![]() Īfter three years, the Rongelapians were allowed to return home, assured by officials that conditions were safe. That would come later.įood and Drug Administration officials use Geiger counters to measure radioactivity in freshly caught tuna fish after atomic bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean. Tests showed their white blood cell counts plummeting, and high levels of radioactive strontium in their systems. Many Rongelapians were already suffering health effects, like vomiting, hair loss, and all-over body burns and blisters. It took three days before American officials finally evacuated the island, taking the natives to nearby Kwajalein for medical tests. Rain followed, which dissolved the ash and carried it “down drains and into the barrels that provided water for each household,” writes Pincus. People walked in it, and children played with it.” “One man rubbed it into his eye to see if it would cure an old ailment. “Some people put it in their mouths and tasted it,” Anjain recalled at a Washington DC hearing run by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to investigate the incident in 1977. It stuck to their hair and bodies and even between their toes. The natives, who often went barefoot and shirtless, were covered in the toxic debris. Portrait of a boat crew member who suffered burns and general skin discoloration after an H-Bomb test. On some parts of the isle, the white radioactive ash was “an inch and a half deep on the ground,” writes Pincus. It took just hours for fallout to reach the shores of Rongelap, where it blanketed the island with radioactive material, covering houses and coconut palm trees. ![]() Not only were there no evacuations, but “Castleīravo,” as it was dubbed, was also the largest of the thermonuclear devices detonated during the military’s 67 tests, “a thousand times as large as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima,” writes Pincus. Known as Operation Crossroads, the tests were moved to the islands from the US because officials feared “radioactive fallout could not be safely contained atĪny site in the United States,” writes Pincus.ĭuring those early tests, the Rongelapians were relocated to another island a safe distance away.īut the 1954 test was different. In 1946, the US started testing atomic weapons began in Bikini Atoll, 125 miles west of Rongelap. The US detonated nuclear devices between 19 on Bikini Atoll. ![]() Anjain and his five young sons, along with the 82 other inhabitants of Rongelap, were collateral damage from a “deadly radioactive fallout from a hydrogen bomb test… detonated by American scientists and military personnel,” writes Walter Pincus in his new book, “ Blown to Hell: America’s Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders” (Diversion Books), out now. It fell on me, it fell on my wife, it fell on our infant son.” Later that day, “something began falling upon our island,” said Anjain, who at the time was 32 and chief magistrate of the Rongelap atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. Just before dawn on March 1, 1954, John Anjain was enjoying coffee on the beach in the South Pacific when he heard a thunderous blast, and saw something in the sky that he said “looked like a second sun was rising in the west.” Russia says it will no longer share info with US about missile tests Nobel Prize-winning Russian journalist warns ‘no one knows’ if Putin would use nukes Biden is letting America help fund Russia’s nuclear-weapon complexīill Clinton admits regret for having Ukraine give up nuclear weapons
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