by January. After the Pentagon discounted a number of remote spots in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea, the idea became more and more compelling to create a test site somewhere in the seemingly limitless expanses of the Pacific Ocean. There was brief but serious consideration of the biologically abundant Galápagos Islands—a move that, even in those relatively unsophisticated times, would have raised environmentalists’ eyebrows. In the end it was the Marshall Islands (which had lately become de facto American territory) that seemed best suited.
The Marshalls were close to the ocean’s midpoint, far removed from sightseers. There was a large airfield at Kwajalein, ideal for B-29 operations. And while almost any of the twenty-nine atolls and five islands that make up the Marshalls might fit the bill, one group of islands above all others looked ideal. Two hundred fifty-six miles north of Kwajalein, at the northern end of the so-called Ralik Chain—the “Sunset Chain,” the western chain—of islands, there was Bikini.
It was the chosen site for the enactment of a sorry irony. For once the Pacific war was fully over—once the unbearable sounds of battle, and the landing craft and the tanks and the gun emplacements and trenches, had gone away; and once all these things had been replaced by a half-forgotten quietude called peace, and there were lapping blue waters once again, and multicolored fish and white sands and green parrots and thermal-dancing frigate birds and coral reefs and ranks of palm trees leaning into the endless trade winds; once all such things had reestablished themselves as the hallmarks of the South Seas; and once they had particularly done so on tiny, pretty, peaceful, caricaturedly Pacific Bikini—Admiral Blandy and his team devised a plan to end all this, and turn Bikini and all her islands and their lagoon once again into a hellish gyre of ruin and mayhem.
The ruin of this near-perfect paradise was quite deliberate, and it was achieved because the number of Marshallese was vanishingly small, while America, the victor in the recent conflict, was a huge and very visible nation of almost limitless power.
In 1946 only 167 Marshallese men, women, and children were living on the handful of habitable islands strung around Bikini’s substantial shark-filled lagoon. Like all Marshallese communities, they had a local leader, a chief, an iroij, named Juda Kessibuki. But neither the islanders nor their paramount chief had much chance of avoiding the near-total destruction of their homeland, because they were pitted against the will and recommendation of Admiral Blandy, a New Yorker whose prominent beak had earned him the nickname Spike2 and whose influence in the Pentagon and the White House was seemingly limitless. His motto was Pax per Potestatem, “Peace Through Power”—and this was essentially how he persuaded the Bikinians to leave their island and let the Americans ruin it forever.
Admiral Blandy had made his formal choice of Bikini in mid-January 1946. It was promptly approved; and on February 10, Ben Wyatt, the middle-aged U.S. Navy commodore who had been appointed military governor of the Marshalls, flew out to the atoll on a seaplane to deliver the news to the 167 islanders. They should meet him on a Sunday, he said. After church. He was going to use “gentle words” to tell them.
He would use a biblical story. Whether it was cleverly cynical manipulation or a sincere belief in the islanders’ innocence may never be known, but it was decided that the U.S. Navy should appeal to the Bikinians’ devotion to their Bibles, to the legacy of the Victorian missionaries who had passed by a century before.
Commodore Wyatt gathered the islanders around him in a semicircle, under the shadow of a grove of coconut trees. Movies of the event show the ocean surf beating steadily in the background, waves crashing on the outer reef, the sky filled with high cloudlets and with seabirds whirling lazily on the currents. A number of American soldiers stood around, idly half-listening, half on sentry-go for the visitors.
Wyatt took as his Sunday text the Book of Exodus, chapter 13, verse 14, which tells the story of God’s leading the Israelites out of Egypt, during those tense moments shortly before the parting of the Red Sea. To get the refugees to the desert crossing point, Wyatt quoted, “The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.”
It was under the guidance of God that the United States of America, said the commodore, had constructed its own great pillars of fire and smoke, which could and would be used as a weapon “if in the future any nation attacked the peoples of God.” His puzzled listeners smiled weakly, but were silent. Wyatt went on: To make sure that such pillars of fire and smoke worked properly in the service of the Lord, it was now necessary to test them. To test them on Bikini. You have been chosen, the officer went on, to help America develop something created under God’s guidance, “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars.”
It was thus necessary that for a short while everyone leave Bikini Atoll and go off with the navy to be housed elsewhere. “Would you be willing to sacrifice your island,” Commodore Wyatt pleaded, “for the welfare of all men?”
One of the island chiefs said later that Wyatt’s invocation of the Bible had been the clincher, the masterstroke: “We didn’t feel we had any other choice but to obey the Americans.” And Chief Juda, the local iroij who by custom led the community in all matters, reluctantly agreed.
It has never been fully explained just how or when the islanders acquiesced. The Pentagon later said Chief Juda had given his enthusiastic assent right away, and that he thought the bomb tests were a wonderful idea. What we know from a public relations film made some three weeks later, when the commodore tried to get the chief to repeat his enthusiasm in front of a camera, is that the story was somewhat different. The film’s director had to suffer several takes before Juda performed with the degree of sincerity required. He agreed to make what today looks like a rehearsed and robotic utterance before a gathering of puzzled and miserable-looking islanders: “We will go. We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”3
That was sufficient for the Americans. Later there was to be much keening and wailing. But initially the islanders did as they had been bidden. The islanders were duly out of Bikini within a month. They packed up their belongings, abandoned their modest houses and beloved outrigger canoes, and left the homes and gardens they had occupied and tended peaceably for scores of generations past, and they went off in a big and ungainly American naval vessel to an unknown island far away—and all at the behest of white men they’d never before seen, so these white men could perform tasks that they did not readily comprehend and that seemed to be of little value to them.
With enough food for an eight-week stay, they were herded into a single landing craft and bumped uncomfortably over the sea 125 miles east to a very much smaller atoll, Rongerik; it had just half a square mile of land compared with the three and a half of Bikini. Rongerik was already well known to the Bikinians—it took just a day and night’s voyage on an outrigger to get there—and they didn’t like the place. It had poor soil, precious little fresh water, and a wretched few coconut trees. More important, it was, according to local legend, home to a clutch of strange demonic spirits much feared in this corner of the Marshalls. Nonetheless, blithely trusting that the Americans were acting in good faith, they settled in on Rongerik as best they could. They tried to resume a semblance of their disrupted lives, while the testing program back on their home islands got fully under way.
The transformation of their former home was almost instantaneous. Just as soon as the islanders passed over the horizon, from demurrage stations far out at sea a vast armada of American ships started swiftly moving in to take their place.
Admiral Blandy had named his testing program Operation Crossroads—“it is apparent that warfare, perhaps civilization itself, has been brought to a crossroads by this revolutionary weapon,” he had said back in Washington—and it was to be run to a very tight schedule. Construction battalions, Seabees, moved onshore
