Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Marshall Islands

Starting point is 00:00:00 Located between Hawaii and Guam in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is one of the smallest countries in the world, the Marshall Islands. The Marshall Islands has a history unlike many other small countries in the Pacific. Not the least of which is the fact that it has experienced more nuclear detonations per capita on its territory than any other country. Learn more about the Republic of the Marshall Islands and what makes it special on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:40 ThruLine is a podcast that takes. takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. I've done several episodes now on very small countries. And I've always been fascinated by these places and how they came to be. But perhaps the most interesting story is that of the Marshall Islands.

Starting point is 00:01:13 The Marshall Islands is only one of four countries on Earth that consists entirely of coral atolls. The others are Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Maldives. As with other atoll nations, they are all at, or very close to sea level. The highest point in the Marshall Islands, for example, is only 10 meters above sea level, and the average is pretty much at sea level. There also isn't a whole lot of land. In terms of land area, it is the 189th largest country in the world, just slightly larger than Liechtenstein.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Because there isn't much space, there also aren't many people. The population of the Marshall Islands is only 54,000, which ranks at 187th amongst the nations of the world. The Marshallese people are broadly classified as Micronesian. However, unlike Polynesians, there's a greater variation between different Micronesian groups. It's believed that the Marshall Islands might have been first settled by humans as early as 3 to 5,000 years ago, but this is only an estimate, as there's little evidence to be found one way or the other. There is no written record, and given the nature of coral atolls and the materials which exist on them, there's little in the way of artifacts. The first recorded European sighting of the islands occurred in 1526 by the Spaniard Alonzo de Salazar.

Starting point is 00:02:22 He didn't land, nor did he make contact with the people who live there. Three years later, another Spanish explorer, Elvaro de Savedra Saron, tried to land on one of the islands where the locals threw stones at his ship. He then succeeded in landing on another island where they traded with the locals for fresh water and provisions. And the island he landed on might have been bikini or Iwineatech. Other Europeans arrived and brought Western diseases with them, for which the native people had no immunity, and as in many places, there was widespread death. In 1788, the British navigators John Charles Marshall and Thomas Gilbert visited the islands.

Starting point is 00:02:56 The Gilbert Islands, which are part of the nation of Kiribati, were named after Gilbert, and the Marshall Islands were named after Marshall on Western maps. For the most part, there was very little in the way of European contact. There weren't any resources on the islands, and the people who lived there tended to be very hostile to visitors. In 1824, an American whaler crew that mutinyed landed on one of the islands and were massacred down to just two people. 1834, 1845, 1846, and 1852, all saw ships land in the marshals, which were violently attacked, often with their entire crews being killed. The islands were recognized by Europeans as being a Spanish possession in 1874, but it didn't really mean much as it were just lines on a map. The Spanish had no actual presence in the islands.

Starting point is 00:03:41 Germany made an actual attempt to acquire the marshals by actually sending ships there and negotiating treaties with the rulers of the various islands. And the Spanish didn't do much to stop it. Germany finally purchased the islands from Spain in 1885. And the people who lived there, of course, had absolutely no say in the matter. The islands remained in German control until the outbreak of World War I, where they were taken over by the Japanese. And the Japanese territory was lost in 1944 during the Battle of Marshall Islands and World War II to the United States. After the war, the newly created United Nations established the trust territories of the Pacific Islands, a collection of former Japanese islands to be administered by the United States.

Starting point is 00:04:21 I've already done an episode on the trust territories of the Pacific Islands, but for the purposes of this episode, what is relevant was the decision by the United States to use the Marshall Islands for testing their atomic weapons. Beginning in 1946, the United States detonated 67 nuclear weapons over and under the islands in the Marshals. This included the largest nuclear device ever detonated by the United States,

Starting point is 00:04:45 Castle Bravo, in 1954. The equivalent of over 108,000 kilotons of explosives were detonated on the Marshall Islands, primarily over the islands of Bikini and Iwanitak through 1958. Prior to the nuclear test, the entire populations of Bikini and Iwinnitak were relocated to Maduro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. However, unexpectedly, during the Castle Bravo test, two inches or 50 millimeters of radioactive

Starting point is 00:05:11 fallout fell on the island of Rongalab, which had not been evacuated. The residents of Rangalap were eventually evacuated within two days, but many people suffered symptoms of acute radiation sickness, including vomiting, hair loss, and skin burns. As I covered before, the various island groups and the trust territories of the Pacific went their own ways starting in the 1970s. The Marshall Islands became an independent country in 1979 and a member of the United Nations in 1991. While they were legally an independent country, they developed a very unique relationship with the United States. And this was codified in the 1986 Compact of Free Association. The United States signed a Compact of Free Association with all three of the now independent countries that

Starting point is 00:05:54 were formerly part of the trust territories of the Pacific. What does the compact of free association mean for the Marshall Islands? Well, actually quite a bit. It is by far the most important relationship that it has with any other country in the world by a wide margin. For starters, the Marshall Islands are part of the United States postal system. And yes, you heard that correctly. You can send a package to Maduro for the same price you can send something across town if you happen to live in the U.S. This means that the Marshall Islands has both a state and zip code. The state code for the Marshall Islands is MH, and the zip code for all of Maduro is

Starting point is 00:06:32 9-6-960. And I discovered this fact when I literally walked past the Maduro Post Office when I visited back in 2007. Before I visited the Marshall Islands, there was a diplomatic spat where the Postmaster General in the U.S. unknowingly changed postal rates to the marshals as an international rather than domestic destination. The United States has also paid and continues to pay the Marshall Islanders' compensation for nuclear testing conducted in the 40s and 50s. Over three quarters of a billion dollars were paid between 1956 and 1998, and when the compact of free association was renegotiated in 2003, another $3.5 billion was promised to be paid over the next two decades.

Starting point is 00:07:13 Citizens of the Marshall Islands may live and work in the United States without having to apply for a visa or a green card. and likewise, Americans can travel and live in the Marshall Islands indefinitely without any prior approval. Also, marshalese citizens can join the U.S. military, which is often viewed as a good, guaranteed job and a fast-track to U.S. citizenship. The U.S. military also has a unit of engineers that works on projects in the country and medical ships that occasionally stop to perform examinations for civilians. The biggest thing that the United States gets in return is the Ronald Reagan ballistic missile defense test site located on Quadalene Atoll. This is a test site for defensive missile and space technologies. The United States has about 2,500 people who live on Quadaline, including military contractors and their dependents. One of the five base stations for managing the global positioning system is located in Quadaline.

Starting point is 00:08:05 One of the implications of the compact of free association is that about a third of the entire population has left the Marshall Islands and is now living in the United States. About 20,000 Marshallese people are scattered across several U.S. states, but their biggest population, is in a very surprising place. Springdale, Arkansas. Located in the Ozarks, it's the home to the largest population of Marshallese outside of Maduro. The migration of Marshallese to Springdale is a result of a single Marshallese man by the name of John Moody. Moody was a student in the United States, and in the late 1970s, he got a job at a Tyson chicken plant in Springdale. Word of the good jobs and affordable living in Springdale spread throughout the Marshallese community, and people began moving to Arkansas.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Families would often move piecemeal with one family member coming over, getting a job, and then saving up enough money to bring over their relatives. And very slowly, over 40 years, a community developed with churches and other institutions which drew even more martialese. They have an odd status in that they're not citizens,

Starting point is 00:09:07 but they are also not legal immigrants. While the capital city of Maduro is by far the largest city in the Marshall Islands, the next largest city, Eby, which is an island of, on the Quadalene Atoll has a very unique distinction. It is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. It only has a population of about 15,000 people, which isn't a lot. But they are all crammed into an area of only 0.14 square miles or 0.36 square kilometers. That means that the population

Starting point is 00:09:38 density of Eby is 107,000 people per square mile, or 41,600 people per square kilometer. And I recommend you take a look at a satellite image just to see how crowded it is. Despite the nuclear testing, which took place on the island, you can actually visit Bikini Atoll. The residual radiation on the island is pretty close to natural background radiation at this point. The only thing that isn't recommended is eating any food grown on the island. And as astonishing as it might seem, the coral reefs on Bikini are some of the best in the world. And this is mainly due to the fact that there has been no permanent human presence on the island for over 60 years. Bikini Atoll was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010, the first and only such site in the

Starting point is 00:10:23 Marshall Islands. The future of the Marshall Islands is very much in doubt. One of the biggest threats is rising sea levels. This is something that threatens all coral atoll nations. Already high tides are starting to flood part of the islands that were never covered with water before. The low elevation of the entire country means that even a slight increase in sea levels can be devastating. Maduro has already seen severe flooding during storms. The other major concern is the economy. Atolls have no natural resources. The location of the Marshall Islands doesn't put it in the middle of any shipping routes. Bringing anything to the Marshalls is expensive, and there is little land, so there's effectually no manufacturing, which is why so much of the

Starting point is 00:11:03 population has migrated to the United States. And the other big issue hanging over the Marshall Islands is the renegotiation of the compact of free association with the United States. The current agreement expires in 2023, and the next agreement may very well determine the country's future. If you should be so inclined to visit the Marshall Islands, it actually isn't that hard. There's really only one option to get there, and that is the Island Hopper flight on United Airlines. It leaves from Honolulu and stops in Maduro and Quadaline in the Marshall Islands, before continuing on to Kosari, Ponape, and Chuk in Micronesia before finishing in Guam. The next day, the flight does the same thing in reverse.

Starting point is 00:11:42 The only restriction is that you can't get off the plane in quaduline unless you have prior approval because of the military base. But you can stay in each of the islands on the route for however many days you want before picking up the flight again to continue your journey. There isn't a whole lot of tourism to the Marshall Islands, so there isn't a lot of choice for accommodations in Maduro. But on the plus side, odds are you will find rooms available. The number of people who visited the Marshall Islands in 2019 was only 6,000.

Starting point is 00:12:09 100, ranking them 200th in the world for tourism. The Marshall Islands is a small country that many people aren't even aware exists. Yet despite its small size and population, it played an outsized role in the history of the 20th century. However, its future, and whether it can even exist as a country going forward, has still yet to be determined. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams.

Starting point is 00:12:39 The associate producers are Thorpe Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Sharon 70 over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Informative, entertaining podcast. Everything Everywhere Daily is my favorite podcast. The subjects covered are so diverse that I never get bored. Each podcast is about 10 minutes long and covers a subject in depth. Gary has a great podcast voice.

Starting point is 00:13:02 You can hear the enthusiasm in his voice and it just draws me in, making me want to learn more. Please keep up the great work, Gary. Well, thank you, Sharon 70. the enthusiasm in my voice is quite real. I really do enjoy the show and the topics that I cover. Remember, if you leave a review or send a boostergram or send me a question, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Marshall Islands

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