At dawn, under high scattered clouds, they hid in their canoe by the stern of a ghostly LST that was anchored about three miles off the beach, north of the Nevada. Sorry had often fished in almost the exact spot.
As the sun slowly began to light up the abandoned island, they could see the south end no longer bore any resemblance to what they'd once called home. Even from three miles away, the high steel towers and buildings were plainly visible. The navy had only left a few palms here and there.
It didn't seem possible there could be such change in five months.
Grandfather Jonjen glared at the island as if the devil himself had made the changes.
Tara turned and finally whispered, "Do you realize we are the only humans within miles of here?"
***
It was a few minutes after eight o'clock on Tara's watch when the sky suddenly filled with all sorts of aircraft. Bombers, seaplanes, fighters. Sorry had no idea what they were doing. Some were at low altitude, so the three of them sat in the canoe, hunched down, hoping they wouldn't be seen yet.
"They'll land a seaplane and jerk us out of here," Sorry whispered.
His idea was to raise the red sail close to when the bomb was scheduled to drop, and steer north, away from the Nevada. He worried about the breeze.
Tara asked, "Will we be six miles away?"
Sorry nodded. "I hope so."
Grandfather Jonjen said he'd estimate the distance to the huge target ship, glowing in its red coat, and wait until the bomber could be seen before beginning his prayers.
"Please be certain," Sorry said. Six miles was critical.
Then the other planes went away, and the three of them faintly heard a sound from above. They looked up to see sun flashing off a silver bomber.
Sorry said, "I think that's it."
Dave's Dream arrived over the lagoon at 8:26. "This is Skylight One, Skylight One. Ten minutes before first simulated bomb release. Stand by. Mark: Ten minutes before simulated bomb release. First practice run."
Sorry and Tara ran up the red sail and the wind caught it. They shoved away from the LST, and Sorry steered north, watching the sky, saying, "Remember, the radio said they'll make several practice runs. Maybe they'll see us down here."
To Grandfather Jonjen, he said, "Tell me when you think I'm six miles away from the Nevada."
The wind wasn't helping.
"This is Skylight One, Skylight One. Five minutes before actual bomb release. Mark: Five minutes before actual bomb release..."
Sorry said to Tara, "Start flashing the tin lid. They'll see it."
Eight-thirty had come and gone.
Waiting, Sorry thought about the unknowing animals, the goats and pigs that were shaved and smeared with antiflash ointment; about the white mice and white blood cells and leukemia; and about the fish that might glow....
"Skylight One. Skylight One. Two minutes before actual bomb release. Mark: Two minutes before actual bomb release. Adjust all goggles. Adjust all goggles."
Tara stared at flashes of sun reflecting off the bomber in the blue sky. "Look down, please look down here, please look down here..."
On the battleship USS Pennsylvania, a metronome was inches from an open microphone, counting the seconds, heard around the world. Tock, tock, tock, tock, tock ...
At that precise moment, Sorry realized the madness of what they were doing, the madness of where they were, the madness of trusting Jonjen to put them in a safe position.
Up there in the aircraft, the pilots would be looking only at the USS Nevada.
Nothing around it!
Not a single tiny red canoe moving slowly north.
Madness!
They were insane. The three of them in their crazy war canoe were insane.
Grandfather Jonjen, eyes closed, was holding his Bible and praying. Sorry and Tara stood and looked up at the flashes and prayed. God alone could save them now.
"Skylight One, Skylight One. Coming up on actual bomb release. Stand by! Stand by!...Bomb away! Bomb away. Bomb away..."
The light from a million suns flashed over the lagoon, then there was a clap of thunder so loud that it burst eardrums.
A second later, Sorry, Tara, and Jonjen seemed to be encased in shining glass, wearing skins of glass.
From the center of the target ships rose a ball of violent red, turning pink, streaked with chalk white. It grew rapidly, like an evil flower, a huge, whitish pink rose with a white stem lengthening by the seconds, becoming a giant ice-cream cone.
Becoming a white cauliflower.
Becoming white death.
The animals didn't even have time to scream.
In a moment, the heat wave, a wind from hell, caught the red sail and thrust the canoe across the water as if it were a balsa chip, blowing the sail out as if it were a loose kite.
A moment later, a ten-foot wave hurtled across the water, tossing the outrigger up, then throwing it down angrily.
The wave traveled with a wet hissing sound.
Then there was total silence in Bikini lagoon.
***
The Able bomb had spent its energy, had spewed its poison.
Its killing had only begun.
A Factual Epilogue
The explosion took place within a few millionths of a second. Soon, drone planes with Geiger counters began flying over the atoll, listening for the inevitable radiation clicks; then drone boats, also equipped with counters, wound among the target ships. Some had been sunk; others were heavily damaged; some were burning; but most were still afloat. Several hours later, slowly, carefully, support ships edged back into the lagoon, the men aboard listening for the Geiger chirps.
About 10 percent of the animals were killed instantly. Others would die, in time, from radiation. Still others would never bear offspring. Soon, aboard the Noah's Ark ship, there would be a poignant scene: a shaved radiated goat would be strapped to a table for a blood transfusion.
***
By mid July of the next year, the food supply on Rongerik was so low that the villagers were cutting down palms to eat the hearts. What fishing there was couldn't feed them.
A gruel made from coconut meat, coconut water, and flour mixed with cistern water was the primary diet by February 1948. The navy flew in emergency food. The villagers were then moved to Kwajalein and spent the next seven months there while Chief Juda and the other alabs searched for another home.
Finally, they decided to go to Kili, 450 miles away. A "wet" island, Kili has fine palms, breadfruit trees, and even bananas, but no lagoon or harbor. It is completely surrounded by barrier reefs, and on many days even small boats cannot land. Many of the world's first nuclear nomads still live there, almost fifty years after the Able shot. Isolated there, more than six hundred descendants of the displaced Bikinians face a dark future.
In 1969, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that Bikini Atoll was "safe" again for human habitation, that the United States no longer had any interest in it. A group soon left Kili and upon arrival in the lagoon was shocked to see the condition of the islands. One alab, tears in his eyes, said to a government civilian, "What have you done to us?"
The palms were mostly gone. There were skeletons of abandoned, roofless buildings, breezes blowing through open windows. There was junk and scrap all over what remained of the atoll. Broken concrete, oil drums, rusting trucks, cranes, and steel towers. The Defense Department had turned the islands into waste dumps.
A small number of the original families, including a few Rinamu men, were determined to resurrect Bikini from the nuclear dead. They cleared the waste and began life again. They stayed on the main island for almost ten years, until doctors discovered they were being poisoned by Cesium 137, a radioactive material in the sand. Another awful mistake had been made by government agencies in Washington, D.C. As of April 1995, scuba divers explore the target fleet wrecks on the bottom of the lagoon, but the island itself is still poisoned.
The adult children and grandchildren of the relocat
ed Bikinians are still to be found in the Marshalls, mostly on Kili, but on other islands as well; in Hawaii and California; and some in Nevada.
A few of the older people still dream of the Bikini they knew as children. They have a word for it— lamoren. Ancestral land.
Author's Note
On Writing
THE BOMB
By Theodore Taylor
The Bomb has waited for paper and ink for almost half a century, twisting and turning in my mind since the months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In late 1945 the U.S. Navy began searching for a suitable place to explode the world's fourth and fifth nuclear bombs. The site chosen was Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands of the western Pacific, twenty-two hundred miles from Hawaii.
Operation Crossroads sounded interesting. Almost one hundred unmanned warships would gather in the atoll's lagoon for two "shots"—one aerial, one undersea. Navy officials wanted to know if the ships would survive the cataclysmic force of nuclear explosions. Animals would take the place of human crews on the target ships. Goats would be tethered on the open decks; guinea pigs and five thousand rats would be inside the ships, along with the cancer-prone white mice. Some of the goats and pigs would be shaved and smeared with antiflash compounds. (Goats and pigs have skin similar to humans'.) All would be exposed to radiation.
In early February 1946 I boarded the USS Sumner, an ancient submarine tender that had been converted for geodetic survey work. She had printing presses aboard for making navigational charts. A combat veteran of the Pacific war, she'd run with the invasion fleets. For Crossroads our crew would rechart Bikini lagoon, erect navigational towers, plant buoys, and destroy the coral heads that rose from the sea bottom, which could be hazardous to the incoming target vessels. The Sumner was ' the first Crossroads ship to arrive.
The atoll waters were a bright cobalt blue, and the sands of the main island, Bikini, were a stunning white. Palm trees fluttered in the warm wind. I remember the stillness and peace, the incredible beauty. Outriggers glided around the lagoon. Fish jumped. Seabirds winged by.
I remember thinking: Are we really going to drop an atomic bomb on this beautiful place?
There were four drag teams, each operating a forty-foot boat, seeking out those dangerous coral heads, locating them so divers could place dynamite charges to blow them up. I commanded one of those teams.
On February 10,1946, an amphibious aircraft landed near the Sumner carrying the military governor of the Marshall Islands—a navy commodore, one rank below rear admiral. He went ashore to inform the 160-odd natives that the navy needed their atoll for testing two atomic bombs. Knowing they were a religious people, the commodore invoked God to persuade the islanders to go temporarily to another atoll. God would approve of such a move; it would help mankind understand atomic power. Most of the people meekly agreed. After all, the navy had freed them from Japanese occupation. White men had ships and guns and aircraft; the Bikinians grew coconuts and speared fish. They could return home in several years, it was said. They were lied to, willfully or not.
A few days later I went ashore and circled the entire island of Bikini, from the lagoon shore to the ocean barrier reef. I visited the village, with its thatch-roofed houses. The people were still friendly and smiling, though they were losing their homeland in what would become a modern Trail of Tears. I felt ill as I took a landing craft back to the Sumner.
On March 7, less than a month after the commodore first visited, a landing ship tank (LST) backed away from the beach carrying the entire population of Bikini Atoll and all of their worldly possessions. For hundreds of years their people had slept on pandanus mats on the sand, and their possessions were indeed few.
As the LST passed near the Sumner, the people were singing a hymn, looking back at their island. They were bound for Rongerik, an uninhabited atoll 120 miles away. I remember their voices, their fears. There wasn't a dry eye on our ship, and most of us were hardened combat veterans.
More than a half-century later the surviving displaced islanders and all of their children and grandchildren are still nuclear nomads. Their homeland is still poisoned by radioactive fallout; cesium 137 lies deep in the sands.
The Bomb is loosely based on what occurred at Bikini Atoll. I found the book terribly difficult to write.
Theodore Taylor
Laguna Beach, California
Reader Chat Page
Although he's thousands of miles away, Sorry Rinamu is intrigued by the ailīnkan and their modern way of life. What fascinates him about Western culture?
Sorry is worried about taking his father's place on the tribal council. What makes him change his mind?
Chief Juda is reluctant to question the U.S. military's intentions, let alone to resist in any way. Why is he so willing to follow along with their demands?
Why does it seem that Uncle Abram is more capable of understanding the potential of the U.S. government to withhold information from the Bikinians?
Why do you think the Bikinians agree to be relocated? Do you think they had any choice in the matter?
Sorry becomes worried about the future of Bikini Atoll when he sees two warning signs: a moaning albatross and Grandmother Yolo's ominous message from the tournefortia tree. What do you consider to be "warning signs" in your culture? Are you ever superstitious?
Do you think the Americans had the right to choose the Bikini Atoll as their testing site?
What does it signify when Lokileni leaves her doll on the island?
Why does Sorry's teacher, Tara, decide to accompany Sorry and his grandfather in the red canoe?
If you were in Sorry's place, would you have done what he did?
The Bomb Page 12