"Would you prefer to be relocated before we drop a nuclear bomb on your Islands? or stay and watch the fireworks? " Of course, they volunteered to go somewhere else.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://amp.theguardian.com/travel/2002/aug/06/travelnews.nuclearindustry.environment&ved=2ahUKEwjF17yUutrjAhXWgUsFHdxrDN4QFjARegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw0AvOiwsxCSgD_OHr0Q8QqV&cf=1&cshid=1564414582246
The only hindrance for the US and its grand experiments was the small band of 167 Bikini islanders. Commodore Ben H Wyatt, the military governor of the Marshall Islands - to which Bikini belongs - travelled to Bikini to address this very dilemma in February 1946. On a quiet Sunday after church, he assembled the Bikinians to ask if they would be willing to leave their atoll temporarily so that the US could begin testing atomic bombs for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars”. King Juda, then the leader of the Bikinians, after long deliberations among his people, stood before the American delegation and replied, “We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”
While the Bikinians were getting ready for their exodus, preparations for the Operation Crossroads nuclear testing programme advanced rapidly. Some 242 ships, 156 aircraft, 25,000 radiation recording devices and the Navy’s 5,400 experimental rats, goats and pigs soon began to arrive for the tests. More than 42,000 US military and civilian personnel were involved in the testing programme at Bikini.
In March 1946, to make way for the tests, the Bikinians were sent 125 miles eastward across the ocean on a US navy landing craft to the uninhabited, sparsely vegetated Rongerik Atoll. The administration left the Bikinians food for several weeks, but they soon discovered that the coconut trees and other local food crops produced very few fruits when compared to the yield of the trees on Bikini, and the fish in the lagoon were uneatable: the islanders began to starve. Within two months of their arrival they began to beg US officials to move them back to Bikini.
In March 1948, when it was finally understood by US officials that the people on Rongerik were in danger of dying from lack of food, the Bikinians were transported to Kwajalein Atoll where they were housed in tents beside the massive cement airstrip used by the US military. In November 1948, after six months on Kwajalein, the now 184 Bikinians set sail once again. This time the destination was Kili Island, their third community relocation in two years. Kili is a single island with no lagoon and is surrounded by rough seas for most of the year. The Bikinians quickly found life on Kili very difficult as their lagoon-based culture essentially became obsolete; again, they began to starve because of the poor fishing and lack of locally grown food on the island.
While the islanders struggled to cope with their exile, Bikini was in the process of being destroyed. In January 1954, the air force and army began preparations for Operation Castle. This was a series of tests that would include the first air-deliverable, and the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever detonated by the US [the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hydrogen bombs], codenamed Bravo.
Early in the morning on March 1 1954, the Bravo hydrogen bomb was detonated on the surface of the reef in the northwestern corner of Bikini Atoll. Millions of tons of sand, coral, plant and sea life from three islands, the reef and the surrounding lagoon waters were sent miles into the air by the blast. On Rongelap Atoll (located about 125 miles east of Bikini), white, snow-like ash began to fall from the sky three to four hours after the blast onto the 64 people living there and also onto the 18 people living on Ailinginae Atoll.
Children played in the fallout and as night came they began to show the physical signs of radiation exposure. They experienced severe vomiting and diarrhoea, their hair began to fall out, the island fell into a state of panic. Only days later were they moved to Kwajalein Atoll for medical care. Bravo was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Aerial photos of Bikini now show the greatest physical scar left over from the nuclear testing period: where there had once been islands and reef there is now a gaping, blue, sea-filled crater a mile wide and 200ft deep.
After 23 detonations, the nuclear testing on Bikini ended in 1958.
Back on Kili Island, life for the Bikinians had become a battle for survival. When the circumstances presented themselves, the islanders complained bitterly to any US government official who would listen, reminding these officials about the broken US promise that their people would be taken care of as long as they were away from their homeland. In 1967, US government agencies finally began considering the possibility of returning the Bikinian people to their islands based on what they knew of radiation levels on Bikini Atoll from the US scientific community.
Approximately 150 people resettled Bikini in the early 1970s. By September of 1978, however, the Bikinians’ dreams of living on their home islands came to an end. It was then that Trust Territory officials arrived on Bikini to again evacuate the people who were living on the atoll because they had discovered that the radioactive element most prevalent on Bikini, cesium 137, had travelled through the food chain and into the bodies of the islanders. US Department of Interior officials called the huge increases in the islanders’ levels of cesium “Incredible”…
