[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 19]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 26702-26704]
[From the U.S. 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

                                 ______
                                 

                              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 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

[[Page 26703]]

     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 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.

[[Page 26704]]

       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.

                          ____________________