The Marshall Islands: World War II, Nuclear Tests and Displacement

The Baker test of Operation Crossroads: a 21-kiloton underwater nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll, 1946. Public domain.

The islands

The Marshall Islands lie in the central Pacific, roughly between Hawai'i and the Philippines, north of the equator and west of the International Date Line.

• Geography: 29 coral atolls and more than 1,200 islands and islets in two chains stretching over 800 miles. Their land totals about 70 square miles (181 km²) — barely larger than Washington, D.C. — making them, at over 97% water, the sovereign state with the largest share of its territory at sea.
• Life: diverse plants and animals, and human settlement for thousands of years.
• Today: the Republic of the Marshall Islands, an independent nation in free association with the U.S., which provides defense, subsidies and access to U.S. agencies such as the FCC and the Postal Service. Population: about 43,000.

World War II

• Germany ceded the islands to Japan in 1919; they were largely neglected until World War II.
• Japan then saw them as a forward base for possible attacks on Australia, British colonies and even the United States, building airfields on Kwajalein, Maloelap and Wotje atolls and basing seaplanes at Jaluit.
• The U.S. Pacific Fleet raided them in 1942 — the war's first air raids on Japanese territory.
• By autumn 1944, the U.S. controlled most of the islands.

Nuclear testing

After the war, the U.S. chose the Marshall Islands as a nuclear test site.

• Operation Crossroads, July 1946: two tests at Bikini Atoll, the first since Trinity a year earlier, run by Joint Army/Navy Task Force One rather than the Manhattan Project. The aim was to see what nuclear weapons do to warships — both wartime bombs had struck land. More than 90 empty ships sat in the lagoon, watched by an invited audience including journalists. Both bombs were implosion-type plutonium devices like the Fat Man used at Nagasaki, each expected to yield 23 kilotons.
• Test Able (July 1), dropped from the air, did less damage than expected — partly because it fell nearly half a mile (650 m) off target.
• Test Baker (July 25), detonated 90 feet (28 m) underwater, did great damage, including heavy radioactive contamination.
• 1946–1958: the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak.

The Bikini people

Before the tests, Bikini's 167 residents were persuaded to leave temporarily.

1. They were moved to Rongerik, which lacked enough water and resources to support them;
2. then temporarily to Kwajalein, and then to Kili; some moved on to Ejit.
3. In 1972 about 100 returned to Bikini, where radiation was thought to have fallen to safe levels.
4. In May 1978, scientists found high strontium in the well water and excessive cesium-137 in residents' bodies, and the people were evacuated again.

The U.S. set up trust funds for medical care and a small annual payment. Bikini people and their descendants now live across the Marshall Islands and Majuro, the capital, in the U.S. and elsewhere. Bikini is a World Heritage Site, and its sunken "ghost fleet" draws divers — but radioactive contamination still keeps its people from returning.

Sources

Based on "Marshall Islands," Manhattan Project National Historical Park, National Park Service, drawing on Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun (1996), the U.S. Department of State and other sources; a work of the United States government in the public domain.