and Enewetak are well presented by Kiste, Tobin, and others. Various agencies of the U.85.
Government and government contractors such as the University of Washington Applied Fisheries
Laboratory and
the
Lawrence
Livermore
Laboratory
have,
over
the
years,
documented
the
radiological condition at Bikini and Enewetak as conditions changed with time. The most extensive
survey conducted prior to cleanup is reported in detail by the USAEC in Enewetak Radiological
Survey. (NVO-140.) Findings of this survey were used to guide the fine grid survey of many of the
islands at Enewetak during the cleanup phase.
.
But what made cleanup necessary?
(The naive wording of this question
is deliberate.)
The
paramount necessity arises from the fact that the owners of Enewetak Atoll were moved to another
atoll as an accommodation to the United States Government so that Enewetak could be used for
testing of nuclear bombs. The people of Enewetak wanted to return to their homeland and the
United States had agreed to rehabilitate the atoll prior to their return.
But the foregoing does not
answer the question of cleanup necessity. If there were no aftereffects from a nuclear explosion, no
cleanup of Enewetak would be necessary beyond removal of abandoned facilities and equipment.
There are aftereffects. Read again the two quotations presented earlier. The immense ball of
flame, cloud of dark dust, evaporated steel tower, melted sand for a thousand feet, 10 million tons of
water rising out of the lagoon, waves subsiding from a height of eighty feet to seven feet in three
miles were all repeated, in various degrees, 43 times on Enewetak Atoll.
In the northern islands of
the atoll, where most of the testing took place, the land surface was covered by falling radioactive
dust or water, or inundated by waves of possibly radioactive water, or seared by a fireball of intense
heat. Furthermore, some of the tests at Enewetak were many times more powerful than either of
the detonations described above. The largest detonation at Enewetak was the thermo-nuclear device
of Test Mike, rated at over 10 million tons of TNT—about 450 times as powerful as Test Baker.
As a consequence of the nuclear testing, the northern islands of Enewetak Atoll contain radioactive
contamination on or near the land surface and at some depth on islands used as the site for one or
more tests. The term "cleanup" encompasses those activities which were conducted to determine
the location and degree of contamination on each island, to remove radiologically clean and
contaminated debris from all islands, to remove contaminated surface and subsurface soil from
wherever either was above certain guidelines, and to document the radiological condition of each
island prior to the planned resettlement by the people of Enewetak.
Eniwetok* at the End of WW II. Eniwetok Atoll was considered an important target for invasion and
occupation as part of the overall plan to drive the Japanese out of the scattered Pacific islands. The
American invasion of the Marshalls, which had been mandated to Japan by the League of Nations in
1919, was seheduled for the end of January 1944, starting with Kwajalein then progressing to
Eniwetok, which would be a natural staging area for air attacks on Truk and other islands of the
Carolines. On 29 January 1944, carrier planes began the preinvasion air assault and attacked
Kwajalein and Roi-Namur Islands in Kwajalein Atoll, Maloelap, Eniwetok, and Wotje. So thorough
was the bombing that by the end of the day not one enemy plane east of Eniwetok remained
operational. (Richard, 1957.)
Eniwetok had an airfield** well defended with guns and search radar and an excellent lagoon, two
factors which would make it a valuable staging point for future attacks on the Carolines. The
garrison was small because the Japanese never thought that they would have to defendit.
Carrier planes began bombing Eniwetok on 31 January and continued every day through 7 February,
and again on the 1]th and 13th. On D-Day, 17 February, American combatant ships appeared off the
Atoll and concentrated their fire on Engebi Island, the main objective, pouring 2,800 tons of
*This was the name by which the atoll was officially known until early 1973 when the Enewetak
people themselves made known that the name is made up of two Marshallese words: ene (island) and
wetak (toward, or pointing toward the East). Spelling changes of many other names are described in
Section 1.3. Until the end of Section 1.3, the atoll name is spelled in accordance with official usage
during the period of time being discussed,
**The airfield was on Engebi (Janet) Island of Enewetak Atoll, not on Enewetak Island.