Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 215 - How the US Poisoned the Marshall Islands

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys The story of how the US poisoned the Marshall Islands with nuclear fallout and did nothing to clean it up. sources: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/02/27/castle-bravo-the-largest-u-s-nuclear-explosion/ https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/castle-bravo https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-testing-sea-level-rise/ Zohl De Ishtar "Poisoned Lives, Contaminated Lands: Marshall Islanders Are Paying a High Price for the United States Nuclear Arsenal" Seattle Journal for Social Justice. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/lost-sea/ https://borgenproject.org/thyroid-cancer-a-radiation-caused-healthcare-crisis-in-the-marshall-islands/ Oishi, Matashichi. "The Day the Sun Rose in the West: The Lucky Dragon, and I." University of Hawaii Press. *corrections* FDR died after completing 3 terms in office, barely made it 80 days into his 4th.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of Lines with my Donkeys. I am Joe and with me today is Sarah. Hello Sarah. Yay Sarah. Am I allowed to say that with anybody else? Am I cheating? I'm like, no.

I don't want to get involved in y'all's relationship. That's for the best. We're not quite cemented on what we truly are to one another. Anyway, we're talking about podcasting today. Are we talking about podcasting or are we podcasting about something else? No, we're podcasting about something else. Now, Sarah, you have a show called It Came From the Sea. That's true.

You are our go-to person when it comes to anything to do with the ocean. And also we talk about things that aren't ocean related, but that's not important. That ruins my train of thought. How do you feel about the Pacific Islands? Wow, that's a loaded question. Considering I spent most of my adult life on Pacific Islands, I have thoughts. I think generally the islands themselves, like the geology is beautiful, but cultures are very interesting and diverse and deep.

And the kind of modern situations all around, not great. So you're saying is you wouldn't want to drop a nuclear weapon on one of them or several of them? No. Yeah. I had to think about it, but no. That was a layup. You shouldn't want to do that. However, you know who did that a lot?

The entirety of the U.S. government in the 1940s through 60s? That's right. Yeah. We are going to talk about an uplifting story. I'm lying to you. You sound so tired already. It's about the time the United States states killed the bikini atoll oh yeah classic and i need to be clear here poisoned vast swaths of the marshall islands which is a independent and sovereign country today yeah yeah oh god i'm sorry

um this is kind of funny because i think you might recall one of the first times we hung out uh one of the first topics that we both got like we we bonded over as friends was getting way too animated about uh weird nuclear mishaps that had happened i believe you're right yeah really just a classic topic yeah. And I feel like anybody who knows us will be like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Nothing bonds people faster than getting really excited about the demon core. Noted Armenian genius who killed himself with a screwdriver

in a tainted core of plutonium. He thought he was built different. Spoiler alert. He was not he was not well you know one day we're really gonna have to talk about that and laugh at a large group of idiots who accidentally just nuked their insides now um we have talked about uh nuclear accidents in the military before with like losing bombs uh the the occasional soviet submarine that sinks and dies on the ocean floor and uh you know go listen to those we're not talking about those today uh we are going to talk about out of control nuclear weapons tests which had largely unintended

consequences then everybody just hope nobody ever talk about it again to include the the body count which is large um and we will never actually know how many people it's killed indirectly or directly but uh it's more than the u.s likes to admit i have definitely read about different stuff with the nuclear testing in the marshall islands and things like the Castle Bravo testing um but the the actual like amount of people that were directly impacted by it other than and we'll get into like the the residents of the Marshall Islands other than like relocating people you actually don't really see references to people who were killed by these experiments you see a lot of just like here's how they set up stuff or like here's what they were trying to test and how like they grossly like miscalculated what was going to happen but you really don't see a reference to body count which you do see in like

any anything else that you find that's talking about like a nuclear incident one of the first things that people will talk about is like how many how many individuals were killed and it's just not a thing that you get with any of the marshall islands testing right and i i think the reason for that besides the obvious answer which is like no need to talk about that um is that nobody immediately dropped dead uh so they could they could explain it away like no these people didn't die from the castle bravo test they simply all died of uh pituitary cancer that simply happened afterwards and we have no idea why sudden onset cancer three

years later you can't explain that yeah yeah we made the pacific islands be covered in snow once by splitting the atom too hard and uh mysteriously afterwards everybody died died we're not really sure what happened yeah now in case listeners if you're not aware the US is the only country in the world so far to use a nuclear weapon in anger twice

on August 6th and August 9th 1945 blinking two cities from the world and ending World War II on paper. After witnessing this hand of God type destruction, there was a lot of people that began to seriously question the need for a standing army or a Navy anymore. Because when you could just dispatch some dudes who could fly a plane to vaporize an entire city in the blink of an eye, why do war anymore? Okay, that sounds straight up like something curtis lemay would try to sell the u.s government on it probably had something to do with

curtis lemay not to mention there was a lot of people who had green-lighted the use of these bombs from president harry truman down to military commanders down to the guys who had built the goddamn things who didn't fully know what these weapons were actually capable of. Because there wasn't a whole lot of testing done with these weapons before they were used in World War II. This could be because

we simply didn't have that many yet, the speed of which we wanted to deploy them, and of course, because if you started lighting up the goddamn atmosphere enough times, word was going to get out. Have they even done a parachute drop of one to test it at that point? No.

Right. Because most of them are just like put up on a tower and, and exploded and detonated that way. Right? Yeah. The only test conducted before active dropping was just sat out in the desert. And they're like oh look the world

didn't explode we're good just because i know well i know like the pilots like the pilot of the enola gay and the other bomber that dropped him weren't like obviously weren't told a whole lot other than like right drop it here and then leave and leave fast um we're not gonna tell you why but you're you're gonna want to step on it pal yeah yeah just like beyond so like obviously beyond them just not understanding the kind of destructive force that they were dropping not that it necessarily would have changed their mind or anything of course not i believe the pile of the enola gay went to his grave saying he didn't regret a single fucking thing oh you can find some very not great quotes from him all throughout his life yes you can they had no idea what would happen essentially like

they're dropping it it has like a probably a timer for like when it's gonna go off and they're just yeah just hoping it doesn't also like blow up this bomber also probably thinking like oh it's one plane you know whatever yeah there was a fair amount of people who just assumed those guys were gonna die because nobody was really sure yeah this eventually led to people within the government really wanting to you know broaden their horizons and their uh their knowledge on you know world ending weapons uh one guy in particular was a guy named Louis Strauss. Now Strauss is an investment banker with no education in the field of

physics other than what has been called a quote, passing interest. Okay, to be fair, that kid in Michigan who built a pile reactor in his backyard also had what I would describe as a passing interest in physics. Yeah, that kid rocks. I think his name was like Mike Ham, something like that

uh yeah uh he built a breeder reactor in his mom's shed out of whatever the material is that is inside smoke detectors yeah yeah there's a little bit of i think uranium in smoke detectors yeah uh he did it to get a merit badge because for some reason the boy scouts had a nuclear science merit badge which admittedly fucking rocks this is why the girl scouts has never been cool okay yeah the girl scouts had to settle for

building your own ballistic missile merit badge it's not nearly as cool yeah if you unite them together now you're talking like if north korea can do it like it's not worth getting a badge okay nearly as cool. It's an old hat. Yeah, if you unite them together, now you're talking. Like if North Korea can do it, like it's not worth getting a bad UK. One of the reasons that kind of piqued Strauss's interest in radiation in general

was the concept of radiation treatments being possibly useful for cancer patients. He eventually joined the Naval Reserve due to being medically unfit for active service. And, you know, their standards were a step lower during wartime. And he uses a very substantial bank account to fund physics research that he found personally interesting. He was involved in the ordnance branch of the Navy during World War II, and he was able to cultivate incredibly close political relationships within the machine of Washington, D.C. This has made slightly harder for him because he fucking hated FDR and the New Deal.

And FDR really fucking hated him. Yeah. He was one of those people that thought the New Deal was like socialism. Yeah, yeah. That's what I figured. I mean, investment banker, right? Right. Sure.

Who would have thought that investment banker not a big fan of the New Deal? Luckily for him and unluckily for Japan, possibly, FDR died during his third term. And Truman became president, who really, really liked him some Louis Strauss. Of course. To show how big of a fan he was, he eventually promoted him all the way to admiral,

which was virtually unheard of for a guy in the Naval Reserves at the time. Yeah. What? Get close enough and Truman's like like he's an admiral now everybody's like what but he's like he doesn't do anything yeah he also shows up like one weekend a month two weekends a year um or two weeks whatever fuck i don't know yeah eventually strauss found his way on to the u.s interdepartmental committee on atomic energy as the navy's representative and again investment banker um yeah so it's just a whole bunch of people forming washington's uh policies on atomic

energy after like literally months after we figured out it wouldn't wipe out the earth by like igniting the atmosphere or whatever and one of the guys is an investment banker yeah this probably explains a lot i mean you have like military professionals quote unquote like mcarthur and aforementioned curtis lemay too so it's like I know I know qualifications don't really mean anything actually but nah yeah come on meanwhile the scientists are like please stop putting your dick and balls on the bomb we've been

telling there are some of those scientists who would absolutely do that though yeah that's true I mean they were the guys who killed themselves while trying to fuck around with a screwdriver with a with a core several of them were the people who would like just out of like pure like petty whatever um create the like create the infrastructure for climate change denial because people told them they were nuclear physicists and they weren't climate scientists and their response was fuck you i'll do what i

want god damn it. Reagan will listen. Yeah. You just have to make an appointment after his astronomer leaves. That's right. Now, a lot of the people on this interdepartmental committee, investment banker or no, were quite curious on what more applications for nuclear weapons were. Because remember, they had just dropped it on the city. They haven't done anything else with it they're like okay but like what if

we don't do war crimes with it can we use our military targets operation plowshare oh no no that's a that's a that's a topic at length probably for yeah a lot of people like what if we blasted a fucking lake in the ground

fucking incredible man how long it took to make the panama canal fuck that it's it's the staples commercial for the easy button but there's just a fucking mushroom cloud in the background okay but we're not talking about that well i promise i'll save that at length for a different time. We knew, okay, this is the make city go away button, but what if we dropped it on a Navy while it was out at sea? Hypothetically, another Pearl Harbor is happening, and we see a Japanese fleet, well, not the Japanese anymore,

a Russian fleet out at sea. What if we fucking nuke them? Would that work? What would it do to the ships? Right. Now, Strauss, being the naval representative on the board, was determined to show that the Navy would be fine in the age of atomic warfare. And dropping a nuke on it wasn't that big of a deal. He's not even just not a physicist.

He also is just like not somebody who's been around Navy stuff. Really? I don't think he was even ever on a boat he was a naval reserve guy in dc yeah right his uniform is makes as much sense as a guy from the sea org he's got like three ribbons and it's like his marksmanship and his national service defense but he's an admiral yeah Yeah. So, you know, he wanted to drop a nuke on some boats. And yeah, I mean, to be fair, it probably would look rad from the outside. And you actually can watch videos of this test as long as you ignore everything that happens afterwards. And before, very, very bright, pretty lights. Watching the middle five minutes of radio bikini.

And I should point out here, the modern day day we see something like this and we assume the navy was just trying to get more funding like every defense contractor affiliated journalist talking about why some country has totally left the u.s in the dust about some weapons development or another and go back like two weeks talking about supersonic fucking missiles in ukraine or something you know this shit happens all the time but at the time this is a serious question that people weren't quite so sure of. And the military-industrial complex wasn't quite what we know it as today. It was still there, of course, and Eisenhower would famously warn everybody about it in

a couple of years, and that warning would be completely ignored. But we were already balls deep in the Cold War. People were curious what the future of warfare looked like. Right. People were curious what the future of warfare looked like. People were invested on the future of warfare in this situation. The president made sure an all-civilian review board was put in charge of any naval-focused nuclear testing. Because would you believe it? Truman's like, if we put the Navy in charge of this, they're going to fuck with the test to make the Navy look good. What?

Pretty forward-thinking of Truman, quite honestly. Because of course they would do that we still do that yeah i've seen sergeant vilco like there's a famously this thing going on right now of uh the army is fielding what effectively looks like a dune buggy um as like this this quick uh deployment vehicle for like six guys right every single field tests done by soldiers every soldier's like this thing fucking sucks yeah like it has no armor it's uncomfortable we can't fit it up yeah yeah and the like the company that built it i want to say uh i can't remember what it was but uh they're like uh actually the contracts already been signed and we're producing them anyway i mean classic right just yeah obviously now i mean other branches were in on this too and we're pretty dead set on making the

navy be honest with the test but also trying to make sure they looked as bad as possible. If they cut funding from the Navy, the Army is probably going to get it, right? Or the Air Force is going to get it. So like the Army insisted on using more ships and then the Army Air Force demanding that each ship be loaded with fuel, oil, and ammo to make

it as realistic as possible. The whole time Louis Strauss is probably like, God damn it. That's just all in the water now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's more. There's worse things to worry about

that's about to happen if it makes you feel any better. No. And so was born operations crossroads test. And which was opposed. Would you be shocked what I tell you by virtually every scientist that actually works for the government? Because all of this is being done independent of any kind of scientific review.

Oh, of course. Well, because after the bombs were actually dropped, basically after FDR died, before the bombs were even dropped, a good portion of the nuclear scientists had been working on this the whole time that were just like, science is fun. I'm doing science. Really quickly, we're like, oh, I think I've made a huge mistake. We shouldn't actually ever use these. And then noped out, which is like, yeah, kind of too little too late there, bud.

So everybody left behind is that people like, all right, well, let's see if we could send something into space by stacking nuclear weapons on top of one another that's right and now that those losers are out of here all moderation is gone bring in the former nazis even some diplomats and members of the government were against further testing to include the Secretary of State. Because remember, at this point, the Soviet Union hadn't actually detonated their first bomb yet, and they wouldn't until 1949. Yeah. Yeah. So we have like no reason to believe that another country is like an equivalent threat at this point. Yeah, probably not. I mean, they probably assumed the Soviets were going to eventually figure it out and they would figure it out making a virtually a carbon copy version of ours via spies and shit.

But like James Burns, the secretary of state, pointed out kind of reasonably that like, hey, if we keep flaunting how many of these things that we have, that's only going to make anybody else want one of these more. Right. Something could be said for like, hey, the cat's on the fucking back. There's no putting it back now. But if you point out to everyone like, actually we've formed a quite efficient assembly line of destruction, it's going to make other people

feel like they absolutely need one, especially if they're in opposition to us. The Soviet Union and China and everybody else is eventually going to build their own, but we've definitely accelerated it a bit. Right. It wouldn't have felt like an existential threat if we hadn't been constantly blowing up the Pacific Islands. Right. Jesus.

Other scientists were like the black belt scientists, right? Where they were like, okay, well, hear us out. We've never blown one of these up in the ocean. But what happened if we did that? Yeah, that's a question you could ask i guess again on the other flip side of that the other scientists that were i assume office mates with those ones were like okay but we've never done that so maybe we shouldn't yeah right like we don't actually need to answer all of these questions. What if we created Godzilla? And famously, again, another group of scientists are like, well, if we do that, there's going to be people nearby.

We know a fair bit about radiation now. Seems bad. That's going to kill them. We shouldn't do that. So, of course, the government went ahead and did it anyway. Yeah. They're not people. They're enlisted. Yeah, they're sailors ahead and did it anyway. Yeah. They're not people. They're enlisted.

Yeah, they're sailors. Oh, it actually gets worse. I get to say the thing now. Wait, wait. Oh, you did it. So, the government selected the Bikini Lagoon of the Bikini Atoll as the test site on January 24th 1946. Now Bikini Atoll was selected over the other islands around

it. For instance, one of them on the decision board was the goddamn Galapagos. Oh my god! Just to make a fucking statement? Just to be fucking the villain from Fern Gully, I guess. Yeah, right?

Let's just blow up Easter Island. Why the fuck not? No, I assumed one of the reasons they were talked out of nuking the Galapagos is because guys, those are part of Ecuador. Yeah, right? That's part of it. You don't own these places. Yeah, I mean, everything else at this point is like under

military occupation protectorate status whatever but like the galapagos certainly was not yeah yeah yeah fuck now the bikini atoll is part of the marshall islands which is at the time was an american colony under direct governorship of the u.s military which at the time was headed by Navy Commodore Ben Wyatt. Four days after the test site was chosen, the 167 islanders who lived on the atoll were told they're about to get kicked the fuck off and were not told why. Now, as you can probably assume, people were not huge fans of this. In order to sell this forced deportation, Wyatt went to the Atoll and appealed to their deeply held Christian beliefs, which had been spread to them via Protestant and Mormon missionaries in the mid to late 1800s.

Yeah. He compared their deportation from the islands, which was their home for many of them, several generations, as comparable to the story of the Bible, where God saved the children of Israel by leading them to the promised land. Yikes.

Fuck off. Now, the islanders led by their chief complied. And I obviously we have no way. They didn't have a choice. It was either like you go with us or you come with us right yeah it was 100% coerced the chief was smart enough no he did not have a fucking choice in the matter i mean yeah he and his people had just lived through world war ii he knows how this shit works i'm just like i'm blown away by like it was less than a week less than a week before

like from choosing this place to removing the occupants in a way that like it was less than a week less than a week before like from choosing this place to removing the occupants in a way that like obviously i didn't think they would give like great thought to what they're doing with these people but you i don't know i thought they'd maybe have like a couple of weeks to come up with a plan for how to like discuss it with them and relocate them not like four days surprise i mean if you look at official u.s um documents to include there's a video of this uh of this situation uh where it tries to show that the chief uh staunch christian himself would have been like ah yes we are you know god's children and we should listen to this however the video is telling some of the evidence that the chief knew he was being coerced

or in fact had been quite literally threatened uh when nobody was paying attention is that uh on the video of the chief's submission to u.s authorities or news cameras he kept fucking up his prepared lines uh until someone simply held up a cue card for him. Which is literally a thing that they do to hostages being made to record videos under duress. Yeah. Now, the army built temporary housing for them on Rognarok Atoll, which

was a different atoll nearby. Now, I say temporary as in they were one step above tents and the army told them that they would be there for a few weeks, maybe a month. They wouldn't be there very long.

They're still there. Uh, Oh, we'll get there. Okay. It does not have a happy ending. Yeah. How far away is this Island from,

um, the bikini at all? Uh, not close. Okay. Like far enough away that it's, it's, it's completely different.

Yeah. Like, I mean, I know it's not like, no, it's, it's completely different. Yeah. Like, I mean, I know it's not like, no, it's not like their home homeland or whatever, but is it like actually far enough away to be safe from radiation? Nope.

Okay. I mean, the reason for that is this test goes wildly out of control, but it's also hard to tell with like how the wind blows, et cetera, et cetera. If they also would have been safe, regardless, it feels like this was a bad idea in a lot of ways. Yeah.

The reason why they had the chief make these videos is obviously propaganda and optics. Um, this is because unlike the Trinity tests, uh, before it, which was the test in Nevada, nothing about these tests were going to be secret. This test was going to be publicized and not just for a domestic audience, but for an international one. Eventually, over 100 reporters showed up to witness and report on this event, making it what the National World War II Museum called, quote, the most observed, most photographed, and most talked about scientific test ever conducted up until that point. I'm going to need some notes on the use of scientific there.

It goes boom. Ah, yeah, right. Gentleman science. Okay. I mean, just to further prove what the whole point of this test was, Truman moved the test date back a couple weeks so more people could show up and watch it on time. Very scientific. Yeah.

Also, completely disregarding any meteorological predictions. Didn't even cross their minds. Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. Very good. Three tests were planned as part of Operation Crossroads. And as part of Operation Crossroads, Hiroshima or Nagasaki style airbursts known as the able shot, a shallow underwater burst called the Baker shot and a deeply submerged explosion known as the Charlie shot. Shot, right? Yeah, that's right.

None of them. We didn't get down to M for the money shot. We didn't get down to M for the money shot. Now, they assembled the target fleet that they were going to nuke, made up of dozens of old mothballed Navy ships and quite a few captured Japanese and German ones, too. In case you're wondering, what are you going to do with all these captured things at the end of a war? Nuke them, I guess. They then packed the ships with animals because you had to test what would happen to the crew. And this included 200 pigs, 60 guinea pigs, 204 goats, 5000 rats and 200 mice. They already knew what was going to happen.

Like this, this would have made sense during like the Trinity tests when they were like, we're not really sure what happens when you get dosed with radiation via explosion they did have like they did have animals like set out during a lot of the ground testing in nevada right and not to mention they just nuked two cities full right yeah right yeah but yeah they went ahead over 40 000 men and more than 150 support ships were arrayed outside the immediate target area. Somewhat incredibly, the Navy, remember, there's only a couple years removed from World War II, was mostly still staffed with the guys they drafted for World War II. Oh. And they told the men that they could extend their draft time by one year,

because remember, this is a decent job for a lot of these guys. Yeah, right. A lot of people that got mustered for service during World War Two kind of didn't want to leave. Well, there's also like a big difference between like serving in the military

during a time of war, like not, not all in bad ways either. Like you do actually have something to do. You do actually have like a sense of purpose where like a peacetime military,

especially peacetime Navy is a lot of just like nothing in a way that right. Like isn't motivating. Isn't necessarily something you want to stick around in. Yeah. And a lot, but there was a fair amount of people who did and one of the things that they dangled in front of people to hit those numbers maybe mostly because they didn't have enough people in this task force because they were all about ready to muster out so like

fuck we gotta we gotta keep them in somehow re Reenlistment contract benefit here. You extend for one year, you get to watch the nuke go off. You know, if my chief had presented me with that when I was getting out. That would have got me. I probably would still be in, yeah. Yeah, 100% would have got me. Like, look, Joe, you can reenlist for three years and we will nuke a mountain for you. I'm like, fuck yeah. Like, you shouldn't be doing that.

But if I can't stop you anyways well you know yeah the nuke's gonna go off whether i re-enlist or not i might as well be one of the guys that gets my eyes turned to cancerous tumors right you get at least 50 disability for that yeah what's the v actually i the va rating for these guys is uh oh my god not good uh unfortunately the va has decided to see that your-related cancer is not service-connected. Yeah, I could have come from anywhere. Yeah. Now, the able shot went off on July 1st, 1946.

The Baker shot went off July 25th. And according to the government, they were both fundamentally the same device they are implosion based plutonium bombs however the results were not the same nor what anybody was expecting so the Abel was in the air and then the whatever the

B1 was was like shallow right yes the Abel shot was dropped out of a plane which missed its target by a half mile of course couldn't have known and um this of course will be part of one of the many cascading safety failures that happens it detonated above ships that were not meant to be targeted oh and now they weren't supply ships uh or like the service ships with the crewmen on them. However, they were part of the fleet that had the mothball fleet that had been loaded with measuring instruments so they could measure the data.

So they nuked their own data collection repository. This is where I'm again, once again, just can you really call this a science experiment did you really do all the steps to make this a science experiment because i i'm not sure you did i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say if the bomb would have landed on target you could feasibly call it science however they literally just nuked their own science yeah because they can't even measure it right yeah you just whatever whatever whatever fuck everybody here you know to the surprise of most people and honestly me this bomb was kind of a dud uh it did damage to the ships close to the epicenter of the blast but uh outside of that damage was quite

minimal and since it was just an airburst it didn't contaminate anything as much as people figured it would i mean it did spray nuclear contaminants in whichever direction but it wasn't as close um it didn't spread it as much as they thought it would etc it was kind of a failure part of the stuff that spread a bunch of the nuclear material in nagasaki and hiroshima was the fire so i guess that makes sense right if you don't have a bunch of like paper and and thin wood to like be irradiated and then catch on fire and then spread ash around there is just like less material to carry radiation right and like the fallout can't get in the smoke and be easily carried by the wind like this just

literally falls into the ocean or falls on a ship that's made out of metal and full of your recording equipment so full of your recording equipment can So full of your recording equipment or anything. All right. Now this actually was such a letdown. I was like, nah, this sucks. The journalist like left like a lot. There were still some there,

but a lot like, oh, boo. And they left before the Baker shot started. Send the intern next time. Yeah. Now Baker went sideways. Let's say now this was the world's first underwater nuclear test

uh people were really rolling the dice not entirely sure what would happen um and this is this is where we talk about the first whale to get superpowers no scientists no scientists have known for so long that water is incompressible. And so like what that means, right, is like when you set something off in the air, air is very compressible. So like the act of the air squishing together and spreading apart will like absorb some of the energy. Water doesn't do that. So like just to say like if you're setting off an explosion underwater, like, you know, you that the the size of the space taken up by the explosion is the amount of water that's gonna be moved like that's just how it fucking works so

like i'm already mad i'm already i'm just upset i'm actually really glad you explained that uh because i couldn't you're the ocean person um and and rather than try to explain why something went so seriously wrong i'm gonna quote directly from the historical radiological assessment because it's catastrophic to use a word. Quote, the first effect of the blast is a tremendous bubble of water and steam that broke the ocean surface. Then a huge wave over 90 feet high that are called a base surge rolled over target and support vessels. feet high that are called a base surge rolled over target and support vessels. Remember the support vessels are the ones with people in them

as well as the islands of the Atoll. Vast quantities of radioactive debris primarily consisting of fission products radioactive elements resulting from fission or splitting of the bomb's plutonium. Unconsumed plutonium from the bomb's fissioning

core and radioactive sand and coral that had been irradiated by the intense neutron radiation from the blast rained down on the target and support ships, islands, and lagoon. This unexpected outcome caused the contamination of both target and support ships,

the extent of which depended on each ship's position relative to the zero point of the blast. Twelve of the ships to the zero point of the blast. Twelve of the ships in the immediate area of the detonation exploded and sank immediately. Jesus. Whoops! Just, I... Like, okay, I knew that there would be a lot of water displaced, but when you said it was a shallow burst i for whatever reason um forgot that they were on

an atoll which is like an atoll is a collapsed underwater volcano so inside is a crater in the middle of a kind of a ring of what looks like a a circle of an island holy shit i didn't know that so they effectively put it in a cannon to fire outwards. So I guess anytime I had read about this, because I have read about it some, I thought it was in the open ocean, I guess, because a lot of the tests that they would do in the Pacific Proving Grounds would be

just in the open ocean. Yeah, those occurred after this for a reason. Yeah, because I'm just like, what the fuck did you think was going to happen if you just had it suspended near the one shallow bit of seafloor that you had available like the fuck again this i believe this is what happens when the scientists are like maybe don't do that and they're like i'm gonna do it anyway like all right i'm gonna see myself out yeah that's a good point that is a really good point there probably were people just like this is this is gonna cause like

radioactive fucking cement to rain down on top of people and then you just had to add and roll some whatever going ah but what if it didn't not to mention a 90 foot wave of radiation slapping into your boat yeah now you would think going into say a large-scale nuclear test sarah um one of the things you'd have in place is a decontamination process no they didn't what at all nobody even thought about how to decontaminate a ship because remember we're in some warships we're not gonna get hit by any of this stuff we're safely in the distance so they just they just didn't have one i i guess I just always assumed like one of the hospital ships was just like around because that,

you know, good news. It's also radioactive now. Oh my God. Oh my God. Well, Jesus, the contamination spread to the entire support fleet.

And almost as soon as the bomb went off, so much contamination was thrown in literally every single direction that President Truman's like, we're going to go ahead and cancel the Charlie shot. Well, at least he is capable of making good choices once in a while, I guess. We've already talked about what is the science here, right? So let's talk about what they discovered. This is from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Quote, a large ship about a mile away from the explosion would escape sinking, but the crew would be killed by a deadly burst of radiation from the bomb. And only a ghost ship would remain floating unattended in the vast waters of the ocean.

Also known as things I just assumed before this happened. Yeah, right? Like, duh. This also like, okay, wait wait jesus christ this would also mean that their tests like what okay practically right they're looking at the practical effects of nuclear weapons on on a fleet at sea so if a fleet at sea is what you're trying to combat and you've just set off a shallow water nuclear device are you expecting to set up a bunch of like nuclear sea mines in the open ocean and just hope a fleet triggers them?

Good news. They worked on those. Why? I mean, I mean, they worked on nuclear landmines, torpedoes, nuclear missiles.

Yeah. Jet at one point that they were trying. Yes. The ramjet. It was a doomsday machine. I think fucking ruled like the the nuclear ramjet is quite literally something that should only exist in a marvel comic book it's so wildly evil that it was scrapped pretty quickly because even the scientists were like guys the fuck are we doing here they Those are the best.

Because it required it to spread radiated debris as it flew. Oh, yes. Yeah. There would be no way for it to come down other than to cause a nuclear explosion. So if you fired it in a direction, you are, in fact, accepting that you're ending the world

because everything along the way is going to be glowing. It's not related to this, but I'm pretty sure the point of it initially was like we can create a jet that could fly nonstop and never need to refuel. Yes. But then, yeah, then the other issues came into it. How do we stop it? It'll never stop. That's the point. You want an unstoppable plane and you got it.

It was building the unstoppable plane that would also hold more nuclear weapons on board. Yeah, I believe. I mean, it's literally something that like comes out of Warhammer 40k. Like nobody would actually attempt to build that until it happened. And then everybody like took a good long look at themselves in the mirror. I'm like, come on, guys. Let's just go back to planning to nuke the moon instead. This one was a bust.

Yeah. This looks really bad for the future of naval operations in the atomic age. And the Navy knew it, especially because the public knew all about the tests. And most important, the test animals all died. So that's bad if you're the guy who's like pro-navy in the situation we're we i mean of course i'm not glossing over the horrible effects it's going to have on the islanders we're getting there knowing these animals were standing for sailors the guy running the test admiral william blandy quickly told everybody it wasn't that big

of a deal if everybody died because dying from radiation was quote virtually painless. Oh, I don't know about that one. It's like legitimately the worst way to fucking die unless you're immediately burned out of existence and turned to ash. Yeah, awful. Unless you're at the epicenter. Yeah.

Unless you get like actually vaporized. No, if you're just like hit with a wall of radioactive water. It's got to be awful. I mean, they all knew this was a lie. Remember, again, the US had just nuked two cities and it had hundreds of thousands of people that proved them wrong in this situation, right? Right. They had had multiple scientists at this point accidentally over-irradiate themselves and then been able to study the impacts.

Like, this isn't... Come on. They knew even before they nuked two cities that, ooh, radiation really fucking sucks to die from. Yeah. On top of all the dead animals, which remember, there's fucking hundreds of them. A lot of them. Thousands of sailors had been dosed while attempting to clean up their own ships.

Just, you know, no decon process. And with that, let's head back to the displaced islanders because things were not going great. Now, the government had dumped them on their new island for what they thought was going to be a few weeks to a month. It was now clear to the government that this is going to be a bit longer. Also, the government then decided they're going to keep Bikini Atoll for future testing. Fuck the islanders, right? That makes sense. I mean, they've already made it completely unlivable.

Uninhabitable, yeah. The Navy had dropped some food supplies for a few weeks on Ragnarok Atoll, assuming that's all they were going to need. And then they fucked off. Those supplies burned through pretty quickly. And remember, those people were used to their previous island culture and the ecosystems that exist there fishing hunting trees whatever they couldn't figure out how to survive on this

new island it was completely different this led to intense food shortages and uh and that was only made worse by a fire that destroyed their crop of coconut trees a year later when a u.s medical team checked in on them they realized that they had kind of created an accidental Island death trap with no way out and no way to provide themselves with food. The Islanders were dying of starvation. You like, you can't even call it accidental. It's not like it's,

it's fully just negligent. A hundred percent. Yeah. The forced relocation was 100% on purpose. And the, the, the bad planning for everything else is incompetence and uncaring like after they realized they weren't going to move anybody again they could have given

them more food they simply did they didn't even fucking check in on them right that's so like that's part of this too is like they didn't check in on them how like how would they have been able to communicate even back to the navy to like let them know things aren't going well you know like yeah remember this medical team is a year later yeah right and it's not like this is a time when phone lines are like really common in areas that are just like islands in the middle of the ocean because you have to have a physical phone line at this point right and this is widely reported newspapers at the time with the blame falling on the navy rather than the u.s government this is a

naval failure the government didn't have anything to do with this yeah our sweet innocent federal government yeah only two years of wrangling afterwards the military finally moved them again this time to kwajilin atol in march of 1948 and stuffed them into a tent city which ran alongside a massive U.S. military airstrip, but they weren't there for long and were moved again to Keeley Island. Now, once again, food shortages became a serious problem, and people struggled to adapt to their new forced way of life to the point that the U.N. had to give them a cargo ship to use for food transports. It was eventually sunk in a storm. Oh my god. Were they the only residents of that island?

Yes. There was nobody there before for a reason. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? And, like, at least for that interim period where they were next to an airstrip, like, they had a chance of talking to somebody, of, like, getting any kind of information or, like, asking for any kind of aid. But by, like, moving them again

to an island that is uninhabited is just the, just like we don't really want to look at this problem that we've created right especially in like you know and over the course of you know however many hundreds or thousands of years of polynesian uh migration across the pacific ocean if an island wasn't settled on yeah there's a fucking reason for it right like people probably showed up they're like wow nothing here moving on it's not yeah like it's not like voyagers just didn't know that island was there right um now unfortunately for the bikini and islanders uh the u.s military was not done

rendering their island into a radioactive hellhole enter operation. Yes. So by the time of Operation Castle, the control of nuclear testing had finally been handed over to a civilian control panel known as the Atomic Energy Commission, which still exists today. Yeah. FYI, Lewis Strauss made them jump over

so many different fucking obstacles to get to that point. Did he just really not want to give up control of like, Oh, don't worry. He was still on that commission. He was one of five commissioners. Oh my God.

Okay. Jesus. In the meantime, the U S had continued bombing the living shit of the Marshall Island, specifically the, I know we talk a toll. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they had also forcefully deported around 100 people from and Bikini Atoll, which had become known as part of the Pacific Proving Grounds, most of which was open ocean. But there was also, you know, these previously inhabited places inside of it. In between Operation Crossroads and Operation Castle, at least nine nuclear weapons have been detonated there, including Ivy Mike, which was the world's first hydrogen bomb. Though, saying hydrogen bomb isn't quite accurate either. Ivy Mike was in such a testing phase

that it was massive. It was so large. It was a building. It wasn't air-droppable. It wasn't an ICBM because they weren't invented yet. It wasn't an ICBM because they weren't invented yet. Right. It was like a collection of systems that were so large that they it literally looks like a building.

Oh, yeah. Like the Soviets themselves referred to it as a quote thermonuclear installation rather than a bomb. Yeah. Okay. I mean, it was insanely huge. Like, according to historian Keith Zambala, it was effectively a factory that was made to put out this kind of energy, and it was so powerful,

it permanently reshaped the atoll. Yeah, so I knew about... Oh, oh. Yeah, it looks like a silo. Yes. What the fuck? Yeah, the ability to hydrogen bomb ourselves uh outpace the ability to make them small um but unfortunately we have since eclipsed that gap now uh of course you can't

weaponize an entire building so operation castle's bravo shot uh or castle bra Bravo, also known as a shrimp device, was going to be a dry device, meaning it was going to be much lighter and much smaller, allowing it to be possibly deliverable. Though it was the first step of many that would allow it to eventually be dropped out of a plane one day. Okay. Wait, was it also hydrogen? A hydrogen bomb yes okay okay so that's why it's the first like quote-unquote deliverable hydrogen bomb they were working in that direction um operation bravo or operation castle was going to consist of seven different experiments each with a slightly different device using different fuels. Some are wet, some are dry. You know, yeah.

Lob that one up there. I've got nothing intelligent to say in response to that. Wet-ass hydrogen bomb. Where are my girls at? For comparison, the Bravo shot weighed 23,500 pounds.

With a theorized yield of around 5 megatons. Ivy Mike was 10 megatons, but it was the size of a factory. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in the kiloton range, right? Yes. So Fat Man, the bomb dropped to Nagasaki not even 10 years before at a yield of 21 kilotons.

Right. For dumb people like me who aren't aware of math conversions, 1,000 kilotons equals one megaton. And one megaton is equal to one million tons of TNT. Yeah. So, bomb big.

Orders of magnitude. Just fucking ridiculous. Okay. And once we uncork the bastard of splitting the atom to make people blink out of existence, we didn't stop going back to that well for a while. Yeah.

Jesus. The Bravo device was sat down on an artificial island in Bikini Atoll, which was like loaded with diagnostic equipment and stuff. And then set off on March 1st, 1954. And immediately people realized like, oh, someone had fucked up pretty bad. Was it? So it was over the water or underwater it was on top of an artificial island okay so it's like floating yeah yeah it's like a buoy but a an evil buoy with a little goatee painted onto it you know i can't trust them within one second a fireball formed that was almost five miles across and visible for 300 miles.

The mushroom cloud reached to 47,000 feet and grew to seven miles in diameter in the span of one minute. It continued expanding for 10 minutes, growing to 130,000 feet high and 62 miles in diameter at a rate of 100 meters per second. I just imagine everybody on the observation platforms like actively pissing and shitting themselves because that's 10 minutes where you don't actually know whether or not you've maybe just ended like all life on earth. Guys, is it going to keep growing? Guys, where's everybody? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's people like laying on the ground with paper bags over their heads just waiting for to end remember this is supposed to be five megatons yeah it was 15 now this is 1000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on j. And it fired off radioactive contamination in an

uncontrolled fashion that nobody was ever prepared for. For 7,000 miles in every direction. Oh my god. Did that hit the atmosphere? I believe so. Yeah. Jesus. Fallout rained down the surrounding islands of Rognolap and Rognorak.

But remember, Rognorak is the first one they were resettled on. But Fallout made it as far as Australia, India, Japan, and the US, as well as parts of Europe. So much Fallout landed on Rognolap Island, or Atoll,

that children thought that the white powder substance falling on them was snow and they ate it. They all died. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that's what happens when you like just eat something and your pituitary gland is going crazy.

Cause you're a child fucking pops like a balloon. Oh my God. According to the national Institute of health quote, during the second and third decade after the accident, most of the wrong lap children and adults had developed thyroid nodules, most of which turned out to be malignant. Yeah. Duh. Several people from the surrounding islands suffered immediate onset radiation sickness, including vomiting and losing their hair.

This is normally considered fatal as well. Like, if you start vomiting after a nuclear event, you're going to die. Right. almost always. So you can assume these people also immediate casualties, which are not counted in case anybody's keeping track. But the ocean is not an empty place on top of these islands. It also happens to be full of ships. Enter the lucky dragon number five, a Japanese fishing vessel with around 23 men on board.

Now, since the U.S. thought the bomb was not going to be as big as it ended up being, nobody had extended the exclusion zone they tend to broadcast when they're testing. So the crew of the Lucky Dragon 5 thought they were clear of any danger because according to the maps put out by the U.S., they should

have been. The Lucky Dragon was only 95 miles downwind of the test when bravo went off yikes you know you can say a lot of things about the soviet union and it's like just complete disregard for the value of life but when they did most of their tests in siberia they at least like did take into account things like wind and they you know they did i'm not going to say they told everybody in the area that like to leave or anything because they absolutely didn't but when they did things like dropping the sarbamba like their scientists actually

did calculate like the radius they expected and they were actually trying they were actually trying to predict like what was going to happen ahead of time that's as well as long as you leave out that the polygon um in kazakhstan oh and i'm like again not not at all trying to defend the soviet union i'm just trying to think of like the other time they exploded something that was too big like yeah yeah um theirs is more of a i don't know murder by a thousand paper cuts or something yeah um i mean the polygon is a awful awful thing we'll talk about it eventually at some point. Um, but that was their testing ground and Ooh,

boy. No. And I'm like, they also did not remove a lot of the people who were indigenous to Siberia when they were doing testing, but just, no, they did not.

Something about the, like something about putting it over the ocean where it's like, things are the most likely to spread very far, very quickly is. Yeah. It's just a different kind of like complete, complete negligence. And I mean, comparing this to Zarbama, like they build Zarbama to be the biggest bomb on earth.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It was very intentional. Yeah. Whereas like this was a fuck up. Oh yeah. And the science behind the fuck up,

honestly, I don't quite understand. It was something that like something reacted differently than they thought it would yeah so when um and i'm not like anywhere near a nuclear physicist at all either but as a nuclear physicist please go on oh yes let me explain um no it is essentially when you have uh when you have a bunch of like ingredients together for any kind of chemical reaction or any kind of like what's going to set off a chain reaction right one reaction that will like the energy of which will start another reaction the energy of which will start another reaction um if you

were to look at like the energy put into the system and the energy you expect to get out on a graph with an x y axis it would it would pretty much be like a linear slope of some sort there'd be like a pretty clear like you know you put in twice as much material you get twice as much explosion or something like that or twice as much material three times as much explosion like you'd have some sort of relationship you can look at but with with almost every system like this there is a point at which that relationship changes and so my understanding what happened with castle bravo was essentially they were assuming that the relationship was going to continue to be this like very obvious and predictable we put in this much material we

put in this much energy we will get right This like normal factor of growth when we get energy out. And they just hadn't like physics wasn't advanced enough to predict this. And they hadn't obviously tested anything this big. So they just didn't realize that like, well, no, actually, if you put in like three or four times more material than you have before,

you're not going to get the same response. You're actually going to get like up just a much much bigger response out of this material um and it it's one of those things like a wild runaway chain reaction type deal maybe yeah yeah basically trying to think of like a way to compare it to something more common but i'm drawing a blank right now yeah you got me i mean like i mean it's easy to know. I don't know shit about science in general, but I kind of understand that.

I don't know. It's just like, it's one of those things like, yeah, they probably couldn't have, physics probably hadn't advanced enough, like theoretical physics, for them to have figured this out. Like they probably could not look at previous explosions and kind of the numbers that came out of that

and predicted that it was going to be this big. But at the same time, they didn't need to be doing it. Right. That's the simplest answer. The whole thing is like, yeah, they didn't, there was no need for it to be this big. Yeah. If at any point you're unsure of the science behind your doomsday device

simply don't use it right right and at some point like you know spoilers i guess for like the mid 60s and 70s at some point scientists did eventually get that yeah but like maybe we shouldn't do this anymore guys yeah we did kind of just blow up an entire like a toll worth of like homelands for people in order to figure that out and of course uh the the the most insane reaction to this would be like this was worth the sacrifice to learn these things and like fuck off i'm not even entertaining that bullshit no no it literally wasn't these like there was nothing that we gained out of almost any of these specific proving ground tests that like needed to happen no of course not um it so one lucky dragon crewman um who remember was something 95 miles away from the blast said quote a yellow

flash poured through the porthole which i have to say is a bad fucking sign if you can see colors wondering what happened, I jumped up from my bunk near the door, ran on deck and was astonished bridge, sky and sea burst into view painting a flaming sunset. I looked around in a daze and I was totally at a loss. And then the white ash began to rain down on them. Oh my God.

That's like really fast too. Yeah. Having no idea what any of this was, many of them touched it with their bare hands. What time, what time of day did this happen? Was it at night? Uh,

I believe it was in the middle of the day. Oh wow. Okay. Uh, within hours, every man on board became violently ill. They experienced pain, headaches,

nausea, dizziness, and diarrhea. Their eyes began to turn red and they developed an itchy mucus. Oh, wait. Was that like conjunctivitis? Isn't there a specific type of conjunctivitis? Pink eye.

Yeah. I mean, I think it could also be like radiation burns or something on their eyes because some of them looked at it with unprotected eyes. their eyes because some of them looked at it with unprotected eyes. Now, they figured out, like, they had no idea what had happened to them. However, they thought that this ash probably had something to do with it,

right? Yeah. So, they collected some into a bag to bring home with them for analysis, but they kept it, that bag, hanging from one of the bunks. So it was right next to them during their entire trip back to Japan. Okay, I'm just going to say at this point, that was just a bad call on their part.

That was a bad call. Like, respect figuring out that the mysterious sky ash is probably killing you. But also, if you think it's killing you, maybe don't hang it up next to your face while you're sleeping. I'm going to go on a limb here and say if there's one group of guys who might have known what would have happened to them it's a group of japanese fishermen come on like you know what just happened the world's worst dream catcher now by the third day the crew had began to develop uh small blisters anywhere that had been touched by the radioactive ash their Their faces began to turn a dark red. And by a week later, still not home yet,

they lost their hair. Now, if there's one group of doctors that were familiar with the side effects of being fucking nuked, it was Japanese doctors. And it did not take long for these doctors to take one look at these guys and be like, holy shit, what happened?

Right. Like, how did this happen to you? Right. However, quick medical attention did not mean these men were, at these guys like holy shit what happened right like how did this happen to you right however quick medical attention did not mean these men were had a good road ahead of them in case you're unaware if radiation sickness does not kill you immediately it is as we've talked about the worst

fucking way to die the crew had to stay in hospitals for over a year getting a battery of tests and treatments done while they were bleeding from the inside out as their DNA slowly turned against them and their blood cells evaporated. They were given constant bone marrow and blood transfusions

because one of the things radiation does to you is destroy your bone marrow, causing a chain reaction across your entire body, shutting it down one system at a time before you can even generate your own blood. In September, Kubo Yama Ikichi, one of the crewmen, finally died,

having lost his mind and having to be secured to a bed. The other 22 crewmen were discharged from the hospital in May of 1955. Virtually all of them would eventually die of cancer. Honestly, I'm amazed that any of them were able to be discharged. I am too.

It took them a week to get home. Yeah. I do need to point out that there is something of a thought. It's not completely supported, but I wouldn't fucking doubt it that local American doctors in Japan were kind of using them as test subjects. Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Which they have been found to have done for a lot of the survivors of the hiroshima nagasaki bombings they sure were and since this is like literally 10 years later like guys you're really gonna do this again okay right somehow after all of this testing went ahead after operation castle dozens more nuclear weapons were set off in the same area to include operations hard tech and dominic where 71 different devices were tested oh my too many there's too many we have too many of these finally testing ended on

the grounds of the pacific brooding area in 1963 with a partial test band uh treaty that and atmospheric and underwater testing of nuclear weapons because yeah yeah and that was like that was something that was done from my memory basically directly in response to russia setting off sarbamba was when those talks began yeah for the partial test van yeah now you might be wondering whatever happened to the hundreds of people who may have been relocated and impacted by this well mostly generational food shortages only three years after the castle bravo test islanders in Rongelap returned home and immediately began getting sick. Wait, what?

They sent them back? They sure did. In 2007, a report by the CDC by radiobiologist Ulrich Berling said that scientists at the time were fully aware of the risks and put the islanders back anyway for research purposes. Oh, what the fuck yeah doctors also conducted experimental and unnecessary thyroid surgeries on islanders for 30 years what what surprise surgeries are these uh i assume uh on their thyroid to probably biopsy uh to see how radiation is affecting the ones that don't have cancer. Then in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson, noted aficionado of his own dick, decided to return the Bikinian people following an Atomic Energy Commission study that stated,

quote, well, water could be used safely by the natives upon the return to Bikini. It appears that radioactivity in the drinking water may be ignored from a radiological safety standpoint. The exposures of radiation that would result from repatriation of the Bikini people do not offer a significant threat to their health and safety. Yep. In 1968, Johnson told 540 forcefully displaced people that he was going to allow them to return to their homeland saying quote is our goal to assist the people of bikini to build on these once desolate islands a new and model community why were they like yeah what the fuck dude they weren't desolate when you showed up and people had been living there for generations us a eight-year plan was formed to make the islands quote habitable again.

That'll fix it. You know, everybody knows radiation only takes like five, eight years max to get cleared up. Yeah. This included doing things like planting crops like coconut trees and giving them a chance to mature so they can harvest them. Yeah, so the coconuts that are just... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, fuck. Late in 1969, the commission said, quote, there's virtually no radiation left at all, and we can find no discernible effect on either plant or animal life.

By 1971, people were moved back in. Oh, of course not. Nor did they eat the crabs. We'll get there. crabs will get there. Only then was it discovered that coconut crabs retained an incredibly high rate of radiation because you guessed it. The husks of the coconuts, which retained even higher levels of radiation.

Really changes Moana. That's how that crab got formed. Yeah. Yeah. So that's like that in particular, that the way radiation is taken up by plants that has been known for like a very long time because when you plant something that fruits that like bears any kind of fruit or vegetable like produce uh most of the radiation

that it will pull out of the soil will be held within the fruiting body of a thing like that is just known what's incredible is they're rediscovering the concept of the food chain but like via racism like you already knew this fucking happened that is like that is the American way being being honest here if you follow this back to its logical source

if the coconuts are being contaminated that meant the groundwater was contaminated holy shit we move these people back into a super fun site. No, no water on the Island. No animal that lived on the Island and no food grown on the Island was fit for human consumption.

Oh my God. So of course the U S immediately moved them off. Right? Right. 10 years, 10, 15. Yeah.

The U S did not move these people immediately. Instead, they put out weird rules. To be fair, the U.S. was busy with this little thing called Vietnam that definitely needed to happen. One of the rules were like, don't eat or drink anything on the island. We'll send it to you. I mean, that's basically just like living in Red Hill in Oahu right now. Yeah. It's basically just like living in Red Hill in Oahu right now.

Yeah. By 1978, the U.S. finally conceded they'd have to move them again when it was discovered that every single person on the island had 11 times more the amount of cesium-137 in their bodies than anybody ever should throughout the entirety of their lives. Yeah. Fully 10 years later then. Yeah. Jesus.

Since then, the U.Ss has dragged its feet in court low balling any settlements or you know trust funds that should be set up for the victims of its testing when the bikinian people brought this to the u.s supreme court the court refused to even hear the case yeah a fucking supreme court always uh always nothing but slam dunks right bunch of old fucks. None of them should ever feel safe. Even the ones I like should never feel safe. They should feel just as safe as any school kid in America.

Yeah. Since then, uh, some amount of cleanup has been done with topsoil from various different atolls. Um, it was then all locked away under a cement tube, uh,

a cement tube on an Island though. uh, they popped on top of it. Yep. Yep. You want to know what the seawater is doing to that whole thing? Seawater is notoriously like not, you know, difficult for any kind of engineering project to overcome. Sarah, now tell me what happens if you plop an incredibly heavy cement sarcophagus directly down on a beach. I'm just so mad.

It is. It is basically the ultimate seawall here. Yeah, no, it's, that's, well, it's not going to do anything.

Yeah. It's leaking real bad. Putting a cement cap on it was never going to do anything right. Like it's not going to prevent the loss of radioactive material because the water coming up through the sand underneath is just going to pull it all out anyways and then because you have yeah like this massively heavy just cement cap on top of this thing it is going to create pressure like it's going to be fucking heavy and that's going to cause the land underneath it which is sand and, to just shift and sink more and then

release more radioactive material. Yeah, all the radioactive equipment that's buried will simply go back into the ocean. Ugh. No. Science! Did they hire the Army Corps of Engineers to build this? I believe they hired a coyote

who only went by the name Wiley. Oh my god. When did they only went by the name Wiley. Oh, my God. I know the cap is leaking. When did they establish the cap? How long has that been there? I think the 70s. Okay. Now, as for the independent Marshall Islands, they are still living with the effects of largely uncontrolled nuclear testing to this day.

they are still living with the effects of largely uncontrolled nuclear testing to this day thyroid conditions are so common that people have theorized that the marshallese tradition of passing stories down via song will die out because so many people are having cancer they can't fucking talk well even if they have children like radiation will move into an unborn fetus like that's right thousands of people were directly exposed to radiation at the time of the contamination through the environment or secondary problems from contaminated people having children right uh and which has only increased thyroid conditions like cancer and hyperthyroidism by 10 times the amount of the u.S. mainland. All cancer rates across the board doubled, with liver cancer rates being 40% more than anywhere else.

Though a report from the University of Hawaii at Manoa says the rates are actually probably way higher due to the fact that the Marshallese Islands have very bad healthcare infrastructure, meaning that fewer people are reporting illness, meaning that their statistics are fucking low. Right, and if you have something like liver cancer, that fewer people are reporting illness meaning that their statistics are fucking low right and if you have something like liver cancer like thyroid cancers uh will often often result in

a tumor that is pretty visible um yes but no if you have like other like cancer of your soft organs like you're not gonna know it's just gonna hurt really bad and then you're gonna die so like yeah none of these none of these numbers that are being reported unless you actually send out teams of epidemiologists to go and like directly study any of this shit. You're never going to know. You're going to have this plausible deniability. And I saw one report that said uterine cancer and people was like 90% higher than the mainland. Yeah, it's fucking.

And this is the these are like the Republic of the Marshall Islands. These were not islands that we directly dropped nuclear weapons on. This is all cascading effects that remember, everyone would have known about. This is not new. They did not discover that the wind takes fucking radioactive material. I think that's like that's what i keep coming back to i guess with this story is that like at every point it wasn't even willful it wasn't even like intentional i guess that's what i was trying to get with the soviet union stuff is like when the soviet union

like killed people because they just didn't feel like emptying out siberia they knew they were going to do it and it was it was just they knew it and they didn't care and that was like that made it an intentional act in a way that like okay you're actually admitting some sort of responsibility or at least some sort of culpability for like the pain you're causing people but with the u.s it is like fully not even stopping long enough to think about the people that you're impacting right it is just like different shades of the same colonial racism oh yeah yeah yeah exactly it's it's and that is very american right to just especially for like our government in particular just to not to not even consider other people and like in that kind of like very passive way uh to to ruin lives

uh it's it's disgusting and it's like it's frankly insulting for anybody who was affected by these things. Yeah, it's awful. In 1988, the Marshallese government forwarded a nuclear claims tribunal with American funding to pay damages to victims that would require a lifetime treatment, which I need to be clear here, is the entire island. Yeah. But the United States never financed a tribunal like they said they would. And in 2007, that money that they did give ran out. By then, the tribunal had paid $91.4 million to about 2,000 people, two-thirds of whom had thyroid diseases or cancers. Well, I'm like, what does that do for people at that point?

Nothing. It's out of money. Yeah, they have nothing. You're giving individuals money, but you're not like building any kind of infrastructure or giving them the money like giving their government the money to build infrastructure to actually make hospitals that can manage all these things to like provide medicine like you it's not doing anything and and remember like we've talked about this is a problem that's literally going to be virtually perpetual. Their soil is contaminated, so anything they grow will be contaminated. The animals that they eat

will be contaminated. Their children that they have because they're contaminated will be contaminated. This is something that will not go away, whatever the fucking half-life of this shit is. A million fucking years or whatever. And they stopped giving them money. Now,

this continues to run rampant without control or medical treatment with no end in sight as well as little to no cleanup efforts anywhere. Effectively, the United States killed the Marshall Islands before it ever gave them independence in 1986. And in closing, in 1947, a Marshallese islander named Lore Kesebuki wrote effectively an anthem for his island of Rognarok, which he'll never be able to go back to. It says, quote, No longer can I stay, it's true.

No longer can I live in peace and harmony. No longer can I rest my head on a sleeping mat and pillow. Because my island and the life I once knew there, the thought is overwhelming, rendering me hopeless, helpless, and in great despair. And I've seen some really weird fucked up tourism pieces that have come out because obviously the marshall islands are desperately attempting to have an economy yeah and one of them was from like outside uh the magazine outside online okay um that tries to like spin it spin this in a way like oh you can eat the crabs you can only like one a day.

Because, of course, one of the things that happens is because of these abandoned areas, forcefully abandoned areas, it's apparently very good for scuba diving. That I would believe. Yeah. So that's something that's sprung up in the economy

since then. But come on man come on right like they shouldn't have to shouldn't have to rely on these things right so that's the uplifting light-hearted story sorry sarah i thought i got the fun ones i feel like you do get the fun ones but now you get a depressing one because of of wetness no i mean castle and bravo as we established was very dry that's true it's a problem remember folks always apply water-based lubricants to your nuclear devices right yeah if you use silicone it can degrade the material yeah just because the other i guess the other thing too is like what would people compare this

to and like all i can think is like oh i bet there's some like awful like dipshit travel journalist who has called this like the chernobyl of the pacific or something um oh yeah i saw like lots of people that compare it to that when like the the the direct comparison is the polygon because that's virtually the same thing that the soviet union did was drop a fuckload of nukes in the middle of kazakhstan without telling anybody right and to this day of course people having to deal with the horrific after effects of that comparing this to chernobyl is not right no because like chernobyl chernobyl was an actual accident it was an actual accident it was caused by like a completely different kind of like neglect but then there's also like the amount of radiation released was like i guess because that's it right like when they put people back on the marshall back on the bikini atoll in the 70s like you can't compare

that to the people who remained in the irradiated area around pripyat because like that level of irradiation was so different yeah it was like it's not comparable at all. Yeah, rather than a runaway bomb compared to a meltdown. Well, not even just the one bomb, right? So if you look at pictures of the Marshall Islands... 71 bombs, my bad. Right, and you can see the craters, actually. I've seen these things kind of out of context, but not with the full story kind of being told all at once um but no you can you can see like full craters like lagoons that have

been created by atomic blasts in that area and you can just see the pockmarks um that are the result of like this you can call it testing but it really wasn't right like they weren't really testing anything so much as they were just fucking around right right of course and that's you know the same thing that i mean even today and like nevada there's fucking places that are insanely irradiated yeah um and that's that's fucking awful i'm fairly certain like groom lake and a lot of the other testing areas were had been reservations had been like areas where of course they fucking were the indigenous populations of the u.s had already been like pushed into these areas that were like arid and were basically devoid of like the ability to grow food and then further pushed off so that

the u.s military could could fuck around of course that's what happened why would it be any other fucking way jesus so it's it yeah yeah now i do have something uh to to let us exit out the gate on a happy note well maybe not you really don't like horses um so we do something on this show called questions from legion if you like to ask a question from legion support the show go on our patreon add your question to the ever-growing thread uh and i will pick it um so today's questions uh question from the legion is would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses oh did you get this question off of reddit in 2014 um i guess i mean i would fight the duck-sized horses. Ducks are scary. A horse-sized duck, I don't think so.

It's terrifying. I know, thank you. But a bunch of horses, I get to just like punt? Yeah, exactly. How are they coming at me? Is it like one at a time, like an action movie? That would be fun. But also, if they're all coming at you at once,

what if you just got like a big push broom? Yeah, get on out of here, ducks. Like the idea of a horse-sized duck is terrifying that's like 600 pound duck with a weird twisted cock the size of a baseball bat charging at you okay wait you think though you think the horse i guess horses were always hanging dong so i guess that horses hang mad dong yeah and since it's it's like it's uh adopting all all kinds of like horse characteristics it gets the weird horse people teeth too oh some ducks have teeth oh yeah but like the horse ones are weirder because they look like people teeth i don't know why i

find that so disconcerting but i don't like it i don't know that i've ever considered horses as having people teeth but i grew up around really big people teeth i mean i okay they don't know that I've ever considered horses as having people teeth, but I grew up around really big people teeth. I mean, I, okay. They don't feel good when they bite you. Of course they don't. People don't feel good when they bite you.

Well, once you're into this sort of thing, but like, whatever, but like, it's like that weird fish that has people teeth. I really don't like a lot of, a lot of fish have people teeth.

You're talking about like fucking hate that. Yeah, probably. Yeah. He braces, but braces on the fish. That's ableist. Being ableist to a fish.

That's how we're going to close out this episode. Sarah, plug your show. If you're into more ocean-based stuff, listen to Sarah's show. That's pretty much it. Yeah. I have a podcast as well. It's called It Came From the Sea. I have a mysterious collection of background stuff about the ocean.

And so I use my background knowledge and just stories that I find interesting to kind of try to explain the ocean and ocean science in ways that I hope are more approachable to people who are kind of off-put by the idea of learning about science. Wait, you mean uplifting stories? You don't talk about nuking the sea repeatedly? To be fair, no. I cannot say that all of my episodes are uplifting as I have been told multiple times to,

can we please stop talking about climate change? Hey, if I've become the genocide podcast, you're becoming the climate change podcast. That's just what we have to do now. I have one that's not about climate change podcast. That's just what we have to do now. I have one. It's not about climate change, but it's depressing because we learn about how, um,

overfishing caused Ebola. Outstanding. Um, everybody listen to Sarah's show. And also thank you for listening. Uh, if you like our show, consider supporting it on Patreon,

even a dollar gets you all sorts of stuff like discord access, bonus episodes, early episodes. Uh, or if if you if you don't want to spend money consider leaving us a review it's good for algorithmic based reasons that i do not understand but it's free so you know cool um also until next time don't nuke the pacific islands