As America celebrates Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month this May, Rose Gottemoeller, former undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, remembers the painful history of Castle Bravo—the largest and most catastrophic US nuclear weapons test conducted in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War—and urges the United States to finish the compact extension with the three island nations to contain China’s growing influence in the Pacific.
In a second essay, Sally Clark, a former Peace Corps volunteer, recollects her discovery of the bewildering toll on the Marshallese and the environment caused by the 67 nuclear weapons tests the United States conducted between 1946 and 1958 at the Bikini and Enewetak atolls—and asks for an apology and justice.
—François Diaz-Maurin
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The Hunters Point Community Biomonitoring Program has conducted urinary biomonitoring screenings capable of detecting up to 35 toxic and nutrient elements on residents and workers at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and Treasure Island where an estimated 100 ships exposed to fat man plutonium bombs during the 1946 Operations Crossroads testing in the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands. In April of 2022, as a guest of Dr. Terry Marshall, the leadership of the Hunters Point Biomonitoring Foundation toured the world renown Lawrence Livermore Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry in a step towards implementation of our Plutonium Screening Initiative led by James Dahlgren MD. Dr. Dahlgren is recognized nationally as a toxic tort expert in human biomonitoring as he served as expert witness in Hinkley versus PG&E - the "Erin Brokovich case"- the nation's largest toxic tort settlement case in 1996.
The history of the Marshall Islands is evident in Hunters Point where we have detected clusters of radioactive and cancer causing chemicals and cancers proven to be induced by ionizing radiation exposure at the corridor of entry to the United States Radiological Defense Laboratories and an industrial landfill known to contain radium dials, barrels of irradiated animal carcasses and radioactive sandblast used to decontaminate ships hauled back from the Marshall Islands in 1946.