Exposure

In March 1946, inhabitants of Bikini Atoll were shifted from their homes 125 miles east to Rongerik Atoll. The US would be testing nuclear devices off Bikini.

The Marshall Islands had once been peaceful. From the early 20th century, the Japanese began to use the islands in a military build-up to World War II. The remote island cluster had become strategic. In February 1944, the Americans seized them in a blood-soaked battle. The following year the US decided to use Bikini for tests.

Rongerik was tiny and infertile. American food supplies soon ran out and the Bikinians did not get enough to eat. Yet no expense was spared to film the blasts of Able and Baker, the first two atomic bombs under Operation Crossroads. By 1947, the Bikinians were starving, while Micronesia was designated a UN Strategic Trust Territory to be administered by the US. This arrangement lasted till 1991.

Shocked at the Bikinians? state, investigators urged the US to shift them. Moved to Kili Island in 1948, they were again dogged by starvation. Irregular supplies from the Americans did not help. By 1957, food shortage was acute. Some were then sent to Jaluit Atoll.

On March 1, 1954, the US had detonated the hydrogen bomb, Bravo, in Operation Castle, on a reef in Bikini. Bravo was a thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its radioactive cloud spread over 7,000 square miles.

The Marshallese, unknowing, watched a second sun blooming in the sky. In the fallout, radioactive ash covered the ground even on Rongelap Atoll, far east from Bikini, and turned the water yellow. People fell sick of radiation poisoning, and the whole region was irradiated. The 23 men on Fukuryu maru, a Japanese fishing ship nearby, were covered with ?gritty white ash?. The first death among them was in September.

Ninety per cent of the children under 12 at the time of Bravo developed thyroid tumours. People suffered from leukaemia, cancer of the oesophagus, stomach, intestines, pancreas and bone. By 2002, a US trust fund had paid out $79 million to 1,808 islanders, but it was rather slow. Forty-six per cent of the islanders had died.

Shortage of food on Kili made the Americans decide to shift the Bikinians back to their atoll in 1967, after cleaning up radioactive debris. The Bikinians were unwilling at first, because of the conflicting reports on levels of radiological contamination.

But quite a few of them were back in their homeland by 1975. It was clear that water, and the food grown on the island, were highly radioactive. That year Bikinians filed their first lawsuit in the US federal court, demanding a complete scientific survey of Bikini and the northern Marshall islands. Radiation in human beings was found to be far above the permissible level. The islanders left again, in 1978.

In the Eighties, the US government awarded the Bikinians two trust funds as compensation for land. The nuclear claims tribunal released another award in 2001 against the Bikinians? lawsuit for damage to their lands and people. But the tribunal does not have money to pay the claims. The Bikinians filed another case this April against the US government, for failing in its obligations. Only a fraction has been paid so far for radiological cleanup, loss of use, hardship and suffering.

In 1994, the US department of energy released a list which showed that the 82 tests in Bikini, Enewetak and Johnston atolls between 1946 and 1962 had the total blast power of at least 128,704 kilotons of TNT, equal to 8,580 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

The inhabitants of Bikini Atoll, like those from Rongelap and others, have not been able to go home. They still live in different parts of the world.