It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: The Marshall Islands Part One: For the Good of Humanity and to End All Wars

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

James begins a 4 part series looking at the history and future of the low lying atoll nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. This episode looks at the islands’ nuclear legacy. Original Air Date: 9.5.23See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Cross. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Notorno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. About 20 years ago, maybe 30, a circus visited Marjore, the largest island on the Marjore Atoll in the capital city of the Marshall Islands. They came to Marjore, as almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanus or fish does, on a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to take them to their next destination. And so the residents of this tiny island, which at times is no wider than the single road which travels its whole length, decided that they'd have to share the food that they themselves had imported at great cost. And they set about gathering apples, bananas, and anything else

that they thought an elephant might like to eat while it waited for a way off an island that barely has enough room for its own people, let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural as the tides of the sea, greet each other the same way they do strangers, by saying yokewe. The word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kabua explain them. He's the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, so he seems like he'd be a good source. I would say the word, yokewe,

yokewe is our greeting word. Yokewe has a lot of several meanings. You can say when you meet someone first time, you say yapwe. When you greet someone and when you also say goodbye, instead of say goodbye, you also yapwe. So you can use that also. Like during the weekend, there was a tournament, fishing tournament.

And if you were fishing and you caught a, you have a big fish on the line and you really, if you're about to land the fish but the line's not. So what do you say? You say, oh, yukkui. Not hello to the fish but you just say yukkui because you lost the big catch. So it can be used that way.

Like when you lose someone or someone passed away, you miss that person. Yaquay, so and so he was here, but no one could hear, so we can say yaquay. So there's several meanings, but the deeper meaning of yaquay is, you are beautiful like the rainbow. Ya means rainbow, and kwe is you. So we combine the two words, is you are a rainbow. Ia means rainbow, and weis.

So we combine the two words, you are a rainbow, and you are beautiful as a rainbow. On the map, the Marshall Islands look like the little dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Majuro. But unlike those little specks of dust that managed to sneak their way onto my camera sensor, Marshall Islands belong here.

Here is a pretty vague turn. The 29 coral atolls and 5 islands that allow 54,000 martialese to live on 182 square kilometres of land span an oceanic territory of 200,000 kilometres. It's like you took a small American town and scattered it across an area one and a half times the size of Alaska. Even though the RMI is 98% water, every inch of land is precious to the Marshallese, whose matrilineal society ensures that land passes from mother to daughter, and ties families to the remote islands that make up the low-lying atolls of the Republic. It was on one of the bigger chunks of land that I recorded the music you heard a minute ago. Maduro is an atoll, that's a coral ring that encircles the lagoon.

And its biggest island is about 30 miles long, but often less than 100 yards wide. There's one road that runs the length of it, and sometimes also spans the width of it. It's also home to about half the RMI's population. The highest point on the atoll lies just three meters above sea level. If you want to get higher than that then your only options are houses or palm trees. From the top of the fifth floor of the Napa auto parts store, which also houses the UNDP and the Marshall Islands Olympic Committee, you can see the whole island. For Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise that barely poke their heads out from the top of the ocean

are everything. Their land and their ties to it define them. Without their place, they can't be themselves. Even though many thousands of Marshallese live in the diaspora of the United States, they still import handicrafts made from little shells on the outer islands and coconut husks. Many of them come back to the islands to retire. But slowly, the ocean is taking those islands back. Rising sea levels and more extreme tidal

surges have placed this tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change. There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the Marshall Islands have, or what they can do to halt the creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed on just a few square kilometres of land, among millions of square kilometres of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything, but now it's threatening to take everything away from them. One day, they fear their islands will become uninhabitable, a saltwater invades a water table and their trees die, while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave, but they can't stand alone against climate change either.

But the Marshallese are resilient people. They've weathered many storms to get to where they are now. The tiny museum in Majuro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic. A nuclear bomb. The Second World War. But in the end, these did little to crush the incredible kindness of the tenacity of the Marshallese. The islands that make up the Aramaai have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years, and they have been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese and United States governments before becoming an independent republic.

Before they were named by a British sailor, the islands had their own name. I'll let Jeff, a Marshallese Renaissance man who was at once a driver, the head of the World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse, and the custodian of an incredible collection of Marshallese music, explain what they were called before that. Before we used to call it Loli, like That's before it turns into Marshall. Because this word Marshall came from this guy that found these islands. Captain Marshall. Undeniably the Marshall Islands are not a bad place to find yourself on a summer afternoon. And in the time I spent there I took several trips to the smaller islands around Maduro

Atoll. They look like the platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms, vibrant coral reefs, white sand and turquoise water. I love freediving, and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and dozens of brightly coloured species of fish in almost infinite visibility without even needing to put on a wetsuit or a weight belt might be the closest I'll ever get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on the left and on the right, spends much of its time and money preparing for its own imagined version of a crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war. For others, it's the encroaching

of the ocean on their land and the resulting loss of places to live and grow food. And for others it's a collapse of basic services like power and clean water that we take for granted. These are all storms to the tiny island nation who have already weathered. And it hasn't done so in the atomised and individualistic way that so many American preppers fantasise about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic and welcoming community. There's a lot we can learn from the people of the Marshall Islands and their story. And so this week I'll be doing my best to share the stories that they shared with me. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnaal Tales from the Shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. If you're familiar with the islands, it's likely because of the history of one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll. The name is a German bastardization of a Marshallese word, Pikini. Pik meaning plain and knee, meaning coconut tree.

It's a flat base where coconuts grow. But you likely don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't safe to eat anymore anyway. If you've heard of Bikini Atoll, it's because of what the United States did there after the Second World War. On the 18th of July 1947, the Marshall Islands were placed in a Strategic Trust territory by the United Nations. This territory was administered by the United States, which was supposed to administer the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants and of

international peace and security. But a year before the trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing in the Lagoon at Bikini Atoll, a site that would, over the next 15 years, become the most heavily bombed place on Earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map, and much of their population left dead, sick, and without the land that defines them and their ability to thrive on these tiny islands amidst the endless ocean. As far as possible, I want to let the Marshallese survivors of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories. They call what happened on Bikini in Enewat Akatol the nuclear legacy of their country.

Talking about the nuclear legacy is a difficult topic with the Marshallese government that was very far from settled and the numbers the US were offering were very far from sufficient. I was very fortunate to join a few other journalists on the tiny island of Bocanbocan, a short boat ride away from Majuro and home to perhaps the most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch, walked around the island, and then had a talk on the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors. I'll let them introduce themselves. My name is Chaka Bekidion. I'm from the Marshall Island. I am a student at CMI, College of the Marshall Island, and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club, which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission

with our director, Mary Silk, and now our commissioner, Ariana Tivon. All right, once again, my name is Ariana Tivon Kiluma. I work as a commissioner and nuclear justice envoy for the RMI National Nuclear Commission. And once again, thank you very much for having us this afternoon. Yeah, well, welcome to the Marshall Island.

My name is Evelyn Ralfo. I'm the director for education and public awareness. Once again, welcome. Enjoy the rest of your days here. My name is Cinserlene Pernet. I work with the National Nuclear Commission as an admin and physical officer. I'm not sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since the past said we all go, so that's the way we support the past.

We're on the same boat. Welcome to the Marshall Islands. She's from Mediato. She's from Mediato. She's from Mediato. Yeah. The three of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors.

They were exposed to fallout. Her mother was exposed to fallout. Her mother, Grace's mother, was also exposed to the radioactive fallout, as well as my great-grandfather. I think that's what really drives us to share this with you. Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that came after it.

Although we know the name Bikini Atoll, the entire Republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Maduro itself, thanks to the ill-advised decision to drop bombs on a day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site. In fact, right next to our hotel and showing the same parking lot, there's a US Department of Energy office. I asked Jeff what that was doing there. Yeah, I saw there's a DOE there. Yeah I saw there's a DOE office, a health office, in the street here. The one on the next to the hotel, that's the office where they do the radiation testing and there's a one near the AMI, Air Marsal, that's the clinic for those survivors. Now the survivors, there's few of them, like maybe less than 50.

Wow. The RMI saw fighting in the Second World War. It's memorialized in murals across Majuro. In 1943 and early 1944, the USA bombed and then fought the Imperial Japanese military, who had been occupying the island since 1914. US soldiers and marines, along with Marshallese scouts, landed on Majuro, Kwajalein and Eniwetok on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat we took across the lagoon to Bocanbotin. The fighting was fierce and the scale of the destruction was immense. Overall, the Americans lost 611 men and suffered 2,341 wounded.

261 were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over 11,000 men and had 358 captured. Today, the Bikini Atoll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of the ships and planes that fought that battle. Alongside the Nagato, the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the shadow of this war that was evoked in 1946, when 167 of Bikini Atoll's inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States. They initially accepted this settlement, quote, for the good of mankind and to end all wars,

in the words of the US commandant at the time. Assisted by US Navy Seabees, they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls. Nine of the 11 family heads from Bikini elected to be transported 125 miles to Rongarik Atoll, an island with about one quarter of the landmass of Bikini Atoll. Many believed the island to be haunted, and by the time the Navy left them with a few weeks of water and food, they had every reason to be afraid. I'll let Arianna explain what that removal process was like. They had asked the people if they were willing to give up their homelands for the good of

mankind and to end all wars. And because our people are people of faith in Christianity, they were very afraid. They did not want to leave, but because of the amount of power that the military showed up with their big ships compared to our small canoes and the amount of troops that were on that island on that morning, it was very hard for them to, you know, fight against what was being asked of them. And if you have time to look through documentaries of the nuclear legacy,

you will see a certain part where the commander, a Commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt, he was sitting down and asking the chief at that time, can we use this island for the good of mankind? And in response, the people all respond in Unijogen, emman, which means okay. And from their testimonies, they had to take that shot over 40 times to make sure that, you know, they all said emman at the same time to get the best shot they could for, you know, maybe for reports to the UN. But it was a very frustrating time for them. Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought 95 ships, fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time, this would have ranked the Navy a bikini atoll just outside the top

five biggest fleets in the world. But those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows presented by I heart and Sonora an Anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America From gasoline counters with shape-shifters To bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Now, you might think that given the testing was on ships, the Atoll's navy would be some kind of mid-century Mary Celeste. But you'd be wrong. 3,350 experimental rats, goats and pigs died in the service of this strange nuclear experiment. Some of them after being subjected to the great indignity of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. which bizarrely scientists thought might be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather staggering that this research was being done three years after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable human suffering does not seem to have been top of the priority list. The first tests at the island somehow misfired. The gathered press were disappointed and many of them went home. But the second, codenamed Baker, didn't.

Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, the longest serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called the Baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove a 2,000 foot wide pillar of water into the air. It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of radiation across the islands of the Atoll, which at the time the residents had been expecting to return to. Just five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Joyard, a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit design named the Bikini after the Atoll. It was, one writer quipped, the atom bomb of fashion. The people of the Atoll, however,

gained little from the outfit or the testing. In January of 1948, just two years after their removal, Dr. Leonard Mason visited the Bikini in Zonrongarig and was appalled to find that people there had almost starved to death. We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one of them said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the University of Whitey, asked that food and water be bought immediately. The US built houses for Bikini Atoll residents on Ujalang Atoll, but it decided to use these for the residents of Enewataka Atoll, where it was also about to begin conducting nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents alongside a runway,

Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents alongside a runway before they eventually chose Kili Island, a land of less than one square kilometre, as their next home. Also evacuated were Enewata, Krongelap and Wotho Islanders. They too thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could go home in a short period of time. They too found out later that this was not the case. Over the course of their exile, they had been moved several more times, starved half to death, cheated of their compensation and stripped of their ancestral homeland. For the next 12 years, the United States would drop increasingly

large bombs, culminating in 1954 with the Bravo shot of Operation Castle, also known as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we know of the US ever deploying. Within those 12 years, there were 67 known devices that were tested here. There could have been more, but all we know of is 67. One of them was the Castle Bravo shot that yielded 15 megatons, which when scientists calculated the equivalent of the Bravo shot would have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half times every single day for 12 years. That 15 megaton Bravo shot yielded more than 2.5 times the estimated 6 megaton explosion when it was detonated on an artificial island in the Bikini Atoll.

The device's mushroom cloud reached a height of 47,000 feet, which is 1,400 meters, and a diameter of 7 miles or 11 kilometers in about one minute. Eventually, it reached a height of 40km and a diameter of 100km. This took less than 10 minutes. It travelled more than 100m per second and covered 7000km of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot, weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favourable, but nonetheless the decision to go ahead with the first test was taken by Dr Alvin Seagraves. Joint task force 7 ships, located 30 miles east of Bikini in what was thought to be an

upwind position, began detecting high levels of radiation just two hours after the test, very soon after they began travelling south at full speed to avoid the fallout. But directly downwind of the blast and unable to travel were Rongelap and Alingan air tolls. Ariano explained the impact of the fallout there, which residents were not warned about. American service people there were warned to stay inside, not eat or drink anything. But no such warning was given to the local residents. Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors from red to yellow to orange. It was just a very, very bright morning and then they started hearing like thunderous roars a couple minutes later and it was

just like roars after roars. And it was a very frightening time because this was just not something, you know, does not happen every day. And then around 10 a.m., the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts from Rungalap Atoll, which is the closest to Bikini. The fallout had started to arrive,

and they were not sure what was going on. There was men out fishing. There was also stories from these witnesses that prior to this test, the military had gone to Rongruk and they had movie nights and they would show the community movies where it's snowing. Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo shot for the people who, despite never having any quarrel with the USA, were the recipient of the largest nuclear bomb it's ever detonated. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen here, updated monthly, at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Wrath. Join me, Danny Dreil, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.