Climate Chaos Will Bring More Nuclear Nightmares
Curiosity (and radioactivity, as per Schrödinger) killed the cat; whether it plans to take the opportunity to bring itself back from the brink is still a matter of debate. Humanity has a habit of opening scientific Pandora’s boxes and banishing the demons that come out to the realm of dystopian science fiction, away from the pubic discourse. While the threat of nuclear war seems to pale in comparison to the utter devastation climate change is likely to cause within the century, nothing seems to symbolize the military-industrial complex’s contributions to the crisis as effectively as a mushroom cloud. Cold War-era weapons testing has scarred the Earth, and many of those wounds have yet to heal. Climate change is what could open many of them back up, whether through cracking concrete waste repositories or encouraging nuclear proliferation in anticipation of resource wars — and with proliferation invariably comes testing.
[Climate change already poses an inherent risk to nuclear energy production, being water-intensive; nuclear facilities rely on cooling towers to ensure operational safety, and warming river water could compromise the ability of inland reactors to remain cool during heatwaves. Most are also unequipped to deal with storm surges: according to a sobering Bloomberg review “of correspondence between the [regulatory] commission and plant owners, 54 of the nuclear plants operating in the U.S. weren’t designed to handle the flood risk they face. Fifty-three weren’t built to withstand their current risk from intense precipitation; 25 didn’t account for current flood projections from streams and rivers…”. Read more here.]
While this is by no means comprehensive, here are a few former test sites that are more than echoes of the Cold War’s legacy of unbridled proliferation and nuclear colonialism; climate change could threaten to reawaken some of these radiological sleeping giants.
According to a United Nations environmental report, 20 billion tons of industrial waste (7 billion tons of toxic waste), have accumulated on Kazakhstani territory. Formerly a large part of the USSR nuclear complex, Kazakhstan is still contending with massive volumes of unsafely disposed of radioactive waste.
The area surrounding the Semipalatinsk Test Site (“The Polygon”), the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear weapons test site, still has elevated radiation levels. An increased risk of birth defects, thyroid and blood cancers (10–15% higher contraction rate than national average) is a direct result of radiation poisoning.
The Nevada-Semipalatinsk Antinuclear Movement (named in solidarity with protests against the Nevada Test Site in the U.S.) was organized by a diverse group of Kazakh citizens in response to decades-long nuclear weapons testing by the Soviet Union in the Polygon. At their first meeting, the Movement laid out their defining principles — the Soviet Union should close and remediate Semipalatinsk, end nuclear weapons production, turn management of nuclear waste over to the public, map the extent of radiation damage across the Soviet Union, and ensure greater transparency in the treatment of radiological victims and expand access to medical care for people affected by the tests, with their ultimate goal being the worldwide eradication of nuclear weapons — publicizing these aims in a widely circulated petition, “High Time.” While Nevada-Semipalatinsk launched several demonstrations, the largest documented was on August 6, 1989, the 44th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Around 50,000 people gathered at Karaulnaya volcano in protest of nuclear weapons testing at Semipalatinsk and across the world.
The demonstrations continued, and the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement gathered international support by standing in solidarity with their anti-nuclear counterparts in first the U.S. and later the Russian Arctic, where the Soviet government planned to continue testing at Novaya Zemlya. This is where Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, was detonated. Eventually their efforts led to the closing of both Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya, Semipalatinsk being the first closed test site in history.
However, decontamination and recultivation processes have continued for 30 years without end, and much public health information remains classified.
The USSR had been diverting water resources from the region for decades; the disappearance of the Aral Sea (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) is a result of the rerouting of its tributaries for agricultural irrigation. Pollutant waste and soil and water contaminants can circulate further when carried by flooding, and drought undermines recultivation and bioremediation efforts.
Lake Karachay, considered the most polluted place on Earth, offers an instructive lesson on why drought and radioactive waste don’t mix. Located within Russia’s formerly top-secret, poorly regulated Mayak Production Association, the lake and its tributaries were nuclear waste dumps. The locals in the surrounding region of Chelyabinsk fell victim to the facility’s caprices as it underwent multiple meltdowns and accidents in the 1950s, without any credible information about their ailments provided; cancer incidence is estimated to have increased by around 20%. Following a drought in 1968, winds carried radioactive dust from the lakebed, irradiating nearby villages.
France tested 17 nuclear weapons in Algeria, four (including 70-kiloton Gerboise Bleue) atmospheric tests in Tanezrouft and 13 (including Béryl, an accident that exposed military personnel and locals to the radioactive material produced by the detonation) under the Hoggar Mountains, near Reggane and In Ekker respectively. The latter 13 tests were conducted after the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), as per a clause in the Évian Accords that allowed France continued access to its military installations in the region.
The French military failed to inform the locals about residual radiation hazards. France apparently intended to forget the tests altogether, burying contaminated debris in the area surrounding the test sites — however, Saharan winds leave nothing buried for long. Nomadic Southern Algerians recovered some of this material, using it for scrap metal and construction.
Despite an increase in cancer rates and birth defects, most of the affected are still awaiting compensation from France’s Committee for Compensation of Nuclear Test Victims (CIVEN). Meanwhile, France has repeatedly refused to grant Algeria access to the testing archives, leaving the extent of the radiological graveyard largely unknown.
Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies was almost too eager for the British to detonate seven nuclear weapons of mass destruction (along with 600 minor tests, which actually caused more contamination) at the Maralinga atomic weapons test range in the 1950s and 60s, not even consulting Parliament before declaring it a joint test site. At some points, the fallout from these tests were estimated to have contaminated the entire Australian continent. The local Aboriginal population, primarily the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, were the most heavily impacted. Maralinga was their land, and the Indigenous groups who lived on it were forcibly displaced — of course not far enough to avoid radiation exposure — and what was returned remains poisoned.
The British government organized two cleanup operations, both ineffective if not completely botched: attempts to seal up residual plutonium in the earthen tombs where it belongs stirred up thousands of tons of radioactive dust, dispersing the toxic metals farther over Indigenous land. Britain was released from “all liabilities and responsibilities” pertaining to its use of the test site subsequent to a deeply flawed report from the UK’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), a reassessment of which prompted litigation from the Australian government. Australia asked that Britain pay for the vitrification of waste in the storage pits and provide compensation to the Indigenous communities affected. The UK paid a settlement of 13.5 million AUD ($9 million) in 1993, but bureaucratic hurdles, including unavailable hospital records and lax epidemiological studies, makes even this behindhand compensation unattainable for most claimants.
The Aboriginal communities of Maralinga are still suffering from the devastation wrought by the “black mist” fallout from the blasts. Dramatic public health disparities persist, and will continue to in Aboriginal Australians as long as environmental racism — whether nuclear testing, coal and heavy metal mining, or resource extractivism in any form — is not addressed.
Amchitka, a volcanic Aleutian Island of Alaska, is tectonically unstable — the perfect test ground for three underground bombs, Long Shot, Milrow, and five-megaton Cannikin.
International criticism and protests (the “Don’t Make A Wave Committee,” later to become Greenpeace, was formed in opposition) could not deter the U.S. from conducting the largest underground nuclear test in U.S. history. Even being part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge did not spare Amchitka from the man-made calamity — the military reserves the right to come and go as it pleases, its operations ostensibly antithetical to conservation. The November 6, 1971 detonation of Cannikin shook the island to its core, the seism it caused registering a 7 on the Richter scale. The shock wave itself violently killed most wildlife in the blast range.
The workers involved were not provided with the right protective gear, and records of their radiation exposure were not kept; follow-up epidemiological studies were not performed on the workers or Indigenous Aleuts, who rely heavily on fishing. Leakage of radioactive material from the underground blast chambers is likely extensive — Greenpeace field studies found contaminants in freshwater and plant matter — but there has been little research confirming how much groundwater has percolated through them and into the ocean.
What will rising tides drag out of a seismically unstable, volcanically active, radioactive and bomb-blasted island? Only nonexistent research or time will tell.
The Marshall Islands were part of the United States’ 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. Over the course of a variety of codenamed operations, 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 one 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.
Note: the Marshall Islands weren’t the only test sites in the Pacific , and the U.S. wasn’t the only NWS operating there — the French military tested 193 nuclear weapons in French Polynesia from 1960–1996, with Tahiti being exposed to 500 times the maximum accepted levels of radiation from plutonium fallout. Read more about France’s nuclear crimes against humanity here.
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 pain inflicted on the Marshallese people and the damage done to 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 Free Trade Agreements weaponized by carbon budget-monopolizing countries like the U.S. and their pet TNCs, 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 are 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 an equally sinister subterranean 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.
Author’s Note: The section on the Marshall Islands was originally published in The Defiant Movement, titled “At Another Crossroads.”
