At Another Crossroads

António Martins 

It’s no secret that the Trump administration wants to resume nuclear weapons testing. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty remains unenforced in the United States; the Senate never ratified it. There’s little in their way, but there’s also less to bargain with: thanks to the administration’s hardheaded unilateralism, the U.S. is bound to fewer nonproliferation treaties than before. It’s also lost the authority to invoke those treaties against other countries seeking to expand their nuclear capabilities (case in point: Iran). While upholding international non-testing and nonproliferation regimes and encouraging disarmament should be incentive enough for the United States to avoid testing, one must look no further than ~ 4,922 miles to the southeast of California, towards the Marshall Islands, to put the myth of testing’s innocuousness to rest.

The Marshall Islands were part of the United States’ post-WWII, Cold War-era Pacific Proving Grounds, where the military detonated 67 nuclear weapons with a cumulative explosive yield thousands of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Militarily strategic, the low-lying atolls served as U.S., British and Japanese outposts in the Pacific Theater of the second War to End All Wars. Besides maintaining global supremacy by cowing the communists, that has always been the rationale for nuclear armament: deterrence not just of a nuclear attack but of war itself was an end that testing supposedly served. Over the course of a variety of codenamed operations (including Crossroads, Greenhouse, Ivy, Castle, and Sandstone), 23 weapons were detonated on Bikini, 44 on Enewetak. The islanders were evacuated, of course – the U.S. military washed its hands of responsibility once the people of Bikini were relocated to (small and resource-poor) Rongerik Atoll, and the Enewetak islanders to Rongelap, Utirik, and Ailinginae Atolls. The islanders’ sacrifice didn’t seem to matter too much to the military. After all, U.S. Navy Commodore Ben Wyatt had claimed it was “for the good of mankind”; the end was well worth the utter destruction of a few islands.

The islanders may have been out of the blast range, but they were by no means safe.

The starving Bikini islanders, provided with only a few weeks’ worth of provisions by the military, had to be relocated from desolate Rongerik Atoll to the U.S. military base on Kwajalein to Kili Island, more fertile than Rongerik but still far smaller than Bikini. Kili was not an atoll and lacked a lagoon, forcing the Bikinians to change their traditional lifestyles and their diets; they remain largely reliant on imports. The still highly radioactive plants and wildlife on Bikini are living reminders of the island’s history, and drive home the point that no matter how much a country invests into remediation or how long it’s been, the world’s most powerful weapons of mass destruction will always leave a scar.

The Marshallese sought help from the UN, but the testing continued unimpeded.

Castle Bravo, the largest U.S. nuclear device ever detonated, was only engineered to be about four hundred times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It turned out to have a yield over thousand times greater. Enewetak islanders on Rongelap, Utirik and Ailinginae were exposed to the snow-like radioactive fallout from the blast. Some of the health effects were immediate, and many of the people living on Rongelap were burned and contracted radiation sickness. The U.S.’s reaction to this emergency was not just cursory: the military waited two days to evacuate people (some of whom were already experiencing acute radiation poisoning), and allowed them to return when radiation levels were still well above the safety threshold. Meanwhile, military scientists got to work on Project 4.1. Supposedly a way to provide medical care to the radiation-stricken Marshallese, the architects of the highly classified project were likely motivated more by the opportunity to research the effects of radioactive fallout on humans. Allowing the residents of Rongelap to resettle early might have been a way to expose more of the population for a prolonged amount of time – Rongelap was the perfect natural laboratory. Just like the Marshallese were not properly informed of the risks of testing, they did not grant their informed consent to being experimented on; about one-fourth of the patients were not previously exposed, and over the course of the decades-long project the U.S. doctors operated on over a hundred thyroid cancer patients, with highly mixed results. The Marshallese are still contending with the long-term impacts of the tests: as late as 2010, the National Cancer Institute suggested that over one half of cancers in the northern atolls are attributable to radioactive fallout.

The flag of Bikini Atoll is a testament to the atomic legacy of the islands; adopted in 1987, it is designed to remind the United States of its failed responsibility to protect the islanders and their home. It closely resembles the U.S. flag, but its 23 white stars in the blue top left section represent the 23 islands of the Atoll. Three black stars at the top right represent the three islands obliterated by the detonation of 15-megaton hydrogen bomb Castle Bravo on March 1, 1954. The two black stars on the lower right are for Kili Island and Ejit Island of Majuro Atoll, where the Bikinians now live; in the same stripe is a quote from Bikinian King Juda to Commodore Wyatt, “MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ,” or “Everything is in the hands of God.”

The U.S. had assumed administrative and military control of the islands after WWII, and treated the UN-approved “Trust Territory” as a culturally and ecologically disposable dumping ground. The Marshallese people unsurprisingly voted in favor of independence, forming the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Though the Marshallese government signed a defense-guaranteeing Compact of Free Association with the United States so its citizens would retain access to certain government services, the U.S. State Department evidently interpreted it more as a waiver of liability. The Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established under the Compact, but the $150 million compensation trust fund is hopelessly dilatory. No amount of money could repair the damage done to the Marshallese people and their beautiful islands.

The RMI recognized this, and in 2014 filed the “Nuclear Zero Lawsuit”  against the U.S. and the eight other Nuclear Weapon States in the International Court of Justice. The Marshallese did not seek further compensation from the U.S., but instead demanded accountability for their failure to comply with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As parties to the NPT, the Nuclear Weapons States are obligated to take steps towards denuclearization – the U.S. defended its record on reducing its stockpile, but is still modernizing its nuclear weapons – a resumption of testing would put the U.S. in a position antithetical to the goals of the NPT, and be pouring salt into the radiation wounds of the Marshallese.

Thanks to climate change, a symptom of colonialism followed by exploitative, neocolonial trade the carbon budget-monopolizing United States forces countries like the RMI to participate in, the islands are at risk of being inundated by rising sea levels within the next few decades.

So far, the Marshall Islands’ corals are bleaching en masse, dead fish are washing up on their beaches, and the islanders fought the worst outbreak of dengue fever in Pacific history last year. The RMI’s per capita CO2 emissions is less than two tons. The average footprint of a U.S. citizen is over 16 tons.

While this could result in the entire nation becoming climate refugees, Enewetak’s recovering ecosystems face a chthonic but just as sinister threat: the locals call it The Tomb. Runit Dome is not just a relic of the “atomic age,” but an active betrayal of the Marshall Islanders – the radioactive waste-filled concrete repository is about as full of hot air as a U.S. politician and leaky as their words. It breaks just as readily as the government’s promises, and with higher tides and stronger storms comes a higher risk of the dome releasing its toxic contents into the Enewetak lagoon or the ocean. While military officials have doubted the integrity of the dome since its construction, the Marshallese have every reason to doubt the integrity of the U.S. government – this time, they outwardly refuse to take responsibility.

Apparently, it’s the RMI’s problem. Just like nukes are Russia’s problem, colonization was Britain’s problem, or climate change is China’s problem. The only difference is that climate change is not a local issue, and rising sea levels and changing currents may redistribute a fair amount of the world’s pollution. If tides can cause plastic to wash up far from its source, why should radioactive waste be any different? The United States can only run away from its responsibilities until it is knee-deep in the sludge it created.