Pod Insights ABC Rewind 03 | Rainbow Warrior | Project 4.1 About this episode In the days following the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear detonation, the people of Rongelap, in the Marshall Islands, desperately need help. But when that help arrived, it came with something they didn’t expect and never agreed to.
Transcript 5,415 words · 12 speakers
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0:09 Speaker 01 In the previous episode, we took you to the Marshall Islands in 1954, where the United States had carried out its most powerful nuclear weapon tests to date. We learned about the largest of those tests, Castle Bravo, which because of an error, created a blast so powerful, witnesses described it as a second sun on the far horizon. We also met the people of Rongelap Atoll, who were covered in fallout from the Bravo test and who are still dealing with repercussions from that test today. So how did the fallout affect them?
0:51 Speaker 02 I want to tell a story about the time they dropped the bomb.
1:01 Speaker 01 This is Alit Edman. He was just one year old and living in Rongelap when Castle Bravo was detonated in 1954. His parents shared the stories of that day and what came after with him.
1:14 Speaker 02 They saw all the fishes die and fruits from our plants started falling off too.
1:27 Speaker 03 They saw all the fishes die and fruits from our plants started falling off too.
1:36 Speaker 03 They saw all the fishes die and fruits from our plants started falling off too.
1:47 Speaker 01 Alit is a small man, just under five feet tall. As he sits to talk with us, his legs are almost constantly involuntarily in motion. You can see his body is giving him trouble and has for some time. We're talking to a Medes hominajur. Eve Burns, a journalist and Rongelap piece, is translating for him.
2:07 Speaker 03 After a while, a ship arrived.
2:16 Speaker 01 The ship he mentioned is the USS Philip. On March 3rd, two days after the blast, it steamed into Rongelap Lagoon, the first assistance of any kind.
2:32 Speaker 01 For ABC Radio Australia and RNZ, I'm James Nokise and this is The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. In this episode, I'm gonna take you back to the days immediately after the Castle Bravo detonation, and through what followed. The Rongelap people desperately needed help, and it arrived. But with that help came something they didn't expect and never agreed to.
2:58 Speaker 01 This is The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, episode 3, Project 4.0.
3:10 Speaker 04 The removal of personnel from the contaminated eight tolls was done mainly by destroyers. These destroyers were attached to the task force primarily for security purposes, but were easily adapted for use as evacuation vessels.
3:29 Speaker 01 The destroyer dropped anchor in Rongelap lagoon. They were met on the beach by magistrate Jeanne-Jean, Jetan's older brother. In the first day or so, American medicals repeatedly washed the bodies and clothes of the islanders to remove contamination. They reported trouble washing the people's hair due to the thick layer of coconut oil used to dress it.
3:48 Speaker 02 They were washed with this one, and then they were washed.
3:55 Speaker 03 After that, they came with clothing that kind of felt like paper.
3:59 Speaker 01 They told the Rongelap people they needed to leave their homes. All 82 people, four of them pregnant women, were taken off the island. The elderly and most sick by seaplane, the rest by ship. The ship's captain reported that the islanders, quote, "were not reluctant to leave."
4:18 Speaker 01 Mina Titus, who we heard last episode, was just seven when the debris from Bravo snowed on her and other Rongelap children. She told us her memories. Journalist Hilary Hosaya is translating.
4:32 Speaker 05 But before everybody went inside the...
4:36 Speaker 05 The ship were all clustered together and they began taking their clothes off and started hosing everybody down, which I found to be very different, surreal for us.
4:53 Speaker 01 Sick, burnt, their hair coming out in clumps, their bodies covered with swords. The people of Rongelap, now nuclear refugees, were unloaded on Kwajalein Atoll. Kwajalein is almost 250 kilometers south of Rongelap and isn't the Atoll's original name. It's more like Kwajalein, but under the influence of the languages spoken by colonizers, the name changed over time. Locals mostly call it Kwaj.
5:22 Speaker 01 It had been just a few days since the detonation, but everything was different now.
5:36 Speaker 05 We were taken to Kwajalein, to a place where they had already prepared housing, temporary housing for us, and we were told not to go anywhere.
5:46 Speaker 01 To your average US serviceman, Kwajalein and Rongelap probably seemed pretty much the same, but not for the Rongelapese, who were standing on land they didn't belong to and by people they felt didn't want to know them.
6:03 Speaker 05 I remember wherever we go as a community, people tried to stay away from us, keep a distance.
6:17 Speaker 05 They would often call us "bukluk", which is translation for "explosion". They would say, "Oh, those are the Bukluk people. Stay away from them. We don't want to get poisoned." And this is what we have to deal with.
6:34 Speaker 01 The evacuees spent three years away from home. During their forced exile, nothing felt the same. They felt the American doctors seemed interested in more than just treating the Rongelap people.
6:53 Speaker 05 I remember they would gather us together and conduct tests on us.
7:01 Speaker 01 Soon after the Castle Bravo detonation, in fact, just a few days after, a US Navy doctor, Eugene P. Cronkite, was given an order to take charge of a study. Its title: "Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High-Yield Weapons." It became more infamously known as Project 4.1. There were three stated aims: to evaluate the severity of the sickness, of course, to provide medical aid, correct, and to (ahem) study the injuries the Rongolap people had suffered. Ambiguous.
7:44 Speaker 01 The instructions given to Dr. Cronkite were clear: Project 4.1 was not to be made public. Secrecy was key. His orders read, quote: "Due to possible adverse public reaction, you will specifically instruct all personnel in this project to be particularly careful not to discuss the purpose of this project and its background or its findings with any except those who have a need to know." "Need to know" did not include the people of Rongolap. Permission to be studied was not sought from them. Consent never obtained. Not a single Rongolapese signed anything saying, "Yes, go ahead and test me."
8:29 Speaker 01 To be fair, maybe they would have, but the choice was never given. Imagine if you can that the people who have been testing radioactive devices in your backyard suddenly tell you that they will now be studying what that radiation has done to you. And because there's supposed to be trust, you don't know what you're meant to be questioning, what might be reasonable. Imagine your reaction. Would it be adverse?
8:58 Speaker 01 This is all beginning to sound like a bad sci-fi film, albeit one with a large budget. But here's the part where it becomes horror.
9:05 Speaker 06 You see these films of these people on quadrillion and their skins peeling off and the doctors are looking at them.
9:13 Speaker 01 That's Jack Needon, former Health and Human Services Secretary for the Marshall Islands and documentary maker. You remember him from episode two, Indiana Jones with the goatee. In his efforts to help the Marshallese, Jack went through a lot of the archival material around Bravo when the files were declassified in the 1990s.
9:32 Speaker 06 And suddenly we came upon these documents that describe this Project 4.1, where they have an American scientist saying that, hey, this is really good for us because the Marshallese people are more like us than the lab mice.
9:54 Speaker 01 Jack's talking about Merrill Eisenberg. Eisenberg was actually an engineer, not a scientist, and his job on Operation Castle was head of the US Atomic Energy's Health and Safety Lab. In his obituary, The New York Times called him "a practical man who sought to balance ideals and realities." Let's look at Eisenberg's actual words about Rongelab and the people living there. That island is by far the most contaminated place on Earth, and it will be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment. While it is true that these people do not live the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than the mice.
10:36 Speaker 06 Which, you know, if you're Marshallese and you're reading that, or anybody else on the planet, that's like, God, you know, what kind of mindset is that?
10:46 Speaker 01 Project 4.1 became a part of the Castle Bravo story. The people of Rongelab were monitored and studied closely and carefully. For the American team doing the work, the study was informing the treatment and went hand in glove. Dr. Robert Conard, one of the leaders of the medical team that came from Brookhaven National Laboratory in the States, would later tell the investigating committee that their primary goal was to treat the people. And treat them they have done, right up to the current day, at a cost of millions of dollars a year. Of course, the money spent by the US on healthcare for the Marshallese is directly related to the nuclear testing programme there. It might well be regarded as the cost of doing business. The US saw the research on the people of Rongolap
11:29 Speaker 01 done in concert with treatment as vital. Dr. Conrad says, quote:
11:34 Speaker 04 "We were trying to get as much information as we could into the medical literature. We knew that we were dealing with an area that was unexplored in human beings, and we wanted to find out as much as we could."
11:45 Speaker 01 And that research is important. The world has learnt a great deal from studies on the Rongolapis. It's just that no-one asked them. And the Rongolapis have found getting their own medical records to be hard if not impossible. Because remember, all of this was on a need-to-know basis. It was super top-secret. There was just one small problem. Japan let the monster out of the box.
12:15 Speaker 07 The Japanese fishing boat named Lucky Dragon happened to be just outside of the danger zone. And then the radioactive fallout coming from one of the explosions called Castle Bravo fell onto that boat. And then all 20-some crew members were exposed.
12:38 Speaker 01 I'm learning about the Japanese involvement with Castle Bravo from Toshihiro Higuchi, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University. On March 1st, 1954, the Dago Fukuryo Maru, Lucky Dragon number five in English, was fishing illegally for tuna in the waters near Bikini. Their story is how Japanese journalists got out the word about Bravo.
13:00 Speaker 07 When Castle Bravo test went wrong, US authorities rushed to control information about the test. But what happened was the Lucky Dragon basically slipped away from that information control and then went back to Japan, having suffered from the effects of radioactive fallout. And then that actually made the national headline.
13:29 Speaker 07 So the really, the Lucky Dragon Incident was not just a news for the Japanese, but also for the world. The original film, Godzilla, was made in 1954, the same year when this American thermonuclear bomb test, Castle Bravo, took place. The plot was the nuclear test awoke the ancient monster and then made them radioactive. The film was a social commentary on not only the dangers of the nuclear age, but also
14:11 Speaker 07 really the fate of the world as we tampered with the forces of nature.
14:16 Speaker 01 The first report from Project 4.1 was published in 1955. Not long after, something surprising happened.
14:27 Speaker 02 After a few years, they returned us back to Rongelap.
14:37 Speaker 01 That's right, the Rongelap peas were sent home. In 1956, the US Atomic Energy Commission declared it was safe to live on Rongelap again. They based that decision on the science of the time, which showed that while there was contamination on the atom, it was at a level deemed acceptable, with the exception of land crabs. Yeah, land crabs. The AEC said the Rongelap people, who were generally pretty healthy, could return home, but don't eat the crabs. They're still not safe.
15:21 Speaker 01 If only they knew then what was later discovered in 1989, when the commission did the Rongelap reassessment project. They looked at old field data from 1957, which showed the gamma dose on the atom was at the maximum permissible for the general population. So on June 29, 1957, the Rongelap people went home. And soon, there were signs that not all was well.
15:51 Speaker 01 Between 1957 and 1963, doctors on the island noted two possible effects of radiation: double the normal number of abnormally terminated pregnancies, and two boys with markedly stunted growth. And in 1964, they saw unquestionable damage to thyroid glands. There's a line in the report from 1957, the year the people of Rongelap went home. That haunts me. On the one hand, Dr. Conrad and his team think the Atau is safe. But on the other, they also know it's still the most radiated place on the planet. The report reads: "Even though the radioactive contamination of Rongelap Island is considered perfectly
16:35 Speaker 01 safe for human habitation, the levels of activity are higher than those found in other inhabited locations in the world. The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings." Yeah. Radiation data.
16:58 Speaker 08 So yeah, basically, these are the tools, the main tools that we use in our daily lives.
17:03 Speaker 01 When we were in Majuro, we visited the Alele Museum, National Archive and Public Library. Media assistant archivist, Sulen Bao, is showing us around.
17:14 Speaker 08 And then this one is mostly used for a type of food called puro, which is like stinky tofu, but more like martially stinky bread food. Yeah.
17:28 Speaker 01 The museum is only in a small space, but it contains artifacts from 2,000 years of history: canoes, tools, panchanous leaves, and its many, many uses. How important in martialis culture is that passing down of history?
17:45 Speaker 08 It's something that traditionally is really, really important. Like, just growing up, even like in this generation. My grandparents were born way back. They always teach us. They always have this time with you where they have to tell you a story orally, and then you have to picture it by yourself. And that story is mostly a legend. And behind every legend in the Marshall Island, there's always a moral behind them. So oral tradition, knowledge is something, for me, is really important. And it's something that we're trying to...
18:21 Speaker 01 It's oral history going on now behind us. In the hallway is a vivid collection of photos from the nuclear testing period. There are also portraits and personal testimonies. One of them is from Jeanne Ajain, older brother of Jethan and one-time magistrate in Rongelap. It reads:
18:40 Speaker 06 A soldier told us our lives were smaller than a fingernail. They used us as guinea pigs.
18:47 Speaker 01 Solan reads from another she says it touches her the most.
18:51 Speaker 08 She said, "I had seven miscarriages. If it wasn't for the United States had done to me and my family, my children would be growing up like the others."
19:02 Speaker 01 What's her name?
19:03 Speaker 08 Her name is Li Jean Egilang.
19:06 Speaker 01 Next to the photo of Jeanne Ajain is one of Rokor Langenbelik. Her quote? "They knew what they were doing. They used us as human experiments." Now, that belief that the Americans knew what they were doing, that it was all deliberate, is at the heart of the controversy around Castle Bravo. That not only did the US know they were exposing the people of Rongelap to radiation, but that they meant to from the start.
19:36 Speaker 06 I mean, think about this.
19:37 Speaker 01 Jack Needenthal, documentary maker.
19:39 Speaker 06 They know the wind before the Bravo shot has, it's moving in the directions of populated islands in the Northern Marshals. But the US tells all their own military personnel to go below decks and shut the hatches and don't come up until we say it's safe to come up. And they know there's these people on these islands not being told what's going on, not being told to get out of harm's way, and they detonate this weapon that they knew, we now know, was gonna be somewhere between 15 and 19 megatons, which is a thousand times greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons. I mean, these are massive hydrogen bombs. And it goes off and it, it snows on these people, this highly radioactive ash, and as
20:24 Speaker 06 we said, the hairs falling out, crying, vomiting, you know, all, it was just horrible. And that, how dehumanizing, you can't get much more dehumanizing than that.
20:37 Speaker 01 So that question, was it deliberate? Did they use people as guinea pigs? That's not an easy question to ask, let alone answer. So I'm gonna talk for a while, you listen, and make up your own mind. Immediately after the detonation, the US went to great lengths to keep this disaster quiet. But between the lucky dragon number five and an American Marine who told his local paper about the evacuations and the sickness of the Rongelap people, the story got out. The US response was to say they didn't know the winds had shifted suddenly and the yield was much bigger than expected. They held this position for a long time, but as we know, in 1994, a bunch of Project
21:22 Speaker 01 Castle documents were declassified. Many of them are on the NSA archive website at George Washington University. Our team has read a lot of them. So, key questions. Did the wind shift? Yes. And the midnight briefing before the detonation confirmed it, talking about resultant winds in the direction of Rongelap and Rongelik. But the report said the wind speed versus the distance to the atolls meant there was no risk of fallout. It would take 12 to 15 hours for it to reach them. We now know it took less than six hours. Did they warn the people on those Atos, delay the test, or move them out of the way? No, not at all.
22:03 Speaker 01 But they did move the task force ships fifty miles further out. And the two top dogs, General P.W. Clarkson and Dr. A.C. Graves, then gave the go-ahead for the detonation. Did they know how big the yield would be? Document thirty-five says the weapons designers understood the yield could be as high as fifteen megatons, not six as expected. They advised the task force to make sure of the safety of the service personnel. They also used a mix of lithium jutiride, made mostly with lithium seven in the fuel for the bomb, instead of lithium six alone. They believed that lithium seven would be inert. It was not. When ignited, it created the fusion fuel tritium, which massively bumped up the yield.
22:47 Speaker 01 Boom. Big boom. A fifteen-megaton boom. And a toxic cloud, travelling in the direction of the Atos, inhabited by innocent, unaware, uninformed human beings. So did they mean to expose the people of the Atos downwind? Maybe not, but they sure as hell didn't take enough care not to expose them. In 1995, Merrill Eisenberg, the health and safety man who compared the people of Rongelep to lab mice, recorded an oral history of his life and his career. He refers to the marshals almost in passing, saying he hadn't really thought about it a lot since then. But the testing had to happen somewhere, and the marshals, quote, "seems like a reasonable place."
23:32 Speaker 01 Eisenberg claimed he had a great deal of sympathy for the people affected, and said they were treated very badly. But he also regretted not getting any baseline data from them before the Bravo detonation. That, he said, would have been interesting.
23:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, interesting. Anyway, back in 1957, people on Rongelap started getting sick.
23:57 Speaker 01 There's daily exposure to the high radiation levels still on the island. By now, radiation is in the food chain: the fish, the coconuts, the water, the land. Through the food, it gets in the bodies of the people living on the Atoll: men, women, living children, children not yet born. In 1958, a year after the return to Rongelap, the US stops nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands and leaves Bikini Atoll. But the Bikinians don't go home, because their island is deemed too irradiated to be safe. Also by 1958, the rate at which Rongelap women suffered miscarriages or stillbirths was twice that of women who hadn't been exposed to radiation.
24:40 Speaker 01 Babies that survived could have slower-than-normal rates of growth and other problems. Here's menitis, translated by Hilary Hosier.
24:51 Speaker 05 And some of my kids, it took a lot longer for them to start walking. And even as adults, I can tell, some of them may have difficulty, like mental disability.
25:06 Speaker 01 The people of Rongelap have been home for six years when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is signed in 1963, forbidding any state to conduct atmospheric and underwater nuclear weapons testing outside its borders. The ban comes from a growing public unease about the safety and environmental impact of nuclear weaponry. The world is now a no doubt about how dangerous testing is and the fallout it leaves behind. And yet, nothing changes for the people of Rongelap. They aren't moved, they aren't compensated. Everything remains the same.
25:41 Speaker 01 Except for the miscarriages, the stillbirths, the birth defects, and now thyroid tumors, which by the time the Test Ban Treaty was signed are starting to appear.
25:51 Speaker 06 Brookhaven, that was a really, that was again, that was another thing that caused a lot of marshallese, the Ronglepees especially, to be very suspicious of the United States because they would take them to Brookhaven in New York and they would do all these tests on them and then not tell them anything.
26:11 Speaker 01 Brookhaven Medical Laboratories, based in New York, was contracted by the AEC in 1956. They were asked to continue the medical monitoring of people exposed to nuclear fallout. This was a year before the Ronglepees were returned to their island. Mina Titus was one of those people being monitored.
26:31 Speaker 05 I remember visiting different labs in New York,
26:37 Speaker 05 Boston, Washington, Cleveland, and Hawaii. I also remember a certain time where they took out a chunk from right here, from my arm.
26:54 Speaker 05 These were in different times.
26:59 Speaker 01 By the mid-1960s, there was no doubt the radiation had done serious damage to many people's thyroid glands, especially the children's. All the exposed population got thyroid hormone treatment and anyone with thyroid nodules were taken to hospitals in the US and compensated at the rate of $25,000 per surgery. Mina remembers doctors who treated her with kindness and care. She and others from Ronglepe were invited to family dinners and also taken on sightseeing trips, possibly, she says, to distract them from what they were going through.
27:33 Speaker 01 Legolch Yanjain, son of Zhongnanjain, was a baby when Castle Bravo detonated and had evacuated with everyone else. He'd been a healthy kid, but in 1968, at 14, that changed. He was diagnosed with myelogenous leukemia. Legolch died in an American hospital far from home in 1972. He remains officially recognized as the sole casualty of the Castle Bravo detonation.
28:09 Speaker 01 Leckos death proved the final straw for some. Dr. Robert Conard, head of the medical team from Brookhaven National Laboratories, had overseen the treatment of the Rongolapis people for many years. But in 1975, Nelson Anjan, then magistrate of Rongolap, sent him a letter. "Dr. Conard," he wrote, "was no longer welcome on the atoll." "I realize now your entire career is based on our illness," writes Nelson. "We are far more valuable to you than you are to us." Nelson was especially bitter about Conard allegedly telling a newspaper it was the fault of the Rongolapis that Leckos and Jan died because they wouldn't let Conard examine him.
28:52 Speaker 01 He goes on to say Conard never really cared about the Rongolapis as people, "only a group of guinea pigs for your government's bomb research." He asked for a doctor to live permanently on the island, "not just when it's convenient for you to visit." Nelson accuses the United States of trying to "Americanize" us by flying flags and using cast-off textbooks. He says they never really trusted Conard and that they have invited doctors from Hiroshima to examine us in a caring way. "Now that we know there are other people in the world who are willing to care for us," concludes magistrate Anjan, "we no longer want you to come to Rongolap." The following year, 1976,
29:34 Speaker 01 a report finds that of the kids aged 10 or under when Bravo detonated, 69% had since developed thyroid tumors. Mina Titus was one of those kids. She has a scar on her throat from the removal of her thyroid. It's the identifying mark of her generation. You could almost call it a brand. Twice a year, the Department of Energy kept testing Rongolap for radiation and the doctors kept testing the people. Twice a year, they told the people it was safe. No one living on Rongolap believed that.
30:08 Speaker 01 In 1994, the Rongolapis went to Washington DC to talk to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, to say what they thought, that by ignoring the wind shifts and resettling them too soon on their atoll, they were guinea pigs in a vast and awful experiment. The committee acknowledged there was confusion over what it caused the dual purpose of Project 4.1: treat and test. They quoted scientists saying they always put treatment first and the testing was to help improve that treatment. At times, the committee said, the scientists were flying blind. Thyroid damage was the biggest impact of the fallout, but medical science at the time believed the thyroid to be radio-resistant.
30:51 Speaker 01 The committee said there was mixed advice on resettlement, but they also claimed that the Rongolapis and the international community wanted them to go back. They said the doctors did not think they needed consent for the tests they conducted. As Mina Titus said, those were different times. Not really an excuse. Overall, the committee found that the US undoubtedly exposed people of Rongolap to harmful radiation. But, to quote... "The committee found no evidence that the initial exposure of the Rongolapis people or their later relocation constituted a deliberate human experiment, that no harm came to patients from the tests over the years, and that the treatment of radiation-related illness has been well done."
31:41 Speaker 01 Reading this took me back to something I found in the Yalele Museum. Here's another quote from Jeann Riquelme: "For those of us who were affected by the testing, there is no sense of fairness or justice in the present situation. Rather, there is a distinct feeling that the promise has not been kept."
32:11 Speaker 01 In 1985, that sense of there being no justice, no fairness, of promises not kept has been laid at the feet of Jeter Nanjan.
32:20 Speaker 09 They were just innocent people, being in Rongelap, without knowing that someone is going to poison them by exploding Bravo on Bikini. I think we are the call, what we call forgotten kinefics.
32:34 Speaker 01 Sitting on the beach at Rongelap, Senator Nanjan recorded a long interview with his friend anthropologist Glenn Alklay. His frustration was high.
32:43 Speaker 09 They poisoned it, they cover up the wrong thing they did, and now they are using my people every year as animal kinefics.
32:55 Speaker 01 Glenn had been visiting the Marshallese since the 1970s. He and Jeter had spent a great deal of time together over the years, traveling between the islands and the United States, speaking up for the people of Rongelap.
33:08 Speaker 10 Senator Nanjan always took the high road. Pacific men show an outward calm, but underneath the surface, not so calm. That was Senator Nanjan.
33:17 Speaker 01 Ain't that the truth?
33:19 Speaker 10 Marshallese are very gentle people, very kind people. They really abhor and they hate direct confrontation. So on the surface, they're seemingly okay with the US presence and what the US has been doing. But if you speak with them in Marshallese, I speak Marshallese, you get the real story. And there's of course a lot of anger, resentment, angst, and anger about the secrecy and cover-ups relating to the nuclear test.
33:47 Speaker 01 By the time he sat down to record with Glenn, Jeter Nanjan had simply had enough. Marvellous.
33:55 Speaker 11 Welcome. We say "yakwe."
33:58 Speaker 01 Yakwe. Abeka Ajane Madison lives on Ebere, where she works for the Marshall Islands government. We spoke to her online from my hotel room in Majuro. She's a former senator for Rongelap, an activist against nuclear weapons and testing, and has spoken out all around the world, carry on the work of her father, Jethan Ajane.
34:17 Speaker 11 My father, Jethan Ajane, spent his last part of his life leading and working for the Rongelapis people.
34:27 Speaker 01 Abeka told us a story about how something changed in her father. It starts with what should be a joyful event: his grandniece giving birth to her child.
34:36 Speaker 11 She was giving birth to deformed child, deformed baby. And then he was calling in for help, for emergency evacuation. And none came through. And she died. And that's what really triggered him to fight for justice.
35:03 Speaker 01 Jethan realised that before he could help his country, he had to help his island.
35:08 Speaker 11 You know, I think that was a turning point.
35:17 Speaker 01 Jethan changes tack. Two years earlier, in 1983, he'd been in the Marshallese cabinet as health minister. But he realised that his position makes fighting for justice almost impossible. There's another factor. Jethan's frustrated with the negotiations taking place between the United States and the Marshall Islands over the Compacts of Free Association, which eventually come into force in 1986. The compact will move the Marshallese towards self-government rather than under the trusteeship of the US, and would provide 150 million US funds to compensate all Marshallese for the damage done by nuclear testing. Its final terms give the Marshall Islands responsibility
36:00 Speaker 01 for the area affected by the nuclear testing programme, as is a full settlement of claims.
36:08 Speaker 01 In 1983, Jethan and Jain believes that the Marshallis governments are accepting terms that fail to treat the people of Rongelap fairly. While other members of the ministry may have been okay with money, Jethan, representing the people hit most hard by radiation, decided that the only way he could argue for a fairer compensation was to quit.
36:31 Speaker 01 A year after his resignation, Jethan is back in the States, asking for help to leave his island. One of the documents he's holding is a 1978 DOE radiological survey of the Northern Marshall Islands. This report used a number system from 1 to 4, assigning a score to each ato indicating their level of radiation. Bikini Ato, site of the testing, scored a lot of 4s. So did Rongelap. In short, parts of Rongelap are just as irradiated as the worst parts of Bikini. Jethan is asking for funds to help remove the entire population to another island for safety.
37:15 Speaker 01 Jethan begins to speak. He asks his audience to examine the evidence of the damage done by the 67 nuclear detonations carried out by the US. He points out the miscarriages, the birth deformities, the sickness. He's an impressive speaker, quiet yet forceful, measured yet determined. His request is considered, then declined. No one will help them leave. No one will tell them why.
37:50 Speaker 01 Next time on The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.
37:57 Speaker 01 As Jethan and Jain comes to a terrible but unavoidable conclusion, he sets in motion one of the great humanitarian acts of the 20th century.
38:08 Speaker 01 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 executive editor, audio for RNZ. Falea Ngululu Ingas Tundla is the content director for ABC Radio Australia. Piana Yuritich-Gregg is the production coordinator for RNZ. Alison Barclay for ABC. RNZ's Rangi Poehwic engineered the series. Designed by Dexter Edwards. Website by Hing Yi Kong for RNZ.
38:50 Speaker 01 Huge thanks to Eve Burns, Hilary Hosiah, Giff Johnson from the Marshall Islands Journal. Our respect and love to all the people we met in the Marshall Islands. To listen to more episodes of The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, head to ABC Pacific. Catch the whole series wherever you listen to your podcasts.
39:11 Speaker 00 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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