Consequential Damages of Nuclear War

The Rongelap Report

Barbara Rose Johnston, Holly M Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315431796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

The hydrogen test-bomb Bravo, dropped on the Marshall Islands in 1954, had enormous consequences for the Rongelap people. Anthropologists Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker provide incontrovertible evidence of physical and financial damages to individuals and cultural and psycho-social damages to the community through use of declassified government documents, oral histories and ethnographic research, conducted with the Marshallese community within a unique collaborative framework. Their work helped produce a $1 billion award by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal and raises issues of bioethics, government secrecy, human rights, military testing, and academic activism. The report, reproduced here with accompanying materials, should be read by everyone concerned with the effects of nuclear war and is an essential text for courses in history, environmental studies, bioethics, human rights, and related subjects.

Part 1

Introduction

The U.S. nuclear testing program was conducted in the Marshall Islands from 1946 through 1958. The U.S. government detonated atomic and thermonuclear weapons with the aim of achieving world peace through a deterrence policy. This report demonstrates some of the ways in which the Marshallese people subsidized this nuclear détente with their lands, health, lives, and future. The evidence summarized within illustrates some of the consequences of the U.S. nuclear testing program. Its actions essentially inflicted nuclear war conditions on a fragile atoll ecosystem and vulnerable population. The Marshallese, despite appeals to the United Nations, were powerless to stop the testing and unprepared to address the proliferation of problems resulting from the testing.

This report presents findings from a collaborative, participatory, environmental anthropology research project exploring the human environmental impacts of nuclear testing, contamination, and exile as experienced by the people of Rongelap, Ailinginae, and Rongerik atolls.¹ Data from ethnographic research and a review of the scientific literature support findings that nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands resulted in contamination, short- and long-term exposure to radioactive substances, and alienation from land and other critical resources. Nuclear testing destroyed the physical means to sustain and reproduce a self-sufficient way of life for the people of Rongelap. Radioactive contamination and involuntary relocation radically altered health, subsistence strategies, sociopolitical organization, and community integrity. A lifetime of service as human subjects in a wide range of biomedical experiments further harmed the health and psychosocial well-being of the people of Rongelap.

This report argues that the full extent of damage and injury, and the consequences of this damage and injury, must be considered when attempting to shape compensatory and remedial responses. Compensatory actions must reflect individual injuries and experiences, including pain, suffering, and hardship. Compensatory actions must also reflect the corporate experience of the people of Rongelap, whose health, vitality, and way of life have been fundamentally altered by the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program. Evidence presented in this report supports claims for compensation for:

• Social, cultural, economic, and political hardships and injuries experienced by the population of Rongelap as a result of the loss—through involuntary relocation and extensive contamination of terrestrial and marine resources—of the material basis for sustaining a healthy, self-sufficient way of life

• Psychosocial stigmatization, pain, and suffering experienced by the people of Rongelap as a result of their acute and long-term exposures to fallout

• Pain and suffering endured by members of the Rongelap community as a result of their involvement in long-term studies on the effects of radiation and their use as human subjects in a range of isolated experiments that had nothing to do with their individual health and treatment needs

• Natural resource damages and socioeconomic stigmatization experienced by the people of Rongelap, and the broader nation, as a result of contamination produced by the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

Summary of Relevant Findings

• The people of Rongelap experienced involuntary displacement from Rongelap and Ailinginae atolls when they were physically removed from their atolls (March–May 1946; 1954–1957). When people returned to their atolls, they lost access to a viable healthy ecosystem (thus they were displaced from their ability and rights to safely live in their environment in the years between 1957 and 1985). They became exiles (1985–present) when they were finally informed of the life-threatening contamination levels in their homeland.

• Families were deprived of their right to live and use lands on Rongerik Atoll.² Rongerik Atoll was taken for U.S. naval use following World War II and used as a weather and fallout tracking station during the nuclear testing program (1946–1958). The U.S. Navy, without getting permission or providing compensation, used Rongerikas a resettlement site for the Bikinians (1946–1948). And in 1957, when the Rongelap community was resettled on Rongelap and Ailinginae, the United States prohibited all access to and subsistence use of Rongerik Atoll due to severe contamination from nuclear weapons fallout.

• Exposure concerns involve much more than exposure to radiation and fallout from a singular testing event in 1954. Exposure concerns involve the persistent presence of contamination from sixty-seven atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. This contamination includes radioactive elements released through nuclear explosions, as well as tracer chemicals, such as arsenic, used to “fingerprint” the fallout from each weapon. The people of Rongelap, Rongerik, and Ailinginae were exposed to external radiation and other toxic substances not only from fallout but more significantly from internal ingestion—breathing dust and smoke from household and garden fires, drinking water, consuming terrestrial and marine food sources, and living in houses and using material culture fashioned from contaminated materials.

• “Exposed” people of Rongelap include those living on Rongelap and Ailinginae in 1954 who were exposed to Bravo and other test fallout; those who were resettled in 1957; those who were born on the contaminated atoll; those who were exposed to materials and food originating from Rongelap, Rongerik, and Ailinginae atolls; and the descendents of people exposed to radioactive contaminants. Given the synergistic, cumulative, and genetic effects of long-term exposure to radioactive isotopes and other environmental contamination from military testing, exposure is of concern to this and future generations.

• The people of Rongelap, Rongerik, and Ailinginae, with other Marshallese, served as unwitting subjects in a series of experiments designed to take advantage of the research opportunities accompanying exposure of a distinct human population to radiation. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) initially funded human subject research involving the Marshallese in 1951 in an effort to document “spontaneous mutation rates” to better estimate the genetic effects of radiation produced through the nuclear weapons testing program. Research on the human effects of radiation was intensively conducted beginning in March 1954, with efforts to document the physiological symptoms of U.S. servicemen and Marshallese natives exposed to fallout from the Bravo test. Initial findings from this and other biological research projects helped shape the goals and approach of an integrated long-term study on the human and environmental effects of nuclear weapons fallout. That study began in 1954 and was continued by Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) through 1998.

• The people of Rongelap believe, and the documentary record confirms, that the United States was aware of the extraordinary levels of fallout from Bravo and subsequent tests, was aware of continuing levels of radioactivity, was aware of contamination in the marine as well as terrestrial ecosystem, was aware of the bioaccumulative nature of contamination, noted radiation-induced changes in vegetative and marine life that islanders relied upon for food, monitored the increased radiation burdens of the resettled people returned to Rongelap in 1957, and documented the human health consequences of this systematic and cumulative exposure. Medical exams, especially from the 1950s to the early 1970s, involved monitoring and diagnostic procedures meant to document bioaccumulation processes and physiological symptoms related to radiation exposure, rather than clinical efforts to treat the various radiogenic and related health problems of the people of Rongelap. Periodic “medical surveys” also subjected the people of Rongelap to procedures that produced biological samples—blood, marrow, teeth, and other samples were harvested and sent back to the United States—in support of a wide range of experiments, many of which had little or no connection to the individual health and treatment needs of the people of Rongelap. Varied human subject experimentation also occurred during medical treatment trips to research laboratories in the United States. Ethnographic and documentary evidence demonstrates that the experiences of human subjects were painful, abusive, and traumatic.

• In addition to biophysical injuries, exposure to the environmental hazards generated by the U.S. nuclear testing program (and related biomedical research) resulted in stigmatization and other psychosocial injuries that adversely affected individuals, the community, and the nation. Nuclear testing introduced new taboos: certain lands and foods were off-limits; marriage to certain people involved new social stigmas; birthing presented new fears and health risks; family life often involved the psychological, social, and economic burden of caring for the chronically ill and disabled. The failure of the U.S. government to provide the people of Rongelap with accurate information concerning environmental hazards and risks, coupled with contradictory pronouncements on what was and was not safe, created taboos that were incomprehensible yet dominated living conditions after the onset of testing in the Marshall Islands. This transformation in the loci of control over taboos from a Marshallese cultural realm to a U.S. scientific realm undermined rules and the customary power structures that shaped, interpreted, and reproduced strategies for living in the Marshall Islands. The fear of nuclear contamination and the personal health and intergenerational effects from exposure colored all aspects of social, ...