This article is part of our "Short Primer on Militarism and the Climate Crisis", which you can find in full here: https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2024/new-resource-short-primer-militarism-and-climate-crisis

It began to snow in Rongelap. [...] We kids were playing in the powder, having fun, but later everyone was sick.”

When the US military detonated the most powerful bomb they had ever tested over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands - a hydrogen bomb code-named "Castle Bravo", with 1000 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb - Lijon Eknilang and the inhabitants of Rongelap Atoll and neighbouring atolls could not have known the impact it would have.

The explosion tore a crater 76 metres deep and two kilometres wide winter the Bikini Atoll, and hurled millions of tons of coral limestone and sand into the air, which later “snowed” onto many inhabited islands as radioactive ash.

The inhabitants of four atolls suffered fatal doses of radiation. Despite burns, hair loss and diarrhoea they were only evacuated after two or three days, while other atolls were left totally on their own. There was one acute radiation fatality on a Japanese fishing boat, and around a thousand Japanese fishing boats had to destroy their contaminated catch.

Scientists of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) have calculated that the Marshall Islands tests were equivalent to exploding one Hiroshima size bomb every day for about 20 years.

In total, 315 nuclear bombs were detonated on Pacific islands for testing purposes. The 67 US nuclear explosions on the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 were all above ground and contributed significantly to the worldwide radioactive contamination of the earth's atmosphere. Alarmingly high levels of strontium found in milk and children's teeth contributed to the 1963 treaty to ban nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in space and under water that was agreed upon by USA, Soviet Union and Great Britain. Nonetheless, nuclear testing continued; over 2000 tests have taken place worldwide to date.

On the Marshall Islands the tests led to catastrophic health effects, most notably various cancers and deformities in children, of which the “jellyfish babies” were the worst for the mothers who carried children to full term. As Lijon Eknilang reported: “These babies are born with no bones in their bodies and with transparent skin. We can see their brains and their hearts beating. There are no legs, no arms, no nothing.”

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has been particularly cynical and inhumane in its treatment of the inhabitants of Rongelap Atoll. Documents that have since then been made public prove that the islanders were victims of planned human experiments. When the "Bravo" bomb was detonated, the heavy radiation of inhabited atolls was deliberately accepted, and their evacuation was initiated much too late. Two years after the evacuation, Merril Eisenbud, U.S. Atomic Energy Commissioner, wrote about Rongelap: “That island is by far the most contaminated place on earth, and it will be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.”

The following year, the Rongelap people were resettled. At first the people were extremely happy to return because a family's piece of land, alongside the spirits of their ancestors, is considered to be like a member of the family. But: "What we ate gave us blisters on our lips and in our mouths and we suffered terrible stomach problems and nausea."

Then more and more deformed children were born, and “many people suffered from thyroid tumours, still births, eye problems, liver and stomach cancers and leukaemia”.

People were regularly shipped to the USA for medical examinations, samples were taken from their blood, bone marrow and internal organs, but apart from thyroid operations they received little treatment. Lijon Eknilang “had seven miscarriages, thyroid surgery, lumps in her breast, kidney and stomach problems, her eyesight was blurred”. She died in 2012.

"For the future of our kids", the Rongelap people finally wanted to leave their home atoll, but their requests to the US authorities went unanswered. Little did they know that they had become 'valuable' guinea pigs for the DOE. It was not until 1985 that they were relocated to another island by the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.

The next generation

The following generations, within which many young people also develop cancer, find it easier to draw attention to their fate, even if it is often still not customary to talk about illnesses, especially when they affect women. For centuries, it was said that giving birth to deformed children was a punishment for infidelity of the women. For decades, there was a lack of knowledge about nuclear tests and their consequences.

“No one told me anything”, complains Meitaka Kendall-Lekka, lecturer at the College of the Marshall Islands in Majuro, about her childhood and school days, when the curriculum was based on that of the USA. The nuclear topic has only been part of the curriculum since 2021.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands has been formally independent since 1986; before that, the islands were handed over to the USA as a UN trust territory with the intention “that trust territories were administered in the best interests of their inhabitants and of international peace and security”.

Meitaka Kendall-Lekka comes from Likiep Atoll, where children had also played with the radioactive ash fallout after the Bravo explosion, but which had never been evacuated. When she spoke about her abdominal cancer after a decade of concealment, she received a lot of feedback from other young members of the third generation of nuclear test survivors about their own previously concealed cancers.

"The new generation is more aware, they want to do something about it," says Meitaka Kendall-Lekka happily today. Young Marshallese appear at international conferences and report on their home islands (which are only two meters above sea level on average). On some islands, fishing is prohibited and coconuts are not to be eaten, making people dependent on imported food of poor quality.

They also report on the so-called Runit Dome. The Dome (also referred to locally as “The Tomb”) is 115m wide concrete structure built on an island in the inhabited (!) Enewetak Atoll. Here, a gigantic nuclear legacy of plutonium fragments from a failed nuclear test, and over 100,000 cubic metres of radioactively contaminated rubble and nuclear waste from Nevada has been dumped. The waste is just waiting to be washed away by rising sea levels caused by climate change in a holey bomb crater.

The hope for sufficient compensation from the USA and an apology for what was done to the people is probably in vain. But the third generation of nuclear test survivors is now hoping that as many countries as possible will sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

When Lijon Eknilang visited Germany in 2004, she told us that we should be "learning from our pain": We must do everything we can to eliminate nuclear weapons from the world.