THE DAY THE WORLD TURNED RED: A REPORT ON THE PEOPLE OF UTRIK

2 7 R T H E D A Y T H E W O R L D T U R N E D R E D A R E P O R T O N T H E P E O P L E O F U T R I K K A I E R I K S O N Colin Woodard, writing for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1998, put it well. The Marshall Islands, he noted, is composed of more than 1,100 of the smallest, flattest, most fragile, numerous, and remote islands one can imagine – glorified sandbars anchored to coral reefs by stands of coconut and pandanus, surrounded by bright blue water. They’re scattered among 29 coral atolls, perched along their narrow rings like beads in an irregular necklace. . . . The atolls in turn are spread over three-quarters of a million miles of the central Pacific, thousands of miles from a major land mass. Add all the Marshall’s dry land together and it’s about the size of the District of Columbia. Bikini and Utrik are two of those atolls, separated by 275 miles of open sea. Spring 1954 On 6:45 on the morning of 1 March 1954, a thermonuclear device code-named ‘‘Bravo’’ was detonated seven feet above the surface of 2 8 E R I K S O N Y one of the islands that made up Bikini atoll. The island simply disappeared. Bravo had an explosive power two and a half times greater than its designers had expected, and one thousand times greater than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima eleven years earlier. It was the largest detonation on record. When Americans relate the story, they note that Bravo was one of sixty-seven test shots – all of them above ground – touched o√ on Bikini and Enewetok in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. That number represents just 14 percent of the nuclear tests conducted by the United States, but it was responsible for something like 80 percent of the radioactivity generated by those tests. We Americans learned early to locate our most virulent adventures a long way from home. Bravo had ten times the explosive power of all the above-ground nuclear tests conducted in the United States proper. It became clear in the days leading up to Bravo that local winds were beginning to shift in ominous ways, threatening to endanger islanders living downwind from the blast. No e√ort was made to postpone the test. The most benign telling of that part of the story suggests that meteorological data were not processed properly as they moved up the chain of command and so never reached the people in a position to act on the matter. But an alternative telling suggests that the changed wind patterns o√ered a providential and almost irresistible opportunity on the part of the United States to learn something about the e√ects of radiation on human flesh – a subject about which scientists of the day knew very little. Most of the data then available had come from laboratory mice. Years later, a Marshallese representative to the Congress of Micronesia said, referring to two atolls downwind from the Bravo test: ‘‘The U.S. knowingly and consciously allowed the people of Rongelap and Utrik to be exposed so that the U.S. could use them as guinea pigs.’’ That quote is not a part of the American telling of the story, of course, but about twenty years later, Representative George Miller, chair of a House subcommittee that had held hearings on the matter, wrote to President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hazel O’Leary of the Department of Energy that the people of the Marshall Islands had been ‘‘deliberately exposed to nuclear fallout .’’ T H E D A Y T H E W O R L D T U R N E D R E D 2 9 R Even if one’s sense of conspiracy is not up to so dramatic a conclusion, it is easy to see that the climate of those times did not engender a strong sense of concern for the islanders. An o≈cial of...