US policy toward the Marshall Islands must change

An explosion 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. A legacy of environmental contamination, sickness, death, displacement, and human experimentation. A day of mourning in the Marshall Islands, and a dark period in U.S. history that few Americans know.

The United States must finally give the Marshall Islands fair compensation and an apology for nuclear testing.

March 1 marks the 70th anniversary of a thermonuclear weapons test called Castle Bravo, the most powerful bomb ever detonated by the U.S. military. It created a fireball 4.5 miles wide, hotter than the core of the sun, and launched ten million tons of radioactive debris into the air around Bikini Atoll. 

Bravo caused the worst radiological exposure of all U.S. nuclear tests, which makes it horrific that the United States waited days to evacuate nearby islands. Hundreds of islanders weren’t evacuated at all.

Then the U.S. government began secretly studying the Marshallese people like “mice” under Project 4.1, and during the next three decades resettled them on radioactive islands with false promises of safety. High rates of miscarriages, birth defects and cancer ensued.

Bravo was one of 67 U.S. nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958, equivalent in total to 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for 12 years. From 1947 until Marshallese independence in 1986, Washington administered the islands as a UN-mandated trust territory that it was required to protect.

The Marshallese people are still fighting for nuclear justice today as they struggle with the intergenerational harms of the U.S. nuclear program. 

“The U.S. must take complete responsibility for the ongoing health, environmental, and cultural impacts on the Marshallese people,” says Benetick Kabua Maddison, executive director of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, which serves Marshallese communities in the United States and raises awareness about the nuclear legacy.

For most Americans, this history is invisible, but it shouldn’t be. Americans know the word “bikini”, but few know that Bikini’s people live in permanent exile: Radiation renders their home uninhabitable. Some islands are simply gone, vaporized by bombs.

Americans know the word “fallout”, but few know it was coined after Bravo dumped radiation over a region roughly the area of New Jersey. Attention generated by “Oppenheimer” hasn’t included the Marshall Islands, which bore 59 percent of the megatonnage of all U.S. nuclear tests.

And few Americans understand what we owe the Marshall Islands. The U.S. government considered nuclear testing crucial to American security during the Cold War, and the Marshall Islands hosts a massive U.S. missile base fulfilling that role today. Marshallese enlist in our military at a higher per capita rate than any U.S. state.

“Marshallese are being treated as second class people when it comes to compensation, medical care and other radiation exposure needs,” says Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal. He is the author of “Don’t Ever Whisper,” a biography of his wife Darlene Keju, who grew up on an island downwind from Bravo, became a powerful advocate for nuclear test survivors, and died of cancer at age 45.

Darlene, like many Marshallese, was betrayed by the United States.

“Today, over $2.5 billion has been approved by the U.S. Congress for compensation payments for U.S. citizens under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 (RECA),” Johnson explains. That’s because after RECA ran out of its original $100 million settlement, the United States appropriated more.

In contrast, the Marshall Islands received $150 million in nuclear compensation under the Compact of Free Association (COFA) in 1986. The COFA established a tribunal to adjudicate compensation claims, and when its $150 million ran out, the tribunal sought over $3 billion in today’s dollars. The United States never paid.

Marshallese leaders have pursued funding for the tribunal since the 2000s, and the U.S. government has always refused, insisting that $150 million was a “full and final” settlement.

“This amount pales in comparison to the astronomical sums that the United States spends on wars and nuclear upgrades,” says Maddison. “It cannot remedy the devastating impact of the nuclear weapons testing program.”

In 2023, State Department lawyers blocked U.S. funding from addressing the nuclear legacy.

This deceitful evasion must stop.

The $150 million settlement is not only grossly inadequate, it was signed under false pretenses. Files declassified in 1994 prove that the United States concealed human experiments and the wide range of fallout. Compensation and an apology are imperative: the U.S. government has denied the truth for too long.

The Marshall Islands doesn’t even have an oncology center, and without U.S. funding, won’t get one.

U.S. policy toward the Marshall Islands damages our country’s standing in the Pacific Islands, dangerously ceding ground to China as it seeks to increase its influence there. How can the United States promise the Pacific Islands honest partnership when the legacy of our nuclear weapons program remains unresolved?

The United States must end its shameful mistreatment of the Marshallese people, who have been forced to sacrifice and suffer so much for our country.

Camilla Pohle is an expert on the Pacific Islands who formerly covered the region as a U.S. government analyst.