinema as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but in the year of the Bravo shot Tanaka had something else in mind. He hired the director Ishirō Honda,57 who had traveled through Hiroshima in 1945 and seen the devastation firsthand.

  Gojira, the phenomenally popular film Tanaka and Honda made, was about an ancient dinosaur awakened by U.S. hydrogen bomb testing. Gojira first destroys a Japanese fishing boat—a thinly veiled Lucky Dragon—before attacking and irradiating a Bikini-like island called Odo. Gojira, who is said to be “emitting high levels of H-bomb radiation,”58 then turns on Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to the city.

  As films go, Gojira isn’t subtle. It’s full of talk of bombs and radiation. “If nuclear testing continues, then someday, somewhere in the world, another Gojira may appear” are its somber final words.

  That message, however, got lost in translation. Gojira was remixed for the United States, using much of the original footage but splicing in a white, English-speaking protagonist played by Raymond Burr. What got cut out was the antinuclear politics. The Hollywood version contains only two muted references to radiation. And it ends on a much happier note: “The menace was gone,”59 the narrator concludes. “The world could wake up and live again.”

  The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.

  *

  The Japanese were right to be nervous. Despite all the duck-and-cover warnings about Soviet strikes on Cincinnati and Dubuque, the real front lines of nuclear confrontation were the overseas bases and territories.60 Hundreds of nuclear weapons, we now know, were placed in South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Throughout most of the sixties, there were more than a thousand on Okinawa. Johnston Island, one of the guano islands Ernest Gruening had recolonized, bristled with nuclear-armed Thor missiles. An unknown number of nuclear weapons were stored in Hawai‘i, Alaska (including on the Aleutian Islands), and Midway.

  Arming the bases brought the United States’ nuclear arsenal closer to potential war zones, making its threats more credible. It also distributed risk. With the U.S. stockpile spread widely, Moscow couldn’t target the mainland alone. If it wanted to eliminate the United States’ retaliatory capability, it would have to strike the bases, too, making the operation vastly more difficult.

  Yet while nukes on bases protected the mainland, they imperiled the territories and host nations. Flying nuclear weapons around the bases—something the military did routinely—risked catastrophic accident. Even when the weapons stayed put, their presence turned the bases into tempting targets, especially since overseas bases were easier for Moscow to hit than the mainland was. Arming the bases was essentially painting bright red bull’s-eyes on them.

  A sense of the risk can be gained by considering the Arctic base at Thule in Greenland. Greenland was a colony of Denmark, having roughly the same place in the Danish Kingdom as Puerto Rico had in the United States. This made it an attractive locale for bases, as Greenlanders’ protests counted less with the Danish government than those of Copenhageners. When Washington’s gaze fell on the village of Thule as a base site, the Danish government obliged by removing the indigenous Inughuit community
there. The Inughuits were dropped off unceremoniously with blankets, tents, and the very best of wishes in “New Thule,”61 some sixty-five miles north.

  The virtue of Thule was that it was close enough to the Soviet Union that from there, the United States could lob missiles over the North Pole at Moscow. The drawback was that the Soviets could fire missiles back. The Soviet premier warned Denmark that to allow the United States to house its arsenal at Thule—or anywhere on Danish soil—would be “tantamount to suicide.”62 Nervous Danish politicians incorporated a “no-nuclear”63 principle into the platform of their governing coalition: the United States could have its base, but no nukes.

  Despite this, Washington pressed the issue. When the Danish prime minister didn’t explicitly object, U.S. officials took his silence for winking consent and secretly moved nuclear weapons to Thule. Soon the air force began covertly flying nuclear-armed B-52s over Greenland daily. This was part of an airborne alert program to keep armed planes aloft and ready to strike the Soviet Union at all times—the subject of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, filmed partly over Greenland.

  The general responsible for the program readily conceded how much danger this placed Greenland in. Thule, he told Congress, would be “one of the first ones to go”64 if war came. Even without war, it faced peril. In 1967, three planes carrying hydrogen bombs made emergency landings on Greenland. The next year, a B-52 flying near Thule with four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs crashed,65 hard.

  The plane plowed into the ice at more than five hundred miles an hour, leaving a trail of debris five miles long. Nearly a quarter million pounds of jet fuel ignited, setting off the conventional explosives in all four bombs. Those bombs were supposedly “one-point safe,”66 meaning that the explosives around the core could go off without detonating the bomb, so long as they didn’t go off simultaneously (which would violently compress the core and trigger nuclear fission). Yet some bombs in the arsenal had proved not to be one-point safe, and a lot could go wrong in a crash, especially with weapons that fell below today’s safety standards, such as those at Thule.

  The accident at Thule didn’t set off a nuclear explosion. It did, however, spew plutonium all over the crash site. The air force scrambled to clean up the mess before the ice thawed and carried radioactive debris into the ocean. The recovered waste filled seventy-five tankers.67 Had an accident of that scale happened over a city, it would have been mayhem.

  Could that have happened? Yes. The Thule plane crashed on Greenland, one of the world’s most sparsely populated landmasses. But the same airborne alert system carried planes over one of the most densely populated landmasses, Western Europe. Two years before the Thule accident, a B-52 crashed over the Spanish village of Palomares while carrying four hydrogen bombs,68 each seventy-five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Part of the plane landed 80 yards from an elementary school, another chunk hit the earth 150 yards from a chapel. The conventional explosives went off in two of the bombs, sowing plutonium dust into the tomato fields for miles.

  The third bomb landed intact. But the fourth? It was nowhere to be found. Officials searched desperately for nearly three months. The hunt had “all the makings of a James Bond thriller,”69 The Boston Globe reported. In fact, it bore an unnerving resemblance to Thunderball, the Bond film about missing nuclear weapons that was dominating the box office at the time. When the military finally found the bomb resting on the seabed, it proudly showed it off for the cameras—the first time the public had seen a hydrogen bomb.

  It looked, Time noted approvingly, “just the way it looked in Thunderball.”70

  21

  BASELANDIA

  In 1949 George Orwell conjured up a dark future for Britain. Atomic warfare had ravaged the industrial world. A dictator had taken command. Seeking to “narrow the range of thought,”1 the government was gradually replacing the English language with a nightmare version of Basic, called Newspeak. And Britain had been absorbed into the United States. Its name had even been changed, from Britain to “Airstrip One.”

  Orwell’s novel 1984 was mainly a warning about totalitarianism. But in imagining Britain as a forward base for a U.S.-centered empire, Orwell noted another important trend. The Second World War had seen millions of U.S. servicemen touch foot on British soil. In theory, their presence had been temporary. But as the “cold war”2 (a term of Orwell’s coinage) began, it became clear that the United States would be staying for some time.

  During World War II, one of the most important British bases for the United States had been Burtonwood,3 which hosted more than eighteen thousand personnel at peak. In 1948, the year before Orwell published 1984, the U.S. Air Force returned there. Burtonwood was repurposed to support the Berlin Airlift. It became the largest air force base in all Europe. Thousands of servicemen stayed there, and they didn’t leave until the 1990s.

  This was an important feature of the United States’ pointillist empire. Some of its “points” were on islands or remote spots, such as Thule, the Bikini Atoll, or the Swan Islands. But others were in heavily populated areas. Troops spilled out from the bases, drinking, frequenting clubs, trading on the black market, and organizing trysts. And people who lived nearby found work on the bases or in selling to servicemen. The bases and their environs, in other words, were bustling borderlands where people from the United States came into frequent contact with foreigners.

  The bases were there by agreement—Washington offered protection and usually funds in exchange for the right to plant its outposts. But for the people who lived next to them, it could feel like colonialism. French leftists complained of U.S. “occupiers” and grumbled about “coca-colonization.”4 In base-riddled postwar Panama,5 thousands marched carrying signs reading DOWN WITH YANKEE IMPERIALISM and NOT ONE MORE INCH OF PANAMANIAN TERRITORY.

  For the British, the main issue was the nuclear weapons. The United States had been storing its weapons at British bases, and it flew B-47s over England. Were they carrying nuclear bombs? “Well, we did not build these bombers to carry crushed rose petals,”6 the U.S. general in charge told the press in 1958. He was bluffing, slightly—those bombs were unarmed. But the terrified British public had no way of knowing that.

  Within months,7 more than five thousand well-dressed protesters gathered in the rain at Trafalgar Square. From there, they marched for four days to a nuclear weapons facility in Aldermaston. By the time they reached it, the crowd had grown to around ten thousand.

  These numbers weren’t enormous. But the fact that people had turned out at all, in the 1950s, in the heart of NATO country, to protest the logic of the Cold War was impressive. NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT and NO MISSILE BASES HERE, their banners read in sober black and white.

  An artist named Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the Aldermaston march. “I was in despair,”8 he remembered. He sketched himself “with hands palm out stretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.”

  The lone individual standing helpless in the face of world-annihilating military might—it was “such a puny thing,”9 thought Holtom. But his creation, the peace symbol, resonated and quickly traveled around the world.

  In Holtom’s eyes, the bases sowed fear. Yet seen in another light, they had a certain glamour. The men posted to them were flush with money and consumer goods. So even as the bases provoked protests, they also stirred other passions.

  Take Liverpool, a port city in the north of England. Before the war, it had been a dreary factory town without much by way of entertainment beyond the music-hall scene that typified much of provincial England. Then suddenly, in the 1950s, it lit up like a Christmas tree. It turned out far more chart-topping acts in the following decades than it had any right to. Some, like the Searchers or Gerry and the Pacemakers, have faded with time. Others, like the Beatles, have not.

  A classmate of John Lennon’s estimated that between 1958 and 1964, five hundred bands were playing Me
rseyside,10 the area around Liverpool.

  Why? “There has to be some reason,” wrote the Beatles’ producer George Martin, “that Liverpool,11 of all British cities, actually had a vibrant teenage culture centred around pop music in the 1950s, when the rest of Britain was snoozing gently away in the pullovered arms of croon.” That Liverpool had a port surely helped. Yet for Martin, the answer was to be found elsewhere. Liverpool was a base city. It was, in fact, fifteen miles west of Burtonwood, the largest U.S. Air Force base in Europe.

  Burtonwood was, it must be emphasized, enormous. It was the “Gateway to Europe,” where transatlantic military flights landed. Its 1,636 buildings included the largest warehouse in Europe and the military’s only European electronics calibration laboratory,12 which technicians used to set their instruments and test standards. It had a baseball team, a soccer team, a radio station, and a constant influx of entertainers from the United States (Bob Hope, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby).

  Burtonwood’s significance would be hard to overstate. Whole neighborhoods of Liverpool had been bombed during the war, especially around the Penny Lane area, and its economy was still in shambles. The thousands of U.S. servicemen who came through were like millionaires. Teen-age girls charged at them at the train station (The Daily Mirror, suspecting prostitution, judged this “shoddy, shameful,13 and shocking”).

  In its official contracts alone,14 Burtonwood plowed more than $75,000 into the local economy per day. And that doesn’t count the money for entertainment. Musicians did especially well. They could get gigs on the base, or they could catch the troops who, pockets bulging with dollars, made their way to the Merseyside clubs at night.