No Justice for America's Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Turning Our Backs on the Marshall Islands, Again: Intro: >Last March 1, I was in the Marshall Islands, tiny atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Bravo test. On March 1, 1954, the United States dropped a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It was one of 67 nuclear weapons tests conducted in the Marshall Islands by the U.S. between 1946 and 1958. But while many of the islanders had been evacuated in previous tests, on March 1 the people of four tiny atolls were not. In fact, they were not evacuated until for four days after the massive explosion whose radioactive cloud spread over an area about the size of New Jersey. While this story is horrible in and of itself, documents declassified during the Clinton administration appear to point to the decision by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to make the Marshall Islanders into human guinea pigs. It appears that there was an AEC project, named Project 4.1, whose purpose was to study the effects of radioactive fallout on human beings. Despite its public statements otherwise, it seems that the AEC decided three days after the Bravo test to make the Marshall Islanders into research subjects. It is unclear whether the Marshallese actually received medical treatments for the exposure to high levels of radiation or whether they just received tracers which helped researchers know how human beings were responding, but we do know that they have suffered extraordinarily high levels of cancer, particularly of the thyroid. Moreover, the second and third generations also have high levels of cancer and immune system diseases. Women and girls who were originally exposed during the Bravo tests also experienced high levels of stillbirths, miscarriages and deformities in their babies. "The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany," said then U. S. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary upon first learning about these experiments when some documents were declassified.<
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posted by johannes,
Thursday, March 10, 2005
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