#6: Environmental Imperialism in the Marshall Islands

This post is part of a series of narrative articles I wrote for Nearpod, an interactive classroom tool for students. My essays were incorporated into high school history and social studies classes.

On July 1, 1946, over 90 naval warships, many crowded with livestock and rats, crowded a spot on the Pacific. Forty-two thousand people, including scientists and journalists, observed them with nervousness and anticipation. They had collected specimens to study from the surrounding islands, and would do so again soon. The stakes were high: what they were about to see was the potential of the United States to become a new kind of superpower in this postwar world — the effects of dropping a nuclear bomb, a carbon copy of what was used on Nagasaki the previous year, on naval warships. This detonation, the first major event of what was called Operation Crossroads, was the first deployment of a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Japan.

That summer, French fashion designer Louis Réard released a shockingly revealing design for a swimsuit called the bikini, named after the group of coral islands that were seeing the shocking nuclear testing that was then happening. Bikini Atoll, one of the United States’ main nuclear test sites, was a part of a larger group of islands called the Republic of Marshall Islands, part of the Pacific Islands of Micronesia, about halfway between Hawaii and Australia.

This was just the beginning — the U.S. government used the area around the Marshall Islands for 66 more nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. One of them, in 1954, involved the largest nuclear device the United States had ever exploded. On average, the combined explosive power of those tests deployed regularly would amount to 1.6 Hiroshima-sized explosions per day.

Over 70 years later, much of the land around Bikini Atoll and the rest of the islands still could not be safely inhabited.

The first seafarers arrived from Micronesia on these islands between 2000 and 500 BC, becoming the islands’ only inhabitants for many centuries. Europe’s first contact with the islands is dated to the 16th century, when Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan sailed through the region, although Spanish navigator Alonso de Salazar is credited with first sighting them. The first recorded sightings of the Marshall Islands do not describe any explorers actually shoring there, but a half-century later, Spain claimed the islands.

In 1864, Germany established a trading company on the islands; about 20 years later, it bought the land from Spain for $4.5 million and the trading companies took over. The Islands were then captured by Japan in 1941.

The Republic of Marshall Islands gained independence in 1983 through the Compact of Free Association — which meant “free association” with the United States. The United States would be allowed to use the Islands as a nuclear testing site, in exchange for $3.5 billion and defense services. The Marshall Islands would retain sovereignty, but would have to consult with the U.S.government in decisions regarding its foreign affairs — and the United States would have the right to “assist or act on behalf of the Republic of the Marshall Islands,” where it saw fit.

But the Islands’ relationship with the United States began much earlier. In 1944, the United States carried out Operation Flintlock, during which they captured the territory from Japan. The United States had long seen the Islands as key territory to control in its war with Japan in the Pacific, and starting in 1946, began a series of nuclear weapons testing. This was a part of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, resulting in an exodus of 167 Marshallese as refugees — the entire population of Bikini Atoll.

Rear Admiral William Blandy, head of the task force that was appointed to conduct tests around Bikini Atoll, wanted room for the U.S. Navy to be as prepared as possible for an atomic war, and the Marshall Islands were the place where the military could gain more immediate knowledge of what these new kinds of weapons could do. “We wish to acquire,” he said in 1946, “a few miserable islands of insignificant economic value, but won with the precious blood of America’s finest sons, to use as future operating bases. All that can be raised on most of these islands is a few coconuts, a little taro, and a strong desire to be somewhere else.”

This attitude about the disposability of the Marshall Islands and the residents there would continue for a long time. One Sunday after church that same year, a Navy commodore told people in Bikini Atoll that they were like the people of Israel — chosen people, meant to help mankind perfect the atomic bomb and save them from future wars. Within a month, the residents boarded ships set for the United States; within five, the first two tests were conducted.

One morning in 1954, a Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuryu Maru, became suddenly enveloped in radioactive ash. Its 23 crew members immediately became ill with radiation poisoning: the chief operator of the boat died seven months later of acute organ failure; 15 other crew members died later of cancer and other causes.

This was the Castle Bravo test, a 15 megaton hydrogen bomb detonated 60 kilometers away from the Fukuryu Maru. It exploded with 1000 times the force of Hiroshima. More than 10,000 square kilometers were rendered uninhabitable.

The United States encouraged relocation back to the atoll with free housing, insisting that it was safe again, and within a few years, the approximately 100 islanders who came back showed traces of plutonium in their urine. This has happened more than once — in 1957, people were allowed to return to live on Rongelap Atoll, and were forced to flee again in 1985 because of residual radiation. In the early 1970s the United States brought former residents back to Bikini after claiming that the island was safe, and then removed them again in 1978 after locally grown food showed high radiation levels.

In 2014, the Republic of the Marshall Islands sued the United States and eight other nuclear-armed countries for “flagrant violation of international law,” failing to uphold the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The suit did not seek money, but just more accountability on the part of the United States. Three years later, the lawsuit was dismissed, stating that the terms of the treaty that were breached were “not judicially enforceable.”

Tony deBrum was a young boy, fishing with his grandfather in the shallows of the island, when Bikini Atoll was bombed. He was 280 miles away on his island, but he could see the blinding flash and his entire sky turn red. “Like a fishbowl had been put over my head, and blood poured over it,” he recalled. People on islands 2,600 miles away could see it too.

DeBrum became the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, outspoken on the issues of nuclear testing and climate change. In 2015, at an event for Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, he said that the victims of American nuclear testing “have been taken from us before their time,” so that Americans could learn more about the “effects of such evil and unnecessary devices.”

The islands today are also affected by the United States’s ballistic missile defense testing that happens on Kwajalein Atoll, where the United States has a lease until 2066. This military base alone has an annual budget from Washington of $182 million, and deBrum spent his career trying to extend that support to the residential islands as well.

Tony deBrum continues to influence United Nations policy-making so that the environmental damage caused by the West can bring about some kind of compensation for the Marshall Islands. Today, the Marshall Islands are not only impacted by the effects of 20th century nuclear testing, but also by rising sea levels — like many other low-lying nations, the Marshall Islands are literally sinking. This problem is especially urgent here, though, where most of the islands are less than six feet above sea level, and less than a mile wide.

Because of this, many Marshallese emigrate to the United States — which they are allowed to do freely — if they are able to bring their families along, or don’t have any.

For the decades spent bombing the life out of the Marshall Islands, the United States provides 5,258 displaced people of Bikini Atoll and their descendants with a “compensation” of $147 every quarter, from a trust fund in Baltimore. Jack Neidenthal, a Peace Corps representative to the United States on Marshall Islands, said, of the United States, “I think they’re going out of their way to wash their hands of the Marshalls.”