Bikini: 50 Years of Nuclear Exposure

On July 1, 1946, less than a year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States resumed nuclear testing in the Pacific. In March, 1954 the US forced the 166 inhabitants of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, part of the United Nations Trust Territory that was among the spoils of victory in world War II, to leave their home island. On July 1, 1954 it conducted the first full-scale test of a Hydrogen Bomb at Bikini. The blast is estimated at 15 megatons, that is the equivalent of 15 million tons of TNT, one thousand times as powerful as the bomb exploded at Hiroshima. The Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon No. 5, sailing well beyond the zone demarcated by US authorities for the test, was covered with white ashes, later recognized as radioactive coral dust. The next day all 23 crew members suffered from headache, nausea, diarrhea and other symptoms from exposure to radioactivity. The symptoms were more acute among inhabitants of Longelap Atoll, 180 kilometers East of Bikini and other atolls. On September 23, the Lucky Dragon's chief radio operator died of jaundice, diagnosed as having been complicated by radioactivity. In Japan, the incident sparked a national petition campaign to ban nuclear weapons led by a women's group in Suginami Ward, Tokyo. The twenty million signatures that it collected within months provided a springboard for a national and international anti-nuclear movement. In August 1955 the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs convened in Hiroshima, the first in a series of annual meetings that became the center of the antinuclear movement. This series of articles, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bikini test, records the fate of the crew members, the fishing communities that were their homes, and their impact on the subsequent treatment of atomic victims in Japan.