GIFF JOHNSON
A new report on the US nuclear weapons testing legacy in the Marshall Islands highlights the lack of United States study into important health concerns voiced by Marshallese that make it impossible to have a clear understanding of the impacts of the 67 nuclear weapons tests.
“The Legacy of US Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands,” a report by Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, was released late last month. The report was funded by Greenpeace Germany.
“Among the many troubling aspects of the legacy is that the United States had concluded, in 1948, after just three tests that the Marshall Islands was not ‘a suitable site for atomic experiments’ because it did not meet the required meteorological criteria,” Makhijani said. “Yet testing went on.
“Also notable has been the lack of systematic scientific attention to the accounts by many Marshallese of severe malformations and other adverse pregnancy outcomes like stillbirths. This was despite the documented fallout throughout the country and the fact that the potential for fallout to cause major birth defects has been known since the 1950s.”
Makhijani highlights the point that despite early documentation in the immediate aftermath of the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb test and numerous anecdotal reports from Marshallese women about miscarriages and still births, US government medical officials in charge of managing the nuclear test-related medical program in the Marshall Islands never systematically studied birth anomalies.
Among points outlined in the new report:
- Gamma radiation levels at Majuro, officially considered a “very low exposure” atoll, were tens of times, and up to 300 times, more than background in the immediate aftermaths of the thermonuclear tests in the Castle series at Bikini in 1954. Thyroid doses in the so-called “low exposure atolls” averaged 270 milligray (mGy), 60 percent more than the 50,000 people of Pripyat near Chernobyl who were evacuated (170 mGy) after the 1986 accident there, and roughly double the average thyroid exposures in the most exposed counties in the United States due to testing at the Nevada Test Site…Only a small fraction of the population has been officially recognized as exposed enough for screening and medical attention; even that came with its own downsides, including people being treated as experimental subjects.
- “In interviews and one 1980s country-wide survey, women have reported many adverse pregnancy outcomes. They include stillbirths, a baby with part of the skull missing and ‘the brain and the spinal cord fully exposed,’ and a two-headed baby. Many of the babies with major birth defects died shortly after birth. Some who lived suffered very difficult lives, as did their families. Despite extensive personal testimony, no systematic country-wide scientific study of a possible relationship of adverse pregnancy outcomes to nuclear testing has been done. It is to be noted that awareness among US scientists of the potential for major birth defects due to radioactive fallout goes back to the 1950s. Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivor data has also provided evidence for this problem.”
- “The occurrence of still-births and major birth defects due to nuclear testing fallout in the Marshall Islands is scientifically plausible but no definitive statement is possible at the present time. The nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands created vast amount of fission products, including radioactive isotopes that cross the placenta, such as iodine-131 and tritium. Radiation exposure in the first trimester can cause early failed pregnancies, severe neurological damage, and other major birth defects. This makes it plausible that radiation exposure may have caused the kinds of adverse pregnancy outcomes that were experienced and reported. However, no definitive statement is possible in the absence of a detailed scientific assessment.”