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"Nuclear weapons Marshall Islands Testing."
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Bombing the Marshall Islands : a Cold War tragedy
\"During the Cold War, the United States conducted atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. The total explosive yield of these tests was 108 megatons, equivalent to the detonation of one Hiroshima bomb per day over nineteen years. These tests, particularly Castle Bravo, the largest one, had tragic consequences, including the irradiation of innocent people and the permanent displacement of many native Marshallese. Keith M. Parsons and Robert Zaballa tell the story of the development and testing of thermonuclear weapons and the effects of these tests on their victims and on the popular and intellectual culture. These events are also situated in their Cold War context and explained in terms of the prevailing hopes, fears, and beliefs of that age. In particular, the narrative highlights the obsessions and priorities of top American officials, such as Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.\"--Page i.
Book
The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific
This article explores how the concept of ecosystem ecologies, one of the most influential models of systems thinking, was developed in relation to the radioactive aftermath of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Islands. Historian Richard Grove has demonstrated how tropical island colonies all over the globe served as vital laboratories and spaces of social, botanical, and industrial experiment in ways that informed modernity and the conservation movement. I propose a similar relationship between the militarized American island colonies of Micronesia and how their constitution as AEC laboratories contributed to both atomic modernity and the field of ecosystem ecology. This was enacted through metaphorical concepts of island isolation and distributed visually by Atomic Energy Commission films that upheld an aerial vision of the newly acquired atolls for an American audience. Finally, the myth of isolation is also at work in the ways in which Marshall Islanders exposed to nuclear fallout became human subjects for radiation experiments due to the idea of the biological isolate.
Journal Article
Measurement of background gamma radiation in the northern Marshall Islands
We report measurements of background gamma radiation levels on six islands in the northern Marshall Islands (Enewetak, Medren, and Runit onEnewetak Atoll; Bikini and Nam on Bikini Atoll; and Rongelap on Rongelap Atoll). Measurable excess radiation could be expected from the decay of 137Cs produced by the US nuclear testing program there from 1946 to 1958. These recordings are of relevance to safety of human habitation and resettlement. We find low levels of gamma radiation for the settled island of Enewetak [mean = 7.6 millirem/year (mrem/y) = 0.076 millisievert/year (mSv/y)], larger levels of gamma radiation for the island of Rongelap (mean = 19.8 mrem/y = 0.198 mSv/y), and relatively high gamma radiation on the island of Bikini (mean = 184 mrem/y = 1.84 mSv/y). Distributions of gamma radiation levels are provided, and hot spots are discussed. We provide interpolated maps for four islands (Enewetak, Medren, Bikini, and Rongelap), and make comparisons to control measurements performed on the island of Majuro in the southern Marshall Islands, measurements made in Central Park in New York City, and the standard agreed upon by the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) governments (100 mrem/y = 1 mSv/y). External gamma radiation levels on Bikini Island significantly exceed this standard (P = <<0.01), and external gamma radiation levels on the other islands are below the standard. To determine conclusively whether these islands are safe for habitation, radiation exposure through additional pathways such as food ingestion must be considered.
Journal Article
Mortality of Veteran Participants in the CROSSROADS Nuclear Test
In 1946, approximately 40,000 U.S. military personnel participated in Operation CROSSROADS, an atmospheric nuclear test that took place at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Congress passed a law directing the Veterans Administration to determine whether there were any long-term adverse health effects associated with exposure to ionizing radiation from the detonation of nuclear devices. This book contains the results of an extensive epidemiological study of the mortality of participants compared with a similar group of nonparticipants. Topics of discussion include a breakdown of the study rationale; an overview of other studies of veteran participants in nuclear tests; and descriptions of Operation CROSSROADS, data sources for the study, participant and comparison cohorts, exposure details, mortality ascertainment, and findings and conclusions.
eBook
Confronting a Trinity of Institutional Barriers: Denial, Cover-Up, and Secrecy
Discourses of government and the nuclear industry erase previous fear and knowledge about the damages and injuries from nuclear weapons that impact indigenous communities. This cover‐up enables nuclear states and nuclear industries to promote nuclear energy as a viable response to climate change. Many people, including environmentalists, consider nuclear energy to be the only viable energy source for the future global economy in that it does not contribute to climate change. It is difficult for us to consider the full scope of the risks that accompany decisions to embrace nuclear energy as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, because lessons learned about radiation remain secret or silenced.
Journal Article
Archaeology of brutal encounter: heritage and bomb testing on Bikini Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands
When the nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, modelled the bikini at a public pool in Paris on 5 July 1946, the blaze of publicity that followed the unleashing of the fashion icon immediately trivialised the humanly willed catastrophe wrought on Bikini Atoll and its Indigenous inhabitants four days previously. Between 1946 and 1958, a total of 67 nuclear bomb tests were carried out in the Marshall Islands, including in 1954 the world's first deliverable hydrogen bomb, which vaporised three of Bikini's islands and produced radioactive fallout that resulted in the deaths of, and ill-health effects for, Marshallese, American and Japanese people and for the atoll itself. Today, Bikini Atoll is almost uninhabited. This paper is based on a preliminary survey of the atoll and outlines the material traces of nuclear testing, which comprise profound landscape modifications and other physical evidence, including an experimental target fleet of sunken ships, buildings and infrastructure remains, and cultural plantings. Listing of Bikini Atoll on the World Heritage List in 2010 has (re)materialised and (re)imagined the cultural landscape of Bikini Atoll in a way that privileges the global story of bomb testing over the local narrative of lost homeland. However, I argue that the listing of Bikini Atoll is a subversive act coopted by both global and local actors in a way that is mutually beneficial.
Journal Article
Navigating the Revival of Voyaging in the Marshall Islands: Predicaments of Preservation and Possibilities of Collaboration
Endeavors to preserve esoteric domains of cultural knowledge in Oceania face severe challenges. Paradoxically, revitalization projects risk recontextualizing specialized knowledge and this weakens its cultural significance. In this article, I draw attention to the complexities of this predicament by providing ethnographic details on an ongoing voyaging revival in the Marshall Islands. I examine the competing cultural imperatives to simultaneously safeguard knowledge-based positions of identity, maintain deferential relationships with chiefly authority, and revitalize the cultural heritage. The navigational knowledge is being carefully guarded within families despite, or perhaps because of, decreasing numbers of custodians of a unique wave-based voyaging tradition. Now, Marshallese are navigating through unknown routes to uncover knowledge that has been lost, forgotten, and fragmented, and this suggests possibilities for new models of collaborative research that are sensitive to the politics of culture and tradition as they address the practices of cultural recovery.
Journal Article
Radioactivity and Rights
Cash can never compensate people for a half century of exile and the destruction of a lifestyle and culture. The environmental destruction caused by US nuclear testing that has adversely impacted the people and ecology of the Bikini Atoll and other islands in the Marshall Island chain is discussed.
Journal Article