Speaker 1: About twenty years ago, maybe thirty, a circus fitted to Majoro,
Speaker 1: the largest island on the Marjoro Atoll, in the capital
Speaker 1: city of the Marshall Islands. They came to Majoro, as
Speaker 1: almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanas or fish does on
Speaker 1: a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to
Speaker 1: take them to the next destination, and so the resident
Speaker 1: of this tiny island, which at times is no wider
Speaker 1: than the single road which travels its whole length, decided
Speaker 1: that they'd have to share the food that they themselves
Speaker 1: had imported a great cost, and they set about gathering apples, bananas,
Speaker 1: and anything else that they thought an elephant might like
Speaker 1: to eat while it waited for a way off an
Speaker 1: island that barely has enough room for its own people,
Speaker 1: let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people
Speaker 1: of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural
Speaker 1: as the times of the sea, greet each other the
Speaker 1: same way they do strangers, by saying yo quai. The
Speaker 1: word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kaboo explain them.
Speaker 1: He's the President of the Republic of the Marshal Islands,
Speaker 1: so he seems like he'd be a good source.
Speaker 2: I would say the word yupid ye, greeting word yaguey.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of several meanings, and you can say
Speaker 2: when you meet someone first time, you say yagohey. When
Speaker 2: you greet someone, and when you also say goodbye, instead
Speaker 2: of saying goodbye, you also say yupe, So you can
Speaker 2: use that also, like during the weekend there was a
Speaker 2: tournament fishing tournament, and if you were fishing and you
Speaker 2: got it, you have a big fish on the land
Speaker 2: and you really m hm, You're about to land the fish,
Speaker 2: but the lands snap. So what do you say?
Speaker 3: Say?
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, way, hello to the fish. But you
Speaker 2: just say yeah but because you lost the pit catch.
Speaker 2: So it can be said way like when you lose
Speaker 2: someone or someone passed away. You've missed that prison, yup
Speaker 2: way so and so he was here but no one
Speaker 2: could hear, so we do said yep way. So it
Speaker 2: has several meanings. But the deeper meaning of yuppoy is
Speaker 2: you are beautiful like the rainbow. Yeah means rainbow and ways,
Speaker 2: so we combine the two words. You are a rainbow
Speaker 2: and you are beautiful as a rainbow.
Speaker 1: On the map, the Marshall Islands look like the little
Speaker 1: dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Margiro.
Speaker 1: But unlike there's little specks of dust that manage to
Speaker 1: sneak their way onto my camera center, Marshall Islands belong here.
Speaker 1: Here is a pretty vague turn. The twenty nine coral
Speaker 1: atolls and five islands that allow fifty four one thousand
Speaker 1: Marshalies to live on one hundred and eighty two square
Speaker 1: kilometers of land span an oceanic territory of two hundred
Speaker 1: thousand kilometers. It's like you took a small American town
Speaker 1: and scattered it across an area more than a half
Speaker 1: times the size of Alaska. Even though the Rami is
Speaker 1: ninety eight percent water, every inch of land is precious
Speaker 1: to the marshal Eisee, whose matrilineal society ensures that land
Speaker 1: passes from mother to daughter and ties families to the
Speaker 1: remote islands that make up the low lying atolls of
Speaker 1: the Republic. It was on one of the bigger chunks
Speaker 1: of land that I recorded the music you heard a
Speaker 1: minute ago. Marjorro is an atoll that's a coral ring
Speaker 1: that encircles the lagoon and Its biggest island is about
Speaker 1: thirty miles long, but often less than one hundred yards wide.
Speaker 1: There's one road that runs the length of it and
Speaker 1: sometimes also spans the width of it. It's also home
Speaker 1: to about half the Ramis population. The highest point on
Speaker 1: the atoll lies just three meters above sea level. If
Speaker 1: you want to go high that than you are only
Speaker 1: options are houses or palm trees. From the top of
Speaker 1: the fifth floor of the NAPA Autoparts Store, which also
Speaker 1: houses the UNDP and the Marshal Arwanns Olympic Committee, you
Speaker 1: can see the whole island. For Marshallese people, these tiny
Speaker 1: pieces of paradise that barely poke their heads out from
Speaker 1: the top of the ocean are everything. Their land and
Speaker 1: their ties to it defined them. Without their place, they
Speaker 1: can't be themselves. Even though many thousands of Marshallese live
Speaker 1: in the diasper of the United States, they're still important.
Speaker 1: Handicrafts made from little shells and the outer islands and
Speaker 1: coconut husks. Many of them come back to the islands
Speaker 1: to retire, but slowly the ocean is taking those islands back.
Speaker 1: Rising sea levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed
Speaker 1: this tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change.
Speaker 1: There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the
Speaker 1: Marshall Islands have or what they can do to hold
Speaker 1: creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed on just
Speaker 1: a few square kilometers of land among millions of square
Speaker 1: kilometers of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything.
Speaker 1: But now it's threatening to take everything away from them.
Speaker 1: One day. They fear their islands will become uninhabitable. A
Speaker 1: salt water invads of water table and their trees die,
Speaker 1: while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep
Speaker 1: away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave,
Speaker 1: but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But
Speaker 1: the Marshalis are resilient people. They've weathered many storms to
Speaker 1: get to where they are now. The tiny museum in
Speaker 1: Maduro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic,
Speaker 1: a nuclear bomb, the Second World War, but in the
Speaker 1: end these did little to cruss the incredible kindness of
Speaker 1: the tenacity of the Marshalies. The islands that make up
Speaker 1: the Aramai have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands
Speaker 1: of years. They've been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese,
Speaker 1: and United States governments before becoming an independent republic. Before
Speaker 1: they were named by a British sailor, the islands had
Speaker 1: their own name. I'll let Jeff a Marshal's renaissance man,
Speaker 1: who was at one side driver, the head of the
Speaker 1: World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse,
Speaker 1: and the custod units. An incredible collection of Marshal E's
Speaker 1: music explained what they were called before that.
Speaker 2: Or before he used to call La la la larie like.
Speaker 3: L or l.
Speaker 4: L l O L L luck l A P l
Speaker 4: A P.
Speaker 5: That's before it turned out turns into Marshall.
Speaker 2: Because this word Marshall games from.
Speaker 5: This kandeh abound these islands.
Speaker 1: Captain Marshall undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad
Speaker 1: place to find yourself on a summer afternoon, and in
Speaker 1: the time I spent there, I took several trips at
Speaker 1: the smaller islands around mydro Atoll. They look like the
Speaker 1: Platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms,
Speaker 1: vibrant coral reefs, white sand at turquoise water. I love
Speaker 1: free diving and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and
Speaker 1: dozens of brightly colored species of fish in almost infinite
Speaker 1: visibility without even needing to put on a wet to
Speaker 1: or a weight belt. Might be the closest I'll ever
Speaker 1: get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a
Speaker 1: dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you
Speaker 1: a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on
Speaker 1: the left and on the right, spends much of its
Speaker 1: time and money preparing for its own imagined version of
Speaker 1: the crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war.
Speaker 1: For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean on It's
Speaker 1: the land and a resulting loss of places to live
Speaker 1: and grow food. And for others, it's a collapse of
Speaker 1: basic services like power and clean water that we take
Speaker 1: for granted. These are all storms, so the tiny island
Speaker 1: nation has already weathered, and it hasn't done so in
Speaker 1: the atomized and individualistic way that so many American preppers
Speaker 1: fantasize about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic,
Speaker 1: and welcoming community there's a lot we can learn from
Speaker 1: the people of the Marshall Islands in their story, and
Speaker 1: so this week I'll be doing my best to share
Speaker 1: the stories that they shared with me. If you're familiar
Speaker 1: with the islands, it's likely because of the history of
Speaker 1: one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll.
Speaker 1: The name is the German bastardization of a Marshal lease
Speaker 1: word pikini pick meaning plain surface, and knee meaning coconut tree.
Speaker 1: It's a flat based where coconuts career, but you likely
Speaker 1: don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't
Speaker 1: safe to eat anymore. Anyway. If you've heard of Bikinia Toll,
Speaker 1: it's because of what the United States did there After
Speaker 1: the Second World War, on the eighteenth of July and
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven, the Marshall Islands were placed in a
Speaker 1: Strategic Trust territory by the United Nations. This territory was
Speaker 1: administered by the United States, which are supposed to administer
Speaker 1: the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants out
Speaker 1: of international peace and security. But a year before the
Speaker 1: trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing and
Speaker 1: the lagoon at Bikinia Toll, a site that would, over
Speaker 1: the next fifteen years, become the most heavily bombed place
Speaker 1: on Earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map,
Speaker 1: and much of their population left dead, sick, and without
Speaker 1: the land that defines them and their ability to thrive
Speaker 1: on these tiany islands amidst the endless ocean. As far
Speaker 1: as possible, I want to let the marshal Lease survivors
Speaker 1: of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories.
Speaker 1: They call what happened on Bikini and awaa Atoll the
Speaker 1: nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about the nuclear legacy
Speaker 1: is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially the time
Speaker 1: when none of them have been paid the compensation they
Speaker 1: were allotted, and the US was negotiating a new agreement
Speaker 1: with the Marshalise government. It was very far from settled,
Speaker 1: and the numbers of the US were offering were very
Speaker 1: far from sufficient. I was very fortunate to join a
Speaker 1: few other journalists on the tiny island of boken bowten,
Speaker 1: a short boat right away from Mitro and home to
Speaker 1: perhaps most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch,
Speaker 1: walked around the island and then had a talk on
Speaker 1: the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors.
Speaker 1: I'll let them introduce themselves.
Speaker 6: My name is Zakabekibion. I'm from the Marshall Allen. I
Speaker 6: am a student at CMI College of the Marshall Allen
Speaker 6: and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club,
Speaker 6: which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with with
Speaker 6: our director Mary Souk and now our Commissioner Ariana.
Speaker 4: All right, yeah, once again, my name is Ariana. I
Speaker 4: work as a Commissioner and Nuclear Justice Envoy for the
Speaker 4: r m I National Nuclear Commission. Him once again, thank
Speaker 4: you very much for having us this afternoon, Yael.
Speaker 7: Welcome to the Marshall Island. My name is Evlin Ralpho.
Speaker 7: I'm the director for Education and Public Awareness. Once you
Speaker 7: can welcome, enjoy the rest of your days here.
Speaker 3: My name is Sinceretian Pernet. I work with the National
Speaker 3: Nuclear Commission as an heapman and physical officer. I'm not
Speaker 3: sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since
Speaker 3: the post that we all go so support the post
Speaker 3: go work on the same poet, Welcome to the Partial Islands.
Speaker 7: She's from Mayata, she's from.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the three of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors.
Speaker 4: They were exposed to fall out. Her mother was exposed
Speaker 4: to fall out. Her mother, Grace's mother was also exposed
Speaker 4: to the radioactive fallout, as well as my great grandfather.
Speaker 4: I think that's what really drives us to share this
Speaker 4: with you.
Speaker 1: Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly
Speaker 1: impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that
Speaker 1: came after it. Although we know the name Bikinia Toll,
Speaker 1: the entire republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Madro itself,
Speaker 1: thanks to the elevised decision to drop bombs on a
Speaker 1: day when the populated atolls were downwind at the test site.
Speaker 1: In fact, right next to our hotel and showing the
Speaker 1: same parking lot, there's the US Department of Energy Office AUS. Jeff,
Speaker 1: what that was doing there?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I saw there's a diary office health office in the
Speaker 1: street here.
Speaker 5: The one in the next to the autel, that's the
Speaker 5: office where it through the radiation testing. And there's some
Speaker 5: one near the AMI R. Marshall. That's the planet for
Speaker 5: those survivors. Now, the survivors, there's few of them, like
Speaker 5: maybe less than.
Speaker 1: Fifty wow the RMI saw fighting in the Second World War.
Speaker 1: It's memorialized in murals. Across Marjorro. In nineteen forty three
Speaker 1: and early nineteen forty four, the USA bombed and then
Speaker 1: fought the Imperial Japanese military, who have been occupying the
Speaker 1: island since nineteen fourteen. US soldiers and marines, along with
Speaker 1: marsha Ley's scouts, landed on Marjorro, Quadulion in anywhere up
Speaker 1: on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat
Speaker 1: we took across the lagoon to Bocan Boten. The fighting
Speaker 1: was fierce and the scale of the destruction was immets. Overall,
Speaker 1: the Americans lost six hundred and eleven men, which suffered
Speaker 1: two three hundred and forty one wounded. Two hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty one were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over eleven
Speaker 1: thousand men and had three hundred and fifty eight captured. Today,
Speaker 1: the Bikinia Toll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of
Speaker 1: the ships and plains that fought that battle, alongside the Nagato,
Speaker 1: the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship
Speaker 1: from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1: It was a shadow of this war that was evoked
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty six, when one hundred and sixty seven
Speaker 1: a Bikinia Tolls inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States.
Speaker 1: They initially accepted this settlement quote for the good of
Speaker 1: mankind and to end all wars, in the words of
Speaker 1: the US commandant at the time. Assisted by US Navy seabees,
Speaker 1: they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls. Nine
Speaker 1: of the eleven family heads from Bikini elected to be
Speaker 1: transported one hundred and twenty five miles to Rohngerikatoll, an
Speaker 1: island with about one quarter of the land mass of Bikini.
Speaker 1: Many believed the island to be haunted. By the time
Speaker 1: the Navy left them with a few weeks of water
Speaker 1: and food, they had every reason to be afraid. I'll
Speaker 1: let Ariana explain what that removal process was like.
Speaker 4: They had asked the people if they were willing to
Speaker 4: give up their homelands for the good of mankind and
Speaker 4: to end all wars. And because our people are people
Speaker 4: of faith in Christianity, they the and they were very afraid.
Speaker 4: They did not want to leave, but because of the
Speaker 4: amount of power that the that the military showed up
Speaker 4: with with their big ships compared to our small canoes,
Speaker 4: and the amount of troops that were on that island
Speaker 4: on that morning, it was very hard for them to,
Speaker 4: you know, fight against what was being asked of them.
Speaker 4: And if you have time to look through documentaries of
Speaker 4: the nuclear legacy, you will see a port where the
Speaker 4: commander or commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt. He was
Speaker 4: sitting down and asking the chief at that time, can
Speaker 4: we use this island for the good of mankind? And
Speaker 4: in response the people all respond in unison elman, which
Speaker 4: means okay. And from their testimonies, they had to take
Speaker 4: that shot over forty times to make sure that, you know,
Speaker 4: they all said emmin at the same time, to get
Speaker 4: the best shot they could for you know, maybe for
Speaker 4: reports to the UN. But it was a very frustrating
Speaker 4: time for them.
Speaker 1: Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to
Speaker 1: test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought ninety
Speaker 1: five ships fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time,
Speaker 1: this would have ranked the Navy of Bikini Toll just
Speaker 1: outside the top five biggest fleets in the world, but
Speaker 1: those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Now you might
Speaker 1: think that, given the testing was on ships, the atoll's
Speaker 1: navy would be some kind of mid century Mary Celeste,
Speaker 1: but you'd be wrong. Three hundred and fifty experimental rats, goats,
Speaker 1: and pigs died in the service as its strange nuclear experiment,
Speaker 1: some of them after being subjected to the great indignity
Speaker 1: of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might
Speaker 1: be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather
Speaker 1: staggering that this research was being done three years after
Speaker 1: the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full
Speaker 1: of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up
Speaker 1: in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable
Speaker 1: human suffering does not seem to have been top of
Speaker 1: the priority list. The first test of the island somehow misfired.
Speaker 1: The gathered press were disappointed in many of them went home,
Speaker 1: but the second code, named Baker didn't. Chemist Glen t. Seborg,
Speaker 1: the longest serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called
Speaker 1: the Baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove
Speaker 1: a two thousand foot wide pillar of water into the air.
Speaker 1: It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of
Speaker 1: radiation across the islands of the atoll, which at the
Speaker 1: time the residents had been expecting to return to. Just
Speaker 1: five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Road,
Speaker 1: a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of
Speaker 1: his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit
Speaker 1: designed named the Bikini after the atoll. It was one
Speaker 1: wright equipped the atom bomb of fashion. The people of
Speaker 1: the atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
Speaker 1: January of nineteen forty eight, just two years after their removal,
Speaker 1: doctor Leonard Mason visited the Bikini Rongrik and was appalled
Speaker 1: to find the people there had almost starved to death.
Speaker 1: We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one
Speaker 1: of them, said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the
Speaker 1: University of WAYI asked that food and water be bought immediately.
Speaker 1: The US built houses for Bikini Atol residents on Ujilangatoll,
Speaker 1: but it decided to use these for the residents of
Speaker 1: Aniwata Katoll, where it was also about to begin conducting
Speaker 1: nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents
Speaker 1: alongside a runway before they eventually chose Kille Island, a
Speaker 1: line of less than one square kilometer, as their next home.
Speaker 1: Also evacuated where Anewatak, Wrongalap, and Wathaw Islanders. They too
Speaker 1: thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could
Speaker 1: go home in a short period of time. They too
Speaker 1: found out later that this was not the case. Over
Speaker 1: the course of their exile, they've been moved several more times,
Speaker 1: staffed half to death, cheated their compensation, and stripped to
Speaker 1: their ancestral homeland. For the next twelve years, the United
Speaker 1: States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: four with the Bravo Shot of Operation Castle, also known
Speaker 1: as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we know
Speaker 1: of the US ever deploying.
Speaker 4: Within those twelve years, there were sixty seven known devices
Speaker 4: that were tested here. There could have been more, but
Speaker 4: all we know of is sixty seven. One of them
Speaker 4: was the Castle Bravo shat that yielded fifteen megatons, which,
Speaker 4: when scientists calculated the equivalent of the Bravo shat would
Speaker 4: have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half
Speaker 4: times every single day for twelve years.
Speaker 1: That fifteen megaton Bravo shot yielded more than two point
Speaker 1: five times the estimated six megaton explosion. When it was
Speaker 1: detonated on an artificial island in the Aichinia Toll, the
Speaker 1: device's mushroom cloud reached a height of forty seven thousand feet,
Speaker 1: which is fourteen hundred meters, and a diameter of seven
Speaker 1: miles or eleven kilometers in about one minute. Eventually it
Speaker 1: reached a height of forty kilometers and a diameter of
Speaker 1: one hundred kilometers. This took less than ten minutes, traveled
Speaker 1: more than one hundred meters per second, and covered seven
Speaker 1: thousand kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it
Speaker 1: with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot,
Speaker 1: weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favorable,
Speaker 1: but nonetheless the decision to go ahead with the first
Speaker 1: test was taken by to Alvin Sea Graves jointed task
Speaker 1: for seven ships located thirty miles east of Bikini and
Speaker 1: what was thought to be an upwin position began detecting
Speaker 1: high levels of radiation just two hours after the test.
Speaker 1: Very soon after, they began traveling south at full speed
Speaker 1: to avoid the fallout, but directly down window the blast
Speaker 1: and unable to travel wrong. A lap and a Lingena
Speaker 1: Atolls Arianna explained the impact to fall out there, which
Speaker 1: residents were not warned about. American service people there want
Speaker 1: to stay inside, not eat or drink anything, but no
Speaker 1: such warning was given to the local residents.
Speaker 4: Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors
Speaker 4: from red to yellow to orange. It was just a
Speaker 4: very very bright morning and then they started hearing like
Speaker 4: thunderous roars a couple of minutes later, and it was
Speaker 4: just like roars after Wars. And it was a very
Speaker 4: frightening time because this was just not something you know,
Speaker 4: does not happen every day. And then around ten am,
Speaker 4: the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts
Speaker 4: from ronlap at All, which is the closest to Bikini.
Speaker 4: The fallout had started to arrive and they were not
Speaker 4: sure what was going on. There was men out fishing.
Speaker 4: There was also stories these witnesses that prior to this
Speaker 4: test the military had gone to and they had movie
Speaker 4: nights and they would show the community of movies where
Speaker 4: it's snowing.
Speaker 1: Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo
Speaker 1: shop for the people who, despite never having any quarrel
Speaker 1: with the USA, with the recipient of the largest nuclear
Speaker 1: bomb it's ever decimated. It Could Happen Here as a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
Speaker 1: check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
Speaker 1: slash sources.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening.