Bravo

1949

Two proving grounds. Between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. fired 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. Between 1949 and 1989 the Soviet Union fired 456 at Semipalatinsk, in what is now Kazakhstan. Both places were someone’s home. This story starts with the people who lived there, in their own words where the record has them, then sets out what each government said when asked. Counts differ by who counted, so it says who.

Mar 1946

A king stands up. On a Sunday in February 1946, after church, Commodore Ben Wyatt, the U.S. military governor of the Marshalls, asked the 167 people of Bikini to leave their atoll “temporarily” for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars.” After “much confused and sorrowful deliberation,” King Juda answered for them; Emso Leviticus later said no one dissented in front of the Americans. The Navy took them to Rongerik with food for several weeks, and by 1947 they were “actually and literally starving.” Then Kwajalein, then Kili. In 1998 the IAEA advised against permanent resettlement of Bikini. They have not gone home.

1 Mar 1954

Bravo. At 6:45 a.m. on 1 March 1954 the U.S. fired a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb at Bikini. Strauss, the Atomic Energy Commission’s chairman, said its yield was about double the estimate. The Commission told the U.N. the wind shifted unexpectedly. Merril Eisenbud wrote of reports it was fired despite an adverse forecast; the Marshall Islands government told the U.S. committee forecasts were ignored; and a review it commissioned found “some evidence” that U.S. officials had warnings and did not act. None of these sources shows the test was fired knowing fallout would reach people.

3 Mar 1954

Snow on Rongelap. Lijon Eknilang lived on Rongelap, 150 kilometres from the blast. Her people stayed “two and one-half days after the fall-out came.” Then Joint Task Force Seven moved 236 Marshallese and 28 U.S. servicemen, the count Strauss gave. The 401 people of Ailuk were not moved, though a U.S. committee wrote that the task force “should have evacuated” them. The National Cancer Institute counts 14,000 Marshall Islands residents exposed to the whole testing program. The petition they sent the U.N. said Rongelap’s people “would have avoided much danger” had they known not to drink the water.

23 Sep 1954

The Lucky Dragon. The Japanese tuna boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru was showered with ash. All 23 crew were victims of acute radiation poisoning. The radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, 40, died on 23 September; David Ropeik, writing in the Bulletin, gives the official cause as liver failure. Matashichi Oishi, then 20, said in 2003 that his first baby was stillborn, that “nuclear weapons and their radiation changed my life,” and that Japan’s government too failed the victims. Japan checked 856 boats. The U.S. paid $2 million ex gratia in 1955; the crew got about $5,500 each.

31 Mar 1954

What Washington said. On 31 March 1954 Strauss said the Japanese boat “must have been well within the danger area,” and that the Marshallese “appeared to me to be well and happy.” The Commission’s own published area ended at 166°16′ East. The crew saw the flash to their west, so the boat lay east of Bikini; at eighty miles that is about 20 miles outside it, by this story’s reckoning. Ropeik also puts it outside, but its position is unsettled. Strauss said people were “promptly evacuated”; Rongelap waited two and a half days. Dr. Eugene Cronkite recalled telling Strauss reports of minimal danger were “a downright lie”: “nobody reads yesterday’s newspapers.”

20 Apr 1954

The petition. On 20 April 1954 a petition to the United Nations, “Complaint regarding the explosion of lethal weapons within our home islands,” was signed by 111 people, eleven listed as members of the Marshallese Congress’s hold-over committee. It asked first that “all the experiments with lethal weapons within this area be immediately ceased.” It said that “aside from the complaint registered in this petition” the American administration was “by far the most agreeable one in our memory,” and that no one could promise the exposed people’s “complete recovery.” A U.S. telegram feared the sympathy one author, Dwight Heine, drew, and proposed adding him to the U.S. delegation, to be released to speak for the petitioners.

Jul 1954

What the U.S. told the U.N. On 14 May 1954 Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge said the U.S. was “very sorry indeed,” found the petitioners’ requests “reasonable and helpful,” and said people moved would lose nothing financially. To the call to stop, he said the tests were “required in the interests of general peace and security.” In July the Council voted 9 to 3 for a resolution U.S. delegate Mason Sears called “tacitly approving” them. Privately he urged settlements “forthwith.” Congress paid Rongelap $950,000 in 1964, and Utirik $1,000 a resident in 1977.

16 Jul 1954

What Moscow said. On 9 June 1954, a U.S. memo records, the Soviet diplomat Mikhail Sumskoi answered a question about the Soviet Union’s own explosions with “but that was not in a trust territory.” On 16 July the Soviet delegate asked the Trusteeship Council to note that the tests “have caused irreparable harm to the health of part of the indigenous population” and to tell the U.S. it “should desist.” The Soviet draft was defeated; so was India’s move for a World Court opinion. The Soviet Union, Syria and India voted against the U.S. resolution. Semipalatinsk had been in use since 1949.

1976

What it did to health. Lodge’s “no permanent after-effects” did not hold. The U.S. committee wrote that thyroid abnormalities, and one fatal case of leukemia, were the most significant late effects among the Marshallese. Utirik, with about a tenth of Rongelap’s estimated dose, had as much thyroid cancer, three cases each in 1976, a Brookhaven doctor wrote. Eknilang has had thyroid surgery, and says Lekoj Anjain’s body came home “in a coffin.” The National Cancer Institute estimated about 530 extra lifetime cancers among 14,000 exposed. The people measured as a “control group” also fell ill, Eknilang says; the committee found many of the controls had some exposure.

Jan 1956

Project 4.1. On 6 March 1954 the task force command approved a request from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project for a study of “human beings exposed to significant” radiation; on 8 March a secret order set it up, telling staff to keep it quiet “due to possible adverse public reaction.” Dr. Cronkite understood his mission as “examine and treat”; he and Dr. Conard deny nontherapeutic research. In January 1956 Merril Eisenbud, of the Commission, said Utrik would give “good environment data.” The Marshall Islands government says the exposures were a deliberate experiment. The U.S. committee found no evidence of that, but that consent was “neither sought nor obtained.”

Jun 1957

Home to Rongelap. In 1954 U.S. medical officers advised no further radiation for the exposed Rongelap people “for at least 12 years,” and, allowing for unknowns, none for “rest of natural lives.” On 27 February 1957 the Atomic Energy Commission approved their return, despite “lingering residual radiation” in the food. A health physicist wrote that “we will have to settle for the external readings only”; the committee could not learn why a fuller survey was skipped. Dr. Conard wrote it was the people’s “express wish” to go home. A 1957 report called it safe and said living there would give “most valuable ecological radiation data.” In 1985 Eknilang’s people “evacuated ourselves.”

Sep 1978

Bikini again. In 1967 U.S. agencies began considering a return, and in 1969 the Atomic Energy Commission said “there’s virtually no radiation left.” Families moved back, but in 1975 tests found more radioactivity than expected and the Bikinians sued in federal court, demanding a survey. In April 1978 doctors found radiation in many of the 139 people on the atoll well above the U.S. limit, and in September they were moved out again. Their later claim for compensation, Juda v. United States, was dismissed once the 1986 Compact took effect.

Dec 2004

What was paid. In the 1986 Compact the U.S. “accepts the responsibility for compensation” and put in $150 million as a “full and final settlement.” The Nuclear Claims Tribunal, set up under it by the Marshall Islands legislature, awarded over $87 million for personal injuries and had paid $71.7 million to 1,917 people by 2004; over 40 percent of awardees died before full payment. For land it awarded Bikini $563 million and Enewetak $386 million, and, per Enewetak’s counsel David Cohen, Utrik $307 million and Rongelap $1.03 billion: almost all unpaid. Payments stopped in January 2009, and later suits were dismissed.

Nov 2004

The U.S. answer. In 2000 the Marshall Islands government asked Congress for about $3.3 billion, under a clause allowing more if injuries unforeseen in 1986 left the Compact “manifestly inadequate.” A 2004 State, Energy and Defense report said it did not qualify, that the “present impact” of fallout is limited to the northerly atolls, and that the tribunal paid awards “too liberally.” Dick Thornburgh, reviewing for the Marshall Islands, found the tribunal proper. Eknilang says her sister Chiyoko Tamayose went to the hearing and was never heard. In 2023 the U.S. said the compact and tribunal “constitute the full settlement of all claims”; the Marshallese claim about $3 billion.

Jun 2020

The dome. On Runit Island, in Enewetak Atoll, the U.S. cleanup of the 1970s put contaminated soil and debris in an unlined test crater under a concrete cap, finished in 1979. The Department of Energy says the dome “is not in any immediate danger of collapse or failure,” that there are “no data” showing a measurable adverse effect, and that the Marshall Islands took over responsibility; it adds that the site is “a concern to the people of Enewetak.” A U.N. expert in 2012 had information its structure was “substandard.” In 2019 Secretary-General Guterres, after meeting President Hilda Heine, who feared a leak, called it “a kind of coffin.”

29 Aug 1949

Semipalatinsk. Soviet leaders chose a site in the Semipalatinsk region, and local people “were kept in the dark about the site’s use.” On 29 August 1949, in rain and wind, it fired the first Soviet atomic bomb. Togzhan Kassenova, a nuclear-policy researcher, writes that the test staff knew the weather would expose nearby people to more fallout. It was the first of 456 tests, the last on 19 October 1989. Kazakhstan’s embassy in Finland gives 468, the 1991 closing decree about 500. The Soviet military ran the site in secrecy and withheld radiation data.

1968

Under the clouds. Karipbek Kuyukov was born without arms in Yegyndybulak, a village about 100 kilometres from the site; he attributes this to his parents’ exposure and says people were “treated as guinea pigs.” Gulsum Kakimzhanova, born in 1952 near Semipalatinsk, recalls her railway-worker father’s hair falling out overnight and thinks radiation was the cause. Kassenova reports babies born with missing limbs. The other view is Natalya Zhdanova’s, who lived from 1968 to 2000 in Kurchatov, the secret town the military built for the site, in a military family: “People were not afraid of radiation–maybe because nobody was suffering from leukemia or other diseases.”

1957

Two clinics, two studies. In 1957, Kassenova writes, the Soviet military built the Anti-Brucellosis Dispensary No. 4, purportedly for tuberculosis but in fact to observe radiation’s effects on local people. This story did not read what its own records show. Separately, between 1957 and 1960 Kazakh doctors examined people near the site. According to the study’s leader, Bahiya Atchabarov, interviewed years later, they found “a direct correlation between illness and radiation exposure,” with bleeding and skin changes; doctors sent by the military blamed “environmental factors and poverty.” The team was made to stop. Its findings filled 12 volumes of classified documents.

28 Feb 1989

February 1989. After a radioactive gas leak at the test site, the poet Olzhas Suleimenov told television viewers on 26 February and called a meeting; on the 28th it founded the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, named in solidarity with American protesters. On the 20th the Semipalatinsk party chief had asked Moscow in code to cut the tests. In late March the military invited the movement to a test; a 2 April article, written to answer its concerns, reported nothing abnormal and blamed local industry. Nursultan Nazarbayev, then head of Kazakhstan’s Council of Ministers, praised the movement but, a 2024 thesis reports, said the military could not be blamed. In August it rallied at Karaul, a village by the site.

29 Aug 1991

29 August 1991. Forty-two years to the day after the first test, Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of the Kazakh SSR, signed Decree No. 409 closing the site, “in deference to social demands.” Kassenova says two million signed the movement’s petition and that it came when Moscow was in turmoil after the failed coup; a thesis citing her says the government feared the movement’s protest planned for that day. Nazarbayev said in 2012 he signed “regardless of the tough opposition” of the Soviet military-industry leadership. Soviet security agencies had drafted a decree to end tests in January 1993. This story did not find the Soviet government’s own reply.

Dec 2009

How many. Kassenova, citing a 2008 Kazakh and Japanese book, gives 220,000 affected people, most at 7 to 350 millisieverts and about 37,200 at 350 to 990. Kazakhstan’s embassy in Finland says more than 1.3 million were exposed; a state institute says more than 1.5 million suffered. These mix dosed, exposed and suffered; the sources do not say how each counted, and this story cannot reconcile them. After 1991 Kazakhstan ordered medical help and compensation; no Soviet payment is in the record read. Kuyukov: “My main mission on this land is to do everything I can for people like me to be the last victims of nuclear tests.”