Why Nobody Lives on Bikini Atoll.

Have you ever been to the Marshall Islands?

If so, what you would have found is a nation of some 42,000 people found in the north Pacific Ocean. The islands are inhabited by the Marshallese people, a subgroup of Micronesians, who are closely related to other Pacific Islander ethnic groups and who speak the Marshallese language.

The islands are roughly equidistant between Australia, Japan, and the US state of Hawaii. Previously occupied by Japan, the islands were taken over by the US during World War II, and remain a minor dependency to this day.

The island nation’s territory comprises five main islands, a total of 1,220 smaller islands, and around 29 coral atolls.

And it is one of these atolls—currently bereft of human habitation—which is the most famous of all, and whose name is a byword for the astonishing thermonuclear testing which occurred there in 1940s and 1950s.

It goes by the name Bikini Atoll.

Let’s explore.

Background

The Marshall Islands’ relationship with the United States is somewhat unique, stemming from its time as a Trust Territory under U.S. administration after World War II.

The isolated islands have a history of human habitation going back millennia, being first settled possibly as far back as 1200 BCE. But by the late nineteenth century, they’d become a German protectorate and part of its colonial empire. The islands were one of an isolated batch of German possessions in the Asian and Pacific hemisphere, alongside so-called ‘German Samoa’ (now just ‘Samoa’) and ‘German New Guinea’, (about half of modern Papua New Guinea and the outlying Solomon Islands).

As World War I began, the Japanese Army invaded, and retained control of the islands when Germany’s possessions were divvied up in 1919. This lasted until Autumn 1944, when the US army’s pacific campaign began to force the Japanese back, and the islands came under American control.

The Japanese had kept a garrison of up to 28,000 soldiers on the islands during the war, but ground fortifications were sub-par, and Tokyo decided that the Marshall Islands would serve only as a part of a delay action campaign. Following a series of battles in 1944, the Americans swept away the piecemeal Japanese defence, and the islands became a springboard for further campaigns on Japan’s home islands in the latter stages of the war. Still, stubborn Japanese resistance continued on some of the islands until the very end of the war, when the US dropped the notorious Fat Man and Little Boy bombs on Japan in August 1945. Following this, Japan’s resistance finally unravelled, and the remaining Japanese on Mili Atoll in the southeastern Marshall Islands became the first overseas garrison to surrender to the US on the 22nd of August 1945.

After the war, the US entered an agreement with the UN to administer the Marshall Islands as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The islands gained independence in the 1980s through what was known as the Compact of Free Association.

Nevertheless, the Marshall Islands continue to rely heavily on American economic assistance and defence guarantees, and its currency remains the US dollar. By virtue of the Compact, Marshallese citizens also avail of visa-free access to the U.S. But the relationship has been very far from one-directional. The islands have a complex legacy as a site for U.S. nuclear testing during the mid-20th century, leaving enduring health and environmental impacts on local communities.

Central to all was Bikini Atoll.

Bikini Atoll

Bikini is a coral atoll renowned for its complex history.

It was first discovered by western explorers in the early 1800s, as Russian naval officer Otto von Kotzebue and his crew landed on Bikini. Kotzebue—a Baltic German serving in the Russian Navy—gave the area the German name Eschscholtz Atoll, which was maintained when the atoll became a German possession late in the same century. When the area fell under the control of the Japanese, the local name Bikini was reinstated, and the Japanese military kept a small garrison there as an outpost for a larger base on nearby Kwajalein Atoll.

Kwajalein became the site of ferocious fighting between the Japanese and US armies in the summer of 1944. It is thought that of the nearly 8,800 personnel deployed by Japan to the atoll, including forced laborers, almost 7,800 were killed during the three-day Battle of Kwajelein. Over on Bikini, only five Japanese survived the US attack on their outpost as the battle progressed. These quickly killed themselves as the islands threatened to fall under US occupation, and American forces moved in without a fuss.

Around the same time, positive news was coming for the US out of tests conducted at Los Alamos in New Mexico. The atomic bomb was ready, and decisively ended the second world war the following year. But the US had its sights on even grander weapons, and on an isolated location wherein these could be conducted well out of sight of the public.

And they now had a perfectly suitable patch of island territory within which to explore this idea.

Nuclear Testing on Bikini

Bikini Atoll’s involvement in nuclear testing began in 1946 when the United States selected it for Operation Crossroads, a series of atomic bomb tests intended to study the effects of nuclear explosions on naval vessels.

At that time, the native community of the atoll numbered just 167 people. Encouraged by the destructive effects of a land-based explosion, the US now wanted to secure a site for testing nuclear weapons on American warships. So shortly after the war ended, President Harry S. Truman directed Army and Navy officials to choose a suitable site in the Marshall Islands. Bikini, being far away from both regular sea and air traffic, seemed like it would make an ideal location.

With this in mind, Navy Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, military governor of the Marshall Islands, arrived on the atoll in February 1946. He managed to convince the small community of islanders to relocate elsewhere with the assurance that they could return once tests were completed. The islanders agreed and selected resettlement on Rongerik, another Marshall Island atoll about 140 miles away from Bikini. They moved out in March 1946.

Nuclear testing on Bikini began in the summer of the same year.

From 1946 until 1958, the US military carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, including 23 on Bikini alone. Initially, this focused on further developing the atomic bomb, and the first test of Operation Crossroads took place on July 1st 1946. The so-called Able test saw a bomb nicknamed Gilda dropped on Bikini lagoon by a B-29 bomber.

It missed its target and exploded 520 feet above the service, failing to destroy most of the ships placed in the lagoon but successfully wiping out one-third of the lab animals left on board. A further test—Crossroads Baker—was carried out in the following weeks, but the US army staff soon felt further atomic testing held no value, and a third test planned for 1947 was called off.

This didn’t mean that the military was done with Bikini, however. Instead, focus was shifted on developing a more advanced weapon: the Hydrogen Bomb. The H-bomb had the potential to be as much as ten times more destructive than the atomic bombs which levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the landmark explosion of the first bomb, codenamed ‘Ivy Mike’, took place on nearby Enewatak Atoll in 1952.

The detonation of Ivy Mike was a success, and hydrogen bomb testing continued in the area, including at both Enewatak and Bikini. But what followed was the most destructive test of all, carried out back at Bikini lagoon in March 1954, and codenamed “Castle Bravo”.

Castle Bravo produced a 15-megaton blast, about three times bigger than what was planned. The explosion vaporised three of the islands in the atoll, and tore a mile-wide crater in the bottom of Bikini lagoon. The fallout scattered radioactive debris over a vast area, including inhabited islands, causing severe health and environmental repercussions. The blast also contaminated the 23 crew members of an unfortunate Japanese fishing vessel located 80 miles away, one of whom died of radiation sickness six months later.

The Castle Bravo test became the worst radiological disaster in US history and generated worldwide backlash against atmospheric nuclear testing. It also severely contaminated Rongelap Atoll, located about 100 miles east of Bikini, resulting in the displacement of its own population further south to the Marshall Islands capital, Majuro.

These would later return in 1957, but lingering health defects caused their residence to remain untenable, and they were evacuated for good from the atoll by a Greenpeace vessel in 1985.

Fate of the Bikini Islanders

One year after their displacement to Rongerik Atoll, the displaced residents of Bikini were not doing too good.

As Operation Crossroads got off the ground, the Islanders had been effectively been left to fend for themselves in what turned out to be a highly inhospitable new environment. Rongerik was smaller than Bikini, and had an inadequate water and food supply. The islanders also discovered that its coconut trees and local food crops produced very little yield, and there was even a deep-rooted traditional belief that the atoll was inhabited by evil spirits. By 1947, they were starving due to the lack of food.

Moreover, this promise that they would be returned to Bikini turned out to be spurious. The tests soon rendered their homeland a nuclear wasteland. In total, between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 23 nuclear detonations at Bikini Atoll, which left radiation levels dangerously high for decades, and obliterated most of the surrounding flora and fauna. Even on surrounding islands, local populations turned out to be far from safe, and birth defects and high rates of cancer began to rise among the populations of the island nation.

With their home now unlivable, the islanders chose to be relocated once again: this time to Kili Island, nearly 500 miles south of Bikini Atoll. They didn’t fare much better there, and began to suffer once more from the effects of starvation. During this period, the Bikinians signed an agreement with the US, turning over full use rights to Bikini Atoll.

According to the agreement, any future claims by the islanders would be made against Bikini leaders, and not against the US government. In return, they were given full rights to Kili and several islands in another nearby atoll named Jaluit. They would also receive a lump sum of $25,000 in cash, and an additional $300,000 trust fund with a semi-annual interest payment of around $15 per person per year.

Still the islanders yearned for a return to their home atoll. It didn’t help that Kili turned out to be little better than Rongerik, vulnerable to typhoons and high waves. By the late 1960s, the islanders had had enough. In 1968, President Lyndon B Johnson signed an order which allowed the community to return to Bikini if they chose to do so—which is exactly what many of them did, in spite of the significant risks.

The US Department of Defense consented to a clean-up operation to make the island inhabitable, which included the replanting of coconut trees, construction of a housing development, and the ultimate relocation of the community. By the mid-1970s, around 100 Bikinians resided on the atoll once more.

But the resettlement hit a wall not long after. In 1978, radiation levels in local foods were found to be unsafe, especially the island’s coconuts: which were discovered to contain high levels of the radioactive element caesium-137.

The islanders were displaced again, and returned to Kili Island, where most have remained ever since.

Bikini Today

Unfortunately, the legacy of some of the most destructive nuclear testing ever carried out by humankind lingers heavily over Bikini Atoll.

Its islands remain uninhabited, with the exception of a few seasonal caretakers and some infrastructure for occasional research and tourism.

The atoll’s radioactive contamination has transformed it into an accidental ecological refuge, with coral reefs and abundant marine life flourishing in the absence of human interference. Another curious phenomenon was observed there in the period after the nuclear testing, as a series of so-called “floating islands” began to appear in the lagoon. These were actually huge slabs of coral reef blasted loose by detonations, and buoyed to the surface by gases from the seafloor. Especially in the wake of the Castle Bravo test, this eerie spectacle was reported by multiple observers, although the masses eventually sank back down or eroded away.

The Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. In a descriptive test on its website, UNESCO listed the criteria for its recognition as a site which confirmed that mankind was entering a nuclear era, and which bears witness to the consequences of the nuclear tests on the civil populations in terms of population displacement and public-health issues.

The islanders have, since the 1970s, been locked in attempts to receive appropriate compensation for their displacement and the various health defects they have suffered. A series of funds were established by the US in the following years, including the Resettlement Trust Fund for the People of Bikini with a budget of about $20 million in 1982. In 1983, the Marshall Islands secured its independence with the signing of the Compact of Free Association. Part of the compact included a reparations provision for the Bikini islanders of $75 million payable over 15 years.

However, over the years, the reparation funds and health coverage provided by the US to the islanders has dwindled. Moreover, an independent international tribunal established in 1988 ordered the US to pay the modern equivalent of $2.3 billion to the Marshall Islands in healthcare and resettlement costs. The US refused, arguing that its duty of compensation ended with its Compact payments in the 1990s. The Marshall Islands remain engaged in an attempt to secure this compensation from the US until this day.

By the mid-2000s, the population of Bikini islanders and descendents had grown to over 3,000. None have returned to live on the nuclear atoll, and the majority now live either on Kili, in the Marshall Islands capital Majuro, or in the United States itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the population of the Marshall Islands?

The Marshall Islands have a population of approximately 42,000 people.

What is the history of the Marshall Islands during World War II?

The Marshall Islands were occupied by Japan during World War II. The US took control of the islands in 1944, and the remaining Japanese garrison surrendered in August 1945.

What is Bikini Atoll known for?

Bikini Atoll is known for being the site of extensive nuclear testing conducted by the United States from 1946 to 1958.

How many nuclear tests were conducted on Bikini Atoll?

A total of 23 nuclear tests were conducted on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958.

What was the impact of the Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll?

The Castle Bravo test in 1954 produced a 15-megaton blast, vaporizing three islands, creating a mile-wide crater, and scattering radioactive debris over a vast area, causing severe health and environmental repercussions.

What happened to the original inhabitants of Bikini Atoll?

The original inhabitants of Bikini Atoll were relocated to Rongerik Atoll in 1946. Due to inhospitable conditions and radiation contamination, they were later moved to Kili Island and other locations.

What is the current status of Bikini Atoll?

Bikini Atoll remains uninhabited due to radioactive contamination. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and serves as an ecological refuge with thriving coral reefs and marine life.

What compensation has the US provided to the Bikini islanders?

The US established various funds for the Bikini islanders, including the Resettlement Trust Fund with a budget of about $20 million in 1982 and a reparations provision of $75 million payable over 15 years in 1983. However, the islanders continue to seek additional compensation.

Where do the Bikini islanders live now?

The majority of Bikini islanders and their descendants now live on Kili Island, in the Marshall Islands capital Majuro, or in the United States.

What is the relationship between the Marshall Islands and the United States?

The Marshall Islands gained independence in the 1980s through the Compact of Free Association but continue to rely heavily on American economic assistance and defense guarantees. Marshallese citizens have visa-free access to the U.S.

Sources

• Original Places video: Why Nobody Lives on Bikini Atoll.
• https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=73
• https://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/html/WWII_Pix/Mili_Surrender.html
• https://www.distance.to/Bikini-Atoll-UNESCO-Heritage-Site,Bikini-Atoll,MHL/Rongerik,Rongrik-Atoll,MHL
• https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1339/
• https://time.com/4954082/hydrogen-bomb-atomic-bomb/
• https://www.history.com/news/nuclear-bomb-tests-bikini-atoll-facts
• https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/castle-bravo/
• https://www.distance.to/Bikini-Atoll-UNESCO-Heritage-Site,Bikini-Atoll,MHL/Kili-Island,MHL
• https://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/html/History_Varia/Bikini_History/Bikini_History.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/25/endless-fallout-marshall-islands-pacific-idyll-still-facing-nuclear-blight-77-years-on
• Hero image source by William Keith Nelson (Rosswnelson at English Wikipedia) / openverse, by-sa.