Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Graves was told of the wind direction and knew that radiation would spread downwind and contaminate, at the very least, Rongelap Atoll. But he had his orders, which were to proceed with the test without delay. Moreover, whatever the wind direction might be, no one had any idea how much radiation would be produced. Not that this was strictly relevant, of course, since Graves still cleaved robustly to his views about the malingerers who had concocted all this fuss about radiation being so terribly dangerous.

  So he gave his orders to activate the automatic firing mechanisms. The Castle Bravo bomb should be allowed to explode. The men in the bunker took cover, and then pressed the brilliant red firing button.

  At 6:45 a.m. on that clear, windy, blue-sky Pacific morning, it was as if the world had suddenly stopped, blinded by a vast white light of an intensity never before experienced. The iron gates guarding some terrible inferno seemed to clang wide open and unleash a ball of fire and shock waves and roarings of unimaginable speed, violence, and loudness. A white fireball four miles across was created in less than one second. A minute later, a cloud of debris ten miles tall and seven across rocketed into the sky. Ten minutes on, it was twenty-five miles tall and sixty miles across. The dawning sky lit up for hundreds of miles, and islanders from faraway atolls looked on in horror—for this was a secret test, unannounced, with no prior warnings—as a gigantic pillar of fire and smoke hurled itself into the air, a mushroom top boiling fuming orange and black miles above it, with rings of new-formed cloud expanding and coiling and writhing around it as it raced up through the layers of the atmosphere.

  The shock wave tore across all the islands of the atoll, snapping blazing trees like twigs, razing almost all the hundreds of buildings and towers and sheds and docks and warehouses and barracks erected for management of the tests. Ships waiting beyond the islands were buffeted by giant waves as the shocks ricocheted across the sea.

  A theoretical physicist, Marshall Rosenbluth, was on such a ship, thirty miles away. “There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like a diseased brain up in the sky. It spread until it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience.”

  Down in the bunker, the nine men of the firing party were rocked by what felt like a massive earthquake. Pipes broke, drenching them with water. The concrete walls swayed and cracked. Radiation swept in through the ventilation shafts. Radio contact with the command ship was degraded, ruinously—though the terrified men were able to understand that they would not be picked up by helicopter, as planned, as it was too dangerous for anyone to be on the atoll.

  The men retreated into a single room deep in the bunker, where the radiation levels were a little lower, and there they stayed put—first turning off the air conditioners to stop radioactive air from entering the room, but then having everything else turned off for them when the outside diesel generators failed. There they waited in the sweltering darkness, until finally, late in the day, three helicopters arrived and ordered the team to come to the surface. They emerged draped in sheets, eyeholes cut out, looking like bizarre Halloween exhibits, eager only to get away from Bikini, and from the insistent chattering of the Geiger counters.

  Bikini’s Castle Bravo bomb was a quite extraordinary event, jaw-dropping, awesome, and, except for a few scientists who had advised caution, generally unexpected. It released a truly vast amount of radiation, and all of it was now spreading fast eastward across the Pacific in an enormous plume of dust and debris that for hours following the explosion was raining chunks of highly radioactive coral down from the sky and contaminating everything below. The explosion was greater than anyone had calculated: as a lawyer later told a court during arguments for compensation for the Bikinians, a train hauling the fifteen million tons of TNT that was Castle Bravo’s equivalent would have stretched in an unbroken line of freight cars from Maine to California, with hundreds of cars to spare.

  The damage done by Alvin Graves and the bomb under his command was unprecedented. Within moments, everyone who was watching the blast column, and who knew the geography of the islands, realized that the islanders on Rongelap would probably be contaminated. A ship was ordered to speed across, and by midafternoon had landed a number of sailors in protective clothing to take Geiger counter readings from two of the village wells. They saw islanders who were clearly ill: staggering, vomiting, lying listlessly on the sand. But they said nothing to them, asked no questions, and left in a matter of minutes.

  They were consequently unaware that the islanders had been startled that morning by what appeared to be a great sunrise in the western skies; and had then felt a sudden, jolting warm wind like a stuttering typhoon, followed by an unimaginably loud, thundering roar. They were also unaware that a fine mist had enveloped the island, that showers of grit and great gray flakes had fallen from the sky. Nor did they know that once the roaring had stopped, the islanders had immediately tried to resume their morning routines (breakfast, baking, fishing) and started to live a normal island day until, hours later, they began to show symptoms of some mysterious ailment.

  The Geiger counters knew what had happened. The 236 people of Rongelap had received doses of radiation every bit as great as those suffered by the Japanese in Hiroshima, who had been just two miles from ground zero. But on Rongelap, no alarm had sounded. Instead, the bomb managers’ first reaction was to think of employing the Rongelapese as case studies, as human guinea pigs. Radiation scientists at federal laboratories such as Brookhaven on Long Island expressed a kind of distant delight: “The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”

  So, for the next fifty hours, the Rongelap islanders were left to their own devices, to suffer in isolation until it became clear that the radiation was so powerful it might actually kill them all, whereupon official panic ensued, boats and planes arrived, and the islanders were told to get out, quickly. They were hosed down with water, ordered to wash, checked with Geiger counters, and washed again, a routine repeated three times. They were told to take nothing, to leave with only the clothes on their backs. Those who looked fit enough were taken by ship down to the airbase on Kwajalein. The old and frail went by seaplane. “We were like animals,” said an islander named Rokko Langinbelik, who was twelve at the time. “It was no different from herding pigs into a gate.”

  By now most were complaining of pain, burning, itching, hair falling out, and skin lesions forming. But there was still no official concern for their condition—only an academic interest. They might as well have been in cages. They were scared out of their wits, having no idea what was happening to them, why they were suddenly so ill, whether they were suffering from a fast-spreading contagion. The doctors at the air base did little for them, other than to advise them to wash and to subject them to constant monitoring with the ever-chattering radiation counters.

  Six days later a secret investigation, to be known by the anodyne name Project 4.1, was initiated: “A Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons.”

  No matter that these “human beings” had been the victims of a monstrous and entirely avoidable accident, the consequence of a decision made with casual, almost cynically calculated negligence. The subsequent racism of their treatment at the hands of the authorities was obvious, or at least is amply recognizable at this remove: had the islanders been Caucasians, then official inquiries would have been instantly convened, congressional committees would have been revved into high gear, presidential apologies offered, compensation packages showered like rain. But these were not Caucasians—they were mere Marshallese people, colored natives, members of a subject citizenry, a population now to be firmly contained and kept simply fed, watered, and, above all, docile. So there was never to be any inquiry of substance or value. The victims had w
orth not as members of any society, but as specimens—of importance principally to science. They might as well have been cadavers handed over to anatomists. They might as well have been branded with the term used by Japanese in their notorious human vivisection experiments—their human victims they called maruta, “logs of wood,” a deliberately dehumanizing description, given to lessen the crime. These innocents from Rongelap were America’s maruta, people rendered up as logs of wood. They were to become no more than the accidental subjects, serendipitously offered up to a group of faraway radiation scientists, of a detached, unemotional, and top-secret clinical study, a project of supposed significance for all in the ever more radioactive postnuclear world.

  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, of the time before 1946, w
hen the islanders were asked, ever so gently, to clear themselves out and to allow the American forces to begin their conduct of God’s work, for the good of all mankind. The houses of these people are long gone, their memorials vanished, their fishing boats long decayed, their island traditions long since assimilated into other, alien ways.

  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.