Nuclear powers in the dock

No other nuclear explosion has done more to highlight the grim realities of a long era of nuclear testing than Castle Bravo. In a quite unprecedented move, the Marshall Islands has filed a lawsuit against the United States and eight other nuclear-armed countries in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.
Meeting in Vienna last year in December, humanitarian law experts from more than 150 nations agreed that the nine countries are modernising their nuclear weapons, planning to spend more than $1 trillion on those nuclear arsenals over the next decade.
The legal action against the world’s nine nuclear countries had added significance because this year also marks the sixty-first anniversary of one of the most devastating nuclear test explosions – codenamed Castle Bravo – conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands situated between Hawaii and Australia.
In 1946, the US embarked on a series of controversial nuclear tests located in the Pacific Ocean. Castle Bravo was the largest-ever nuclear test, in which a 15-megaton atmospheric thermonuclear bomb, more than a thousand times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, was dropped on the Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954.
A mushroom cloud created due to these tests spread more than 25 miles in diameter and rose to 130,000 feet in less than 10 minutes, completely vaporising several islands in the Pacific Proving Grounds. Highly pulverised coral and irradiated sand from the blast shot to a height of about 115,000 feet through the troposphere. The device used in the Castle Bravo test was small enough to be carried on a bomber.
The first hydrogen device exploded by the US just two years earlier was the size of a small building. Only three seconds after the trigger for nuclear detonation was touched, people living more than 30 miles away felt their homes moving backward.
Many people felt the shock, travelling through the earth faster than the speed of sound. The Marshall Islands remained under US military occupation till 1947 when their status was changed to a trust territory administered by the US government. The UN’s silence on this harmful project that completely destroyed the culture and livelihood of the Marshallese people also raised serious questions that remain unanswered ever since.
According to some accounts, the Truman administration wanted to keep the entire exercise secret but it became public when a Japanese fishing vessel named Lucky Dragon was trapped in the contaminated zone of the central Pacific, resulting in the deaths of more than 15 crew members. Many experts are of the view that US President Harry Truman approved the area as a test site despite knowing that the likelihood of winds carrying the radioactive fallout of nuclear detonations to other inhabited islands was very high.
April Brown, co-founder of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, mentioned in her recent article: “Winds that were noted as favourable by weather forecasters three days prior to the blast were deemed unfavourable six hours before the test. Still, Major General Percy Clarkson, the head of the military team responsible for carrying out the testing, ordered the detonation to proceed as planned despite the likelihood that winds would carry the fallout over inhabited atolls.”
The situation further worsened in the following days when US officials failed even to evacuate the local population. The relocated population continued to suffer for many years on the previously uninhabited islands where they lacked sufficient food, proper water supplies and medical care.
A 1994 nuclear declassification initiative revealed that the disastrous fallout of the tests affected more people and a wider area than officially acknowledged. Hours after the nuclear tests, radiation rained down like “falling snow” on the people living on islands outside the designated danger zones and unsuspecting children and women kept playing with it, with disastrous consequences to follow.
The Castle Bravo nuclear test left untold impacts on the ecology of the Marshall Islands. Even after six decades, the Castle Bravo test continues to cast a long shadow over the people living on the Islands. The number of mentally deformed children, some with abnormally large heads, is still very high in exposed families. The Marshallese people who were relocated to the US after 1946 are unwilling to go back because of persistent fears of nuclear contamination.
In the early 1970s, American scientists declared Bikini Atoll safe for resettlement but most of the people had to evacuate the area again after two or three years after exposure to extremely harmful radiation, when they started eating food grown on the former nuclear test sites. Calin Georgescu, in a report to the UN Human Rights Council in 2012, claimed: “Near-irreversible environmental contamination has led to the severe loss of livelihood and thousands of people continue to experience indefinite displacement.”
After 2008, the nuclear issue has gradually emerged as a thorny problem in the geopolitical relationship between the Marshall Islands and the Obama administration. But the overall apathy on the part of successive governments in Washington towards the Marshallese people is deplorable. The Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal decided to award more than $2 billion to nuclear-affected Marshall Islanders in compensation but payment was stopped after two years.
The Castle Bravo nuclear tests initially caused a tremendous outcry on the international front but gradually the issue receded into the background because both the US and the USSR were locked in a fierce nuclear arms race during the 1950s.
The US response to the sufferings of the Marshallese people was best explained by Bikinian representative Tomaki Juda in these words: “We are sadly more akin to the Children of Israel when they left Egypt and wandered through the desert for forty years. We left Bikini and have wandered through the ocean for 32 years and will never return to our Promised Land.”
Email: rizwanasghar5@unm.edu