September 5, 2023 • 24 mins
James begins a 4 part series looking at the history and future of the low lying atoll nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. This episode looks at the islands’ nuclear legacy.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
About twenty years ago, maybe thirty, a circus fitted to Majoro,
the largest island on the Marjoro Atoll, in the capital
city of the Marshall Islands. It came to Majoro, as
almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanas or fish does on
a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to
take them to their next destination, and so the resident
(00:38):
of this tiny island, which at times is no wider
than the single road which travels its whole length, decided
that they'd have to share the food that they themselves
had imported a great cost, and they set about gathering apples, bananas,
and anything else that they thought an elephant might like
to eat while it waited for a way off an
island that barey has enough room for its own people,
(00:58):
let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people
of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural
as the times of the sea, greet each other the
same way they do strangers, by saying your quay. The
word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kabu explain them.
He's the President of the Republic of the Marshal Islands,
(01:18):
so he seems like he'd be a good source.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I would say the word yuppid yupey is our greeting
word yuguey. There's a lot of several meanings. When you
can say when you meet someone first time, you say
yaguey when you greet someone, and when you also say goodbye,
instead of saying goodbye, you also say yupey. So's you
(01:43):
can use that also, like during the weekend there was
a tournament, fishing tournament, and if you were fishing and
you got it. You have a big fish on the
land and you.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Really need mhmm.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
You're about to land the fish, but the lands snap.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
So what do you say?
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Say?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Oh, yeah, yeah, way, hello to the fish. But you
just say yeah because you lost the pit catch. So
it can be said way like when you lose someone
or someone passed away. You've missed that prison, yup way,
So and so was here but no one could hear
so then said yep way. So it has several meanings.
(02:25):
But the deeper meaning of yuppoy is you are beautiful
like the rainbow. Yeah means rainbow and ways, So we
combine the two words. You are a rainbow and you're
beautiful as a rainbow.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
On the map.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The Marshall Islands look like the little dots that appear
in my photos of the beach at Margiro. But unlike
there's little specks of dust that manage to sneak their
way onto my camera center, Marshall Islands belong here. Here
is a pretty vague turn. The twenty nine coral atolls
and five islands that allow fifty four thousand marshal Eies
to live on one hundred and eighty two square kilometers
(03:03):
of land span an oceanic territory of two hundred thousand kilometers.
It's like you took a small American town and scattered
it across an area more than a half times the
size of Alaska. Even though the Rami is ninety eight
percent water, every inch of land is precious to the Marshalise,
whose matrilineal society ensures that land passes from mother to
(03:24):
daughter and ties families to the remote islands that make
up the low lying atolls of the Republic. It was
on one of the bigger chunks of land that I
recorded the music you heard a minute ago. Marjorro is
an atoll that's a coral ring that encircles the lagoon
and its biggest island is about thirty miles long but
often less than one hundred yards wide. There's one road
(03:48):
that runs the length of it and sometimes also spans
the width of it. It's also home to about half
the Ramis population. The highest point on the atoll lies
just three meters above sea level. If you want to
get higher than that than your only options are houses
or palm trees. From the top of the fifth floor
of the NAPA Autoparts Store, which also houses the UNDP
(04:09):
and the Marshal Arnds Olympic Committee, you can see the
whole island. For Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise
that barely poke their heads out from the top of
the ocean are everything. Their land and their ties to
it defined them. Without their place, they can't be themselves.
Even though many thousands of marshalse live in the diasper
(04:31):
of the United States, they still important handicrafts made from
little shells and the outer islands and coconut husks. Many
of them come back to the islands to retire, but
slowly the ocean is taking those islands back. Rising sea
levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed this tiny
Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change. There
(04:55):
isn't an exact estimate as to how long the Marshall
Islands have or what they can do to hold the
creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed on just
a few square kilometers of land among millions of square
kilometers of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything.
But now it's threatening to take everything away from them.
One day. They fear their islands will become uninhabitable. A
(05:16):
salt water invads of water table and their trees die,
while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep
away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave,
but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But
the Marshalis are resilient people. They've weathered many storms to
get to where they are now. The tiny museum in
(05:37):
Maduro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic,
a nuclear bomb, the Second World War, but in the
end these did little to cress the incredible kindness of
the tenacity of the Marshalies. The islands that make up
the Aramai have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands
of years, and they've been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese,
(06:02):
and United States governments before becoming an independent republic. Before
they were named by a British sailor, the islands had
their own name. I'll let jeff A Marshallely's renaissance man,
who was at one s driver, the head of the
World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse,
and the Custodiuns. An incredible collection of Marshalley's music explained
(06:26):
what they were called before that.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
Or before he used to call La la la Larlie like.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
L or l.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
L o l l luck lap lap.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
That's before it turned out turns into Marshall, because this
word Marshall came from this guy. Oh A found these islands.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Captain Marson, undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad
place to find yourself on a summer afternoon, and in
the time I spent there, I took several trips to
the smaller islands around my dro Atoll. They look like
the platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms,
vibrant coral reefs, white sand, and turquoise water. I love
(07:18):
free diving and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and
dozens of brightly colored species of fish in almost infinite
visibility without even needing to put on a wet tou
or a weight belt. Might be the closest I'll ever
get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a
dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you
a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on
(07:39):
the left and on the right, spends much of its
time and money preparing for its own imagined version of
a crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war.
For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean on It's
the land and a resulting loss of places to live
and grow food, And for others, it's a collapse of
basic services like power and clean water that we take
for granted. These are all storms, so the tiny island
(08:03):
nation has already weathered, and it hasn't done so in
the atomized and individualistic way that so many American preppers
fantasize about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic,
and welcoming community. There's a lot we can learn from
the people of the Marshall Islands and their story, and
so this week I'll be doing my best to share
the stories that they share with me. If you're familiar
(08:39):
with the islands, it's likely because of the history of
one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll.
The name is a German bastardization of a Marshal Leasee
word pikini pick meaning plain surface, and knee meaning coconut tree.
It's a flat based where coconuts career, but you likely
don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't
(09:01):
safe to eat anymore anyway. If you've heard of Bikinia Toll,
it's because of what the United States did there after
the Second World War. On the eighteenth of July and
nineteen forty seven, the Marshall Islands were placed in a
Strategic Trust Territory by the United Nations. This territory was
administered by the United States, which are supposed to administer
the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants out
(09:22):
of international peace and security. But a year before the
trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing and
the lagoon at Bikinia Toll, a site that would, over
the next fifteen years, become the most heavily bombed place
on Earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map,
and much of their population left dead, sick without the
(09:44):
land that defines them and their ability to thrive on
these tiny islands amidst the endless ocean as far as possible,
I want to let the marshal Lease survivors of the
nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories. They
call what happened on Bikini in and Awa at All
the nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about the nuclear
legacy is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially the
(10:07):
time when none of them have been paid the compensation
they were allotted, and the US was negotiating a new
agreement with the Marshalise government. It was very far from settled,
and the numbers of the US were offering were very
far from sufficient. I was very fortunate to join a
few other journalists on the tiny island of bocan Boten,
a short boat right away from Mitro and home to
(10:28):
perhaps most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch,
walked around the island and then had a talk on
the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors.
I'll let them introduce themselves.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
My name is Zakabekivion. I'm from the Marshall Allen. I
am a student at CMI College of the Marshall Allen
and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club,
which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with with
(11:01):
our director Mary Sock and now our Commissioner Ariana.
Speaker 6 (11:06):
All great, yeah, well, once again, my name is Ariana.
I work as a Commissioner and Nuclear Justice Envoy for
the r m I National Nuclear Commission. Him once again,
thank you very much for having us this afternoon, Yael.
Speaker 5 (11:23):
Welcome to the Marshall Island. My name is Evelin Ralpho.
I'm the director for Education and Public Awareness. Once again, welcome,
enjoy the rese of your days here.
Speaker 7 (11:36):
My name is Sinceretian Prinet. I work with the National
Nuclear Commission as an headman and physical officer. I'm not
sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since
the past that we all go so support the post
go work on the same poet, Welcome to the Partial Islands.
Speaker 6 (11:54):
She's from Mayata, she's from.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Y three.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
Some of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors. They
were exposed to fall out. Her mother was exposed to
fall out. Her mother, Grace's mother was also exposed to
the radioactive fallout, as well as my great grandfather. I
think that's what really drives us to share this with you.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly
impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that
came after it. Although we know the name Bikini A Toll,
the entire Republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Mardro itself,
thanks to the elevised decision to drop bombs on a
day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site.
(12:42):
In fact, right next to our hotel, showing the same
parking lot, there's the US Department of Energy office. Hou's, Jeff,
what that was doing there?
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
I saw. There's a diary office, the health office on
the street here, the.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
One in the next to the autel, that's the office
where they through the radiation testing. And there's the one
near the AMI R. Marshall that's the clinic for those survivors. Now,
the survivors, there's few of them live like maybe less
than fifty Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
The RMI is saw fighting in the Second World War.
It's memorialized in murals across Marjorro. In nineteen forty three
and early nineteen forty four, the USA bombed and then
fought the Imperial Japanese military, who have been occupying the
island since nineteen fourteen. US soldiers and marines, along with
(13:36):
marsh Lea's scouts, landed on Marjorro Quadrilion in anywhere thought
on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat
we took across the lagoon to Bocan Boten. The fighting
was fierce and the scale of the destruction was immense. Overall,
the Americans lost six hundred and eleven men and suffered
two thy three hundred and forty one wounded, two hundred
(13:58):
and sixty one were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over
eleven thousand men and had three hundred and fifty eight captured. Today,
the Bikinia Toll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of
the ships and plains that fought that battle, alongside the Nagato,
the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship,
(14:19):
from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was a shadow of this war that was evoked
in nineteen forty six when one hundred and sixty seven
a Bikini A Tolls inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the
United States. They initially accepted this settlement quote for the
good of mankind and to end all wars, in the
(14:40):
words of the US commandant at the time. Assisted by U. S.
Navy seabees, they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls.
Nine of the eleven family heads from Bikini elected to
be transported one hundred and twenty five miles to Rohngerikatoll,
an island with about one quarter of the land mass
of Bikini. Many believe the island to be haunted. By
(15:04):
the time the Navy left them with a few weeks
of water and food, they had every reason to be afraid.
I'll let Ariana explain what that removal process was like.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
They had asked the people if they were willing to
give up their homelands for the good of mankind and
to end all wars. And because our people are people
of faith in Christianity, they the and they were very afraid.
They did not want to leave. But because of the
amount of power that the that the military showed up
(15:36):
with with their big ships compared to our small canoes,
and the amount of troops that were on that island
on that morning, it was very hard for them to,
you know, fight against what was being asked of them.
And if you have time to look through documentaries of
(15:58):
the nuclear legacy, you will see a certain port where
the commander, a commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt. He
was sitting down and asking the chief at that time,
can we use this island for the good of mankind?
And and in response the people all respond in unison elmmin,
which means okay. And from their testimonies, they had to
(16:19):
take that shot over forty times to make sure that,
you know, they all said mmin at the same time,
to get the best shot they could for you know,
maybe for reports to the UN. But it was a
very frustrating time for them.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to
test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought ninety
five ships fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time,
this would have ranked the navy of Bikinia Toll just
outsire the top five biggest fleets in the world, but
those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Now you might
(17:09):
think that, given the testing was on ships, the atoll's
navy would be some kind of mid century Mary Celeste,
but you'd be wrong. Three hundred and fifty experimental rats, goats,
and pigs died in the service as its strange nuclear experiment,
some of them after being subjected to the great indignity
of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might
(17:32):
be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather
staggering that this research was being done three years after
the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full
of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up
in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable
human suffering does not seem to have been top of
(17:52):
the priority list. The first test of the island somehow misfired.
The gathered press were disappointed in Many of the went home,
but the second, codenamed Baker didn't. Chemist Glen t Seborg,
the longest serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission called
the Baker Test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove
(18:14):
a two thousand foot wide pillar of water into the air.
It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of
radiation across the islands of the atoll, which at the
time the residents had been expecting to return to. Just
five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Road,
a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of
(18:35):
his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit
designed named the Bikini after the atoll. It was one
wright equipped the atom bomb of fashion. The people of
the atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
January of nineteen forty eight, just two years after their removal,
(18:58):
doctor Leonard Mason visited the Bikinians on Rongrik and was
appalled to find the people there had almost starved death.
We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one
of them said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the
University of WAYI asked that food and water be bought immediately.
(19:18):
The US built houses for Bikini Atol residents on Ujilangatol,
but it decided to use these for the residents of
Aniwata Katol, where it was also about to begin conducting
nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents
alongside a runway before they eventually chose Kille Island, a
line of less than one square kilometer as their next home.
(19:43):
Also evacuated where Aniwata, Krangalap and Warthaw Islanders. They too
thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could
go home in a short period of time. They too
found out later that this was not the case. Over
the course of their exile, they've been moved several more times,
staffed half to death, cheated of their compensation, and stripped
(20:04):
of their ancestral homeland. For the next twelve years, the
United States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating in nineteen
fifty four with the Bravo Shot of Operation Castle, also
known as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we
know of the US ever deploying.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
Within those twelve years, there were sixty seven known devices
that were tested here. There could have been more, but
all we know of is sixty seven. One of them
was the Castle Bravo shat that yielded fifteen megatons, which,
when scientists calculated the equivalent of the Bravo shat, would
(20:43):
have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half
times every single day for twelve years.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
That fifteen megaton Bravo shot yielded more than two point
five times the estimated six megaton explosion. When it was
detonated on an artificial island in the Bikinia Toll, the
device's mushroom cloud reached a height of forty seven thousand feet,
which is fourteen hundred meters, and a diameter of seven
miles or eleven kilometers in about one minute. Eventually it
(21:13):
reached a height of forty kilometers and a diameter of
one hundred kilometers. This took less than ten minutes, traveled
more than one hundred meters per second, and covered seven
thousand kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it
with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot,
weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favorable,
(21:36):
but nonetheless, the decision to go ahead with the first
test was taken by to Alvin Sea Graves jointed task
for seven ships located thirty miles east of Bikini and
what was thought to be an upwin position began detecting
high levels of radiation just two hours after the test.
Very soon after they began traveling south at full speed
(21:58):
to avoid the fallout, but directly down window the blast
and unable to travel were wrong. A lap and A
Lingeni Atolls Arianna explained the impact to fall out there,
which residents were not warned about. American servats people there
want to stay inside, not eat or drink anything, but
no such warning was given to the local residents.
Speaker 6 (22:20):
Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors
from red to yellow to orange. It was just a
very very bright morning and then they started hearing like
thunderous roars a couple of minutes later, and it was
just like roars after Wars. And it was a very
frightening time because this was just not something you know,
(22:40):
does not happen every day. And then around ten am
the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts
from rongolap at All, which is the closest to Bikini.
The fallout had started to arrive and they were not
sure what was going on. There was men out fishing.
There was also stories from these witnesses that prior to
(23:03):
this test, the military had gone to and they had
movie nights and they would show the community of movies
where it's snowing.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo
shop for the people who, despite never having any quarrel
with the USA, with the recipient of the largest nuclear
bomb it's ever decimated. It could Happen here as a
(23:51):
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
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It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
slash sources. Thanks for listening.
About twenty years ago, maybe thirty, a circus fitted to Majoro,
the largest island on the Marjoro Atoll, in the capital
city of the Marshall Islands. It came to Majoro, as
almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanas or fish does on
a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to
take them to their next destination, and so the resident
(00:38):
of this tiny island, which at times is no wider
than the single road which travels its whole length, decided
that they'd have to share the food that they themselves
had imported a great cost, and they set about gathering apples, bananas,
and anything else that they thought an elephant might like
to eat while it waited for a way off an
island that barey has enough room for its own people,
(00:58):
let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people
of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural
as the times of the sea, greet each other the
same way they do strangers, by saying your quay. The
word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kabu explain them.
He's the President of the Republic of the Marshal Islands,
(01:18):
so he seems like he'd be a good source.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I would say the word yuppid yupey is our greeting
word yuguey. There's a lot of several meanings. When you
can say when you meet someone first time, you say
yaguey when you greet someone, and when you also say goodbye,
instead of saying goodbye, you also say yupey. So's you
(01:43):
can use that also, like during the weekend there was
a tournament, fishing tournament, and if you were fishing and
you got it. You have a big fish on the
land and you.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Really need mhmm.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
You're about to land the fish, but the lands snap.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
So what do you say?
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Say?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Oh, yeah, yeah, way, hello to the fish. But you
just say yeah because you lost the pit catch. So
it can be said way like when you lose someone
or someone passed away. You've missed that prison, yup way,
So and so was here but no one could hear
so then said yep way. So it has several meanings.
(02:25):
But the deeper meaning of yuppoy is you are beautiful
like the rainbow. Yeah means rainbow and ways, So we
combine the two words. You are a rainbow and you're
beautiful as a rainbow.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
On the map.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The Marshall Islands look like the little dots that appear
in my photos of the beach at Margiro. But unlike
there's little specks of dust that manage to sneak their
way onto my camera center, Marshall Islands belong here. Here
is a pretty vague turn. The twenty nine coral atolls
and five islands that allow fifty four thousand marshal Eies
to live on one hundred and eighty two square kilometers
(03:03):
of land span an oceanic territory of two hundred thousand kilometers.
It's like you took a small American town and scattered
it across an area more than a half times the
size of Alaska. Even though the Rami is ninety eight
percent water, every inch of land is precious to the Marshalise,
whose matrilineal society ensures that land passes from mother to
(03:24):
daughter and ties families to the remote islands that make
up the low lying atolls of the Republic. It was
on one of the bigger chunks of land that I
recorded the music you heard a minute ago. Marjorro is
an atoll that's a coral ring that encircles the lagoon
and its biggest island is about thirty miles long but
often less than one hundred yards wide. There's one road
(03:48):
that runs the length of it and sometimes also spans
the width of it. It's also home to about half
the Ramis population. The highest point on the atoll lies
just three meters above sea level. If you want to
get higher than that than your only options are houses
or palm trees. From the top of the fifth floor
of the NAPA Autoparts Store, which also houses the UNDP
(04:09):
and the Marshal Arnds Olympic Committee, you can see the
whole island. For Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise
that barely poke their heads out from the top of
the ocean are everything. Their land and their ties to
it defined them. Without their place, they can't be themselves.
Even though many thousands of marshalse live in the diasper
(04:31):
of the United States, they still important handicrafts made from
little shells and the outer islands and coconut husks. Many
of them come back to the islands to retire, but
slowly the ocean is taking those islands back. Rising sea
levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed this tiny
Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change. There
(04:55):
isn't an exact estimate as to how long the Marshall
Islands have or what they can do to hold the
creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed on just
a few square kilometers of land among millions of square
kilometers of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything.
But now it's threatening to take everything away from them.
One day. They fear their islands will become uninhabitable. A
(05:16):
salt water invads of water table and their trees die,
while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep
away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave,
but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But
the Marshalis are resilient people. They've weathered many storms to
get to where they are now. The tiny museum in
(05:37):
Maduro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic,
a nuclear bomb, the Second World War, but in the
end these did little to cress the incredible kindness of
the tenacity of the Marshalies. The islands that make up
the Aramai have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands
of years, and they've been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese,
(06:02):
and United States governments before becoming an independent republic. Before
they were named by a British sailor, the islands had
their own name. I'll let jeff A Marshallely's renaissance man,
who was at one s driver, the head of the
World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse,
and the Custodiuns. An incredible collection of Marshalley's music explained
(06:26):
what they were called before that.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
Or before he used to call La la la Larlie like.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
L or l.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
L o l l luck lap lap.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
That's before it turned out turns into Marshall, because this
word Marshall came from this guy. Oh A found these islands.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Captain Marson, undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad
place to find yourself on a summer afternoon, and in
the time I spent there, I took several trips to
the smaller islands around my dro Atoll. They look like
the platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms,
vibrant coral reefs, white sand, and turquoise water. I love
(07:18):
free diving and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and
dozens of brightly colored species of fish in almost infinite
visibility without even needing to put on a wet tou
or a weight belt. Might be the closest I'll ever
get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a
dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you
a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on
(07:39):
the left and on the right, spends much of its
time and money preparing for its own imagined version of
a crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war.
For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean on It's
the land and a resulting loss of places to live
and grow food, And for others, it's a collapse of
basic services like power and clean water that we take
for granted. These are all storms, so the tiny island
(08:03):
nation has already weathered, and it hasn't done so in
the atomized and individualistic way that so many American preppers
fantasize about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic,
and welcoming community. There's a lot we can learn from
the people of the Marshall Islands and their story, and
so this week I'll be doing my best to share
the stories that they share with me. If you're familiar
(08:39):
with the islands, it's likely because of the history of
one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll.
The name is a German bastardization of a Marshal Leasee
word pikini pick meaning plain surface, and knee meaning coconut tree.
It's a flat based where coconuts career, but you likely
don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't
(09:01):
safe to eat anymore anyway. If you've heard of Bikinia Toll,
it's because of what the United States did there after
the Second World War. On the eighteenth of July and
nineteen forty seven, the Marshall Islands were placed in a
Strategic Trust Territory by the United Nations. This territory was
administered by the United States, which are supposed to administer
the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants out
(09:22):
of international peace and security. But a year before the
trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing and
the lagoon at Bikinia Toll, a site that would, over
the next fifteen years, become the most heavily bombed place
on Earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map,
and much of their population left dead, sick without the
(09:44):
land that defines them and their ability to thrive on
these tiny islands amidst the endless ocean as far as possible,
I want to let the marshal Lease survivors of the
nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories. They
call what happened on Bikini in and Awa at All
the nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about the nuclear
legacy is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially the
(10:07):
time when none of them have been paid the compensation
they were allotted, and the US was negotiating a new
agreement with the Marshalise government. It was very far from settled,
and the numbers of the US were offering were very
far from sufficient. I was very fortunate to join a
few other journalists on the tiny island of bocan Boten,
a short boat right away from Mitro and home to
(10:28):
perhaps most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch,
walked around the island and then had a talk on
the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors.
I'll let them introduce themselves.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
My name is Zakabekivion. I'm from the Marshall Allen. I
am a student at CMI College of the Marshall Allen
and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club,
which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with with
(11:01):
our director Mary Sock and now our Commissioner Ariana.
Speaker 6 (11:06):
All great, yeah, well, once again, my name is Ariana.
I work as a Commissioner and Nuclear Justice Envoy for
the r m I National Nuclear Commission. Him once again,
thank you very much for having us this afternoon, Yael.
Speaker 5 (11:23):
Welcome to the Marshall Island. My name is Evelin Ralpho.
I'm the director for Education and Public Awareness. Once again, welcome,
enjoy the rese of your days here.
Speaker 7 (11:36):
My name is Sinceretian Prinet. I work with the National
Nuclear Commission as an headman and physical officer. I'm not
sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since
the past that we all go so support the post
go work on the same poet, Welcome to the Partial Islands.
Speaker 6 (11:54):
She's from Mayata, she's from.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Y three.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
Some of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors. They
were exposed to fall out. Her mother was exposed to
fall out. Her mother, Grace's mother was also exposed to
the radioactive fallout, as well as my great grandfather. I
think that's what really drives us to share this with you.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly
impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that
came after it. Although we know the name Bikini A Toll,
the entire Republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Mardro itself,
thanks to the elevised decision to drop bombs on a
day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site.
(12:42):
In fact, right next to our hotel, showing the same
parking lot, there's the US Department of Energy office. Hou's, Jeff,
what that was doing there?
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
I saw. There's a diary office, the health office on
the street here, the.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
One in the next to the autel, that's the office
where they through the radiation testing. And there's the one
near the AMI R. Marshall that's the clinic for those survivors. Now,
the survivors, there's few of them live like maybe less
than fifty Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
The RMI is saw fighting in the Second World War.
It's memorialized in murals across Marjorro. In nineteen forty three
and early nineteen forty four, the USA bombed and then
fought the Imperial Japanese military, who have been occupying the
island since nineteen fourteen. US soldiers and marines, along with
(13:36):
marsh Lea's scouts, landed on Marjorro Quadrilion in anywhere thought
on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat
we took across the lagoon to Bocan Boten. The fighting
was fierce and the scale of the destruction was immense. Overall,
the Americans lost six hundred and eleven men and suffered
two thy three hundred and forty one wounded, two hundred
(13:58):
and sixty one were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over
eleven thousand men and had three hundred and fifty eight captured. Today,
the Bikinia Toll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of
the ships and plains that fought that battle, alongside the Nagato,
the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship,
(14:19):
from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was a shadow of this war that was evoked
in nineteen forty six when one hundred and sixty seven
a Bikini A Tolls inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the
United States. They initially accepted this settlement quote for the
good of mankind and to end all wars, in the
(14:40):
words of the US commandant at the time. Assisted by U. S.
Navy seabees, they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls.
Nine of the eleven family heads from Bikini elected to
be transported one hundred and twenty five miles to Rohngerikatoll,
an island with about one quarter of the land mass
of Bikini. Many believe the island to be haunted. By
(15:04):
the time the Navy left them with a few weeks
of water and food, they had every reason to be afraid.
I'll let Ariana explain what that removal process was like.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
They had asked the people if they were willing to
give up their homelands for the good of mankind and
to end all wars. And because our people are people
of faith in Christianity, they the and they were very afraid.
They did not want to leave. But because of the
amount of power that the that the military showed up
(15:36):
with with their big ships compared to our small canoes,
and the amount of troops that were on that island
on that morning, it was very hard for them to,
you know, fight against what was being asked of them.
And if you have time to look through documentaries of
(15:58):
the nuclear legacy, you will see a certain port where
the commander, a commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt. He
was sitting down and asking the chief at that time,
can we use this island for the good of mankind?
And and in response the people all respond in unison elmmin,
which means okay. And from their testimonies, they had to
(16:19):
take that shot over forty times to make sure that,
you know, they all said mmin at the same time,
to get the best shot they could for you know,
maybe for reports to the UN. But it was a
very frustrating time for them.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to
test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought ninety
five ships fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time,
this would have ranked the navy of Bikinia Toll just
outsire the top five biggest fleets in the world, but
those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Now you might
(17:09):
think that, given the testing was on ships, the atoll's
navy would be some kind of mid century Mary Celeste,
but you'd be wrong. Three hundred and fifty experimental rats, goats,
and pigs died in the service as its strange nuclear experiment,
some of them after being subjected to the great indignity
of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might
(17:32):
be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather
staggering that this research was being done three years after
the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full
of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up
in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable
human suffering does not seem to have been top of
(17:52):
the priority list. The first test of the island somehow misfired.
The gathered press were disappointed in Many of the went home,
but the second, codenamed Baker didn't. Chemist Glen t Seborg,
the longest serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission called
the Baker Test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove
(18:14):
a two thousand foot wide pillar of water into the air.
It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of
radiation across the islands of the atoll, which at the
time the residents had been expecting to return to. Just
five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Road,
a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of
(18:35):
his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit
designed named the Bikini after the atoll. It was one
wright equipped the atom bomb of fashion. The people of
the atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
January of nineteen forty eight, just two years after their removal,
(18:58):
doctor Leonard Mason visited the Bikinians on Rongrik and was
appalled to find the people there had almost starved death.
We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one
of them said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the
University of WAYI asked that food and water be bought immediately.
(19:18):
The US built houses for Bikini Atol residents on Ujilangatol,
but it decided to use these for the residents of
Aniwata Katol, where it was also about to begin conducting
nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents
alongside a runway before they eventually chose Kille Island, a
line of less than one square kilometer as their next home.
(19:43):
Also evacuated where Aniwata, Krangalap and Warthaw Islanders. They too
thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could
go home in a short period of time. They too
found out later that this was not the case. Over
the course of their exile, they've been moved several more times,
staffed half to death, cheated of their compensation, and stripped
(20:04):
of their ancestral homeland. For the next twelve years, the
United States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating in nineteen
fifty four with the Bravo Shot of Operation Castle, also
known as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we
know of the US ever deploying.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
Within those twelve years, there were sixty seven known devices
that were tested here. There could have been more, but
all we know of is sixty seven. One of them
was the Castle Bravo shat that yielded fifteen megatons, which,
when scientists calculated the equivalent of the Bravo shat, would
(20:43):
have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half
times every single day for twelve years.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
That fifteen megaton Bravo shot yielded more than two point
five times the estimated six megaton explosion. When it was
detonated on an artificial island in the Bikinia Toll, the
device's mushroom cloud reached a height of forty seven thousand feet,
which is fourteen hundred meters, and a diameter of seven
miles or eleven kilometers in about one minute. Eventually it
(21:13):
reached a height of forty kilometers and a diameter of
one hundred kilometers. This took less than ten minutes, traveled
more than one hundred meters per second, and covered seven
thousand kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it
with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot,
weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favorable,
(21:36):
but nonetheless, the decision to go ahead with the first
test was taken by to Alvin Sea Graves jointed task
for seven ships located thirty miles east of Bikini and
what was thought to be an upwin position began detecting
high levels of radiation just two hours after the test.
Very soon after they began traveling south at full speed
(21:58):
to avoid the fallout, but directly down window the blast
and unable to travel were wrong. A lap and A
Lingeni Atolls Arianna explained the impact to fall out there,
which residents were not warned about. American servats people there
want to stay inside, not eat or drink anything, but
no such warning was given to the local residents.
Speaker 6 (22:20):
Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors
from red to yellow to orange. It was just a
very very bright morning and then they started hearing like
thunderous roars a couple of minutes later, and it was
just like roars after Wars. And it was a very
frightening time because this was just not something you know,
(22:40):
does not happen every day. And then around ten am
the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts
from rongolap at All, which is the closest to Bikini.
The fallout had started to arrive and they were not
sure what was going on. There was men out fishing.
There was also stories from these witnesses that prior to
(23:03):
this test, the military had gone to and they had
movie nights and they would show the community of movies
where it's snowing.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo
shop for the people who, despite never having any quarrel
with the USA, with the recipient of the largest nuclear
bomb it's ever decimated. It could Happen here as a
(23:51):
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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