America’s Radioactive Relations

Fifty years ago this month, the United States government exploded its largest hydrogen bomb in a test codenamed "Bravo." In their haste to show the Russians that America, too, had a deliverable H-bomb, United States officials ignored weather warnings and cast prudence aside-irrevocably affecting thousands of Marshall Islanders with a legacy that 50 years on has not been put to rest.

March 1, 1954 is now marked as a national holiday in the Marshall Islands, and is known globally as "Bikini Day." The day of the fallout is a bittersweet memory for nuclear test victims now that they have been given some nuclear test compensation but whom for most of three decades were largely ignored by the American government. That is, except when it came time for annual medical or scientific surveys by doctors who, not having to worry about peer review, routinely placed islanders at considerable risk from ongoing radiation exposure. They were prone to issue statements, such as those by Dr. Robert Conard, head of the Brookhaven National Laboratory medical team, who said in a 1958 report: "The levels of activity (on Rongelap) are higher than those found in other inhabited locations in the world. The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings."

By the 1980s, Marshall Islanders refused to suffer any longer in silence and isolation. Having hired lawyers, and with the negotiations for a new political status between the U.S. and Marshall Islands governments coming to a head, they began for the first time gaining serious worldwide-and American government-attention to their problems. The first Compact of Free Association implemented in 1986 included a "full and final" nuclear settlement providing $270 million over 15 years for compensation, medical treatment and radiological surveys.

The “Bravo Test” on March 1, 1954.

In the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration opened a floodgate of information by agreeing to declassify tens of thousands of Cold War-era documents on the nuclear test period. The release of boxes full of formerly top secret radiation exposure data-available to the U.S. negotiators of the compensation agreement in the Compact, but not the Marshall Islands side-provided, for the first time, a picture of the widespread nature of radiation exposure contradicting the U.S. government's assertion that only four atolls (Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utrik) were exposed. These documents also revealed the fact that the Bravo test of 1954, while being the largest American test ever at 15 megatons, was only one of many H-bomb tests that spewed radioactive fallout on unsuspecting Islanders.

As nuclear test-affected islanders and their government became more sophisticated in dealing with the U.S. government, they did two things in the late 1990s: they forced out the distrusted Brookhaven National Laboratory medical program after 40 years, replacing it with a Hawaii-based private medical provider. Next, they hired high-powered scientists to review U.S. government scientific data. These scientists concluded that U.S. government scientists had grossly underestimated the doses that people were exposed to-particularly the large doses that so-called "unexposed" islanders received when they were moved back by U.S. officials to highly radioactive environments shortly after the Bravo test-providing islanders with powerful evidence for higher compensation.

The Nuclear Claims Tribunal, established by the Compact of Free Association as part of the compensation package, had the job of adjudicating both personal injury and land damage claims-and was given a $45 million fund to take care of the lot. By 2003, 1,700 approved personal injury claims exceeded $70 million. Indeed, more than one third of the claimants, many of them cancer victims, have died without getting their full compensation because the Tribunal doesn't have enough funding. It has been forced to prorate annual payments at a few percent of the "final amount" each year. At the same time, a 10-year process of scientific reviews, land appraisals, and argument by lawyers, scientists and doctors led the Tribunal to award to the nuclear ground zero islands of Bikini and Enewetak compensation for loss of use, hardship and cleanup that topped $1 billion (with previous compensation paid by the U.S. deducted). Rulings on similar land claims from Utrik and Rongelap are expected later this year, and will likely add at least several hundred million dollars, if not more, to the compensation total.

The funding for a medical program that the U.S. supported during the first Compact, expired with that Compact late last year-and its possible imminent closure is causing serious friction in U.S.-Marshall Islands relations. While the U.S. government argues that the $270 million wrapped up its obligation to the Marshall Islands, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Marshall Islander who would agree. Since September 2000, a petition seeking more than $2 billion in additional compensation and medical care has been sitting with the U.S. Congress, and now with the Bush Administration, awaiting a reply.

Bikini Senator Tomaki Juda says Marshall Islanders can't help but see the irony in the stated commitment of the American government to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan but its unwillingness to satisfy an obligation to people who sacrificed their islands and their lives so that the U.S. government could win the Cold War.

As the Bravo 50th anniversary rolls around March 1, America's nuclear test legacy remains on the table as much as it ever did.