The Marshall Islands is seeking more compensation from the US for the health and environmental damages caused by US nuclear testing as part of negotiations to extend a deal that gives the US military access to the Pacific Island nation.
Between 1946 and 1958, the US detonated 67 nuclear bombs on or above the Marshall Islands, including Castle Bravo, the largest-ever nuclear weapons test conducted by the US. The US agreed to give the Marshall Islands $150 million in the 1980s and insists the funds were a “final settlement” for the issue, but the amount fell well short of what is needed to clean up all of the radioactive debris.
Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Jack Ading testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources last week and called for more compensation from the US to renew the agreement with his country, known as the Compact of Free Association (COFA).
The US has COFAs with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau. Renewing the agreements is key to the US strategy against China in the region because it not only gives the US military access to the Pacific Island nations but allows the US to deny other militaries access to the area.
Joseph Yun, the US envoy to negotiate the COFAs, has said the US reached a deal with Micronesia and Palau, but the Marshall Islands is still holding out. The US has offered the Marshall Islands $2.3 billion in assistance over 20 years and a $700 million trust fund. But Ading said his country is seeking more compensation and detailed some of the horrors the Marshallese have faced due to US nuclear tests.
Discussing the Castle Bravo test, which took place in 1954, Ading said US military officials “learned that a change in wind patterns threatened to bring fallout to inhabited atolls that had not been evacuated. They went ahead with the test anyway without warning the islanders, who were blanketed in radioactive fallout and had no idea what it was or that it was dangerous.”
Rongelap Atoll was one of the islands covered in radioactive fallout, and Ading said that as a result, 70% of the atoll’s children under 10 developed thyroid tumors. Many women of several of the affected atolls later “gave birth to babies who resembled jellyfish and peeled grapes.”
The US evacuated Rongelap Atoll a few days after the Castle Bravo test but let the residents return three years later, knowing that the area was still heavily contaminated. In 1956, Merrill Eisenbud, a US Atomic Energy Agency official at the time, said that it would be “interesting” to see how the radiation affected the people of Rongelap Atoll.
“It would very interesting to go back and get good environmental data… so as to get a measure of the human uptake, when people live in a contaminated environment … Now, data of this type has never been available …While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners so, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice,” Eisenbud said.
A previous COFA reached between the US and the Marshall Islands established a nuclear claims tribunal, which eventually dissolved due to a lack of funding. But while it existed, the tribunal ruled that the US needed to pay billions in compensation to the Marshall Islands.
According to Ading, the total amount of unpaid damage awards issued by the tribunal is more than $3 billion. “The US has not come close to properly compensating the Marshallese people for the damage caused by the US nuclear testing program,” he said.
idiots
https://youtu.be/rc9iXHZ2Jpo
The Coming War on China
https://johnpilger.com/videos/the-coming-war-on-china
The film is marked in chapters. Chapter 1 is set in the remote Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, which the United States took over as a United Nations ‘trust territory’ in 1945 with an obligation to ‘protect the population’s health and wellbeing’. From 1946 to 1958, the US exploded the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day in the islands, contaminating its people and environment.
Filming on irradiated Bikini Atoll, which cannot be safely inhabited today, perhaps ever, Pilger describes the testing in 1954 of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Bravo, which vaporised an entire island, leaving a dark chasm a mile wide in Bikini’s beautiful lagoon. The inhabitants had been moved to a nearby atoll, Rongelap, where the ‘unexpected’ fallout endowed them with multiple cancers.
Declassified documents describe a secret programme originally designed to test the effects of radiation on mice and used in the Marshall Islands on human beings. A US Atomic Energy official of the time describes the island of Rongelap as ‘by far the most contaminated place on Earth’.
The human guinea pigs were regularly monitored and underwent scientific examination. Many suffered thyroid cancer, deformities appeared in babies and countless survivors of the original blast died from radiation poisoning. A claims tribunal was set up and quickly ran out of money. The most moving interviews in the film are with islanders, mostly elderly women, who have survived, precariously, in poverty.
Today, the largest of the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein, is home to one of the United States’s most secretive bases, a missile launch pad designed as a ‘stepping stone to Asia and beyond’ and aimed at China.
Wasn’t there a scandal a year or so ago that Navy fuel at a base in Hawaii was leaking into the water supply? I think you’re pretty low on the totem pole for restitution Marshall Islands, sorry.
“Gave birth to babies that resembled jelly fish and peeled grapes,”
Jesus Christ…
Yeh, when judgement day arrives there’ll be a very long line, … except, as ever, the Joe Bidens won’t be the ones made to pay it.
https://earth.org/us-military-pollution/
I am with switching the $3.8 billion annual aid to Israel and give it to Marshall Island people. They’re the one who deserve it…!