Wersgall during the testing program. The 1946 Baker shot alone lefc 500,000 tons of radioactive mud in the lagoon. Nevertheless, official Navy pronouncements remained optimistic concerning Bikini’s condition. A 1947 release is typical: ‘Scientists now engaged in an intensive six-week survey of the Bikini Acoll can find few visible effects of [the atomic tests}]."" The atoll. the release continued, is “the same placid palm-rnged lagoon on which King Juda and his subjects sailed in outrigger canoes.” Among the U.S. tests was the 1954 Bravo shot, the second of the hydrogen bombtests, 750 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Bravo. the largest single nuclear explosion detonated by the United States. was so powerful that it vaporized several small islands and parts of others in Bikini Atoll and left 2 one-mile circular hole in the reef. Moreover, what was described at the time as an unprecedenred shift in wind direction sent the 20-mile-high cloud of radioactive parti- cles from the blast drifting 240 miles eastward across Bikiniand several! inhabited atolls in the Marshalls. In fact. U.S. officials had received an incomplete and alarming report concerning possible changes in the wind direction. Rongelap and Utirik atolls were in the path of the fallout, which fluttered down like snowflakes. Ninety per cent of the Ronge- lapese people suffered skin lesions and loss of hair. Today, 19 of 21 Rongelapese who were under ]2 years old at the timeof the ironically code-named Bravo shot have developed thy- roid tumo.s or other radiation-related ill- nesses. The people of Utirik, who were not removed from their atoll until more than three days after the blast, have recently experienced a sudden increase in thyroid diseases and cancers. The United States has paid several thousand dollars in compensation to the two peoples, and it will provide them with medical care in the post-trusteeship period. But to the Marshallese people in its role as U.N. trustee. One can only wonder where the American nuclear energy industry would be today if the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 had perceptibly injured several hundred USS. citizens. In 1958 President Etsenhower declared a moratorium on U.S. atmospheric nuclear testing. ending the 12-year testing program in the Marshall Islands and raising the Biki- nians’ hopes for resettlement. It was not until 1967, however. that a blue-ribbon ad hoc committee appointed by the AEC reviewed the results of a radiological survey of Bikini and declared the atoll ‘‘once again safe for human habitation."” The committee. which according to the AEC’s chairman consisted of “eight of the most highly qualified experts available.” concluded that ‘the exposures to radiation that would result from the repatriation of the Bikini people do not offer a significant threat to their health and safery.’” A year later Johnson announced that ‘‘the major islands of the atoll are now safe for human habication.”” and he ordered the atoll rehabilitatced and resettled “‘with all possible dispatch.” One Navy press release reported that the “natives are delighted, enthusiastic about the atomic bomb.” The Bikinians on Kili were jubilanc at the news. and nine of them were taken on a reconnaissance of Bikini. Their elation soon turned to shock and sorrow. The idyllic homeland of their memories had disappeared: the coconut trees were gone. and only scrub vegetation remained. One journalist reporred that ‘‘areas closer to the bomb sites have the look of African desert country, with scrub trees and brush in commandof parched land.” Onseeing the site of the Bravo shot, where. they, like the Bikinians, are living legacies of blue water and sand bars were all that remained of three or four islands, the Bikinians declared that their islands had lost their bones. One of the leaders was so overcome 84. 85. the double standard the United States applied that he wept openly.