Mr. Oscar de Brum 2- Alin ‘o7g The surest way of preventing people from eating breadfruit and pandanus grown on Bikini Island. is to see that they are not grown there. This of course would mean destroying the trees that are there now and going back every few years to destroy any new ones which have been planted. Such action I assume would be your responsibility as District Administrator. The only reason for continuing to grow these trees on Bikini Island would be to help with our agricultural research program which we hope some day will help to solve some of the food chain problems. But if that activity causes you an administrative headache, causes your Distad Representative concern, or indirectly leads to apprehension on the part of the people, we would find other ways to obtain the information we need (the farm at Engebi, for example). By the way, ERDA does not have a test garden at Bikini, although we have at times asked for samples of growing foods to be saved for laboratory analysis. If these can be harvested before they ripen and then dried and saved for the next visit of our research vessel, they will certainly provide valuable information. To repeat, though, we would rather give up that limited benefit than cause you difficulty or concern. Your idea of planting mature or established trees on Enyu seems a good one to me. You have asked whether I might use my "good offices" to assist in arranging an airlift of trees to Bikini and surely I would like to help with that. The best suggestion I have right now is that the next time we charter a C-54 from Kwajalein to Bikini we would request that a small amount of cargo space be reserved for transplant trees. Our next such charter will probably occur in about mid-October, and if arrangements can be made in time to have a small number of trees prepared for shipment and on hand at Kwajalein, I will be glad to ask KMR to assist. For this purpose you might have Murph Ownbey work direct with Ted Murawski, the Global representative who looks after our needs at Kwajalein. I will see that Ted is appropriately instructed. One other thought we might consider: on Bikini Island. You do have some mature trees If these could be transplanted to Enyu I would expect that they would very soon be producing relatively uncontaminated fruit.