[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 155 (Thursday, October 30, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2171-E2173]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FIFTY-FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF DETONATION OF THE WORLD'S FIRST
THERMONUCLEAR DEVICE AT ENEWETAK ATOLL IN THE MARSHALL ISLANDS
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HON. ED CASE
of hawaii
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, this week we recognize the 51st anniversary of
the detonation by our country of the world's first thermonuclear device
at Enewetak Atoll in today's Republic of the Marshall Islands. And as
we pause to remember that event, it is also an opportune time for us to
recall both the contributions of the people of Enewetak and other
atolls of the Marshalls to the security of our country and world, and
the difficult legacy which that and subsequent tests have left to their
residents and so many others.
This story was told so well last year in an article in the Honolulu
Weekly by Honolulu journalist Bev Keever entitled ``Fallout: Enewetak
Atoll, 50 Years Ago This Week.'' Subsequently recognized by the Society
of Professional Journalists (Hawaii Chapter) for this work, Ms. Keever
reminds us about the human impact of ``Mike,'' as the device was known,
and counsels us to remember this legacy as we address crucial foreign
policy challenges today and the future.
The text of Ms. Keever's article follows:
Fallout: Enewetak Atoll, 50 Years Ago This Week
(By Bev Keever)
[From the Honolulu Weekly, Oct. 30, 2002]
National and media anniversaries of signal events like
Sept. 11 help to form the collective memory that, over time
and across generations, shapes what a society remembers--or
what it forgets.
An anniversary that serves as a news peg for journalists
re-ignites powerful emotional connections for those who lived
through the event, communication scholar Jill Edy writes, and
may be even more influential for those who did not live
through the event because it ``creates a world they never
experienced.'' Even more important, Edy notes, anniversary
journalism ``impacts whether we remember our past at all.''
An un-remembered part of the U.S. past occurred 50 years
ago on Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 3,000
miles west of Honolulu. On Nov. 1, 1952, at 7:15 a.m., the
U.S. government detonated the world's first thermonuclear
device, code-named ``Mike,'' the most powerful man-made
explosion in history up to that time. In layperson's terms,
it was the prototype for the ``hydrogen bomb.''
Mike unleashed a yield of 10.4 megatons, an explosive force
693 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that had
annihilated Hiroshima in 1945 and the fourth most powerful
``shot'' of the 1,054 acknowledged nuclear tests in U.S.
history. Ushering in the thermonuclear era, the Mike shot
raised to a new level the capacity for mass destruction that
had been inaugurated by humans with atomic weapons only seven
years earlier. Because of this new dimension in the power of
nuclear weapons, President Eisenhower observed in 1956,
``Humanity has now achieved, for the first time in its
history, the power to end its history.''
The Mike shot was controversial. Debate raged within the
scientific community over detonating the so-called super
bomb. One camp warned that the atmospheric chain-reaction
from the thermonuclear explosion would immolate the entire
planet, University of Hawai`i's environmental coordinator
John Harrison reports. Calling such fears farfetched, those
in the second camp, led by influential physicist Edward
Teller, prevailed. The public was not told in advance about
the shot for fear that it would influence the presidential
election held just three days before. Sixteen days after the
Mike shot, U.S. officials announced a thermonuclear
experiment, but provided no details.
Mike was a proto-bomb; in fact, it was more like a
building, Harrison explains as he studies a sepia-toned
photograph of the cylindrical Mike device, about 20 feet in
height and 8 to 10 feet in diameter. Weighing 82 tons and
standing vertically like the shiny innards of a giant thermos
bottle, the cylinder dwarfs a scrawny, shirtless man sitting
in a chair, elbows cocked on his knees and staring at the
ground on Elugelab island, Enewetak atoll. The cylinder is
attached to large tubes to keep its contents of hydrogen
fuel, liquid deuteride, refrigerated below its
[[Page E2172]]
boiling point of minus 417.37 degrees Fahrenheit.
More than 11,000 civilians and servicemen worked on or near
Enewetak to prepare for the blast. They left Enewetak by ship
before the Mike device was remotely detonated from 30 miles
away. The energy from the splitting of atoms with heavy
nuclei like plutonium produced temperatures on the order of
those at the core of the sun that were necessary to kick-
start the fusion of the liquid deuteride with other
lightweight hydrogen nuclei. This fusion produced even
greater energy, so much that, as physicist Kosta Tsipis
writes, ``An exploding nuclear weapon is a miniature,
instantaneous sun.''
The Mike test vaporized the island of Elugelab. Researcher
Leona Marshall Libby wrote at the time that Mike's detonation
created a fireball that swooshed outward and upward for three
miles in diameter and turned millions of gallons of lagoon
water to steam. It left behind a 1.2-mile-wide crater and a
deeply fractured reef platform. Harrison notes that in the
aftermath of a subsequent, adjacent thermonuclear test--the
Koa shot in 1958--the weakened seaward wall of the reef next
to the Mike crater cleaved away and plummeted into the ocean
depths.
Epiphany of a ``Nuclear Holocaust''
Harrison, who lived at Enewetak for five years beginning in
1978 while serving as a UH administrator and senior research
scientist there, says the destructiveness of the Mike shot
defies human comprehension. He recalls the scores of times he
guided his outboard motorboat across segments of the choppy
aquamarine waters of Enewetak's 388-acre lagoon encircled by
the 42 coral islands so pristine and lovely ``they are God's
gift to the entire world.'' His boat would slice into the
shallower turquoise waters that overlay the close-in reefs
and ``then all of a sudden into the deeper, more cloudy
waters that delineated or that filled this enormous, enormous
round circle that was the Mike crater.''
Each time Harrison made that journey, he says, ``it changed
my life.'' He would struggle to understand the cataclysm of
that instant that had transformed an island into a massive
hole in the reef. ``Then and now and to the day I die,'' he
says, ``I could not, I cannot and I will never wrap my mind
around the significance of that.
``There is no way that the mind can grasp that amount of
force,'' he elaborates. ``We have nothing to compare it
with.'' Even so, once in the middle of the Mike crater, he
sensed that he had experienced ``the ultimate epiphany of
what a nuclear holocaust is all about.''
A rare snapshot of the havoc caused by the Mike shot is
provided by a survey made of Enewetak by a scientific
research team from the University of Washington and written
up in a report archived by Harrison. The greatest
radioactivity in fish was found to be concentrated in the
digestive tract, followed by the liver and muscle; in rats
and some birds radioactivity was concentrated in bones. Even
algae that had been scrubbed with a brush and detergent
retained ``specks'' of fallout, the report says, indicating
most of the ``radioactivity is actually present within the
alga.'' Lastly, spotlighting the significance of color in
absorbing the heat of the fireball, the team notes, ``Birds
with dark-colored feathers were burned more severely than
were the white fairy terns.''
A 1978 study of 476 Enewetak rats by environmental
scientists from Bowling Green State University, M. Temme and
W. B. Jackson, noted possible genetic effects caused by
radiation. They hypothesized that radiation effects may have
caused deformations in an important inherited marker of some
rats--the ridge of the roof of the mouth. The scientists
described these ridges as exemplifying ``expressions of genes
affecting development.'' Since 1978, Jackson told Honolulu
Weekly, follow-up studies have supported the notion of
possible radiation-induced genetic effects.
Hiding 8,580 Hiroshima-size bombings in 16 years
Most of the atmospheric testing on the U.S. side was
conducted in the Pacific, but the full extent of these tests
has become clear only in the past decade with the lifting of
official secrecy. Only in December 1993 did the U.S. release
information about the yield of 44 of the 66 U.S. nuclear
weapons tests in the Marshall Islands.
In 1994, the most recent and comprehensive list of all
1,054 U.S. nuclear weapons tests worldwide was made public,
allowing scholars to calculate for the first time the full
extent of the entire U.S. nuclear testing program that ceased
in 1992. These documents show that nearly three-quarters of
the yield of all 1,054 U.S. nuclear tests worldwide occurred
during only 82 tests conducted in the U.S.-administered
Pacific Islands or over Pacific waters during the 16 years of
the U.S. Pacific nuclear testing between 1946 to 1962.
This prolonged secrecy, even beyond the collapse of the
Soviet Union, hid for decades the yield of Pacific tests,
which amounted to at least 128,704 kilotons--a destructive
force equal to detonations of 8,580 Hiroshima-size bombs.
The atolls of Bikini, Enewetak and Johnston, plus Pacific
waters, served as sites for nuclear weapons experiments far
too powerful and unpredictable to be conducted on the U.S.
Mainland. The yield of what The New York Times described as
the mightiest nuclear explosion within the continental United
States, which was the explosion of the first hydrogen device
in Nevada in 1962, was less than 1 percent of the magnitude
of the most powerful Pacific test, later disclosed as the 15-
megaton Bravo shot of 1954. In serving as sites for such
immense infernos, these Pacific atolls and their people
sacrificed enormously for U.S. superpower status. And, they
contributed to the global restraint--and the retreat from
overt nuclear hostilities during decades of the most
dangerous political confrontation in history, the Cold War.
Recent revelations regarding the Cuban missile crisis are
chillingly reflective of that nuclear brink.
Ten months after the Mike detonation, in August 1953, U.S.
officials detected the first Soviet hydrogen explosion and
announced the event to the world. The Eisenhower
administration then set up a deliberate policy to confuse the
public about the escalating order of magnitude between atomic
and thermonuclear weapons, Jonathan Weisgall writes in his
pathbreaking book, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at
Bikini Atoll (U.S. Naval Institute; 1994). ``Keep them
confused,'' Eisenhower told the Atomic Energy Commission.
``Leave `thermonuclear' out of press releases and speeches.
Also `fusion' and `hydrogen.''' The agency complied. Only
decades later, in 1979, did the public learn of this
obfuscation.
Six months after the Soviet H-bomb, on March 1, 1954, U.S.
bomb-makers caught up by unleashing from Bikini atoll the
country's first deliverable hydrogen weapon, code-named
Bravo. Its 15 megatonnage made it nearly one-and-a-half times
the yield of the Mike shot. Bravo was the most powerful U.S.
bomb ever detonated, equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima-sized
bombs, according to U.S. government documents released in
1994. Weisgall observes, ``Hiroshima paled in comparison to
Bravo, which represented as revolutionary an advance in
explosive power over the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb had
over the conventional weapons of World War II.''
Nuclear Victimization of ``our own people''
Bravo also introduced the word fallout to everyday language
worldwide when snow-like radioactive particles dusted 236
residents of nearby Rongelap island, 28 U.S. servicemen and
23 crewmen on a Japanese fishing trawler. In fact, the
thermonuclear era produced radioactive components and fallout
that encircled the globe, settling silently from the heavens.
Beginning particularly with the Mike shot, ``the chemical
signature of our bones changed,'' Harrison told Honolulu
Weekly. The atmospheric weapons tests that proliferated in
scale with the Mike shot dispersed radioactive forms of
iodine, cesium, strontium and other elements. As a result,
Harrison notes, all organisms, including humans, carry the
watermark of the nuclear era woven into their tissues.
The Mike shot marked an acceleration of the man-made
proliferation and escalation of weapons of mass destruction.
The ensuing nuclear age transformed the planet and
its inhabitants. As award-winning journalist Eileen
Welsome writes in her book, The Plutonium Files: America's
Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (Dial Press;
1999): ``The radioactive debris found its way into
starfish, shellfish and seaweed. It covered alfalfa fields
in upstate New York, wheat fields in North Dakota, corn in
Iowa. It seeped into the bodies of honeybees and birds,
human fetuses and growing children. The atom had split the
world into `preatomic' and `postatomic' species.''
Moreover, the ``postatomic'' species must live with the
effects of the nuclear age for generations and centuries to
come. Environmental radioactivity derived from some nuclear
weapons components like plutonium will persist for up to
500,000 years and may be hazardous to humans for at least
half that time.
Fallout and other residual radioactivity from atmospheric
nuclear testing conducted by all nations have caused or will
cause through infinity an estimated 3 million cancer
fatalities, researchers Arjun Makhijani and Stephen I.
Schwartz wrote in the monumental study, Atomic Audit
(Brookings Institution; 1998). That number of casualties is
nearly five times the 617,389 U.S. servicemen killed in World
War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf
War combined.
In 1980, a congressional oversight committee report titled
``The Forgotten Guinea Pigs'' concluded, ``The greatest irony
of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that the only
victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our
own people.'' The House report included in its conclusion--
but only in an obscure footnote--mention of Pacific
Islanders, whose ancestral homelands had sustained the most
U.S. nuclear firepower.
A 33-year exile
U.S. Pacific nuclear testing that began in July 1946
required U.S. officials to evacuate 170 Bikinians and 142
Enewetakese, thus transforming them into so-called ``nuclear
nomads,'' which the Bikinians remain today.
The Enewetakese, when evacuated from their homeland in
December 1947, were told by a senior official, Capt. John
P.W. Vest, that they would be able to return to their atoll
within three to five years. Instead, for the next 33 years
they were exiled on the smaller, desolate Ujelang atoll, 150
miles to the southwest.
Other official U.S. commitments made then are contained in
documents once classified as top secret that Honolulu
attorney Davor Pevec now uses in representing the islanders.
The Enewetakese ``will be accorded
[[Page E2173]]
all rights which are the normal constitutional rights of the
citizens under the Constitution, but will be dealt with as
wards of the United States for whom this country has special
responsibilities,'' according to a memorandum from the Atomic
Energy Commission attached to President Truman's Directive of
Nov. 25, 1947, to the Secretary of Defense.
The 142 Enewetakese (and their descendants) on Ujelang
suffered greatly because of logistical problems, inclement
weather, bureaucratic negligence and the island's desolation.
Even the Department of Interior, in a letter dated Jan. 13,
1978, acknowledged that during their 33-year exile on Ujelang
the Enewetakese ``have suffered grave deprivations, including
periods of near starvation.''
An anthropologist who lived among them on Ujelang and spoke
Marshallese, Laurence M. Carucci, wrote that the stories of
this period told to him over and over by elders focused on
famine and hunger, near starvation and death from illness,
poor fishing conditions, epidemics of polio and measles
and rat infestation.
One Enewetak woman in her 40s told Carucci in 1978 about
these difficult days. She described the stomachs of children
as being ``stuck out like they were bloated and you would
never think they were hungry,'' but in fact they were. Then,
she continued: ``They would get hot fevers, then cold chills;
hot fevers, then cold and sweaty. And then, in just a moment,
they would be gone. Dead, they would never move again. Their
life was gone. And, in those days, the wailing across the
village was constant.''
Their hardship was so severe that in 1969 they commandeered
a supply ship and demanded they be returned home. Their
ancestral atoll was too contaminated with radioactivity for
their return, but the U.S. government did begin an extensive
cleanup and rehabilitation so that on Oct. 1, 1980, some
islanders returned home.
Upon their return, they found a far different atoll, a far
different Enewetak. The Mike shot and 42 other detonations
had devastated Enewetak so severely that more than half of
the land and pockets of the lagoon today remain contaminated
by radiation. The islanders who do reside there cannot live
off of much of their land and must rely on imported food.
Moonscaping Enewetak
The Mike shot was the eighth of 43 nuclear weapons tests at
Enewetak that transformed a placid atoll into a moonscape.
The Enewetak people, now numbering 1,500, are still pleading
with the U.S. government for $386 million in land and
hardship damages and other compensation awarded to them by an
official tribunal established by the U.S. and Marshallese
governments. This panel ruled in April 2000 that after
serving as Ground Zero for 43 weapons tests and receiving
fallout from other shots, the Enewetak atoll: Was
uninhabitable on 49 percent of its original land mass, or
949.8 acres of 1,919.49 acres; was habitable on only 43
percent of its land area, or 815.33 acres; was vaporized by 8
percent, or 154.36 acres.
The lingering effects of U.S. Pacific nuclear tests are
visible today in the numerous kinds of cancers and other
diseases and the degraded homelands that are determined by an
official panel established by the U.S. and Marshallese
governments to result from the U.S. experiments of decades
ago. Compensation for these damages is paid for from a $150
million trust fund that is now too depleted to pay fully
current personal and property claims. Since 1946, researchers
write in Atomic Audit, the U.S. government has paid at least
$759 million in nuclear-related compensation to the
Marshallese. But medical, cleanup and resettlement costs
continue to mount, and Marshallese want more U.S. funding.
The Marshallese prospects for immediate help from U.S.
officials in Washington seem dim, congressional sources in
Washington, D.C., told the Weekly. Enewetak's $386 million in
land claims is not included in the budget Congress is
considering for the fiscal year that began this Oct. 1. Nor
are funds for a medical program that in 2001 ceased to
address Marshallese health needs that have been urgent enough
to warrant sending a six-person delegation to Washington last
month to plead with congressional leaders and staff.
Provisions of the Compact of Free Association set to expire
next year are being negotiated with the Bush administration,
but any agreement must then be acted on by Congress, which is
soon to adjourn. Arguing that U.S. assistance provided in
past agreements is ``manifestly inadequate,'' Marshallese
officials in September 2000 petitioned Congress for increased
U.S. medical and other assistance to meet the mounting costs
of damages to persons and property presumed to be caused by
U.S. nuclear testing. That petition is still being studied by
the Bush administration, and no congressional measure on it
is pending.
from crater to crypt
Much of the plutonium-contaminated soil removed in the
operation to clean up Enewetak was dumped into one of the
atoll's smaller craters on Runit island. This crater was
created May 5, 1958, during the 18-kiloton test shot code-
named Cactus. The crater, 30 feet deep and 350 feet wide, was
filled with about 111,000 cubic yards of radioactive soil and
other materials and then entombed beneath a dome of 358
concrete panels, each 18 inches thick. Researchers in
``Atomic Audit'' report that the unprecedented job, completed
in 1980, took three years and about $239 million.
Soon afterward, a delegation from the National Academy of
Sciences inspected the dome and, John Harrison recalls,
issued a report noting the inadequacies of the dome,
specifically that the predicted longevity of the containment
structure was at best 300 years. Yet, the plutonium-laced
debris encased in the dome will remain radioactive for
500,000 years and hazardous to humans for at least half that
time.
The Runit island entombment is of special interest because
a nuclear-waste crypt is now being finished 800 miles from
Honolulu to bury plutonium-laced materials under a cap of
coral soil at Johnston Island, where four failed nuclear-
tipped missile shots in 1962 showered the atoll and waters
with radioactive debris.
From test site to dump site, the Runit island crypt eerily
symbolizes the legacy of the thermonuclear age that has
caused the Marshallese to suffer disproportionately in
adverse health, environmental and cultural conditions.
The 50th anniversary of the Mike shot and its aftermath
begs for reflection from a nation so riveted on a purported
nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea that it
ignores the era of mass destruction introduced by the United
States on Enewetak with the world's first thermonuclear
explosion.
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