Ground Zero Forgotten - The Marshall Islands once US nuclear test site face oblivion, health issues,

In the Republic of the Marshall Islands

The second of 67 American nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands blew 2 million tons of lagoon a mile into the sky at Bikini Atoll in 1946. (National Archives) Nearly 70 years later, strong tides blamed on climate change are exhuming graves in the capital of Majuro. (Dan Zak/The Washington Post)

About this story: This article was made possible by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Story by Dan Zak Graphics by Kevin Schaul, Laris Karklis

A boy and his grandfather are fishing in the shallows off their tiny island, a dot of green in the sapphire eternity between Hawaii and Australia. The flash comes first, silent and brighter than the sun, from a four-mile-wide fireball beyond the horizon. The sky turns blood red. Wind and thunder follow.

Even 61 years after, Tony deBrum gets “chicken skin” when sharing his memories of the largest American nuclear-weapons test — the biblical, 15-megaton detonation on Bikini Atoll, 280 miles northwest of his island. Its flash was also seen from Okinawa, 2,600 miles away. Its radioactive fallout was later detected in cattle in Tennessee.

“We pause today to remember the victims of the nuclear-weapons testing program,” deBrum says to a couple hundred people seated in a convention hall in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, a little-known nation that was entrusted to the United States as a primitive society 68 years ago.

It’s March 2 at an event marking Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day, and the boy in the shallows is now the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which has entered the 21st century as part trust-fund baby, part welfare state. Its elders have endured burns that reached to the bone, forced relocation, nightmarish birth defects, cancers in the short and long term. Its young people have inherited a world unmade, remade and then virtually forgotten by Washington, D.C.

The victims of the tests “have been taken from us before their time,” deBrum says, so that Americans could learn more about the “effects of such evil and unnecessary devices.”

From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 tests in the Marshall Islands. If their combined explosive power was parceled evenly over that 12-year period, it would equal 1.6 Hiroshima-size explosions per day.

This is not something one gets over quickly.

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Video: Operation Castle tests

A film by the Air Force documents the setup, detonation and aftermath of a number of nuclear tests conducted as part of Operation Castle in 1954.

Epilogue

Over the rest of the year, nuclear issues would dominate the global stage. At the United Nations, the Non-Proliferation Treaty conference would break down over a proposed WMD-free zone in the Middle East. A month later in Vienna, the United States and its allies would negotiate a controversial deal with Iran to relieve sanctions while hampering an Iranian pursuit of the bomb. The State Department would step up its promotion of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty — which remains unratified by the U.S. Senate — even as tensions between Russia and NATO nations reached heights not seen since the Cold War.

A bill would be introduced in Congress to provide for the treatment of American veterans who helped clean up Enewetak in the late 1970s.

(Added Not Part of Story) (H.R. 3870 and S2791, H.R.5980) - Atomic Veteran Healthcare Parity Act for the Veterans of Enewetak Atoll Clean-up Project.

Things would be quieter on Kwajalein Atoll. The U.S. garrison would host an inner-tube water-polo championship in Kwaj’s family pool, and the Turbo Turtles would win the coveted coconut trophy.

Kwajalein High School would celebrate its 10th anniversary, though its campus would remain closed; the causeway that connects it to mainland Ebeye is so run-down that it’s impassable by bus.

The Air Force would break ground across the lagoon on a six-acre “Space Fence” radar site. With pinpoint accuracy it will track bits of debris in orbit, miles above the planet, to safeguard satellites. It is expected to cost around $2 billion.

All of Ebeye would gather for the funeral of its mayor, who died of a heart attack around the anniversary of the Castle Bravo test.

And on May 20, Aug. 19, Oct. 21 and Nov. 9, the latest set of test missiles would launch from the California coast on short tails of white fire, bound for a familiar target.