The Islanders
As the U.S. Government readied Operation Castle, it informed the chief of Rongelap Atoll about the nuclear tests
scheduled for a farther west part of the Marshall Islands; no precautions were recommended. Eighty-six people were
living on Rongelap when the Bravo H-bomb exploded. Winds were heading in their general direction.22
Like other people living on Rongelap, magistrate John Anjain noticed white flecks that looked like snow falling
around them; soon the ground was covered with a layer of fallout over an inch thick.23
"We saw a flash of lightning in the west like a second sun rising," Anjain said as he talked of memories still vivid
in 1980. "We heard a loud explosion and within minutes the ground began to shake. A few hours later the
radioactive fallout began to drop on the people, into the drinking water, and on the food. The children played in the
colorful ash-like powder. They did not know what it was and many erupted on their arms and faces."24
On the neighboring Rongerik Atoll, U.S. monitoring equipment capable of measuring one hundred millirads per
hour went off scale.25 The Americans put on extra clothing and ducked inside a tightly closed building; within
thirty-four hours, all twenty-eight Americans on Rongerik were evacuated.26
Back on Rongelap, which was closer to the Bravo blast, the people were not removed until more than two days
had passed from the time the fallout first hit.27 "Our people began to be very sick," John Anjain remembered. "They
vomited, burns showed on their skin, and people’s hair began to fall out."28
The AEC’s own reports later conceded severe health damage, admitting to eighteen deaths among nineteen
children in the Marshall Islands who received one-thousand-rad thyroid doses from U.S. hydrogen bomb tests in the
area.29 (Comparable dosages of radiation were absorbed by young children living in St. George, Utah, in 1953,
according to secret estimates by top AEC officials—who calculated that thirty cases of cancer would be expected to
develop among St. George residents as a result.)30 Out of twenty-two Rongelap children exposed to the fallout from
the Bravo test, nineteen have had thyroid nodules surgically removed.31
Nor was the damage confined to thyroids, as Anjain knew from grief-stricken personal experience. His son Lekoj,
one year old when the fallout settled on Rongelap in 1954, was nineteen years old when he died of leukemia.32
In 1957, amid widespread publicity, Rongelapese were allowed to return to their atoll. But Rongelap women still
experienced a stillbirth and miscarriage rate twice that of other Marshallese women who had not been exposed to the
fallout. And radiation in their bodies increased rapidly. A 1961 Brookhaven study found body radiation levels had
risen to sixty times normal for cesium; strontium 90 levels rose sixfold.33
Other Marshall Islanders were also affected. A day after the Bravo test mistlike fallout reached Utirik Atoll,
about 275 miles east of the test site at Bikini. After two more days passed, the U.S. Navy evacuated Utirik’s 157
residents.34
In a press release after the Bravo explosion the AEC declared: "During the course of a routine atomic test in the
Marshall Islands, 28 United States personnel and 236 residents were transported from neighboring atolls to
Kwajalein Island according to a plan as a precautionary measure. These individuals were unexpectedly exposed to
some radioactivity. There were no burns. All were reported well. After completion of the atomic tests, the natives
will be returned to their homes."35
The Marshall Islands were in the category of a protective "trust territory" arrangement engineered by the United
States Government. The U.S. had signed a United Nations trusteeship agreement under which the American
government had pledged to "promote the social advancement of the inhabitants, and to this end shall protect the
rights and fundamental freedoms of all elements of the population without discrimination; protect the health of the
inhabitants . . ."36
Some Rongelapese, like other Marshall Island natives, became bitter. "The American people used the
Marshallese people as though they were animals," charged Mitsuwa Anjain, who was twenty-nine years old and
mother of five when the Bravo fallout arrived at Rongelap. "While I am still alive, I can never forget what a horrible
fate the American people inflicted on the Marshallese people."37
Almira Matayoshi was eighteen years old when the fallout rained on her home in Rongelap. We interviewed her
in Hawaii in 1980, with the help of a translator. A friendly woman in her mid-forties, Matayoshi had lost four babies
at birth after the bomb explosion—one of which came into the world with no arms or legs. "The people who are
testing don’t care about people on Rongelap and did not care then," she said. "I will not forget what happened to the
people of Rongelap."38 And Nelson Anjain, fifty-two, a Rongelap tribal chief, told us: "The U.S. has to think about
what it did to the people of Rongelap. Department of Energy came to the islands, knew everything was
contaminated, but did not tell us. . . . They come and check people but no report, no nothing."39
For 166 natives of the Bikini isles, where the United States detonated twenty-three atomic and hydrogen bombs
over a period of a dozen years, a never-ending nightmare began with the first nuclear blast in 1946. At that time,
reflecting the American government’s promises, United States News reported: "Experts are sure the radioactive
danger is temporary, and eventually the islanders will be permitted to return."40
Relocated to the barren Rongerik Atoll in 1946, the Bikinians lived through food shortages as they tried to adapt
to new surroundings within one-half square mile of dry land. Malnutrition followed for years. In 1948 they were
shuttled to Kili Atoll.41
During the 1970s, after a widely fanfared return of Bikinians to their home islands, high concentrations of
radioactivity were still found to be present in the land and food of the atoll. The U.S. Government removed the 140
residents of Bikini in 1978 after determining that dangerous amounts of strontium 90 and cesium 137 were being
absorbed into their bodies.42
In 1981 the New York Times News Service noted, "No one lives on any of the islands in the Bikini atoll."
Elected Bikinian legislator Henchi Balos issued a March 1981 statement lamenting that "our land is radioactive."
Said Balos: "We never wanted to leave. If we cannot go back to Bikini, the United States must pay for taking and
destroying our homeland, for the hardship and suffering we have experienced and for its failure to care for us."43
22. Giff Johnson, "Micronesia: America’s ‘Strategic Trust,’" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1979, p. 11.
23. Citizens’ Hearings, pp. 76-77.
24. Ibid.
25. Johnson, "Micronesia," p. 11.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Citizens’ Hearings, pp 76-77.
29. Chicago Tribune, April 1-5, 1979, published as booklet "Radiation," p. 11.
30. Michael M. May, Director, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to Glenn T. Seaborg (AEC chairman), November 29, 1965; reprinted in Health Effects of Low-
Level Radiation, April 19, 1979, Vol. 2, p. 2120.
31. Giff Johnson, "Paradise Lost," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 1980, p. 28. The article quotes a 1977 federally funded study by Brookhaven
National Laboratory, stating: "Recently about 50 percent of the exposed Rongelap people showed hypothyroidism without clinical evidence of thyroid
disease, a finding that probably portends trouble ahead."
32. Citizens’ Hearings, pp. 76-77.
33. Johnson, "Micronesia," p. 12.
34. Ibid., p. 11.
35. Marshall Islands: A Chronology—1944-1978 (Honolulu: Micronesia Support Committee, 1212 University Ave., Honolulu, HI 96826), p. 4.
36. "United Nations Trusteeship Agreement for the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands," Article 6; reprinted in Greg Dever, M.D., Ebeye,
Marshall Islands A Public Health Hazard (Honolulu: Micronesia Support Committee), p. 25.
37. Marshall Islands: A Chronology, p. 4.
38. Almira Matayoshi, interview, May 1980.
39. Nelson Anjain, interview, May 1980.
40. United States News, February 1, 1946, p. 26.
41. Johnson, "Micronesia," p. 10.
42. Ibid., pp. 14-15. See also, Johnson, "Paradise Lost," pp. 25-26; New York Times, October 13, 1980.
43. The Oregonian, New York Times News Service, March 16, 1981.