Читать книгу Pacific: The Ocean of the Future - Simon Winchester - Страница 12

Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.

Chapter 1

THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, JULY 16, 1945, ON THE DETONATION OF THE FIRST A-BOMB, NEW MEXICO

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN, MAY 24, 1946, TELEGRAM SENT TO PROMINENT AMERICANS

The first hint that the Pacific would be tragically transformed into the world’s first and only atomic ocean came at lunchtime on January 4, when President Harry S. Truman uttered a single cryptic sentence during his State of the Union address for 1950, to this effect: “Man has opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers.” He never mentioned the Pacific by name; nor did he mention it two weeks later, on January 19, when he finally made the fateful decision to which his congressional speech had alluded. Nor did he, two further weeks on, when he issued a formal directive and announced publicly what he had decided.

He didn’t have to. So far as the United States was concerned, the sixty-four-million-square-mile expanse of the Pacific Ocean was the only place big enough and empty enough, and American enough, to allow the testing of the thermonuclear weapons the president had now finally committed his country to create.

The ocean already had had a taste of what was to come. Since 1946 the U.S. government had been secretly testing simple atomic fission bombs in the blue lagoons of its tropics. But these were quite modest weapons—deadly and terrible, to be sure, but nothing compared with what was to come next. The decision Truman made on that third Thursday of January, as well as his formal order to the Atomic Energy Commission that followed, was to start a program of work on a very different kind of device, and of a type both of unimaginable deadliness and theoretically limitless destructive power. It was a bomb that would forever change the nature of warfare, and would forever change the world. And its potential power was such that it could now be tried out, displayed, and demonstrated only in the empty middle of the Pacific.

Until the mid-1940s the ocean had been, in the popular imagination, just as Ferdinand Magellan described it four hundred years earlier. It had seemed a truly pacific sea, a place of maritime languor and quiet, of warm ultramarine waters and gentle trade winds. It suffered its ferocious storms, true, and its island peoples had not always lived lives of placid serenity, but it had not been a battle-scarred sea of churning and salt-stained gray, as the Atlantic was known. Just recently the war between the United States and Japan had seen violence on a gargantuan scale. But what was about to happen now was quite different, and by many orders of magnitude.

When President Truman authorized the 1950 budget of three hundred million dollars for the AEC to begin work on these quite different weapons (the “supers,” as they were lightly called, the fusion bombs, the thermonuclear devices), they were little more than the blackboard musings of physicists’ dreams—but musings well worth bringing to the attention of the Oval Office.

It had been several weeks earlier, on October 6, 1949, that the director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Sidney Souers, told Truman about some physicists’ remarkable claims: that it might well be possible to employ the nuclear fusion of light gases to create explosions of tremendous force, unlike anything known before. Truman’s interest was instantly piqued—driven in part by his knowledge that the Russians had exploded their first crude atomic fission bomb just a few weeks earlier. This had led to bitter and ferocious argument in the United States, principally between the military and the scientific communities, over the morality of making a new kind of weapon that could and probably would have the power to obliterate not merely thousands but millions. Many of the leading figures in the Pentagon, well aware that the now nuclear-capable Soviets would soon also be able to construct such bombs, insisted that the United States develop them, either to keep up or to keep ahead. But many scientists, more aware than most of the terrible powers of the proposed weapons, found the idea of their development utterly abhorrent. Many were gripped with a profound sense of guilt, even shame, for having ever provided the theoretical basis for their construction in the first place. Fission bombs were bad enough; fusion bombs were unimaginable in their potential for horror.

However, and so far as the U.S. government was concerned, this particular debate was officially ended on January 19, when Truman summoned Admiral Souers to the White House to tell him, in person, of what would come to be seen as one of the truly momentous decisions of his presidency. Developing the new superbomb, Truman told him, finally “made a lot of sense . . . that was what we should do” (my emphasis).

On January 31 the president made the necessary formal pronouncement that he had commanded the AEC to begin the necessary research. Enough money had been made available in the budget. America had to have the bomb, he said to his cabinet colleagues, because although no one ever wanted to use it, its possession would offer a bargaining chip during future negotiations with the Soviets. That alone was the pitiless rationale that finally squared the circle, at least for President Truman, in the moral debate.

The AEC duly began its work, in secret, and with great speed. Within a year the musings had become material. The technical challenges of fashioning a thermonuclear bomb were essentially solved. A first, small prototype device, known as George, was exploded three months later, on May 8, 1951. Then, on November 1, 1952, the first true thermonuclear test weapon, known as Mike, was detonated. Then the largest of them all—a weapon that was tested despite a memorable miscalculation that triggered results both unforgivable and unforgiven—was detonated sixteen months after that.

And owing to their daunting size, all these thermonuclear devices were exploded in the middle of the once pacific Pacific Ocean.

So far as the ocean was concerned, the journey to this point began in 1946, on the mid-sea atoll that shares its name with the much-reduced new style of bathing costume introduced that same year. A costume that a disconcerted Le Monde editorial archly described as displaying “the extreme minimization of modesty” and, rather presciently, as “quite as shocking as an explosion.” The swimsuit’s creator, Louis Réard, had said much the same thing, though intending his remark to be more PR than pejorative: “Like the bomb, the bikini is small and devastating.”

As was the island story.

There was in the Pacific an Arcadian time, of course, when all its islands belonged, if belonged is the proper word, to those who had made their livings there for generations. But one by one, group by group, European discoverers happened upon these islands, and one by one, group by group, they lost their easy innocence. The islands that in due time would interest the American bomb testers were first spotted in the eighteenth century by an English seafarer named John Marshall: his fleet came across a vast scattering of atolls in an otherwise empty sea a thousand miles north of the great island of New Guinea. The island inhabitants—Micronesians, as they came to be called by anthropologists—were part Malay, part Polynesian. For thirty previous centuries, they had lived peaceably enough on the atolls that would soon be called the Marshall Islands. They had fished and gathered coconuts, and aside from occasional tussles and skirmishes among one another, they had seldom troubled anyone beyond.

But then came their “discovery,” and in turn a bewildering succession of outsiders who claimed to own and then to rule them, and the Elysian order of old was rudely and permanently interrupted.

As mentioned in the prologue, the Spaniards were the first to arrive, and though they ruled large tracts of the western Pacific from Manila in the Philippines from the sixteenth century onward, they considered the Marshalls too far away to be of much interest. Moreover, the Spaniards’ eventual loss of the Philippines to the United States in the Spanish-American War left their administration of these more distant islands well-nigh impossible—there were an estimated six thousand of them, and it was quite impractical to try to rule them from faraway Madrid.

A few American missionaries, who were busy converting the Hawaiians to Christianity, had stopped by the Marshalls earlier in the nineteenth century, en route to Japan. They left the islanders with a smattering of English, some vague awareness of biblical teachings, and the occasional use of the all-covering Christian version of the Muslim niqab, the Mother Hubbard dress—all influences that remain today. (The Marshalls are overwhelmingly Christian, and Protestant.) These missionaries were not acting as stalking horses for American colonists; that would come later. Instead, it was left to the then more adventurous and imperially inclined Germans, who arrived in the ocean in the later nineteenth century—stout Hamburg traders who discovered goods of one kind and another that could be sent back home to Germany.

Unlike the Spaniards, the Germans believed it was practical and commercially advantageous to try to rule here. They first set up commercial trading stations on the atolls, then established settlements, and finally, with the help of Lutheran missionaries, so entirely convinced the Marshallese that their future would be brighter under the kaiser’s rule that the islands became German colonies. A simple treaty, signed in 1899 with the Spanish and accompanied by a payment of twenty-five million pesetas, transferred ownership of all Spain’s Pacific islands from Madrid to Berlin.1 So, from 1906 onward, the islanders enjoyed an entirely new status. They were no longer overlooked outposts of Spain, but subjects of the Imperial German Pacific Protectorate; were ruled from a Papuan city named Herbertshöhe, fifteen hundred miles away to the southwest; had governors who sported names such as Rudiger, Hahl, and Skopnik; and were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget any Spanish they might have known, and learn German instead.

It would have been a somewhat wasted effort. Just eight years later, in 1914, and though few locally were aware of the Great War raging on the far side of the world, its effects became immediately apparent. Japanese warships suddenly appeared on the horizon, Japanese troops—who at the time were allied to the faraway British—marched ashore, and all the Germans were commanded to leave. They were replaced this time by administrators plucked from the ministries in Tokyo. Once the Germans had been properly vanquished in Europe in 1918, an official League of Nations mandate allowed Japan to run the islands entirely, making the Marshall Islanders “subjects of the Empire of Japan resident in the South Seas Mandate.” They were now to be ruled not from Papua, but from a new colonial headquarters in Saipan, fifteen hundred miles away to the northwest, and run by governors who sported names such as Tawara, Matsuda, and Hiyashi. The islanders were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget all their Spanish and German, and learn Japanese.

Then came the Second World War, and everything changed yet again. So far as the Marshall Islands were concerned, it did so most violently, during the last days of January 1944 and the Battle of Kwajalein, when a large force of American marines killed all but fifty-one of the thirty-five hundred Japanese in the garrison. That spring, governance of the Marshall Islands changed hands once more, with the puzzled locals accepting the rule of a third set of masters in forty years. They were now subjects of the faraway United States of America; were ruled in theory from Washington, DC; paid some kind of notional fealty to President Roosevelt (and soon to Truman); and were advised that to get on in the world, they had best forget all the Spanish and German and Japanese they might have remembered, and learn how to speak English.

They might have supposed that this was to be the final chapter. In fact, it was only the beginning. A new nightmare was about to unfold.

At the end of the war—though the Soviet Union was well on the way—the United States was the only nation to possess atomic weapons, and it had exploded three of them. All had exploited the physics of the fissioning of heavy metals. The first had been a test weapon in the New Mexico desert; the second and third were the live weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Given the utter devastation of the two bombs that had been dropped in anger, and how quickly they helped end Japan’s war-fighting abilities, President Truman had no doubts: these new devices, terrible though they might be, should now become a core element in America’s arsenal. He instructed his Pentagon chiefs to make more of them, to test them, to perfect them, and to create ever better and more lethal versions—and so make quite certain that in matters atomic, the United States retained an absolute military lead over the rest of the world.

It was first decided that the U.S. Navy (and not the army) should be in charge of the tests. The rationale had all to do with the likely metrics of destruction. The success of the early atom bombs, even though their targets were cities, had quite spooked American admirals into suddenly believing that of all the main instruments of war, the surface ship at sea might be the most vulnerable to atomic destruction. Soldiers might perhaps hide in deep cement bunkers; aircraft might be swiftly flown out of harm’s way; but a surface ship (especially an enormous lumbering vessel such as an aircraft carrier) was entirely vulnerable to nuclear attack, and could possibly be sunk by a single bomb, and within minutes. It could neither run nor hide from a bomber coming at it with a weapon of such power. Consequently, the future of the American navy—of navies in general, in fact—might be at stake: for if an atomic weapon could sink all ships with such ease, then the capital ship itself would soon be an obsolete entity, no better than a knight in armor on an iron-plated charger.

If, however, was key. No one knew if an atom bomb could actually sink an enormous naval vessel. It looked quite likely. But no one could be certain. So one of the guiding principles behind the early test program that President Truman now demanded was the need to elicit the truth. Could an atom bomb destroy a major capital ship: a battleship, an aircraft carrier, a heavy cruiser? The navy feared that its assets were the most vulnerable target; so the navy should conduct the tests.

The mechanics of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime plan to make the first atom bombs, had left behind a well-oiled production line. As during the war, plutonium for the postwar tests would come from the giant plant at Hanford, in Washington State; the enriched uranium would come from the immense centrifuge farms in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and the design and final assembly of the gadgets, as they were initially termed, would continue at the laboratory in Los Alamos, in New Mexico. But where best to test them? The White House charged a vice admiral named William Blandy with finding the best place “to permit the accomplishment of the tests with acceptable risk and minimum hazard.”

Wherever the bombs were to be tested had, first, to be in territory that was firmly under American control. Since one of the main concerns at the Pentagon was the effect such weapons would have on large warships, it seemed prudent to carry out the test in a sheltered lagoon in which test vessels could be anchored as targets and blasted with bombs. The chosen place should also have a very limited local population—as Admiral Blandy remarked, “[I]t was important that the local population be small and cooperative so they could be moved to a new location with a minimum of trouble.”

Weather had to be reliable—most especially the winds, which had to be predictable at a range of altitudes up to a dozen miles, the height of the mushroom cloud’s pillar, since any sustained movements of air would determine where plumes of radiation from the pillars might end up. There was the question of remoteness: ideally it should be far away from shipping lanes and from the inquisitive, and yet not too remote, since it had to be within range of an airfield that could house the bombers that would carry any air-dropped weapons to be tested. The favored heavy bomber of the time was the B-29 Superfortress, with an average range of 3,700 miles. The perfect test site could thus be no more than half that number of miles from an airfield, to allow a journey out and back: 1,000 miles distant from the field seemed ideal.

The search for such a place began in October; the choice had become clear by January. After the Pentagon discounted a number of remote spots in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea, the idea became more and more compelling to create a test site somewhere in the seemingly limitless expanses of the Pacific Ocean. There was brief but serious consideration of the biologically abundant Galápagos Islands—a move that, even in those relatively unsophisticated times, would have raised environmentalists’ eyebrows. In the end it was the Marshall Islands (which had lately become de facto American territory) that seemed best suited.

The Marshalls were close to the ocean’s midpoint, far removed from sightseers. There was a large airfield at Kwajalein, ideal for B-29 operations. And while almost any of the twenty-nine atolls and five islands that make up the Marshalls might fit the bill, one group of islands above all others looked ideal. Two hundred fifty-six miles north of Kwajalein, at the northern end of the so-called Ralik Chain—the “Sunset Chain,” the western chain—of islands, there was Bikini.

It was the chosen site for the enactment of a sorry irony. For once the Pacific war was fully over—once the unbearable sounds of battle, and the landing craft and the tanks and the gun emplacements and trenches, had gone away; and once all these things had been replaced by a half-forgotten quietude called peace, and there were lapping blue waters once again, and multicolored fish and white sands and green parrots and thermal-dancing frigate birds and coral reefs and ranks of palm trees leaning into the endless trade winds; once all such things had reestablished themselves as the hallmarks of the South Seas; and once they had particularly done so on tiny, pretty, peaceful, caricaturedly Pacific Bikini—Admiral Blandy and his team devised a plan to end all this, and turn Bikini and all her islands and their lagoon once again into a hellish gyre of ruin and mayhem.

The ruin of this near-perfect paradise was quite deliberate, and it was achieved because the number of Marshallese was vanishingly small, while America, the victor in the recent conflict, was a huge and very visible nation of almost limitless power.

In 1946 only 167 Marshallese men, women, and children were living on the handful of habitable islands strung around Bikini’s substantial shark-filled lagoon. Like all Marshallese communities, they had a local leader, a chief, an iroij, named Juda Kessibuki. But neither the islanders nor their paramount chief had much chance of avoiding the near-total destruction of their homeland, because they were pitted against the will and recommendation of Admiral Blandy, a New Yorker whose prominent beak had earned him the nickname Spike2 and whose influence in the Pentagon and the White House was seemingly limitless. His motto was Pax per Potestatem, “Peace Through Power”—and this was essentially how he persuaded the Bikinians to leave their island and let the Americans ruin it forever.

Admiral Blandy had made his formal choice of Bikini in mid-January 1946. It was promptly approved; and on February 10, Ben Wyatt, the middle-aged U.S. Navy commodore who had been appointed military governor of the Marshalls, flew out to the atoll on a seaplane to deliver the news to the 167 islanders. They should meet him on a Sunday, he said. After church. He was going to use “gentle words” to tell them.

He would use a biblical story. Whether it was cleverly cynical manipulation or a sincere belief in the islanders’ innocence may never be known, but it was decided that the U.S. Navy should appeal to the Bikinians’ devotion to their Bibles, to the legacy of the Victorian missionaries who had passed by a century before.

Commodore Wyatt gathered the islanders around him in a semicircle, under the shadow of a grove of coconut trees. Movies of the event show the ocean surf beating steadily in the background, waves crashing on the outer reef, the sky filled with high cloudlets and with seabirds whirling lazily on the currents. A number of American soldiers stood around, idly half-listening, half on sentry-go for the visitors.

Wyatt took as his Sunday text the Book of Exodus, chapter 13, verse 14, which tells the story of God’s leading the Israelites out of Egypt, during those tense moments shortly before the parting of the Red Sea. To get the refugees to the desert crossing point, Wyatt quoted, “The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.”

It was under the guidance of God that the United States of America, said the commodore, had constructed its own great pillars of fire and smoke, which could and would be used as a weapon “if in the future any nation attacked the peoples of God.” His puzzled listeners smiled weakly, but were silent. Wyatt went on: To make sure that such pillars of fire and smoke worked properly in the service of the Lord, it was now necessary to test them. To test them on Bikini. You have been chosen, the officer went on, to help America develop something created under God’s guidance, “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars.”

It was thus necessary that for a short while everyone leave Bikini Atoll and go off with the navy to be housed elsewhere. “Would you be willing to sacrifice your island,” Commodore Wyatt pleaded, “for the welfare of all men?”

One of the island chiefs said later that Wyatt’s invocation of the Bible had been the clincher, the masterstroke: “We didn’t feel we had any other choice but to obey the Americans.” And Chief Juda, the local iroij who by custom led the community in all matters, reluctantly agreed.

It has never been fully explained just how or when the islanders acquiesced. The Pentagon later said Chief Juda had given his enthusiastic assent right away, and that he thought the bomb tests were a wonderful idea. What we know from a public relations film made some three weeks later, when the commodore tried to get the chief to repeat his enthusiasm in front of a camera, is that the story was somewhat different. The film’s director had to suffer several takes before Juda performed with the degree of sincerity required. He agreed to make what today looks like a rehearsed and robotic utterance before a gathering of puzzled and miserable-looking islanders: “We will go. We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”3

That was sufficient for the Americans. Later there was to be much keening and wailing. But initially the islanders did as they had been bidden. The islanders were duly out of Bikini within a month. They packed up their belongings, abandoned their modest houses and beloved outrigger canoes, and left the homes and gardens they had occupied and tended peaceably for scores of generations past, and they went off in a big and ungainly American naval vessel to an unknown island far away—and all at the behest of white men they’d never before seen, so these white men could perform tasks that they did not readily comprehend and that seemed to be of little value to them.

With enough food for an eight-week stay, they were herded into a single landing craft and bumped uncomfortably over the sea 125 miles east to a very much smaller atoll, Rongerik; it had just half a square mile of land compared with the three and a half of Bikini. Rongerik was already well known to the Bikinians—it took just a day and night’s voyage on an outrigger to get there—and they didn’t like the place. It had poor soil, precious little fresh water, and a wretched few coconut trees. More important, it was, according to local legend, home to a clutch of strange demonic spirits much feared in this corner of the Marshalls. Nonetheless, blithely trusting that the Americans were acting in good faith, they settled in on Rongerik as best they could. They tried to resume a semblance of their disrupted lives, while the testing program back on their home islands got fully under way.

The transformation of their former home was almost instantaneous. Just as soon as the islanders passed over the horizon, from demurrage stations far out at sea a vast armada of American ships started swiftly moving in to take their place.

Admiral Blandy had named his testing program Operation Crossroads—“it is apparent that warfare, perhaps civilization itself, has been brought to a crossroads by this revolutionary weapon,” he had said back in Washington—and it was to be run to a very tight schedule. Construction battalions, Seabees, moved onshore to erect blockhouses and barracks and steel towers for all the cameras and radiation sensors and telescopes and men that would be needed; flotillas of ships brought in heavy materials (cement, steel, bulldozers, backhoes, tons of protective lead shielding); and the navy started ferrying in scores of old and captured ships of every type imaginable, which were to be set down at fixed positions in the lagoon and used as targets.

More than forty thousand men were soon to be involved out in the western Pacific—eating, inter alia, twenty tons of meat and seventy thousand candy bars every single day—making sure the testing program went ahead as scheduled. For everyone knew that with the help of their spies, the Soviets were breathing hard down the Americans’ necks. And those in the U.S. Navy knew, or suspected, that their very profession, their navy, could well be imperiled, because sinking their ships with atomic bombs was now, apparently, quite as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Operation Crossroads was to be the first of the 55 nuclear test programs (most of which involved several separate tests) that would be run by the United States over the next half century. The total of 1,032 atomic bombs that America has exploded since 1945 far exceeds the combined totals of all the other nuclear devices exploded by all other nuclear-capable countries in the world. In later years the United States would conduct tests of different kinds of delivery systems (of gravity drops, ballistic missiles, artillery shells, mines) and for different kinds of uses and customers (for the army; for use in outer space; even for peaceful uses, such as digging great trenches in the earth). Most of these later tests would be carried out in the deserts of Nevada, many of them underground. But the most impressive first 67 of these tests were carried out in the Pacific, and the biggest and most symbolic was on Bikini itself.4

Though only twenty-three tests were carried out there, the TNT-equivalent tonnage of each of the bombs was enormous; and because the Bikini weapons taken together were so huge (and because the tests of two of them, as we shall see, went so badly wrong) those twenty-three tests account for more than 15 percent of the total power of all the atomic explosions triggered in the history of all American testing.

Crossroads was the very first of these tests, and it was specifically designed for the benefit of the navy: the ships being led into the anchorage in the weeks leading up to the first of the two main explosions were to be steel-clad guinea pigs, the first nonhuman victims of the Pacific’s atomic age.

Navy crews first assembled a total of seventy-three ships toward the eastern end of the lagoon, some four miles southwest of Bikini Island. The vessels were clustered in concentric circles around a red-and-white-painted American superdreadnought battleship, the USS Nevada, the ship that had famously managed to get away during the Pearl Harbor attack, despite being hit by a torpedo and bombs during the raid. She was old, built in 1914, and the navy thought that choosing her to be the bull’s-eye for the first A-bomb test would permit her to die with dignity, still in service to her country.

But she didn’t die. In the end, the bombardier of the plane that carried the first bomb up from the airfield at Kwajalein—the Able shot, as it was termed—proved less than competent and missed her by seven hundred yards. She didn’t sink, was nicely repaired, and limped back into service for two more years.

This bomb used for the Crossroads Able shot was almost identical in design and delivery to the weapon that had been dropped on Nagasaki a year previously, was essentially the same as the first-ever test weapon exploded weeks beforehand in New Mexico: it was a Fat Man, with a plutonium core, and it was set to detonate in midair five hundred feet above the target. It did so, precisely on schedule if not precisely on target, at 9:00 a.m. on July 1, 1946.

Its explosion, and its effects, turned out to be only moderately spectacular. The press—more than a hundred reporters were gathered on ships moored outside the lagoon5—was seemingly compelled to display reverent ecstasies of purple prose. And who could blame them? After all, the first three atomic explosions had been witnessed only by American military personnel or by the victims. Almost no American civilians had ever seen such a thing—another reason that Bikini, as the mise-en-scène for the weapons’ first public display, remains so symbolically important a place, and why the Pacific, as backdrop, remains the most nuclear of the world’s oceans.

The New York Times reporter aboard the USS Appalachian, William Laurence, was dutifully awed, dictating over the ship’s wireless:

As I watched the pillar of cosmic fire from the sky-deck of this ship it was about eighteen miles to the northeast. It was an awesome, spine-chilling spectacle, a boiling, angry, super volcano struggling toward the sky, belching enormous masses of iridescent flames and smoke and giant rings of rainbow, at times giving the appearance of a monster tugging at the earth in an effort to lift it and hurl it into space.

From this point I watched the atomic bomb as it burst. It was like watching the birth and the death of a star, born and disintegrated in the instant of its birth. The new-born star made its appearance in a flash so dazzling no human eye could look at it except through goggles that turned bright daylight over the Pacific into a pitch-dark night. When the flash came it lighted up the sky and ocean with the light of many suns, a light not of the earth.

The journalists’ ardor cooled somewhat over the coming days. The Times triple-decker front-page headline on the morning after intimated, at least among the editors, an early degree of sobriety, verging on disappointment. “Blast Force Seems Less Than Expected,” it read, and the lead paragraph’s obligatory description of the bomb’s initial dazzling flash as “ten times brighter than the sun” was followed by a cautionary “but,” and by the news that of the seventy-three ships moored inside the atoll, only two had actually been sunk. The paper may have been a little hasty, because actually five went down: two old American destroyers, two transport ships, and, eventually, the graceful Japanese cruiser Sakawa, which had been seriously damaged and which foundered as she was being towed from her anchorage. She nearly dragged the towing tug down with her, though panicking crewmen cut the towline with acetylene torches in the nick of time.

Aside from being the first atomic bomb detonation ever seen publicly, the Able shot is now probably best remembered for what it failed to do—and because some of the failures were positive, and confirmed what Admiral Blandy had reassured everyone days beforehand: “The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity.” It didn’t set fire to any of Bikini’s palm trees, either.

But it also didn’t do what was hoped for. It didn’t seem to stir much agitation among the immense fleet arrayed around the drop zone. It damaged generally only rather small ships that were very close to the explosion’s center. It failed to sink the USS Nevada; it failed to sink the enormous Japanese battleship Nagato—a fate that many had hoped for, since Nagato had been Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship during the raid on Pearl Harbor, and her destruction would have been rich in retributive symmetry. It also failed to sink the former German pocket battleship Prinz Eugen, which was at the time a commissioned ship of the U.S. Navy, having been claimed as a war prize and been brought all the way to Bikini from Wilhelmshaven by a German American crew.6

The bomb also didn’t do as much damage to the animals that had been posted onto some of the ships as stand-ins for crewmen. There were goats in gun turrets, rats at the radar screens, pigs on the poop decks, mice by the mainmast, and rodents by the score just about everywhere. Three quarters of them survived, for a while, some of the goats chewing away unconcernedly while all hell was breaking out about them. Two celebrated survivors, Pig 311 and Goat 315, remained so healthy for so long that they were brought to Washington, DC, and put on display at the zoo.

The second reason for the Able shot’s historic importance is more technical, and has whispers of the macabre. For the plutonium in the core of the weapon, which had been manufactured in August of the previous year, had already been involved in no fewer than two fatal accidents at the nuclear program headquarters at Los Alamos.

The components of the core, when kept apart from each other, were not especially dangerous—but when pressed together, and under certain circumstances, they could go “prompt critical,” as the phrase has it, and release sudden immense amounts of radiation. This is what had happened to this particular core, twice. First, on August 21, a physicist named Harry Daghlian dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto the core, causing it to go critical and douse Daghlian with enough radiation to kill him four weeks later.

The more notorious second incident took place in 1946, the following May. A flamboyant Los Alamos experimenter named Louis Slotin was carefully turning the blade of a screwdriver to lever the two nickel-plated sphere halves apart, and then move them closer to each other to measure the increasing radiation—“tickling the dragon’s tail,” as it was called. During this delicate process something startled him—in the feature film made of the event, it was the breaking of a dropped teacup—and he jerked the screwdriver, causing the hemispheres suddenly to close on each other. There was a blinding blue flash of Cherenkov radiation, and all the Geiger counters in the room went promptly off scale. Slotin stood up and shoved the top hemisphere onto the floor, ending the criticality and, with it, the radiation burst. But in doing so, he received a formidable dose of neutron and gamma radiation on his hand, and he calculated within hours that he was soon going to die. He was exactly right; and he did so, in intense pain, nine days later.

From then on, as a consequence of these two deaths, the twin half spheres of plutonium, with their shields of nickel and beryllium, became collectively known as the Demon Core. It was this very core that would become the operational heart of the Able shot. One could imagine the physicists just wanting to use it up, to explode it and take it out of their tiny inventory of plutonium bomb charges. But given its sorry history, the superstitious might well say that the use of the Demon Core guaranteed that the Able shot was doomed, either to cause more accidents or to be a failure.

In the end the only certain “casualty” of the first Crossroads bomb was the captain of the plane that dropped it, who banged his lip when the shock wave struck his departing B-29. What otherwise haunted Able was not disaster, but indeed, a certain sense of failure.

For it also largely failed to impress. Few of the UN observers sent to monitor the event were captivated. A Soviet professor, Simon Alexandrov, gave a very Russian shrug of his shoulders and, using a locution more modern than he knew, declared the bomb “not so much.” A Brazilian said it was “so-so.” A New York congressman said he felt the heat wave, but agreed with others aboard the observers’ ship that the eighteen-mile distance to the drop zone had somewhat reduced the spectacle. Weathermen said the humid air had also deadened the sound and heat radiation. Newspapers in the United States photographed the mothers of the pilot and bombardier who’d dropped the weapon. These two bespectacled ladies, gathered in La Crosse, Wisconsin, appeared curiously unmoved. Only after the weapon had exploded did they say their boys must surely have enjoyed their adventure.

It was beginning to look as though the Bikinians had been turfed out of their home for nothing. But then came the second of the Crossroads tests, the Baker shot, on July 25. This was a far greater spectacle—at first a supposed success, in a military and a public relations sense. Yet it was also, in some other ways, a disaster—the first, as it happened, of several.

Able had been an air-dropped bomb. Baker, which was also designed to measure the effect of atomic weapons on the waiting congregation of capital ships, was by contrast to be exploded underwater. The official explanation for Able’s signal failure to sink as many ships as expected was that most of its damage had been done above the vessels’ waterlines. Baker would, by contrast, do its damage to underwater hulls rather than above-water superstructures. As a ship killer, it should have been more effective.

Indeed, it was—both effective and spectacular-looking enough to be, for a while, the poster child, quite literally, of the atomic age. The bomb was suspended ninety feet down in the water, inside a concrete container held by steel cables from the underside of an old landing craft. So confident was Admiral Blandy that this shot would be a success that he summoned Juda, the Bikinian leader, over from Rongerik to view it. Blandy didn’t imagine Juda would show up, but when he did, and boarded the navy observation vessel, he told his hosts he was looking forward to the explosion, and he hoped that once it was done with, he would be able to bring his people home. It was the wishful thinking of the truest naïf.

The weapon was duly exploded at 8:35 a.m. and provided the watchers with a spectacle they would never forget. With a gigantic whoosh, it suddenly created at first a mile-wide glass-bubble sphere of water and steam and condensate and crushed coral and mud that thundered out of the mirror-calm blue of the lagoon, and out of which erupted, at fantastic speed, a perfectly symmetrical hollow column, a mile high, of millions of tons of near-white water and seafloor sand topped by a ragged cloud of spray and coral debris—and which, caught by cameras as it fell slowly back into the lagoon, remains today one of the iconic images of the time. To those enthralled by matters atomic—and many young Americans especially were utterly captivated—it was to be the perfect wall poster, to be set alongside a pouting Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe laughing at her billowing dress. The mushroom cloud had already become something of a cartoonable cliché: that there was none produced after the Baker shot—subsea detonations produce much more of a crown-shaped, cauliflower-shaped arrangement, it was realized—made for an originality, a certain coolness, the bomb as a term of art.

The explosion entirely vaporized the landing craft, no measurable parts of which have ever been found. But it did far more than that. It sank ten ships, including two battleships, an aircraft carrier, and three submarines. Most potently, photographs taken a millisecond or two after the blast reached the surface show a dark stain rising vertically up along the side of the great water column. This stain is believed by analysts to be the entire battleship Arkansas, upended by the enormous blast and seemingly pasted onto the column’s side before being hurled into the maelstrom that followed and then thrust back into the water upside down. This was a mighty battleship, with a displacement of twenty-six thousand tons. To be reduced to a mere stain, a mid-ocean skid mark—with the whole starboard side of her hull, the side that had faced the bomb blast, crushed as if by some monumental hammer blow; and then her ruined self thrown backward into the Pacific mud, with her guns lolling out of their upended casemates like the tongues of the hanged Mussolinis—is a fate few would wish on any ship. Especially not a ship with so proud a heritage as the Arkansas, built in 1910, with service in both world wars, and with Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa among her battle honors. Her sudden annihilation as an almost casually picked-up and tossed-away victim of the supersonic subsea pressure wave from the bomb must have made many an admiral shake his grizzled head.

The plutonium bomb Helen of Bikini, used in the underwater Baker shot of Operation Crossroads, expelled disastrous quantities of fallout, ending the series. The dark stain at the column’s lower right is said to be the entire battleship USS Arkansas. U.S. Department of Defense.

There were months of subsequent scientific fascination with this one bomb—a whole conference was convened eight weeks later to deal with the vast amount of data that came from the explosion. Elaborate new atom bomb terms were created: the Wilson Cloud, the slick, the crack, the bubble, the base surge, the cauliflower.

Geophysicists, unexpectedly, learned something from the explosion that helped solve a near-Pacific problem of old: why the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa had caused a tsunami. It turned out that, unwittingly, the two detonations, the volcano and the atom bomb, somewhat mimicked each other. The A-bomb’s explosion created a huge underwater bubble of fast-expanding gas; and the water displaced by the bubble formed a wave ninety feet high, which then rocketed toward Bikini Island, and was still fifteen feet high when it got there seconds later and picked up ships and tossed them onto the beach with cool impunity and then flooded the entire island.

Krakatoa’s explosion did much the same thing: the island of the volcano was vaporized; seawater rushed into the white-hot void and then similarly flashed into bubbles of superheated steam, which triggered a surface wave. Big volcanoes are very much larger than anything even nuclear-armed mankind can manufacture. The Krakatoa tsunami killed forty thousand and then spread around the world, being seen and felt ten thousand miles away hours later. Bikini did no such thing.

But this second Bikini bomb also caused one terrible and entirely foreseeable wrong of which Krakatoa was manifestly not guilty. It spread abroad a vast and deadly amount of radiation. The military had been given due warning that this would happen. Admiral Blandy, who had once famously declared, “I am not an atomic playboy . . . exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim,” was told that this bomb would be much more dangerous than its predecessor. Its plume of radioactive by-products would not be swept away by upper-atmosphere winds, but would be dumped directly into the lagoon, and would contaminate the waters and the shore and any ships that might survive the initial explosion. The scientists said that to go ahead would be foolhardy. But Blandy, who would later celebrate Operation Crossroads with a party whose centerpiece was a cake decorated with a large mushroom cloud, decided to go ahead with the test anyway—and the result was a catastrophe.

The cloud of falling debris itself produced a considerable amount of radiation, as expected; but as this column was falling back to the sea, a nine-hundred-foot-high wall of mist—the base surge, as it was later called—spread outward from the column and quickly enveloped the surviving ships as it rolled over them. This turned out to be the killer wave, and no one had known it would occur or how dangerous it would be. But it contained the majority of the fission products of the explosion, and though their total mass (three pounds or so, combined with about ten pounds of plutonium left over from the blast) might seem trivial, the substances were so toxic that an immense cleanup operation had to be undertaken, and very, very fast.

Yet the navy had made no advance contingency plans to do this. The result was an instant panic among the officers, and then sheeplike obedience by thousands of sailors who, wearing in most cases shorts and T-shirts, and using hoses, sprays, mops, and buckets of lye, were landed on each of the intensely radioactive vessels and ordered to clean away the residual material as quickly as they could. Fifty ships promptly set sail into the lagoon with fifteen thousand enlisted men, all soon bent on measuring and cleaning and hosing and decontaminating—and at the same time unwittingly absorbing, in their clothing, on their skin, in their hair, in their lungs, and on everything they subsequently touched, unimaginably excessive amounts of radiation. Plutonium debris was in any case not detectable by Geiger counters, so contamination with this most insidiously dangerous element went unnoticed at first.

Navy commanders on the spot had been given an impossible task, one that was incredibly perilous and that displayed the cruelest peacetime folly of having well-protected officers ordering wholly unprotected servicemen to perform the most treacherous labor. Pictures show groups of men swabbing the decks as they might have done after a topside dinner party, cheerful and vastly amused. One man said the ships were covered with sand and chunks of coral from the seabed, and he proudly displayed a chunk of rock he planned to take home, then put it in his pocket.

Though statistics relating to the later fates of these men—specifically, figures showing which of their number died of cancers that could reliably be put down to the Bikini bomb—are muddied, scientists quickly recognized, as the navy brass clearly did not, the terrible potential dangers. As a result, the next scheduled test, Crossroads Charlie, was canceled, and the Crossroads series formally terminated. Admiral Blandy was moved away from the Pacific to command the Atlantic Fleet, where he retired after three more years. He died in 1954.

But this was by no means the end of Bikini’s nightmare. For one thing, the displaced islanders—by now largely overlooked in the drama of the weapons testing program—were in ever-worsening shape. When Chief Juda returned to Rongerik from the Baker test, and reported with his characteristic innocence that their islands still looked much the same and all the palm trees were still standing, he was addressing a community on the verge of starvation. The supply caches left behind by the Americans had run out; most islanders now survived on thin gruel and barely edible fish; a fire had devastated their main coconut plantation. A visiting Marshall Islander reported that the Bikinian exiles were emaciated, “just skin and bones,” and an American doctor found compelling evidence of real malnutrition.

The islanders found an unanticipated champion. Harold L. Ickes, who had been Roosevelt’s interior secretary for more than a dozen years, the man who desegregated the national parks and who dedicated Boulder Dam and who was in many ways the personification of the practical implementation of FDR’s New Deal, got involved. By now retired, he was still a formidable champion of the underdog. In late 1947 he wrote a syndicated column decrying the treatment of the Bikini Islanders: “The natives,” he declared, “are actually and literally starving to death.”

All Washington read Ickes’s essay, and it shocked Truman’s administration into action. The government tried at first to deny responsibility—asserting, untruthfully, that the Bikinians were at fault: “[T]he natives selected Rongerik themselves,” said a statement. “We built them houses, schools and watersheds on that island, and they were perfectly happy initially. Later it developed that the island was not as productive as originally expected, and we had to augment their food supply by bringing in food for them.”

Few bought the lie. So boats and seaplanes were suddenly scrambled, and far away from the White House and the National Press Club, out on a sleepy mid-ocean atoll, an operation commenced that was born out of a sudden sense of national guilt. Scores of bewildered and unhappy Bikinians, most who by now had quite broken faith with the American government, were suddenly being moved again. This time they were shipped more than two hundred fifty miles to the south, to the great base atoll of Kwajalein, where they were put up in tents set up in lines along the huge airstrip.

It was noisy, busy, frightening, a world far removed from their isolated life up on a detached coral chain, far distant from a culture that had been based for hundreds of years on the stark simplicity of lagoon fishing. On Kwajalein, then as now a fully functioning American military base, all was stark, and little was simple. There was food and water in abundance. Too much abundance, many say today, since this was where the Bikinians began seriously and lethally to modify their diets, adding Spam, Coca-Cola, white sugar, and flour—and to change their working habits, to become what many regard them as today, participants in a handout culture. Few would dispute that from this moment on, the exiled Bikinians began to change, their native attitudes steadily eroded and diluted as the years away went on: Kwajalein is where the great alteration began to take hold.

Within months the U.S. government swiftly realized how unsuitable it was for the Bikinians, especially the growing number of newborn children, to be living in tents on a military airstrip. So in November 1948 they were moved for a third time, now to a tiny uninhabited speck in the southern Marshalls called Kili Island, a place that neither was an atoll nor had a lagoon. The island has no harbor, and during high seas a landing can be impossible. Airdrops from military cargo planes have to be arranged still, when sea conditions are too trying. A grass airstrip theoretically allows Air Marshall Islands access, but flights are few and very far between. Nonetheless, Kili is where the Bikinians, now transmuted from unwilling atomic exiles into perpetual atomic nomads, have been based ever since 1948. It now seems they may never go home.

If this proves to be so, it will be for many reasons—one being the obvious and long-lasting radiological contamination of their home in 1946, in the aftermath of the Crossroads Baker shot. But their exile is also a consequence of their atoll being massively polluted yet again, by the one most disastrous bomb for which Bikini has become most notorious, and which was exploded eight years later, on March 1, 1954: Castle Bravo.

By this time, the mid-1950s, there was no doubt that the Pacific was the place to test the truly big bombs of the future. On January 19, 1950, President Truman had made his decision. The superbomb, the thermonuclear fusion bomb, was to be made, and tried out—and it was to be employed as a bargaining chip with the Russians. The first prototype, George, had been tested in 1951; a bigger version in 1952. And now this one. The first potentially deliverable American thermonuclear weapon,7 a classic hydrogen bomb, it was code-named Castle Bravo. It remains by far the biggest nuclear weapon ever exploded by the United States, and its enormous and little-anticipated explosive impact resulted from two big mistakes, a combination of a major technical miscalculation and mulish stupidity.

History has left someone to blame for the error: a brilliant physicist with a curiously interesting stake in the nuclear world. He was named Alvin Cushman Graves, and a previous mistake with fissile material in 1946—a mistake not his own but one that killed the man who made it—very nearly killed him, too. That Graves survived the accident, and then recovered sufficiently to preside over the disastrous 1954 Castle Bravo test, was probably not entirely unconnected with his cavalier, cocksure attitude toward radiation risks from fallout. Such risks, he once famously declared, were “concocted in the minds of weak malingerers.”

The accident Graves survived was the second of the two lethal accidents that famously involved the Los Alamos lab’s notorious Demon Core. Graves was the man standing just behind Louis Slotin when the pair of three-inch hemispheres of nickel-beryllium-plated plutonium briefly touched each other and a sudden surge of blue light and viciously dangerous radiation flooded the room. Graves was partly shielded by Slotin’s body, but he nevertheless received a sufficiently scalding bath of gamma rays, X-rays, and neutrons to kill him. Few of his doctors thought he would live. He was in the hospital for weeks, briefly lost all his hair, and developed serious neurological and vision problems. But to the amazement of all, he then slowly and steadily got better, ultimately recovering almost totally. Physically at least, there was little scarring, except one small spot of baldness, which he liked to display.

Infamously disdainful of the supposed dangers of atomic fallout, the nuclear accident survivor Alvin Graves ordered the fateful firing of the Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon, the biggest of all American nuclear tests. National Nuclear Security Administration.

He eventually became well enough to be appointed—though at this remove, and considering what then happened, it is surely right to wonder at the wisdom of his appointment—scientific director of the Castle series of thermonuclear bomb tests. He swiftly became the most enthusiastic advocate of these new weapons—not least because he was well aware that the Soviet Union’s nuclear program was catching up fast.8 Once he arrived at the Enewetak headquarters of what were now called the Pacific Proving Grounds, he made one thing abundantly clear to his staff: since he had survived the very worst that the atom could throw at him, he would stop at nothing to detonate the Bikini-based fusion device that was now in his care.

The bomb designated for the Castle Bravo detonation was an innocent-looking steel cylinder fifteen feet long, four feet in diameter. It looked rather like a large propane tank. It had been designed at Los Alamos, where, to suggest its innocence of purpose, it had been given the code-name the Shrimp. It had been shipped in great secrecy—lights off at night, aircraft and destroyers keeping pace with the cargo ship—to Enewetak in February, and was taken by barge to Bikini, with tarpaulin wraps to prevent the unauthorized curious glimpsing its size and shape. There it was suspended from the ceiling of a large shed, called the shot cab, that had been erected on an artificial island built on a reef off Nam Island, at the very northern tip of the atoll. A causeway connected the shot cab with dry land; the wires that would lead to the electronic firing bunker snaked across the sandbanks and coral reefs and past the Bikinians’ now long-abandoned houses, to the tiny sliver of Enyu Island, twenty miles away.

At the end of February, all staff members were evacuated from Bikini and all ships were removed from the lagoon. Only the firing crew, nine men buried beneath concrete a dozen feet belowground, stayed behind.

Before the firing button was pressed, there were two serious uncertainties. The first was just how big this bomb would be. The Ivy Mike explosion of sixteen months before had been a thumping ten megatons, spectacular and memorable—and when that bomb blew up, it did so exactly as powerfully as the physicists had predicted. But Castle Bravo was using a solid rather than a liquid source of hydrogen—the hydrogen that would be compressed with such force and heat as to make it undergo fusion, and release the massive amount of energy that would cause the explosion. The solid compound in the new bomb was lithium deuteride, an amalgam of lithium and isotopic hydrogen. And no one knew exactly how much hydrogen it would release, or how big the detonation would be.

The testers would soon find out. And because of the other uncertainty—over the weather and, more specifically, the direction of the winds on detonation day—a great many others would find out as well.

For several days before the test date, the winds had been blowing in what was considered an acceptable direction: toward the west, where they would carry any radioactive fallout over an empty expanse of sea. The United States had declared a 57,000-square-mile “danger area” in an official Notice to Mariners, suggesting that craft keep away if possible, but without stating why. Had matters stayed as they were, the detonation would have caused little obvious harm.

However, on the night before the planned blast, February 28, the wind began to veer toward the east, away from this designated danger zone. Matters then got worse. As the sun inched up on the morning of the shot, meteorologists started reporting that at upper altitudes a powerful gale was now blowing directly from Bikini and toward the other populated atolls of the Marshalls, most notably in the direction of Rongelap, a hundred miles away, and forty miles farther on toward Rongerik, where the Bikinians had first been sent. On Rongerik there was still an American duty weatherman; he later told the newspapers that the wind, even at sea level, had been blowing directly at his island home from the west—from the direction, in other words, of Bikini, where they were counting down to firing the bomb.

Alvin Graves was aboard the command ship, the USS Curtiss, a venerable seaplane tender that was well accustomed to bombs, since she had been damaged by and had survived both the Pearl Harbor attacks and then a kamikaze strike in mid-Pacific. And though this bomb was a military device, Graves, the civilian chief of the project, had been given ultimate authority over the army general who was in command of the task force operating the weapon.

Graves was told of the wind direction and knew that radiation would spread downwind and contaminate, at the very least, Rongelap Atoll. But he had his orders, which were to proceed with the test without delay. Moreover, whatever the wind direction might be, no one had any idea how much radiation would be produced. Not that this was strictly relevant, of course, since Graves still cleaved robustly to his views about the malingerers who had concocted all this fuss about radiation being so terribly dangerous.

So he gave his orders to activate the automatic firing mechanisms. The Castle Bravo bomb should be allowed to explode. The men in the bunker took cover, and then pressed the brilliant red firing button.

At 6:45 a.m. on that clear, windy, blue-sky Pacific morning, it was as if the world had suddenly stopped, blinded by a vast white light of an intensity never before experienced. The iron gates guarding some terrible inferno seemed to clang wide open and unleash a ball of fire and shock waves and roarings of unimaginable speed, violence, and loudness. A white fireball four miles across was created in less than one second. A minute later, a cloud of debris ten miles tall and seven across rocketed into the sky. Ten minutes on, it was twenty-five miles tall and sixty miles across. The dawning sky lit up for hundreds of miles, and islanders from faraway atolls looked on in horror—for this was a secret test, unannounced, with no prior warnings—as a gigantic pillar of fire and smoke hurled itself into the air, a mushroom top boiling fuming orange and black miles above it, with rings of new-formed cloud expanding and coiling and writhing around it as it raced up through the layers of the atmosphere.

The shock wave tore across all the islands of the atoll, snapping blazing trees like twigs, razing almost all the hundreds of buildings and towers and sheds and docks and warehouses and barracks erected for management of the tests. Ships waiting beyond the islands were buffeted by giant waves as the shocks ricocheted across the sea.

A theoretical physicist, Marshall Rosenbluth, was on such a ship, thirty miles away. “There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like a diseased brain up in the sky. It spread until it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience.”

Down in the bunker, the nine men of the firing party were rocked by what felt like a massive earthquake. Pipes broke, drenching them with water. The concrete walls swayed and cracked. Radiation swept in through the ventilation shafts. Radio contact with the command ship was degraded, ruinously—though the terrified men were able to understand that they would not be picked up by helicopter, as planned, as it was too dangerous for anyone to be on the atoll.

The men retreated into a single room deep in the bunker, where the radiation levels were a little lower, and there they stayed put—first turning off the air conditioners to stop radioactive air from entering the room, but then having everything else turned off for them when the outside diesel generators failed. There they waited in the sweltering darkness, until finally, late in the day, three helicopters arrived and ordered the team to come to the surface. They emerged draped in sheets, eyeholes cut out, looking like bizarre Halloween exhibits, eager only to get away from Bikini, and from the insistent chattering of the Geiger counters.

Bikini’s Castle Bravo bomb was a quite extraordinary event, jaw-dropping, awesome, and, except for a few scientists who had advised caution, generally unexpected. It released a truly vast amount of radiation, and all of it was now spreading fast eastward across the Pacific in an enormous plume of dust and debris that for hours following the explosion was raining chunks of highly radioactive coral down from the sky and contaminating everything below. The explosion was greater than anyone had calculated: as a lawyer later told a court during arguments for compensation for the Bikinians, a train hauling the fifteen million tons of TNT that was Castle Bravo’s equivalent would have stretched in an unbroken line of freight cars from Maine to California, with hundreds of cars to spare.

The damage done by Alvin Graves and the bomb under his command was unprecedented. Within moments, everyone who was watching the blast column, and who knew the geography of the islands, realized that the islanders on Rongelap would probably be contaminated. A ship was ordered to speed across, and by midafternoon had landed a number of sailors in protective clothing to take Geiger counter readings from two of the village wells. They saw islanders who were clearly ill: staggering, vomiting, lying listlessly on the sand. But they said nothing to them, asked no questions, and left in a matter of minutes.

They were consequently unaware that the islanders had been startled that morning by what appeared to be a great sunrise in the western skies; and had then felt a sudden, jolting warm wind like a stuttering typhoon, followed by an unimaginably loud, thundering roar. They were also unaware that a fine mist had enveloped the island, that showers of grit and great gray flakes had fallen from the sky. Nor did they know that once the roaring had stopped, the islanders had immediately tried to resume their morning routines (breakfast, baking, fishing) and started to live a normal island day until, hours later, they began to show symptoms of some mysterious ailment.

The Geiger counters knew what had happened. The 236 people of Rongelap had received doses of radiation every bit as great as those suffered by the Japanese in Hiroshima, who had been just two miles from ground zero. But on Rongelap, no alarm had sounded. Instead, the bomb managers’ first reaction was to think of employing the Rongelapese as case studies, as human guinea pigs. Radiation scientists at federal laboratories such as Brookhaven on Long Island expressed a kind of distant delight: “The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”

So, for the next fifty hours, the Rongelap islanders were left to their own devices, to suffer in isolation until it became clear that the radiation was so powerful it might actually kill them all, whereupon official panic ensued, boats and planes arrived, and the islanders were told to get out, quickly. They were hosed down with water, ordered to wash, checked with Geiger counters, and washed again, a routine repeated three times. They were told to take nothing, to leave with only the clothes on their backs. Those who looked fit enough were taken by ship down to the airbase on Kwajalein. The old and frail went by seaplane. “We were like animals,” said an islander named Rokko Langinbelik, who was twelve at the time. “It was no different from herding pigs into a gate.”

By now most were complaining of pain, burning, itching, hair falling out, and skin lesions forming. But there was still no official concern for their condition—only an academic interest. They might as well have been in cages. They were scared out of their wits, having no idea what was happening to them, why they were suddenly so ill, whether they were suffering from a fast-spreading contagion. The doctors at the air base did little for them, other than to advise them to wash and to subject them to constant monitoring with the ever-chattering radiation counters.

Six days later a secret investigation, to be known by the anodyne name Project 4.1, was initiated: “A Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons.”

No matter that these “human beings” had been the victims of a monstrous and entirely avoidable accident, the consequence of a decision made with casual, almost cynically calculated negligence. The subsequent racism of their treatment at the hands of the authorities was obvious, or at least is amply recognizable at this remove: had the islanders been Caucasians, then official inquiries would have been instantly convened, congressional committees would have been revved into high gear, presidential apologies offered, compensation packages showered like rain. But these were not Caucasians—they were mere Marshallese people, colored natives, members of a subject citizenry, a population now to be firmly contained and kept simply fed, watered, and, above all, docile. So there was never to be any inquiry of substance or value. The victims had worth not as members of any society, but as specimens—of importance principally to science. They might as well have been cadavers handed over to anatomists. They might as well have been branded with the term used by Japanese in their notorious human vivisection experiments—their human victims they called maruta, “logs of wood,” a deliberately dehumanizing description, given to lessen the crime. These innocents from Rongelap were America’s maruta, people rendered up as logs of wood. They were to become no more than the accidental subjects, serendipitously offered up to a group of faraway radiation scientists, of a detached, unemotional, and top-secret clinical study, a project of supposed significance for all in the ever more radioactive postnuclear world.

And for a while it seemed this project would remain top secret—except that an army corporal named Don Whitaker glimpsed a group of the evidently very sick islanders in their hastily built camp on Kwajalein and wrote to tell his relatives in Cincinnati, who were sufficiently horrified by his letter to pass it to the local paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer. The letter was published on March 9, a little more than a week after the blast. The news then spread rapidly, and it backed the U.S. government into a corner. It was forced to admit that, yes, there had been a nuclear test; that, yes, some islanders had been briefly exposed; but that they were being treated and that all was well.

The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, angrily denied that the islanders were being regarded as guinea pigs, or that their evacuation had been deliberately delayed during those first two days so that their now unique biologies might be studied. Any suggestions otherwise were “utterly false, irresponsible and gravely unjust to the men engaged in this patriotic service,” he declared. Moreover, he had taken the trouble to fly out to Kwajalein and see the islanders, and they “appeared to me to be well and happy.”9

The people of Rongelap were not alone; there were other casualties. Most notably, a Japanese tuna fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon Five, happened to be innocently fishing in the waters near Rongelap that day; she was quite drenched in radiation.

Twenty-three men were aboard. The wooden hundred-footer had sailed from the southern Japanese port of Yaizu some five weeks previously, and after an expedition off Midway Island from which the pickings were extremely slim, the skipper decided to try his luck down in the Marshalls. He knew the dangers, he was well aware of the various Notices to Mariners about testing, and when the western sky lit up with a blinding white flash and then a huge orange fireball on that March 1 morning, he knew very well what had happened. Seven minutes later came the unmistakable Godzilla-rumble of the detonation; all aboard knew it was time to head north, to get as far away as possible.

But the men had to haul up their nets, and while they were engaged in this laborious task, the ash started falling. It was made up of great white flakes of scorched Bikini coral, quite tasteless—one crewman licked an especially large piece—odorless, cold. It fell incessantly, like snow mixed with cotton candy; after three hours, the men were covered with the stuff, their hair was matted, their bare brown shoulders were gray with grit. And very soon after these sea-weathered fisherman had stowed their gear and begun to chug away from the danger zone, they started to fall sick: nausea, burns, headaches, hair loss, stomach problems.

The irony is that these men, all victims of a hydrogen bomb, were Japanese, and were quickly diagnosed back at their home port as suffering from acute radiation sickness. The diagnosis was made so swiftly for the bleakest of reasons: after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese doctors knew all too well—by the way that this unique, newfound, and one might say American-made ailment presented itself—exactly what they were dealing with.

For weeks the men were terribly ill, bedridden, and dangerously vulnerable to infection. The American authorities did little to ease their medical misery, by declining, at least at first, to explain fully what isotopes had so contaminated them, since to do so might reveal something of the bomb’s internal design.

Lewis Strauss, the AEC chairman who had already issued such trenchant denials about the alleged ill-treatment of the Rongelapese, now found himself performing similarly robust damage control over the Lucky Dragon Five. The boat, he suggested mendaciously, may well have been in the pay of the Soviet Union, and was spying. The burns on the men’s skin were no more than a chemical reaction to the lime in the calcined coral. And their boat, in any case, had had no business fishing inside the danger zone. Mr. Strauss also suggested that the tuna caught both by this ship and others known to be in the danger zone was uncontaminated and harmless—though he said nothing when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later placed severe limits on the importation of Japanese fish, which had the effect on the Yaizu fishing community of adding economic insult to radiation injury.

One of the crewmen, the ship’s radio operator, died six months later,10 leaving behind a note suggesting that he be regarded by history as the first fatality caused by a hydrogen bomb.

These are all episodes in a sad and shameful saga, and a story without a visible or imaginable end. Many Pacific peoples have suffered the unhappiest of fates, and to no obvious advantage. There is the fate of the contaminated Rongelapese, now all exiled, irradiated, sick, with sickly offspring and terminated pregnancies and tumors and mysterious growths and varying other legacies of florid illness and early death. There are the more casually forgotten islanders from the other test atoll of Enewetak, now home to the huge crater from the so-called Cactus test of 1958, which is currently entombed under a bizarre stadium-size dome of thick and leaking cement. There are the surviving crew members from the Lucky Dragon Five, most of them now living miserably far from home, self-scattered anonymously around Japan. Shame is still attached in Japan to the so-called hibakusha, “explosion victims,” because some people are still scared that radiation sickness is contagious and can be spread, like leprosy. So the fishermen are exiled, too, victims until they die.

Underpinning all, most infamously, is the fate of the Bikinians. Though some remain on the congested islet of Kili, most of the 400 known members of the group (children, mostly, of the original 167 exiled inhabitants) are scattered, too, many now far afield. They are to be found all around the Pacific, their ancestral homes irradiated, their health compromised, their understandably querulous attitudes found tiresome by some—and, with their layers of lawyers, involved in interminable disputes about their compensation.

Unsurprisingly, Washington has dealt with its nuclear polluting of the modern Pacific mainly by paying out uncountable millions in taxpayer money and hoping the problem will go away. “Bombing Bikini Again,” read the headline in a newspaper article in 1994: “This Time with Money.” Trust funds, compensation, claims, payouts, investments—these days such words pepper the language of the Bikinians: “In all our meetings now,” said a former Peace Corps volunteer who now acts as liaison with the U.S. government, “it’s just money, money, money.”

One means of gathering money for the islanders these days is by promoting the sunken ships of Bikini Atoll, catnip for the world’s richest and most elite deep-sea divers. So even though the local Marshall Islands airline has only one plane, and it is almost always grounded, tourists who are willing to go by charter ship make their way to the atoll to dive down onto the superstructure of the USS Saratoga and to swim alongside sharks and to enjoy the bragging rights of having visited one of the best-known, least-seen places on earth. A place now declared by UNESCO to be worthy of designation on the list of World Heritage Sites, to be a place of “outstanding universal value,” an outstanding example of a nuclear test site, associated with “ideas and beliefs . . . of international significance.”

The divers who visit the lagoon occasionally do take their dinghies across to land, where they can poke around under the new-growing palm trees, stroll past the abandoned bunkers of rust-stained concrete, imagine much about the atoll’s explosive recent past. But they will see precious little to remind them of Bikini’s more ancient history, of the time before 1946, when the islanders were asked, ever so gently, to clear themselves out and to allow the American forces to begin their conduct of God’s work, for the good of all mankind. The houses of these people are long gone, their memorials vanished, their fishing boats long decayed, their island traditions long since assimilated into other, alien ways.

In August 1968, there seemed a chance that matters might come back to normal. President Lyndon Johnson ordered that the people of Bikini be allowed to enjoy the comfort of their own homes once again. His scientists had told him, and he was now telling the world, that it was safe for everyone to return. Everyone, he said, should go do so.

On the night of the president’s announcement, the Bikinians who still lived in shacks down south on Kili, the tiny, prison-like speck that had been their exile home for the previous twenty years, rejoiced. At last, they thought, their great national sacrifice was over and they could resume the peaceful rhythms of their former lives of fishing and copra making, and of voyaging in their outriggers to spend time with island neighbors of the western Pacific seas. So more than a hundred of them went off home, exuberant, relieved. An image from the time shows a group of island elders disembarking onto the coral shore, wearing shirts and ties, and so turning their homecoming into a formal event, an episode suffused with the proper dignity.

But the scientists had been wrong. “We goofed,” one of the AEC officials said, with that breezy detachment of language that has marked so much of the official accounting of the saga. “The radioactive intake in the plant food chain had been significantly miscalculated.” It turned out there was still a great deal of radiation deep down in the Bikini soil. The vegetables the islanders grew were contaminated, lethally so.

Congress then had to be asked for a further fifteen million dollars to take the islanders away again. They all left in 1978 and are now back on Kili, or have spread themselves around to other places in the world that will have them. “We were so heartbroken,” an islander named Pero Joel told an interviewer in 1989. “We were so heartbroken we didn’t know what to do.”

Where they and their ancestors had once lived had, during the twelve years from 1946 to 1958, seen the explosion of twenty-three atomic bombs, with the combined force of forty-two million tons of conventional explosives. Everything the islanders had known had been obliterated: their homes and boats destroyed, their soil and the seawater contaminated, and their lives changed and spoiled forever. And for what purpose? To what end?

The blue Pacific now churns ceaselessly each present day along Bikini Atoll’s quite deserted coral beaches. The palm trees lean into the breeze, unclimbed. There are no sails out in the lagoon, no sounds of chanting as the fishermen pull in their nets, no villagers gathering to chatter under the coconut groves. Bikini is today a place of a strangely deadened silence—a terrible, unnatural emptiness that compels any visitor to turn somewhere, to try to face the eternally invisible perpetrators of all this, and demand of no one and of everyone: just why?

1 Interestingly, the 1899 treaty never specifically mentioned the Marshall Islands, leaving some to argue about their legal status still today—arguments that, considering the amount of money involved for aid and compensation, are of more than mere historic interest.

2 Or, according to one Internet source, Waffle Nose. He had a remarkable similarity to the actor Karl Malden.

3 This evacuation was to be echoed two decades later, in the Indian Ocean, when the Pentagon wanted to use the British colonial possession Diego Garcia as a military base. Denis (later Lord) Greenhill wrote in an infamous memo that there were just “a few Tarzans or Men Fridays” living there. In fact, a vibrant community of more than two thousand people was shipped off against its will to Mauritius. It has been fighting for compensation ever since.

4 A number of weapons were also exploded on the nearby atoll of Enewetak, an atoll that suffered similarly but that for many reasons has never attracted quite the same attention. “A Pacific Isle,” a New York Times headline read in 2014, “Radioactive and Forgotten.”

5 The countdown and explosion were relayed by radio around the country and world. The BBC broadcast the test on the Light Programme, a station usually reserved for music and soap operas, but it was late at night in Britain, and static interference made the entire event well-nigh inaudible, with only “one word in ten” able to be understood.

6 When the German crew finally left their ship at Panama, the American sailors discovered they couldn’t work the Prinz Eugen’s boilers. Tugs had to be ordered, and the eighteen-thousand-ton ship had to be towed across the Pacific, bound for this vain attempt to destroy her.

7 The first true hydrogen bomb, code-named Ivy Mike, had been successfully detonated on the nearby Enewetak Atoll sixteen months before. But the hydrogen in that experiment had to be supercooled, making the combined bomb—it had to have a Nagasaki-like Fat Man bomb as a trigger—truly massive. It weighed sixty-two tons, so it was far too big to be used as a weapon. Castle Bravo, by contrast, used solid fuels and weighed in at only ten tons, and the success of the test convinced both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force that H-bombs could now be made in sizes that could be delivered by aircraft or missiles.

8 The very first Soviet A-bomb had been exploded in 1949, more than four years after the first U.S. test in New Mexico. But Moscow’s first thermonuclear H-bomb test came in August 1953, just nine months after the United States’ Ivy Mike fusion bomb on Enewetak.

9 Whether this was a deliberate employment of economy with the truth can never be known. But it is worth remembering that Strauss famously and wrongly predicted that nuclear fusion would allow for the generation of electricity “too cheap to meter,” and that he was also largely responsible for destroying the postwar career of the Manhattan Project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, suspecting him, also quite wrongly, of being a Soviet spy.

10 The man who licked the falling dust lived into his eighties, and opened a dry-cleaning business, while another opened a tofu restaurant. All received the 2015 equivalent of five thousand dollars in compensation, once the United States formally took responsibility. The ship was hauled out of the water and now stands in a museum—not as a local monument in Yaizu, but in Tokyo, where she still gets national attention.