and islanders from faraway atolls looked on in horror—for this was a secret test, unannounced, with no prior warnings—as a gigantic pillar of fire and smoke hurled itself into the air, a mushroom top boiling fuming orange and black miles above it, with rings of new-formed cloud expanding and coiling and writhing around it as it raced up through the layers of the atmosphere.
The shock wave tore across all the islands of the atoll, snapping blazing trees like twigs, razing almost all the hundreds of buildings and towers and sheds and docks and warehouses and barracks erected for management of the tests. Ships waiting beyond the islands were buffeted by giant waves as the shocks ricocheted across the sea.
A theoretical physicist, Marshall Rosenbluth, was on such a ship, thirty miles away. “There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like a diseased brain up in the sky. It spread until it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience.”
Down in the bunker, the nine men of the firing party were rocked by what felt like a massive earthquake. Pipes broke, drenching them with water. The concrete walls swayed and cracked. Radiation swept in through the ventilation shafts. Radio contact with the command ship was degraded, ruinously—though the terrified men were able to understand that they would not be picked up by helicopter, as planned, as it was too dangerous for anyone to be on the atoll.
The men retreated into a single room deep in the bunker, where the radiation levels were a little lower, and there they stayed put—first turning off the air conditioners to stop radioactive air from entering the room, but then having everything else turned off for them when the outside diesel generators failed. There they waited in the sweltering darkness, until finally, late in the day, three helicopters arrived and ordered the team to come to the surface. They emerged draped in sheets, eyeholes cut out, looking like bizarre Halloween exhibits, eager only to get away from Bikini, and from the insistent chattering of the Geiger counters.
Bikini’s Castle Bravo bomb was a quite extraordinary event, jaw-dropping, awesome, and, except for a few scientists who had advised caution, generally unexpected. It released a truly vast amount of radiation, and all of it was now spreading fast eastward across the Pacific in an enormous plume of dust and debris that for hours following the explosion was raining chunks of highly radioactive coral down from the sky and contaminating everything below. The explosion was greater than anyone had calculated: as a lawyer later told a court during arguments for compensation for the Bikinians, a train hauling the fifteen million tons of TNT that was Castle Bravo’s equivalent would have stretched in an unbroken line of freight cars from Maine to California, with hundreds of cars to spare.
The damage done by Alvin Graves and the bomb under his command was unprecedented. Within moments, everyone who was watching the blast column, and who knew the geography of the islands, realized that the islanders on Rongelap would probably be contaminated. A ship was ordered to speed across, and by midafternoon had landed a number of sailors in protective clothing to take Geiger counter readings from two of the village wells. They saw islanders who were clearly ill: staggering, vomiting, lying listlessly on the sand. But they said nothing to them, asked no questions, and left in a matter of minutes.
They were consequently unaware that the islanders had been startled that morning by what appeared to be a great sunrise in the western skies; and had then felt a sudden, jolting warm wind like a stuttering typhoon, followed by an unimaginably loud, thundering roar. They were also unaware that a fine mist had enveloped the island, that showers of grit and great gray flakes had fallen from the sky. Nor did they know that once the roaring had stopped, the islanders had immediately tried to resume their morning routines (breakfast, baking, fishing) and started to live a normal island day until, hours later, they began to show symptoms of some mysterious ailment.
The Geiger counters knew what had happened. The 236 people of Rongelap had received doses of radiation every bit as great as those suffered by the Japanese in Hiroshima, who had been just two miles from ground zero. But on Rongelap, no alarm had sounded. Instead, the bomb managers’ first reaction was to think of employing the Rongelapese as case studies, as human guinea pigs. Radiation scientists at federal laboratories such as Brookhaven on Long Island expressed a kind of distant delight: “The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”
So, for the next fifty hours, the Rongelap islanders were left to their own devices, to suffer in isolation until it became clear that the radiation was so powerful it might actually kill them all, whereupon official panic ensued, boats and planes arrived, and the islanders were told to get out, quickly. They were hosed down with water, ordered to wash, checked with Geiger counters, and washed again, a routine repeated three times. They were told to take nothing, to leave with only the clothes on their backs. Those who looked fit enough were taken by ship down to the airbase on Kwajalein. The old and frail went by seaplane. “We were like animals,” said an islander named Rokko Langinbelik, who was twelve at the time. “It was no different from herding pigs into a gate.”
By now most were complaining of pain, burning, itching, hair falling out, and skin lesions forming. But there was still no official concern for their condition—only an academic interest. They might as well have been in cages. They were scared out of their wits, having no idea what was happening to them, why they were suddenly so ill, whether they were suffering from a fast-spreading contagion. The doctors at the air base did little for them, other than to advise them to wash and to subject them to constant monitoring with the ever-chattering radiation counters.
Six days later a secret investigation, to be known by the anodyne name Project 4.1, was initiated: “A Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons.”
No matter that these “human beings” had been the victims of a monstrous and entirely avoidable accident, the consequence of a decision made with casual, almost cynically calculated negligence. The subsequent racism of their treatment at the hands of the authorities was obvious, or at least is amply recognizable at this remove: had the islanders been Caucasians, then official inquiries would have been instantly convened, congressional committees would have been revved into high gear, presidential apologies offered, compensation packages showered like rain. But these were not Caucasians—they were mere Marshallese people, colored natives, members of a subject citizenry, a population now to be firmly contained and kept simply fed, watered, and, above all, docile. So there was never to be any inquiry of substance or value. The victims had worth not as members of any society, but as specimens—of importance principally to science. They might as well have been cadavers handed over to anatomists. They might as well have been branded with the term used by Japanese in their notorious human vivisection experiments—their human victims they called maruta, “logs of wood,” a deliberately dehumanizing description, given to lessen the crime. These innocents from Rongelap were America’s maruta, people rendered up as logs of wood. They were to become no more than the accidental subjects, serendipitously offered up to a group of faraway radiation scientists, of a detached, unemotional, and top-secret clinical study, a project of supposed significance for all in the ever more radioactive postnuclear world.
And for a while it seemed this project would remain top secret—except that an army corporal named Don Whitaker glimpsed a group of the evidently very sick islanders in their hastily built camp on Kwajalein and wrote to tell his relatives in Cincinnati, who were sufficiently horrified by his letter to pass it to the local paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer. The letter was published on March 9, a little more than a week after the blast. The news then spread rapidly, and it backed the U.S. government into a corner. It was forced to admit that, yes, there had been a nuclear test; that, yes, some islanders had been briefly exposed; but that they were being treated and that all was well.
The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, angrily denied that the
