high, which then rocketed toward Bikini Island, and was still fifteen feet high when it got there seconds later and picked up ships and tossed them onto the beach with cool impunity and then flooded the entire island.
Krakatoa’s explosion did much the same thing: the island of the volcano was vaporized; seawater rushed into the white-hot void and then similarly flashed into bubbles of superheated steam, which triggered a surface wave. Big volcanoes are very much larger than anything even nuclear-armed mankind can manufacture. The Krakatoa tsunami killed forty thousand and then spread around the world, being seen and felt ten thousand miles away hours later. Bikini did no such thing.
But this second Bikini bomb also caused one terrible and entirely foreseeable wrong of which Krakatoa was manifestly not guilty. It spread abroad a vast and deadly amount of radiation. The military had been given due warning that this would happen. Admiral Blandy, who had once famously declared, “I am not an atomic playboy . . . exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim,” was told that this bomb would be much more dangerous than its predecessor. Its plume of radioactive by-products would not be swept away by upper-atmosphere winds, but would be dumped directly into the lagoon, and would contaminate the waters and the shore and any ships that might survive the initial explosion. The scientists said that to go ahead would be foolhardy. But Blandy, who would later celebrate Operation Crossroads with a party whose centerpiece was a cake decorated with a large mushroom cloud, decided to go ahead with the test anyway—and the result was a catastrophe.
The cloud of falling debris itself produced a considerable amount of radiation, as expected; but as this column was falling back to the sea, a nine-hundred-foot-high wall of mist—the base surge, as it was later called—spread outward from the column and quickly enveloped the surviving ships as it rolled over them. This turned out to be the killer wave, and no one had known it would occur or how dangerous it would be. But it contained the majority of the fission products of the explosion, and though their total mass (three pounds or so, combined with about ten pounds of plutonium left over from the blast) might seem trivial, the substances were so toxic that an immense cleanup operation had to be undertaken, and very, very fast.
Yet the navy had made no advance contingency plans to do this. The result was an instant panic among the officers, and then sheeplike obedience by thousands of sailors who, wearing in most cases shorts and T-shirts, and using hoses, sprays, mops, and buckets of lye, were landed on each of the intensely radioactive vessels and ordered to clean away the residual material as quickly as they could. Fifty ships promptly set sail into the lagoon with fifteen thousand enlisted men, all soon bent on measuring and cleaning and hosing and decontaminating—and at the same time unwittingly absorbing, in their clothing, on their skin, in their hair, in their lungs, and on everything they subsequently touched, unimaginably excessive amounts of radiation. Plutonium debris was in any case not detectable by Geiger counters, so contamination with this most insidiously dangerous element went unnoticed at first.
Navy commanders on the spot had been given an impossible task, one that was incredibly perilous and that displayed the cruelest peacetime folly of having well-protected officers ordering wholly unprotected servicemen to perform the most treacherous labor. Pictures show groups of men swabbing the decks as they might have done after a topside dinner party, cheerful and vastly amused. One man said the ships were covered with sand and chunks of coral from the seabed, and he proudly displayed a chunk of rock he planned to take home, then put it in his pocket.
Though statistics relating to the later fates of these men—specifically, figures showing which of their number died of cancers that could reliably be put down to the Bikini bomb—are muddied, scientists quickly recognized, as the navy brass clearly did not, the terrible potential dangers. As a result, the next scheduled test, Crossroads Charlie, was canceled, and the Crossroads series formally terminated. Admiral Blandy was moved away from the Pacific to command the Atlantic Fleet, where he retired after three more years. He died in 1954.
But this was by no means the end of Bikini’s nightmare. For one thing, the displaced islanders—by now largely overlooked in the drama of the weapons testing program—were in ever-worsening shape. When Chief Juda returned to Rongerik from the Baker test, and reported with his characteristic innocence that their islands still looked much the same and all the palm trees were still standing, he was addressing a community on the verge of starvation. The supply caches left behind by the Americans had run out; most islanders now survived on thin gruel and barely edible fish; a fire had devastated their main coconut plantation. A visiting Marshall Islander reported that the Bikinian exiles were emaciated, “just skin and bones,” and an American doctor found compelling evidence of real malnutrition.
The islanders found an unanticipated champion. Harold L. Ickes, who had been Roosevelt’s interior secretary for more than a dozen years, the man who desegregated the national parks and who dedicated Boulder Dam and who was in many ways the personification of the practical implementation of FDR’s New Deal, got involved. By now retired, he was still a formidable champion of the underdog. In late 1947 he wrote a syndicated column decrying the treatment of the Bikini Islanders: “The natives,” he declared, “are actually and literally starving to death.”
All Washington read Ickes’s essay, and it shocked Truman’s administration into action. The government tried at first to deny responsibility—asserting, untruthfully, that the Bikinians were at fault: “[T]he natives selected Rongerik themselves,” said a statement. “We built them houses, schools and watersheds on that island, and they were perfectly happy initially. Later it developed that the island was not as productive as originally expected, and we had to augment their food supply by bringing in food for them.”
Few bought the lie. So boats and seaplanes were suddenly scrambled, and far away from the White House and the National Press Club, out on a sleepy mid-ocean atoll, an operation commenced that was born out of a sudden sense of national guilt. Scores of bewildered and unhappy Bikinians, most who by now had quite broken faith with the American government, were suddenly being moved again. This time they were shipped more than two hundred fifty miles to the south, to the great base atoll of Kwajalein, where they were put up in tents set up in lines along the huge airstrip.
It was noisy, busy, frightening, a world far removed from their isolated life up on a detached coral chain, far distant from a culture that had been based for hundreds of years on the stark simplicity of lagoon fishing. On Kwajalein, then as now a fully functioning American military base, all was stark, and little was simple. There was food and water in abundance. Too much abundance, many say today, since this was where the Bikinians began seriously and lethally to modify their diets, adding Spam, Coca-Cola, white sugar, and flour—and to change their working habits, to become what many regard them as today, participants in a handout culture. Few would dispute that from this moment on, the exiled Bikinians began to change, their native attitudes steadily eroded and diluted as the years away went on: Kwajalein is where the great alteration began to take hold.
Within months the U.S. government swiftly realized how unsuitable it was for the Bikinians, especially the growing number of newborn children, to be living in tents on a military airstrip. So in November 1948 they were moved for a third time, now to a tiny uninhabited speck in the southern Marshalls called Kili Island, a place that neither was an atoll nor had a lagoon. The island has no harbor, and during high seas a landing can be impossible. Airdrops from military cargo planes have to be arranged still, when sea conditions are too trying. A grass airstrip theoretically allows Air Marshall Islands access, but flights are few and very far between. Nonetheless, Kili is where the Bikinians, now transmuted from unwilling atomic exiles into perpetual atomic nomads, have been based ever since 1948. It now seems they may never go home.
If this proves to be so, it will be for many reasons—one being the obvious and long-lasting radiological contamination of their home in 1946, in the aftermath of the Crossroads Baker shot. But their exile is also a consequence of their atoll being massively polluted yet again, by the one most disastrous bomb for which Bikini has become most notorious, and which was exploded eight years
