Shadow and Subterfuge Series





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Technology often has consequences. Some of them are drastically obvious, some little known or hidden, and others of them unintended and lingering. The radiation effects from Hiroshima might be considered as being all of them. But one I find intriguing is the people of Bikini – not the swimsuit wearers, but Pacific Islanders who gave up their homes “for the good of mankind.” Was it? That’s the issue.

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On a Sunday in February 1946, after church, an American naval officer gathered the people of a small Pacific atoll and asked them to leave their home.

There were 167 of them. The officer was Commodore Ben Wyatt, military governor of the Marshall Islands, and he spoke to them through an interpreter under the palms. The United States, he explained, needed their atoll to test a new kind of bomb. The tests would be for the good of mankind and to end all world wars. The move would be temporary.

The people talked among themselves for a long time. Then their leader, a man the Americans called King Juda, stood up and gave the answer that has followed Bikini ever since: they would go, believing that everything was in the hands of God.

Most of them never lived there again.

WHY BIKINI

The United States had used atomic bombs twice in war. Within months of the surrender, the Army and Navy wanted to know what the weapon would do to a fleet. They needed somewhere remote, away from shipping lanes and air routes, with a large, sheltered lagoon in which to anchor target ships. Bikini had all of that, and a population small enough to move.

The test series was called Operation Crossroads, and it was meant to be seen. Reporters, officials and cameras were brought across the Pacific to watch. Nearly a hundred ships, many of them veterans of the war just ended, were anchored in the lagoon as targets, with animals on their decks to show what the blast would do to living things.

LEAVING

The islanders had a few weeks. Navy Seabees helped them take down their church and their community house so they could carry them with them. In March 1946 they were loaded onto a landing ship with their canoes and their belongings and taken to Rongerik, an uninhabited atoll about 125 miles to the east.

Rongerik was a fraction of Bikini’s size. Its trees bore little fruit, its lagoon yielded fish that made people ill, and the islanders’ own traditions held that it was a place of bad spirits. The Navy had left them food for a few weeks. It was not enough, and it was not replaced often enough.

In July, while they tried to make a life on Rongerik, the bombs went off. The first, called Able, was dropped from a plane over the target fleet. The second, Baker, was set off underwater, and threw up a column of radioactive seawater that drenched the ships around it. King Juda was flown back to watch it.

HUNGRY

Within two years the people of Bikini were starving. An American anthropologist who visited Rongerik in 1948 was shocked by what he found. The Navy moved them to the base at Kwajalein, where they lived in tents beside a runway, and then, in November 1948, to Kili.

Kili is a single small island, not an atoll. It has no lagoon. The people of Bikini had lived from calm, sheltered water: fishing, sailing, moving from islet to islet. On Kili the surf pounded the reef and boats could not come in for months at a time. Their skills no longer fitted their home. More than once, supplies could not be landed and food had to be dropped from the air.

Meanwhile the testing at Bikini went on and grew. Over the next twelve years the United States set off about two dozen nuclear devices there. In 1954 a test called Bravo, the largest bomb the United States ever detonated, blew a crater into the reef and spread fallout across inhabited islands far beyond the atoll. Three of Bikini’s own islands were gone.

GOING HOME, AND LEAVING AGAIN

In 1968 the U.S. government announced that Bikini was safe. Crews cleared debris and replanted coconut trees, and from around 1969 families began to return.

It did not last. Tests of the people who had gone back found radiation building up in their bodies from food grown in Bikini’s soil. In 1978 they were moved off the atoll a second time. Thirty-two years after Commodore Wyatt’s Sunday visit, the promise of a temporary move had become the permanent condition of a whole people.

Today the descendants of those 167 islanders number in the thousands and are scattered across Kili, Majuro and the United States. Bikini itself is empty except for a few caretakers and the wrecks in its lagoon, now a destination for divers.

WHY IT MATTERS

The early Cold War is usually told through capitals: Washington, Moscow, Berlin. But it also had its outposts, and the people who lived in them rarely got a vote. The Bikinians were asked, and they said yes. They were asked by a victorious superpower, in the language of sacrifice, about a weapon almost nobody on earth yet understood, and they answered with faith rather than information.

The tests at Bikini told the world what an atomic bomb did to ships. What they did to the people who used to live beside that lagoon took far longer to learn.

They were told it was for the good of mankind. Nobody asked them what it would cost.

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Gary Kidney writes the Shadow & Subterfuge series of historical espionage thrillers. Book Three, The Kremlin Parity Protocol, sends Fred Brown to witness the Soviet Union’s first atomic test in 1949, three years after Bikini, when both sides had learned what the new weapon could do and neither was asking permission.