Radio Bikini: Show It To Your kids

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

Reading up on Nigerian history of late I find that in 1963, three years after independence from British colonial rule, the young Nigerian government broke diplomatic relations with France over its nuclear tests in the Sahara and southern Algeria. These were met with many protests and Nigerians too were concerned about the fallout.  Reading this made me think of the arrogance of colonial regimes. Why didn’t the French government test their nuclear bombs in The Camargue? That’s a rhetorical question of course as we know why; the French population wouldn’t have put up with it and it would have undermined the power of the French ruling class in their own back yard. Some estimates put the Algerian death toll during the French colonial rule at over 10 million so risking Algerian lives was clearly a better opti

 

I thought more about this after I read a piece this weekend by Timothy Noël Peacock on the Legacies of the post war nuclear tests that is published at The Conversation.com and it spurred me to look a little further in to the issue. That’s how I came across the documentary above and I urge folks to watch it. It’s called Radio Bikini after the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, a beautiful coral reef and lagoon where the US exploded nuclear bombs. In all, the US conducted 23   nuclear tests there up till 1958. Overall the US has conducted 1,054 atomic tests up to 2020.

 

The documentary begins with celebrations as WW2 ended after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Japan as a warning to the Chinese, the Soviets and the entire world, that the US had the big stick and would use it. In 1946, the US was the only country in the world with the atomic bomb and needed to test it further. The Special Committee on Atomic Energy developed Operation Crossbow and chose the Bikini atoll and the testing ground after the inhabitants were removed of course.

 

The Bikinians had no say in the matter. The Bikinian Chief who is interviewed in the documentary describes how they were told that the US needed to do this to see what would happen “in case there was another war.”, and that they would “have to leave”. Their beautiful lagoon would be the testing ground for this awesome power the chief was told by an American who said he was “the most powerful man in the world”. The purpose of this test, the inhabitants were told, was to turn this, “great destructive power in to something for the benefit of mankind.” That the lagoon and its coral reef was a more suitable place to drop nuclear bombs rather than Lake Michigan was no doubt to offer the Bikinians a place in history as the source of mankind’s salvation due to the generosity of US imperialism.

 

Atomb bombs had not been dropped over water or exploded under water and the first two tests were the most important and well known. There were many old ships and sea vessels loaded with animals placed in the lagoon to study the affect the blasts would have on life and military equipment. There were hundreds of navy personnel involved and there is some powerful testimony from one of them, John Smitherman.

 

Smitherman points out that he didn’t recall the word radioactivity being mentioned at all and the general message was that they were all protected and it was very safe. “Don’t worry about it, it won’t harm us” he was told. But Smitherman and others were showered with debris after the blast that covered the ship, their clothes, their hair and so on. After the experiment, Smitherman got sick and was given a medical discharge and sent home. Up until the interview in the film, he was not told what was wrong with him.  Make it to the end and see what it did to him. How many thousands of enlisted men suffered a similar fate? For Smitherman, and no doubt thousands of other US workers who were in the navy, it was a “slow death from that time to this day” he says.

 

It’s not an easy video to watch. But it is important for us to draw some conclusions from it. One is relevant to today when the mass media and the right wing forces are attacking people for publicly protesting injustice. Colin Kaepernick was savaged and harassed for his mild protests against police violence and the murder of black people in particular. We still have the right to protest on paper but the illusion or limits of bourgeois democracy are laid bare when protests begin to turn in to a conscious movement and action for real change.

 

In the documentary we see protestors opposing the tests carrying signs that say the tests are not scientific but military and they were right. The mass media will always call protests riots and the ruling class will always use provocateurs to discredit them Any strike that successfully gives power to labor over capital is terrorism as far as the capitalist class is concerned.

The US dragged the UN along but we have to look at the objective situation.  The US was the only atomic power and had shown what it can do in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a crime against humanity. The UN, still a capitalist club, was in no situation to stop the US from doing whatever it wanted. The productive forces of both US allies and enemies were destroyed and there was no country on earth that could stop the US at that point. By 1950, the US had over 50% of world trade and most importantly, atomic bombs.

 

It is important as well that we see the sheer barbaric nature of capitalism and its proponents. The US ruling class, like all ruling classes, had no respect at all for the people or the environment that it would pollute with radioactivity for generations to come. “There’s nothing in my life I want more than to go home to Bikini……” the chief says, “……The reason I can’t go back is because the Americans tell me there is poison there, I don’t understand this, but that is what the Americans say. This is not my island. I want to go back to my paradise, where God intended us to be.”

 

As far as I know, Bikinians are still scattered throughout the region unable to return home. A very familiar scene in the history of capitalist development. Peackock describes the event:

 

“But the cost which can never be calculated is the power of those images upon the human imagination and fear, as well as their effect on the nuclear arms race. Many target ships, while damaged, survived Crossroads Baker, but were enveloped in so much radioactive seawater that decontamination became almost impossible, except for a few vessels. Plans to sail the remaining ships back to the US triumphantly gave way to sinking most of them.”

 

Capitalism is a violent, competitive and destructive system of production. By its very nature it is hostile to the environment, and to all life, human included. While the existence of nuclear weapons has prevented a global war between the big powers, it has led to regional forever wars but we need to recognize that they do not make all those nuclear weapons never to use them. In Radio Bikini, US president Truman thanks God for giving the atomic bomb to the US rather than “our enemies” and offers prayers that God will guide the US to use the bomb in his ways and “for his purposes”. Didn’t Pompeo say something similar fairly recently? Religious fanatics of varying types, and there's plenty of them in the US body politic, see global conflagration as prophecy, as divine words written in 5000 year old tracts.

 

All working class people should watch this video and come away from it with one powerful conclusion. The political and military representatives of the capitalist class see no difference between some native on an island in the pacific and the US workers who were on those ships at Bikini atoll when their class interests are at stake. It’s pretty certain that more American workers died from that experiment than Bikinians although never being able to return to your home and witnessing the destruction of a coral reef that provided your sustenance is a death of sorts.

 

Then inescapable truth is that the US sailors have more in common with the Bikinian people than their own officers, their own president, their own government. Without the worker, society cannot function, wars cannot be fought, the environment poisoned. In that sense, “we” have no country of our own. Wow! I just had a great idea. What if workers of the world united as workers. Might that be a first step in changing course and building a sane, civilized global society?

 

I can’t believe no one’s thought of that?