ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607150117
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES J. HANLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
NOTE: above
DISPLACED BY AN atomic bomb test in 1946, these Pacific islanders are demanding the United States restore what it nearly ruined.
On a July morning a half-century ago, the sun rose twice over the mid-Pacific, at the dawn of the atomic age.
A B-29 SuperFortress called ``Dave's Dream,'' a silver glint bearing in from the south at 28,000 feet, approached a ring of sandy islets, white specks in a blue eternity, and opened its bomb-bay doors.
It was 9 a.m., the sun floating up the eastern sky, when the bombardier unleashed his payload, and bathed the ancient sea in an unearthly new light.
Eight miles away, watching from the USS Mt. McKinley, 19-year-old Army clerk Dick Anderson typed out what he saw:
`` ... a huge mass of flames approximately two miles in diameter ... we could feel a wave of heat ... a very beautiful color ... it reminds one of pink cotton candy.''
By 2 p.m., Anderson's ship was entering the lagoon because, he supposed in his diary, the radioactivity was quickly subsiding.
Later that July of 1946, the U.S. military exploded a second atomic bomb in the Pacific lagoon. This time Juda, head man of 167 people taken from the atoll, watched from the Mt. McKinley. If their island survived the test, he said, his people would return.
``Because it is home.''
To most of us it's a swimsuit. But to Juda's children, to Dick Anderson, to thousands of others who were there, Bikini is a tragedy, a story without end, one that goes on even in this 50th anniversary year.
This October, the National Academy of Sciences is expected to announce results of a study to determine whether sailors and soldiers present at the 1946 tests have died at unusually high rates, possibly because of radiation exposure. It could bolster the case for more government compensation.
And in November, the Bikinians, with millions of dollars won in claims against the United States, plan to begin a long-awaited ``scrape,'' removing radioactive topsoil from their island to clear the way, at last, for their return.
Why, after a half-century, are questions still unanswered, exiles still uprooted?
``It can be summed up in the arrogance and ignorance and secrecy of the U.S. atomic testing program,'' said Jonathan Weisgall, the Bikinians' Washington lawyer.
In 1946, that ignorance came into play.
Pentagon planners didn't know what atom bombs, like those recently dropped on Japan, would do to a fleet of warships. Physicists said they could check this via laboratory calculations. But the admirals wanted the real thing.
Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, seized from Japan in the just-ended war, was chosen for ``Operation Crossroads.''
Two dozen tiny islands looping around a 240-square-mile lagoon, 2,100 miles southwest of Hawaii, the atoll was remote from sea and air routes. Its wind was predictable and its population sparse - Juda's people, the sturdy, taciturn Micronesians living on the biggest island, one-square-mile Bikini.
They were moved in March 1946 to Rongerik atoll, 120 miles east, and told they could return after the tests.
Bikini's lagoon soon filled with more than 90 surplus warships, including the U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga and the Japanese battleship Nagato, to await ``Dave's Dream.'' Dozens of working ships, carrying 42,000 military and civilians, took part in the operation.
Radio and newsreels gave the world its first ``live'' look at the stunning power of the atom. Just days later a Paris designer was inspired to name his shocking new bathing suit for the far-off atoll.
But back at Bikini, the impact was less than expected. The bomb, equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, was off-target and sank only five vessels.
The second 20-kiloton ``shot,'' on July 25, was detonated 90 feet below the lagoon's surface. This one sank a flotilla.
The blast heaved a massive column of water more than a mile upward. The outward force flung the giant Saratoga a half-mile, to sink along with 11 other ships. Dozens of vessels were drenched with radioactivity from the collapsing ``mushroom.''
In the days that followed, Navy clean-up crews boarded the ships left afloat to try to save them by swabbing away contamination.
They had no protective clothing. Radiation monitoring equipment was unsophisticated. Even crews on outlying ships must have been exposed, Anderson says today.
``We desalinated lagoon water for drinking, cooking, showering. That had to be a major source of radiation,'' said the Chatsworth, Calif., retiree, who has had five operations for skin cancer.
Navy commanders eventually gave up the decontamination effort. The ships were towed to sea to use for target practice. And by the 1970s, veterans were filing disability claims for cancer and other illnesses they blamed on Bikini or other test-site duty.
Most were turned down. The Pentagon insisted the radiation exposure had been low, a contention the veterans angrily dismiss.
``Lies and stonewalling and simply ignoring us are the weapons they use,'' said Crossroads participant Oscar Rosen, a retired history professor who heads the National Association of Atomic Veterans.
In the 1980s, a congressional review raised doubts about the Pentagon's assessment of exposure, and an embarrassed National Academy of Sciences had to withdraw a report finding no unusual mortality among test veterans, conceding the research was flawed. But the science remains inconclusive.
The atomic veterans, meanwhile, have made headway politically, winning congressional approval in 1988 for disability payments for a limited list of cancers.
The veterans now want the number of these ``presumptive'' diseases increased, and they back legislation - opposed by the Clinton administration - to pay compensation to veterans' children suffering from listed cancers.
``There simply is no scientific basis for assuming the offspring of radiation-exposed veterans have been so injured,'' said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jesse Brown.
The new National Academy report, looking at mortality and its causes, could be a turning point for the veterans' campaign. But Rosen is pessimistic, and his group has begun its own effort to survey atomic veterans' health.
For the Bikinians, the turning point came eight years after Crossroads, and it was a point of no return.
``Midnight, March 1, 1954. That was key,'' said Weisgall, their lawyer. ``That's when a decision to postpone the Bravo shot could have spared Bikini.''
In 1946, the Bikinians thought they would return home within months. But the tests stretched into the 1950s, and in 1954 the ``Castle Bravo'' thermonuclear blast unexpectedly showered Bikini island with deadly, long-lasting fallout.
The ``predictable'' winds had failed, shifting east - toward the island - from their regular northward direction. Recently uncovered documents show that officials knew 12 hours beforehand the winds were changing, but they decided not to postpone the test.
By the time of Bravo, the Bikinians were living 500 miles to the south, on Kili Island.
During two years at Rongerik, an atoll poor in fish, the displaced islanders had almost starved, despite the U.S. Navy's pledge to care for them. In 1948, they were resettled on Kili, a lonely, rockbound isle without a lagoon and with no means of self-sufficiency. In plywood shacks, they survived on canned food as wards of the U.S. government.
Although testing at Bikini ended in 1958, its soil remained ``hot.'' But in 1969, after the Atomic Energy Commission declared the island safe, more than 100 Bikinians moved back.
The AEC calculations were wrong. The returnees were ingesting high levels of cesium-137 from Bikini's coconuts, which were drawing the radioactive material up from the soil. In 1978, they were shipped back to Kili.
By then, the Bikinians had enlisted Weisgall to press their case in court and congressional corridors. Step by step in the 1980s, they won almost $200 million from the U.S. government, to support both daily living and Bikini's decontamination.
The trust funds, producing annual income of $2,000 per individual, are getting stretched. The Bikinian population, under 200 in 1946, has exploded to 2,200 because of a high birth rate and outside marriages.
Nine hundred remain on Kili; others are scattered around the Marshall Islands; and 300 students, mostly primary and high schoolers, are in the United States.
``Kili is like a jail,'' said Andy Bill, a Bikinian who lives in Majuro, capital of the now independent Marshalls. ``Everyone there will want to go back home.''
The big ``scrape'' scheduled to begin in November is expected to strip 15 inches of cesium-laced soil from 100 acres, the Bikini village area where deteriorating huts from the 1970s stand.
But questions remain: Where will the soil go? Will the first rebuilding phase take 10 years, as some believe? Can the Bikinians afford to later dig up the island's other 500 acres?
The islanders also wonder how many of them will go home.
Bikini has limited water supplies and limited opportunities for a livelihood, especially since radioactivity elsewhere in the atoll will keep them from roaming the islands freely, as their forefathers did, to gather coconuts and other food.
``There's no sense going back if all the islands aren't cleaned up, all the atoll,'' said one leader, Henchi Balos, who left Bikini as an 8-month-old in his mother's arms.
How much would a total cleanup cost? ``Another $200 million would be enough, I think.''
Official Washington won't speak ill of the Bikinians, in view of what was done to them. But it will draw lines.
``With the budget constraints we are under, I think it's highly unlikely we are going to be doing anything like that,'' said a key congressional staff member on Bikinian matters.
Whatever happens, the homing instinct won't die, said Jack Niedenthal, a Majuro-based representative for the Bikinians.
``They will tell you that Bikini is their gift from God,'' said the ex-Peace Corps volunteer, who is married to a Bikinian. ``They won't all 2,200 just plop down there. But everybody would build some kind of dwelling.''
LENGTH: Long : 182 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. This atomic blast, which took place July 25, 1946,by CNBended the Bikinians' life as they knew it. Graphic: Map by AP.