The destruction of Bikini Atoll

Mike Phipps highlights a grim anniversary.

Seventy years ago today, at dawn on March 1st, 1954,the United States detonated a new type of thermonuclear bomb on Bikini Atoll. Bikini Atoll is a tiny ring of small coral islands with a total land mass of about two square miles and is part of the larger Marshall Islands chain in the central Pacific Ocean.

The nuclear explosion was about 1,000 times more powerful than either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War Two and far exceeded its designers’ expectations: many of the instruments that they had put in place to evaluate the effectiveness of the weapon were destroyed. The 15-megaton blast was three times bigger than planned. According to one estimate, the explosion hurled debris in the air that was the equivalent of 216 Empire State Buildings. It vaporised three islands.

This was not the first explosion on the Atoll. In 1946 the 167 inhabitants of Bikini were assembled and asked if they would be willing to leave their home “temporarily” so the US could test atomic weaponry “for the good of mankind.” They were relocated on another atoll 125 miles away where the lack of a local food supply soon led to their starvation.

They were then transferred to another atoll in the western Marshall Islands and began constructing housing – until the US decided it now wanted that atoll too for nuclear testing. The Bikinians were transferred elsewhere and housed in tents beside a US military airstrip. They settled on Kili Island, where they continued to be plagued by starvation, as their new ‘home’ did not support their traditional diet and lifestyle of lagoon fishing. They moved again but problems of inadequate food supplies continued into the 1960s.

Meanwhile their historic homeland was in the process of being irradiated. Worse, the new nuclear test of March 1st 1954 went ahead in the full knowledge that the winds were blowing in the direction of inhabited atolls.

Following a blinding flash, a fireball of intense heat shot into the sky and an immense cloud, filled with nuclear debris, shot up more than 20 miles and generated winds hundreds of miles per hour, which blasted the surrounding islands and stripped the branches and coconuts from the trees.

Joint Task Force ships 40 miles away recorded a steady increase in radiation levels that became so high that all men were ordered below decks and all hatches and watertight doors were sealed. Others were less protected: 23 fishermen on a Japanese fishing vessel were showered with white ash. Shortly after being exposed to the fallout their skin began to itch and they experienced nausea and vomiting. One man died.

Islanders in the vicinity were also affected by the fallout. Shockingly, they were not evacuated ahead of further nuclear testing during the year. Over the next five years, a further 21 nuclear bombs were detonated on Bikini Atoll.

In the 1970s, after some cleaning up of radioactive debris, Bikinians began to return to their home, despite the fact that there were “higher levels of radioactivity than originally thought.” Certainly, local foods grown on the atoll were too radioactive for human consumption. Escalating amounts of radioactive elements in the atoll – and its inhabitants -led to a new evacuation programme in 1978.

It’s now clear that decontamination efforts in the days following the tests were completely ineffective and instead contaminated those involved in the work.

In 2001, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal awarded the Bikinians damages of $563 million. The only drawback was that the Tribunal did not have the funds to pay: that was up to a reluctant US Congress. So far, the US has paid around half that sum. Last year, the Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands was still petitioning the US for adequate compensation for the health and environmental effects of the 67 nuclear bomb tests it conducted from 1946 to 1958.

In total, the US was ordered to pay $2.3bn to the Marshall Islands in healthcare and resettlement costs. But it has refused, arguing that its liabilities ended when it paid $600m in the 1990s. In 1998, the US stopped providing medical care for cancer-stricken islanders, leaving many in financial hardship.

Meanwhile, radiation levels on Bikini Atoll remain well above the established safety standard for human life and it remains uninhabited seventy years on. Ten years ago, Lani Kramer, a councilwoman in Bikini’s local government, told AFP: “As a result of being displaced we’ve lost our cultural heritage – our traditional customs and skills, which for thousands of years were passed down from generation to generation.”

“After they were exposed like that I can never trust what the US tells us,” said Kramer, adding that she wants justice for the generations forced to leave. A UN report says the contamination is “near-irreversible.”

The March 1st test produced the highest fallout levels in history. Besides the immediate impact of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea, then later hair loss and skin lesions, fallout exposure is medically linked to increases in leukaemia and thyroid cancer. The female population of the Marshall Islands have a sixty times greater cervical cancer mortality than a comparable mainland United States population. The Islands’ populations also have a five times greater likelihood of breast or gastrointestinal mortality. The male population on the Marshall Islands’ lung cancer mortality is four times greater than the overall United States rates, and the oral cancer rates are ten times greater.

Today, there is little visible evidence of the tests on the islands except for a 115-metre-wide cement dome which locals nickname the Tomb, on Runit Island, adjacent to Bikini. Built in the late 1970s and now old and cracking, its concrete lid covers more than 90,000 cubic metres, or roughly 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools, of radioactive soil and nuclear waste. Unbeknown to the Marshallese people, the US shipped the waste from Nevada, where it was testing nuclear weapons on Native American land. Rising sea levels and natural ageing mean that the Tomb is at risk of imminent collapse.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: Nuclear explosion. Creator: rawpixel.com | Credit: rawpixel.com. Licence: CC0 1.0 DEED CC0 1.0 Universal