The Journal. - The Financial Legacy of the Nuclear Tests on Bikini Atoll

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

As part of the U.S. nuclear tests after World War II, a total of 23 nuclear weapons were detonated on and around Bikini Atoll. Eventually, the U.S. set aside funding to help the people of Bikini and their descendants. But, as WSJ’s Dan Frosch reports, those compensation funds have been drained. Further Reading: -Nuclear Tests Ravaged Their Home. Their Leaders Drained a Compensation Fund Dry.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1946, at the dawn of the Cold War, the U.S. ramped up its tests of nuclear bombs. Many miles away, the raging might of searing flame, crushing force, and deadly radioactive water is seen falling in a killing mist. One test site was the American territory of Bikini Atoll. Over 12 years, a total of 23 atomic bombs were detonated at and around the chain of islands.

But before it was a nuclear test site, it was home to more than 100 people. The U.S. government evacuated those islanders ahead of the experiments. And for decades, they were nuclear nomads, hopping from island to island, often facing harsh conditions, sometimes starvation.

Eventually, the U.S. government agreed to set aside funding to help the people of Bikini and their descendants. Descendants like Jessie Elme, whose grandmother was 15 when she was forced to leave Bikini Atoll. Three islands were disintegrated and they can never go back. It's radioactive. They can never go back. It's radioactive. Jessie now lives in Florida, but she has relied on the funds to help with everyday expenses. I would be able to get diapers or baby food or whatever. It would help pay for school books and papers and pens and things like that.

Those payments were dependable until earlier this year. In February, we just stopped getting our payments. You know, the date came up, it passed, and then another two weeks passed by, and now it turned into a month. And then after that, the next payment, and we're like, hmm, so is there no money anymore? Something's going on here. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, August 18th. Coming up on the show, compensation funds were set aside for the descendants of Bikini Atoll. What happened to their money? Your teen requested a ride, but this time, not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride, but this time, not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an

Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. Where exactly is Bikini Atoll? It's kind of in between the Philippines and Hawaii. That's sort of a good way of looking at it. That's our colleague Dan Frosch. It's literally sort of a speck of an island or islands, I should say, that almost look like a bracelet or an anklet, if you're looking at it from above. It's in the middle of the South Pacific.

Bikini Atoll is part of the larger chain of islands known as the Marshall Islands. More than 80 years after those nuclear tests, Bikini Atoll is still uninhabitable. So what would you find if you were to visit Bikini Atoll now? If you were walking around on the beach, what would you see? Can you drink the well water, lay on the sand? So you would find a largely deserted series of islands.

You can't drink the groundwater there. According to researchers, it is still radioactive, as are the coconuts. And you will see coconut crabs who typically feast on these coconuts, but are also radioactive because of the nuclear fallout from, you know, decades earlier. There were 167 people living on Bikini Atoll ahead of the blasts. The U.S. government relocated those families and told them two things. First, that the residents would be able to return to Bikini eventually. And second...

What you're doing is in service to humanity. It's going to help. I mean, they were told that their actions would help end all wars. Quite a promise to be making. That's right. After years of displacement, descendants of Bikini were still struggling. So in the 1980s, Congress decided to intervene. The U.S. government did several things that they thought would help the Bikini Atoll people deal with the hardship that they had endured.

The government set up two separate funds to help. The first pot of money was a $110 million trust fund. Now, this money was initially intended to clean up Bikini Atoll and hopefully at some point get people back onto the islands, chained to their homeland. But it quickly became clear that cleanup from 23 nuclear bombs was not feasible. So that money went to the remote government representing the Bikinian diaspora spread across other islands. And so the U.S. government decided to let that money be used to help the Bikinians, who were essentially living in existence in exile, operate their own government and pay for various expenses, schools, housing, scholarships,

schools, housing, scholarships, operating expenses for their government in the two places that they had largely resettled, which were Kili and Ejit. Think of it as an operations fund, and the Bikinian government had some freedom to spend this money the way they wanted to. The second fund was for compensating Bikinians and their descendants. We created something called the Bikini Claims Trust, a totally different fund. And the purpose of that fund

was to disperse quarterly payments to Bikinians and their descendants, which in a single year typically amounted to about $500. This fund allocated $75 million for compensation. It was to be doled out every three months to some 7,000 descendants of those original residents, people now spread across the Marshall Islands and the United States. So the people of Bikini Atoll had two funds worth millions, one main operations fund for running the remote government,

and a second fund for compensation checks. For decades, the operations fund was overseen by the U.S. Interior Department. And every year, the Bikinian people would go to the Interior Department and say, we need several million dollars to help operate our government and to build houses on the island of Kili and Ajit where our people are living. And there would be a back and forth and they'd finally come up with a figure. And that money would be used for those purposes. And there would be a sort of an extensive auditing process to ensure that the money from that fund was used for exactly what the

Bikinian people and their government said it was going to be used for. And that process went largely unencumbered until 2017. And then something happened in 2017 that would change everything for the Bikinian people and how that money was dispersed. A new leader with big promises would take charge. That's after the break. At Air Miles, we help you collect more moments. So instead of scrolling through photos of friends on social media,

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Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. In 2016, the Bikinian diaspora elected a new mayor. His name is Anderson G. Bass. G. Bass and the government of Bikini Atoll don't actually run things from Bikini Atoll, since the islands are basically deserted. They work remotely from Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. As mayor, G-Bus called on Washington to give Bikinians more autonomy over the operations fund. He said he wanted to put some of it in the stock market and leverage it for investments in tourism and infrastructure.

This money is not enough to resettle the people of Bikini. At the same time, as we encounter many challenges through the time of climate change and as we try to survive on these isolated islands with not enough financial and facing health issues and education problems. All this comes together and we try to make sure we provide for the people. And this money is not enough to relocate. Jeebus, like some others in the bikini community, thought that, you know, the U.S. government should not be controlling this pot of money,

that the limits on what it could be used for were too restrictive and were impeding the advancement of the Bikinian people, and were really just sort of an extension of a paternalistic colonialist past. Eventually, the U.S. government gave over control of the money. The Interior Department agrees with him and says, you know what, you're right. We'll let you guys manage this fund. We'll let you withdraw as much money as you want at any time. We're out of here. Almost immediately, they went on a colossal spending spree. Huh. What were they buying? Any and everything you can imagine, really. A new fleet of government cars, a new pickup truck for

the mayor, a new jet plane as an investment that they hoped would revive scuba tourism. Their idea was, well, maybe we can use this plane to make scuba diving in the area more accessible, to bring in more divers. But they had not unfortunately finalized the deal with one of the airline operators in the area. A lot of these investments tanked, like that $3.25 million airplane. Dan says it's been sitting idle at an airport in Taiwan for two years. So this plane has not been used for this burgeoning scuba business that the bikini leaders had envisioned. Some land that they had bought in Hawaii and had hoped to develop is sitting vacant, also has not been developed. So all these revenue-generating

investments that bikini leaders had made had really failed to deliver on the money that would have been used to replenish this fund. Before the Jibas administration took control, the main operations fund for the Bikinian government totaled nearly $60 million. Within six years, it's been drained to less than 0.2% of that amount. What struck me most about this story was the brazenness of the spending on the part of the leadership of the Bikinian people. Like people could see that.

People could see it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of trips. There was even a check that we viewed in our reporting that paid for the mayor's vacation. And you can imagine that it adds up. Jeebas attributed criticisms of his government's spending to political opponents. The money to run the government was gone. So if you live on Kili and you work for the government,

you're not getting a check anymore because there's no money in this fund that was used to pay government employees to operate the government. Power on the island is having to be rationed because there's no money in this fund to use to pay the bills for electricity. And so the G-Bus government turned to that second pot of money, the compensation fund. According to G-Bus government turned to that second pot of money. The compensation fund. According to G-Bus,

there was still $29 million in there, earmarked for quarterly checks for Bikinians and their descendants. The Bikinian leaders say, okay, we gotta put the power back on, we gotta pay our employees. Let's go into this claims trust fund and start getting the government back up again. But there was a problem. This trust fund called the claims trust fund has very strict

parameters on how much money you can withdraw per year and very strict parameters on when you can withdraw again after you've exceeded your annual limits. Dipping into that compensation fund set off alarm bells. And while Jeebas and his team say they believed they could keep withdrawing money from it... It turns out they were wrong. And once they withdrew money from that trust fund to get the government back up again, the trustee said to them, well, wait a minute, you've reached your limits. You can't withdraw any more money from it. So that is where we are now.

These quarterly payments have stopped, and there's no indication of when the spigot will be turned back on. Two funds, one completely drained on that spending spree, the other locked up for the foreseeable future. The Interior Department has referred the issue to its inspector general for investigation. Jibas has defended his actions, saying that the U.S. government never provided enough money to meet the needs of Bikinians. He added that some of the investments were successful and others might still make money. He also blamed the administrators of the trust for barring access to the compensation fund. In the meantime, 7,000 Bikinians and their descendants have been left in the lurch. Many of them need those quarterly payments. Some descendants who ended up on Keeley earn as little as $3 an hour. What does this story tell us about the long and lasting impact of those 20th century nuclear tests?

You know, that's a really good question. And I think if there's anything to be learned from what's happening to the Bikinian people right now, it's that the fallout from these nuclear tests did not simply manifest itself in radioactive ash and, you know, elevated radiation levels, that it's impacting people to this day financially, culturally, in ways that are really hard to quantify. And then the other sort of question becomes, what is the U.S. government's role still? culturally, culturally, in ways that are really hard to quantify. And then the other sort of question becomes, what is the U.S. government's role still? Is it their responsibility to make things right, to make sure, you know, that Bikinian's financial situation is completely settled? Or can the government simply wash its hands of the whole thing and let Bikinian's sort

of fend for themselves. What is America's responsibility to these people? Jesse Elme, the Bikinian descendant, says her grandmother lives on Keeley Island and has no income besides the compensation payments. Jesse has joined protests, and her sister is running against GBOS in an upcoming election. The United States promised to take care of the people of Bikini if they would move and leave their island so that they could do their bomb testing. They trusted them, and they just, they failed them. failed them. Now, after all of that, their own leaders decided to let them down by not taking care of what little bit they had. And there they are, Friday, August 18th.

Additional reporting in this episode by Christine Maiduke. The Journal is a co-production of Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal. Thank you. Sarah Platt Alan Rodriguez Espinosa Heather Rogers Jonathan Sanders Pierce Singhy Jeevika Verma Lisa Wang Catherine Whalen and me, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner

Nathan Singapak and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Catherine Anderson Peter Leonard Bobby Lord Emma Munger

So Wiley and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Nicole Pasolka. Thanks for listening. See you on Monday.