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5 1 irradiated! The Bikini Incident I Carry Inside Me March 1, 1954: In extreme secrecy, the U.S. military conducted a nuclear test at Bikini in the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific. It was the test of an extraordinarily large, fifteen-megaton bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It scattered massive amounts of “death ash” into the atmosphere and over the ocean and struck terror worldwide. It was our Lucky Dragon #5, fishing for tuna near Bikini, that revealed this huge event to the world. Although our ship was all of a hundred miles from the point of the explosion , the pure-white “death ash” fell like snow; our feet left footprints on the deck. The strange ash we brought home with us bore powerful radiation; it also contained a top U.S. military secret—the composition of the hydrogen bomb. This hydrogen bomb, a “dirty” fission-fusion-fission bomb, was made from lithium deuteride, and it contained Uranium 237, a deadly material not found in nature. When it first fell on us, the fallout emitted fifteen to twenty roentgens per hour, as much as the ash that fell a half mile from Ground Zero in Hiroshima. Exposure to the radiation for the fourteen days on the trip back to port gave each of us a total dose of from 250 to 330 roentgens. A lethal dose is 400–500 roentgens and up. The “death ash” rose into the atmosphere and, mixed with rain and snow, fell to earth for hours, affecting all living things. In the snow falling on Hokkaido in the north, in the rain that fell on Kyushu in the southwest, strong radiation 6 CHAPTER ONE was detected—thousands of counts per minute; and people feared that being hit by the rain would cause them to lose their hair or give them atomic bomb disease. The “death ash” that poured down on the Pacific Ocean poisoned not only the water, but also the sea life, from plankton to tuna. Soon, terrified by the almost daily media coverage of the contaminated tuna, the whole nation was in a panic, and people stopped eating fish. It’s been called the twentieth century’s worst case of environmental pollution. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Pacific War had displayed the destructive power of nuclear weapons; they were inhumane acts that can be described as indiscriminate mass murder or terror attacks. They left behind cruel scars and suffering. The hydrogen test at Bikini was one thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but because it was conducted over the ocean, it didn’t leave the same destructive imprint. However, the real fearsomeness of hydrogen bombs is less their explosive power than the massive radiation they produce. Those who understood the destructive power of hydrogen bombs and the fearsomeness of their invisible radiation foresaw the end of human life and were gripped by a sense of crisis. In August 1955, they organized a World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bombing, with a motto that transcended ideology: “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist.” Some 32 million Japanese, nearly half the voters of Japan, signed a petition against nuclear testing, and some 670 million people worldwide signed the Vienna Appeal. These are figures unthinkable today.1 This outpouring of support offered the best opportunity to abolish nuclear weapons, but that goal was never achieved. To make matters worse, Japan’s government supported the nuclear arms race against the will of its citizens. This is the Japan that has suffered from nuclear weapons three times. If conservatives and progressives had come together and made patient efforts to stop the production of nuclear weapons, a different path might have opened up. As if thumbing their noses at such thinking, bewitched by the vast power of nuclear weapons, the leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union made no concessions to each other, claiming instead “the defense of free nations” or “selfdefense ,” and ratcheted up the nuclear arms race. Although the race carried with it the danger of explosion at any minute, the logic of numbers and power 1. 32 million was roughly one Japanese in three. The Vienna Appeal (begun in January 1955) was a petition drive by the Communist-led World Peace Council against “any government that prepares for atomic war.” See Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting...

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