Thursday, August 27, 2009
Castle Bravo test
Among the decisions left over from the Bush administration for President Barack Obama to decide upon is whether the federal government should pay a $1 billion settlement to the people of a tiny South Pacific island who were exposed to U.S. nuclear tests in the 1950s. A special tribunal ruled in 2007 that the United States should compensate the people of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands because their island was contaminated by the 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test at nearby Bikini Atoll, exposing them to high levels of radiation and forcing them to abandon their island altogether.
A review of thousands of pages of official documents by Newsday found government doctors at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, had been given responsibility for providing medical care to Rongelap’s residents in the succeeding years after nuclear testing had stopped. But the islanders, as well as experts hired to review their medical history, argued before the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal that the American doctors spent more time studying the effects of the radiation exposure than actually treating the people.
The story of Rongelap’s people includes the fact that the U.S. government, after removing the residents from their island for three years in the late 1950s, returned them to their homes even though American officials knew the area was still heavily contaminated with radiation. The islanders also were not told about the dangers of eating local foods polluted by fallout—so that Brookhaven researchers could use the opportunity to study how radioactive toxins move through the body.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Cold War Fallout for Brookhaven National Lab (by Thomas Maier, Newsday)
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