America’s
shame – the N-bomb guinea pigs
May 16, 2014 by
By Peter CalderThe New Zealand Herald
5:00 AM Saturday May 17, 2014
Thanks to T.
The 1954 blast on Bikini Atoll was 1000 times bigger than the
bombs used against Japan.
It
was, at the time, the biggest bang humans had ever made. The US nuclear test at
Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954, was 1000 times larger
than the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That’s
not in the same league as the fury nature unleashed on Krakatoa or beneath what
is now Lake Taupo, but the 15-megaton blast – codenamed Castle Bravo – has been
exceeded artificially only once, by the Soviets’ 50-plus megaton Tsar Bomba in
1961.
What
happened next was one of the great nightmares of the nuclear age. Fallout from
Castle Bravo drifted over the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and
Utirik.
On
Rongelap, children played in highly radioactive incinerated coral, thinking it
was storybook snow.
An
hour after the explosion, the per-hour radiation level on the islands was 130
roentgen (R); 50 hours on, it was 175R. Normal background exposure is about 20R
in a lifetime.
More
than 60 years on, the fallout, literal and moral, from the test has not been
cleaned up.
Two
generations of birth defects and cancers, notably thyroid cancers and
leukaemia, have ravaged the atolls’ population, and women have given birth to
babies that looked like bunches of grapes or jellyfish.
The
US Government has never denied the islands were contaminated. But eight months
after Bravo, the word “accidental” began to appear in all official documents.
It has never been removed.
Now,
an independent American documentary film, Nuclear Savage, which
will screen in Auckland next week and Wellington next month, gives for the
first time solid documentary evidence of deliberation.
Adam
Horowitz, whose 1990 film Home on the Range reported on the
islanders’ plight, is scathing about his Government’s actions and subsequent
inaction.
Speaking
from his base in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he says the documents constitute “black
and white” evidence of what has long been alleged and suspected – that the
contamination of the Marshalls atolls, far from being an unhappy accident, was
a premeditated, minutely planned and cynically executed experiment to establish
the long-term effects of radiation poisoning on humans.
“A
lot of people over the years have talked about experimentation, but we were
always dealing with allegation and suspicion and assertion,” he said. “There
was no hard evidence of experimentation. Now there is.”
The
documents in the film show the existence, a year before the test, of a
programme within Bravo, numbered 4.1, and labelled “a study of the response of
human beings exposed to significant beta and gamma radiation due to fallout
from high-yield weapons”.
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