(28 Feb. 88) The DOE (Department of Energy) boat is in port for resupply. A couple of the Marshallese crew members have BX priviledges on Kwaj. Each day they take the DOE pickup truck to the Ten-Ten store a block up 6th Street and return with food and beverages (mostly beer, vodka, whiskey and wine). The Marshallese on board the ship work on the nuclear devastated atolls of Bikini and Eniwetak. The only jobs there are construction, maintenance and cleanup. No matter where you go on these atolls, radiation is present, more tolerable in some places, not so in others.
Small groups have returned to their atolls over the years after assurances by the U.S. Government that the islands were safe for human habitation, only to discover later that the DOE had been less than honest with them.
Four atolls have been recognized by the U.S. as being contaminated by radiation. These four: Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik are recipients of benefits from the much-disputed compensation program provided to the affected islanders.
Twelve other atolls in the fallout zone from these nuclear tests, however, were deemed to have suffered insignificant amounts of radiation contamination and were left out of any follow-up health studies and were not included in the monetary settlement.
But problems on these other atolls such as tumors, cancer, and deformed babies, once rare, have increased dramatically. Some islanders have even reported mutant three-headed coconut trees.
The DOE has continually denied or understated the dangers posed by radiation on the affected atolls. But islanders who have been allowed to live on Utirik, Bikini and Rongelap years after the tests were completed are also showing a significant increase in the same health problems.
A report by the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission – now DOE) scientists in 1957 after the Rongelap islanders were allowed to return to their homes is quite revealing.
Despite “slight lingering radiation” the report declares that, “The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”
Didn’t the Germans conduct experiments with humans not too long ago? And weren’t those experiments considered crimes against humanity?
I got a close look at a couple of the Marshallese nuclear workers one day. Their eyes and teeth are the color of parchment paper – or the color of teeth found in skulls that have been buried several hundred years.
“In February of 1946 Commodore Wyatt, the military governor of the Marshalls, traveled to Bikini. On a Sunday after church, he assembled the Bikinians to ask if they would be willing to leave their atoll temporarily so that the United States could begin testing atomic bombs for ‘the good of mankind and to end all wars.’ King Juda, then the leader of the Bikinian people, stood up after much confused and sorrowful deliberation among his people, and answered, ‘We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.’”
They never went back.
Filed under: Almost Paradise Volume 3
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