first to arrive, and though they ruled large tracts of the western Pacific from Manila in the Philippines from the sixteenth century onward, they considered the Marshalls too far away to be of much interest. Moreover, the Spaniards’ eventual loss of the Philippines to the United States in the Spanish-American War left their administration of these more distant islands well-nigh impossible—there were an estimated six thousand of them, and it was quite impractical to try to rule them from faraway Madrid.
A few American missionaries, who were busy converting the Hawaiians to Christianity, had stopped by the Marshalls earlier in the nineteenth century, en route to Japan. They left the islanders with a smattering of English, some vague awareness of biblical teachings, and the occasional use of the all-covering Christian version of the Muslim niqab, the Mother Hubbard dress—all influences that remain today. (The Marshalls are overwhelmingly Christian, and Protestant.) These missionaries were not acting as stalking horses for American colonists; that would come later. Instead, it was left to the then more adventurous and imperially inclined Germans, who arrived in the ocean in the later nineteenth century—stout Hamburg traders who discovered goods of one kind and another that could be sent back home to Germany.
Unlike the Spaniards, the Germans believed it was practical and commercially advantageous to try to rule here. They first set up commercial trading stations on the atolls, then established settlements, and finally, with the help of Lutheran missionaries, so entirely convinced the Marshallese that their future would be brighter under the kaiser’s rule that the islands became German colonies. A simple treaty, signed in 1899 with the Spanish and accompanied by a payment of twenty-five million pesetas, transferred ownership of all Spain’s Pacific islands from Madrid to Berlin.1 So, from 1906 onward, the islanders enjoyed an entirely new status. They were no longer overlooked outposts of Spain, but subjects of the Imperial German Pacific Protectorate; were ruled from a Papuan city named Herbertshöhe, fifteen hundred miles away to the southwest; had governors who sported names such as Rudiger, Hahl, and Skopnik; and were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget any Spanish they might have known, and learn German instead.
It would have been a somewhat wasted effort. Just eight years later, in 1914, and though few locally were aware of the Great War raging on the far side of the world, its effects became immediately apparent. Japanese warships suddenly appeared on the horizon, Japanese troops—who at the time were allied to the faraway British—marched ashore, and all the Germans were commanded to leave. They were replaced this time by administrators plucked from the ministries in Tokyo. Once the Germans had been properly vanquished in Europe in 1918, an official League of Nations mandate allowed Japan to run the islands entirely, making the Marshall Islanders “subjects of the Empire of Japan resident in the South Seas Mandate.” They were now to be ruled not from Papua, but from a new colonial headquarters in Saipan, fifteen hundred miles away to the northwest, and run by governors who sported names such as Tawara, Matsuda, and Hiyashi. The islanders were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget all their Spanish and German, and learn Japanese.
Then came the Second World War, and everything changed yet again. So far as the Marshall Islands were concerned, it did so most violently, during the last days of January 1944 and the Battle of Kwajalein, when a large force of American marines killed all but fifty-one of the thirty-five hundred Japanese in the garrison. That spring, governance of the Marshall Islands changed hands once more, with the puzzled locals accepting the rule of a third set of masters in forty years. They were now subjects of the faraway United States of America; were ruled in theory from Washington, DC; paid some kind of notional fealty to President Roosevelt (and soon to Truman); and were advised that to get on in the world, they had best forget all the Spanish and German and Japanese they might have remembered, and learn how to speak English.
They might have supposed that this was to be the final chapter. In fact, it was only the beginning. A new nightmare was about to unfold.
At the end of the war—though the Soviet Union was well on the way—the United States was the only nation to possess atomic weapons, and it had exploded three of them. All had exploited the physics of the fissioning of heavy metals. The first had been a test weapon in the New Mexico desert; the second and third were the live weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Given the utter devastation of the two bombs that had been dropped in anger, and how quickly they helped end Japan’s war-fighting abilities, President Truman had no doubts: these new devices, terrible though they might be, should now become a core element in America’s arsenal. He instructed his Pentagon chiefs to make more of them, to test them, to perfect them, and to create ever better and more lethal versions—and so make quite certain that in matters atomic, the United States retained an absolute military lead over the rest of the world.
It was first decided that the U.S. Navy (and not the army) should be in charge of the tests. The rationale had all to do with the likely metrics of destruction. The success of the early atom bombs, even though their targets were cities, had quite spooked American admirals into suddenly believing that of all the main instruments of war, the surface ship at sea might be the most vulnerable to atomic destruction. Soldiers might perhaps hide in deep cement bunkers; aircraft might be swiftly flown out of harm’s way; but a surface ship (especially an enormous lumbering vessel such as an aircraft carrier) was entirely vulnerable to nuclear attack, and could possibly be sunk by a single bomb, and within minutes. It could neither run nor hide from a bomber coming at it with a weapon of such power. Consequently, the future of the American navy—of navies in general, in fact—might be at stake: for if an atomic weapon could sink all ships with such ease, then the capital ship itself would soon be an obsolete entity, no better than a knight in armor on an iron-plated charger.
If, however, was key. No one knew if an atom bomb could actually sink an enormous naval vessel. It looked quite likely. But no one could be certain. So one of the guiding principles behind the early test program that President Truman now demanded was the need to elicit the truth. Could an atom bomb destroy a major capital ship: a battleship, an aircraft carrier, a heavy cruiser? The navy feared that its assets were the most vulnerable target; so the navy should conduct the tests.
The mechanics of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime plan to make the first atom bombs, had left behind a well-oiled production line. As during the war, plutonium for the postwar tests would come from the giant plant at Hanford, in Washington State; the enriched uranium would come from the immense centrifuge farms in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and the design and final assembly of the gadgets, as they were initially termed, would continue at the laboratory in Los Alamos, in New Mexico. But where best to test them? The White House charged a vice admiral named William Blandy with finding the best place “to permit the accomplishment of the tests with acceptable risk and minimum hazard.”
Wherever the bombs were to be tested had, first, to be in territory that was firmly under American control. Since one of the main concerns at the Pentagon was the effect such weapons would have on large warships, it seemed prudent to carry out the test in a sheltered lagoon in which test vessels could be anchored as targets and blasted with bombs. The chosen place should also have a very limited local population—as Admiral Blandy remarked, “[I]t was important that the local population be small and cooperative so they could be moved to a new location with a minimum of trouble.”
Weather had to be reliable—most especially the winds, which had to be predictable at a range of altitudes up to a dozen miles, the height of the mushroom cloud’s pillar, since any sustained movements of air would determine where plumes of radiation from the pillars might end up. There was the question of remoteness: ideally it should be far away from shipping lanes and from the inquisitive, and yet not too remote, since it had to be within range of an airfield that could house the bombers that would carry any air-dropped weapons to be tested. The favored heavy bomber of the time was the B-29 Superfortress, with an average range of 3,700 miles. The perfect test site could thus be no more than half that number of miles from an airfield, to allow a journey out and back: 1,000 miles distant from the field seemed ideal.
The
