Pod Insights ABC Rewind 02 | Rainbow Warrior | The Day of the two suns About this episode The Atomic age arrives in the Marshall Islands as the US turns the region into a nuclear testing ground. But after one massive detonation, nothing will ever be the same for the people of Rongelap Atoll.
Transcript 3,889 words · 14 speakers
0:10 Speaker 00 In the last episode, on the night of July 10th, 1985, the lives of Greenpeace and New Zealand were forever changed by the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. We looked at why this happened and how the geopolitics of both New Zealand and France, with their unique history of clashing over nuclear testing, had heightened the sinking itself from a single military operation against an NGO to a full-blown international incident. The success of Greenpeace and its specific anti-nuclear operations was part of France's motivation for taking such unprecedented force against a supposed international ally. But what exactly was that Greenpeace success? And where had they been?
1:01 Speaker 00 March 1st, 1954.
1:05 Speaker 01 Cire, yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh. Yeh, ma, yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh.
1:13 Speaker 00 It's Monday morning on Rongelap, one of the 29 atolls in the Marshall Islands, located just north of the equator in the western Pacific Ocean.
1:23 Speaker 00 A young girl, seven-year-old Mina Titus, is sleeping safe and secure in her family home.
1:29 Speaker 01 Keh, ru, zil, a, pa, ma, yeh, yeh, yeh. Yeh, leng, pu, dar, yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh.
1:38 Speaker 00 This is Mina speaking her native Marshallese. What she's saying is everyone was woken up by the sound of a blast. Running outside, she sees the sun rising in the east. At the same time, another sun appears to be rising in the west as a giant fireball forms. Confused, she and other curious children ignore their parents' calls to go back indoors. On Rongelap, this is a day unlike any other there has ever been or will ever be again. It is a day of two suns. What child could resist such a spectacle?
2:17 Speaker 00 Not seven-year-old Mina. For her, two sons are a marvel. But the adults on the island know how the world works. They travel. Had a world war going on all around them ten years earlier. They know about the awesome technological advancements being made elsewhere. And they know a second son means something is very, very wrong.
2:43 Speaker 01 Joroloa, ai vodu, ai vodu vunu. Ni no yu atayu, unre vatan mi javu.
2:49 Speaker 00 Mina says she saw something unbelievable. White ash falling from the sky, covering everything: houses, food, water. Was this snow? Even adults are drawn outside to see something they had only read about. Two sons in the sky might sound like the stuff of myths and legends, but how can it be snowing in the Pacific? The answer lies 120 kilometers away, on the nearby Bikini Atoll, where a seven-kilometer-wide fireball has been created by the largest nuclear explosion the United States has ever produced.
3:27 Speaker 01 No, unju, ni, ai vodu, siu, ni, paru, vodu.
3:34 Speaker 00 Mina believes going outside when the adults told her not to took a toll on her body.
3:50 Speaker 00 The massive detonation that Mina, her family, and her neighbors saw and felt will eventually result in global calls for an end to atmospheric testing as well as straining relations between the United States and several countries across the Pacific. When the US finally ends their Pacific tests, eight years later, it will be far too late for the Rongelabus, who are caught in the fallout of the 15-megaton Castle Bravo detonation.
4:26 Speaker 00 I'm James Nokise and this is The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. This is episode two, The Day of Two Suns.
4:39 Speaker 00 Seventy years after the Castle Bravo detonation, the Rongelap Peace Communities live in several parts of the Marshals, but not on Rongelap itself.
4:50 Speaker 02 So Ronge Town was created by our local government and they built a couple of houses for Rongelap Peace people who are not living on Mejato. But it's a very small community.
5:05 Speaker 00 This is Eve Burns, a local reporter at The Marshall Islands Journal, whose grandmother was one of those children in Rongelap back in 1954. Eve's 26, an athlete who represents the Marshals in the 400 metres. She's guiding RNZ producer Justin Gregory and myself around Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands.
5:27 Speaker 02 My great-grandma's Brina Rgulung, she never shied away from speaking her mind. Like if an American kind of acts all high and mighty in front of her, she would always remind them that they wouldn't be on the map if it wasn't for us, if it wasn't for the testing that they did on us, on our islands.
5:57 Speaker 00 Justin and I arrive in Majuro a week before the 4th of July, which somehow makes us right on time for the Marshall Islands' official 4th of July celebrations, time to coincide with the local US military leaders being in town. The locals call it Bold July. It's surreal. The president of the Marshals is there. Senior staff from the American Diplomatic Service are there. A military band has been flown in from Hawaii and sung Foo Fighters. The local staff let me steal extra American flag cake. We are asked not to record. I steal more cake. And in the paper the following week,
6:42 Speaker 00 there are thirteen pages of adverts from locals celebrating US independence.
6:59 Speaker 03 Really differentiates Marsh Island from the other Pacific is that we are an Atoll nation.
7:05 Speaker 00 That's Kathy Jetnil Kitchener, Marshallese poet and the country's first published author.
7:11 Speaker 03 It's like a string of islands. We're only two meters above sea level and there's no mountains at all. So it's very, very flat and there's no higher ground to go to. There's a closer sort of awareness of the ocean.
7:28 Speaker 00 To the Marshallese, their islands remain the center of the universe, the center of their lives.
7:34 Speaker 03 Land is incredibly important to Marshallese people because it's so limited. You know, it's very precious. It's passed down from generation to generation. You inherit it through your mother's side or matrilineal side. And a lot of times the land that you count as your family's land, it extends not just from the land but out into the lagoon and to the ocean side also. You know, when there's different reports about Marsh Island, they tend to focus on the scarcity of the land, how hard it is to live there. But when you talk to Marshallese people, especially those who are elders and have been raised much closer to the land, they're able to say, well, actually that land is where you get all the birds. That land is where we go to harvest arrowroot.
8:18 Speaker 03 That land is where we go to harvest pandanus and coconut trees for copra. You know, like there's an awareness of where you're able to get the different resources that you need.
8:30 Speaker 00 Unfortunately, though, history often depressingly shows us when you live in a beautiful, isolated tropical paradise, colonizers will eventually show up to do some colonizing.
8:43 Speaker 00 About ninety-eight percent of the Marshall Island territory is water. Nearly two million square kilometers, surrounding twenty-nine atolls and five major islands. It's hard to say when Micronesians first arrived on the islands with much precision, but if you said maybe one and a half thousand to two thousand years ago, you'd have plenty of researchers and archaeologists agreeing with you. And maybe you're thinking, "Marshall doesn't sound very Micronesian." And you'd be right, the same way Micronesian doesn't sound very Pacific.
9:14 Speaker 00 In seventeen eighty-eight, British Royal Navy Captain John Marshall was returning from New South Wales. His ship, the Scourge, was part of the Australian First Fleet, and after dropping off a collection of convicts, he was free to go explore the Pacific. He wasn't the first European to come across the islands. The Spanish swung by in the sixteenth century, dropped a "cara loco consuotema" to reach his own, and left. Importantly for Marshall, he was the first English-speaking person to trade with the locals. So, British mapping charts named the islands after him, becoming known forever as the Marshall Islands. Ever had someone come over for dinner and then you name your house after them? Me neither. Nearly a hundred years later, the Spanish suddenly thought the Marshalls looked familiar.
9:59 Speaker 00 In eighteen seventy-four, they formally laid claim to the islands before selling them to Germany. The Marshallese weren't at the negotiation table. It was a good deal for the Spanish, who got cash, and a good deal for the Germans, who got copra. Copra is the dried white flesh of the coconut, and a valuable trading good in the eighteen hundreds. The Marshallese got new landlords.
10:26 Speaker 00 Everything was going vunderbar until nineteen fourteen, when Japan, also a fan of Pacific trading possibilities, captured the islands from the Germans, building military bases there. Japan's control was made official in nineteen nineteen, when the Allied Powers told the defeated Germans they had to give up all their islands in the Pacific after World War One. Again, the Marshallese had no say. Japan volunteered to take over, and everything seemed coprosetic. Thank you. With an official League of Nations decision to administer the islands under the Imperial South Seas Japanese Mandate. That is, right up until nineteen forty-one.
11:13 Speaker 00 On December 7th, 1941, Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Honolulu. A local radio station was one of the first to get the news out. It is a real war. That "real war" between Imperial Japan and the imperialistic United States rages across the Pacific. It was also colonial powers fighting for and amongst their colonies in an effort to be the dominant force across the Pacific. Australia and New Zealand were guarding the South. Russia was lurking in the Far North, which left a battleground of hundreds of islands between Hawaii and Japan. Those islands were not uninhabited.
11:57 Speaker 00 They had and still have people living on them. People who have been used and relocated and reused by imperial powers like Apache football. Peoples whose spiritual practices are dismissed and whose resources are sold on by unknown traders without consent. People now caught in the crossfire between unrelenting advanced military powers battling for supremacy.
12:29 Speaker 04 The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many foes, and the end is not yet.
12:37 Speaker 00 In August 1945, war in the Pacific comes to an end. First Hiroshima's bombed, then Nagasaki.
12:50 Speaker 00 There's no agreed number, but it's estimated that between 150,000 to 250,000 Japanese people die. The Empire of the Sun surrenders, with the image of the mushroom cloud seared into the world's collective psyche forever. With Japan's defeat, the US takes over their territories as the preeminent military power in the world. President Truman announces to the world that atomic weapons have ended the Pacific War and that the nuclear age has begun.
13:21 Speaker 04 With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.
13:39 Speaker 00 As the borders and new front lines of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR are established, it's clear that harnessing the might of atomic destruction is the new measure for a true global power. In 1945, that's an exclusive club of one. But, even in the first flush of world domination, the US knows that exclusivity can't last forever.
14:04 Speaker 05 Let's face it, the threat of hydrogen bomb warfare is the greatest danger our nation has ever known. Enemy jet bombers carrying nuclear weapons can sweep over a variety of routes and drop bombs on any important target in the United States.
14:20 Speaker 00 The USSR, it seems, is close to having the power to destroy American cities as suddenly and violently as the Americans had destroyed Japanese cities. So the Americans must stay ahead, because why de-escalate when you can dominate?
14:38 Speaker 00 To keep the US safe requires the building of a superior arsenal of weaponry, and to do that, a new test area needs to be found. There are risks in undertaking a testing program, and the US needs to find a way to mitigate these risks.
14:53 Speaker 05 And here is Bikini, nearly 4,000 miles from the United States, a tiny coral atoll destined for atomic bomb experiments. Here, a long way from the heavily populated areas of the world, the Army and Navy will put the atom bomb through a laboratory test. Here, a whole fleet of iron ships will undergo the attack, observed by scores of military men and men of science.
15:23 Speaker 00 Bikini Atoll is part of the relic chain of islands. It's one of those 29 atolls that make up the Marshall Islands, a million miles from Kair and very specifically 4,000 miles away from the United States. And it's here that the States created the Pacific Proving Grounds, where they would test their nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll in the name of... world peace?
15:50 Speaker 00 My grandfather fought in World War II in Africa. My grandmother was bombed in London. The Second World War caused deep trauma, and there was a desire to keep the world from ever going through it again.
16:07 Speaker 00 There's a belief that nuclear weapons will be a deterrent and can bring a lasting peace. But no one really knows the totality of what happens when you trigger a nuclear reaction.
16:20 Speaker 00 A lot of testing had taken place in New Mexico for the Manhattan Project. Even after they started at Bikini, the Americans were still trying things out in the deserts of Nevada and would until 1994. More than 900 tests were carried out there, close enough to Las Vegas for residents to feel them and see the mushroom clouds.
16:43 Speaker 00 The marshals, 4,000 miles away from mainland US, must have seemed remote enough to the Americans to be a place of relative safety to carry on developing these weapons.
16:55 Speaker 06 Yes, life is simple and beautiful on Bikini Atoll. Until today, February 3rd, 1946, when there enters into Bikini Lagoon a fateful thing, a grim, huge symbol of civilization in its most terrifying form.
17:10 Speaker 00 The newsreel goes on to talk about requests to the people of Bikini.
17:15 Speaker 07 All right now, James, will you tell them that the United States government now wants to attempt to turn this great destructive force into something good for mankind? And that these experiments here at Bikini are the first step in that direction.
17:33 Speaker 00 The whole thing is like, "Trust us, we're American."
17:37 Speaker 08 1946, the Americans came and it says they're going to test this great new device for the good of mankind, bring peace to the world. And stop all the war.
17:52 Speaker 00 Alson Kellen is the former mayor of Bikini Island, president of the Council of NGOs, a traditional canoe maker, and master oceanic navigator. We talked to him on the beach at Majuro, where he runs classes in sailing and navigation. He explains how the Bikinians initially interpreted the US explanations.
18:11 Speaker 08 It's pretty deep than, deeper than we think, because that was just right after the World War II. People still have that picture of the horror in their mind. And they are, you know, they're very strong Christian believers. So when you put war and peace together, anything for that. They're willing to sacrifice.
18:34 Speaker 00 That sacrifice for the Bikinians is to move off their island, 200 kilometers to Rongodik Atoll. In the Marshall Islands, they say, if you take away their land, their spirits go too. Losing your land is like losing your soul. But there's a Western saying that comes up a lot when talking about colonization: "The end justifies the means."
18:57 Speaker 09 And part of what they were saying about the Bikinians are, "These are a nomadic group of people." Nomadic? They've been there for like centuries.
19:06 Speaker 00 That's Jack Needon Thor, American-born, Marshallese by choice. He's been a schoolteacher, a financial consultant, Secretary General of the Red Cross and the Marshalls, Secretary of Health and Human Services for the Marshallese government, and a documentary maker.
19:19 Speaker 09 And the way they were describing, "Oh, they're happy to be moving off their islands and going somewhere else, like they've always been doing", which was a complete, you know, load of crap, is the only way to put it.
19:36 Speaker 00 With the Bikinians relocated to the Atoll of Rongodik, the United States Program of Atomic Bomb Testing and Development begins. They call it Operation Crossroads.
19:49 Speaker 00 It begins July 1, 1946 with a bomb named Gilda, named for screen goddess Rita Hayworth's film of the same name.
19:59 Speaker 10 Eighty-seven ships take positions three miles off Bikini to suffer the shattering impact of the fifth atomic bomb. Here will be tested the capacity of modern armament to withstand the crushing shock of compressed water traveling a mile per second. The evacuated ruler of Bikini, King Judah, gets a front-row seat at the bomb blast as he arrives aboard the Mount McKinley and is greeted by Admiral Blandy, Joint Task Force One commander.
20:27 Speaker 10 Twenty-five seconds, twenty seconds, fifteen seconds. Dr. Holloway, leader of the Los Alamos Group and the entire fleet, waits in almost agonized tenseness. Now but five seconds to go, and...
20:52 Speaker 00 Fun fact: That's not actually what a nuclear blast sounds like. But the recording equipment at the time didn't get anything remarkable to match the visuals. So what you're hearing is what the sound people who saw the footage thought would match the blast. Even then, it doesn't do what happened justice. Thankfully, they described it.
21:09 Speaker 10 Many miles away, the raging might of searing flame, crushing force and deadly radioactive water is seen falling in a killing mist as the great circular wall of sea closes in on the guinea pig fleet.
21:27 Speaker 10 The combined forces let loose, swamped the nearby ships and crushed their thickly armored hulls like cardboard.
21:35 Speaker 00 While Operation Crossroads continues, it becomes clear to the US that they're going to have to step this thing up a notch.
21:41 Speaker 09 1953, the Russians detonated a weapon. It wasn't very powerful, but it was a hydrogen bomb.
21:47 Speaker 00 A hydrogen bomb. Second-generation nuclear design, allowing for far, far greater destruction than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. US President Harry Truman, who authorized those bombings, had said that God had given America the bomb. So the godless communists of the USSR can't be allowed to have even bigger bombs. Truman gave the all-clear for a new series of tests, and so begins Operation Castle, its ultimate objective: to test designs for an aircraft-deliverable thermonuclear weapon.
22:24 Speaker 00 6:44 a.m., 1st of March, 1954, Bikini Atoll. The Americans are about to press go on the biggest bomb they've ever built, 1,000 times bigger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This detonation will become known as the Castle Bravo shot.
22:43 Speaker 09 The Bravo shot is what changed, in my mind, the history of the Marshall Islands.
22:49 Speaker 00 20 miles outside of the exclusion zone are a fleet of US Navy warships, waiting, watching. In a bunker on the northern side of the Atoll are the scientists who built the bomb. They're ready, prepared, expectant. A change in wind direction is assessed, then judged safe. The go-ahead is given.
23:14 Speaker 00 And exactly one minute later, at 6:45 a.m., boom!
23:22 Speaker 00 The scientists and the sailors watch as a massive blast, a full 15 megatons, goes up in the morning sky. The three islands beneath are vaporized instantly. A mushroom cloud, 25 miles, 40 kilometers high, climbs into the sky, and the debris begins to travel east, carried by the wind. The watching Americans are awed, may be terrified by what they're seeing.
23:48 Speaker 00 Thing is, they weren't the only ones who saw it.
23:53 Speaker 00 Rongelap Etto is around 120 kilometers southeast of Bikini. That's about the distance between Sydney and Newcastle in Australia, Wellington and Palmerston North in New Zealand, or New York and Philadelphia in the States. In 1954, Rongelap is home to about 85 people. Among them, seven-year-old Mina Titus, and Billiard Edmund, schoolteacher. Here's his diary from March 1st, 1954.
24:21 Speaker 00 It was between 5 and 6 when the first flash came. From threat overwhelming and most frightening event. As the lightning faded, a huge and fiery sun-like object rose up in the western part of the lagoon.
24:35 Speaker 00 You may find Billiard's language poetic, but there's nothing metaphorical about it. This is simply descriptive, and that's the true horror of what he's witnessing.
24:45 Speaker 00 It was the sun, for it was round, but it was much bigger than our sun. It was a sun, for it was lighting the sky and giving off heat. Yet its intensity was far greater, and it was much brighter, which left all of us aghast.
25:02 Speaker 00 The more you read Billiard Edmund, the harder it actually becomes to keep yourself anchored in the fact it's a diary and not the first Pacific sci-fi novel. But declassified US documents and publicly released footage of the Bravo test back up his words. This really happened. He's really seeing this. None of us could move, but everyone stared at the fireball without a word. Then the queer-looking fiery object became a giant mushroom, and then another, and then another, and still another grew upon another. The explosion, the ever-frightening sound accompanied by a tornado-powered wind sweeping through our land, twisting coconut trees, uprooting bushes, smashing windows. Thatched roofs of most houses were blown out.
25:47 Speaker 00 My 10-year-old boy was knocked down.
25:54 Speaker 00 On another island, 3,000 kilometres away, far from the two sons, from the falling ash, from the boys getting knocked off their feet by a nuclear bomb going off, was a 21-year-old called Jethan Anjan. He's from Rongelap, but fate has him safely out of reach in Fiji. But this day was also the defining day of Jethan's life. So on the day of Castle Bravo, the day of two sons, Jethan finds himself in Fiji, now studying to become a dentist. He's 20 years old, soon to be 21. He doesn't know about the bomb. He doesn't know that he won't get to see his land for three more years. And he doesn't know that the invisible horrors of Castle Bravo go way beyond that initial blast.
26:39 Speaker 01 I have children. Children are more lucky, I have one. I'm telling them, well.
26:47 Speaker 11 Some of my kids, it took a lot longer for them to start walking.
26:55 Speaker 11 And even as adults, I can tell some of them may have difficulty, like mental disability.
27:03 Speaker 00 Mina Titus was there, remember. Mina, her family, and Jethan Anjan will be living and struggling with those horrors for the rest of their lives.
27:16 Speaker 12 Before the testing, we were very healthy people. Today, we are sick.
27:23 Speaker 00 That's next time on The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, episode 3, Project 4.1.
27:33 Speaker 00 The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior was written, produced, and presented by me, James Norkese. Sophie Townsend is the script editor and writer. Justin Gregory, writer and producer. The Last Voyage is a co-production between ABC Radio Australia and RNZ. Justine Kelly is the head of ABC Radio Australia. Tim Watkins is the executive editor, audio for RNZ. Faleanga Fulu Ingas Tunsla is the Content Director for ABC Radio Australia. Piana Juretic-Gregg is the Production Coordinator for RNZ. Alison Barclay for the ABC. RNZ's Rangi Poehuk engineered the series. Designed by Dexter Edwards. Website by Hingi Kong for RNZ.
28:15 Speaker 00 Huge thanks to Eve Burns, Hilary Hosier, Giff Johnson from The Marshall Islands Journey. Our respect and love to all the people we met in the Marshall Islands.
28:27 Speaker 13 You've been listening to an ABC podcast. You can discover more ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listener.
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