STATEMENT OF BIKINI ATOLL SENATOR TOMAKI JUDA
ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BRAVO SHOT
March 1, 2004

Today, March 1, is the 50th anniversary of the Bravo shot – the largest U.S. nuclear test in history. It is a sad day for us and for our friends and relatives all around the Marshall Islands. That test, that day – like radiation itself – still lingers in the Marshall islands after half a century, and, like radiation, it will not go away.

Most people here know the story of our people. It is in history books, government reports, and films. Next Saturday, March 6, will mark the 58th anniversary of the day that we were moved off our islands by the U.S. Navy for Operation Crossroads, the first tests of atomic weapons after World War II. We were first moved to Rongerik, where we nearly starved to death, then to Kwajalein, and then finally to Kili in 1948. Sadly, Kili remains home to most Bikinians, and life there remains difficult. Kili is a single island, while Bikini Atoll has 23 islands and a 243-square mile lagoon. Its land area is more than nine times bigger than Kili. To make matters worse, our population is 15 times larger today than what it was in 1946. Kili has no sheltered fishing grounds, so our skills for lagoon life are useless on Kili. In the past, we sailed our outrigger canoes to lands, fish and islands as far as the eye could see. Today, we are prisoners, trapped on one small island, with no reef and no lagoon.

Meanwhile, between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested 23 atomic and hydrogen bombs at Bikini, including the 1954 Bravo shot, which was, at the time, the largest manmade explosion in the history of the world. It is hard to imagine the deadly force of Bravo:

• It was equal to the force of nearly 1,000 Hiroshima bombs.


• It created a fireball four miles wide that vaporized the entire test island and parts of two others, leaving a hole in Bikini’s lagoon one mile wide and 200 feet deep.


• It destroyed most of the buildings on an island 14 miles across the lagoon to the south.


• It was so powerful that it caused the concrete detonation bunker on Eneu Island, 24 miles away, to move off its foundation.


• At Kwajalein, 250 miles away, there were high winds, and the buildings shook as if there had been an earthquake.


• As we all know, there was a so-called “unexpected” shift in the winds, sending fallout east instead of north, right over Bikini Island and downwind to Rongelap and Utrik.


• The deadly fallout covered an area of 7,000 square miles. How large area is that? Let’s put it this way: If Bravo had been set off in Washington and the fallout headed northeast, everyone from Washington to Boston would be dead.


• In fact, President Eisenhower told a press conference in late March of that year that U.S. scientists were “surprised and astonished” at the size of the Bravo shot.

And what about our people? We have been exiles from our homeland since 1946, except for a brief period after President Lyndon Johnson announced in 1968 that Bikini was safe and the people could return. Many of us returned and lived there until 1978, when medical tests by U.S. doctors revealed that we had ingested the largest amounts of radioactive material of any known population.

History sadly repeated itself in late August 1978, as U.S. ships once again entered our lagoon and the Bikini people packed up and left. What went wrong? AEC scientists estimated the dose of radiation we would receive on Bikini, but they made an error in arithmetic, which threw off their calculations by a factor of 100. “We just plain goofed,” one of the scientists told a reporter at the time.

Only one good thing resulted from Bravo. It was so awful and frightening that it
set off a huge international debate that eventually led to the U.S. moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing and the U.S.-Soviet Union Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed by President Kennedy shortly before he was killed in 1963.

The tragedy of Bravo continues to haunt our people today. Fifty years have gone by, but Bravo is still with us. From March 1, 1954 until today, our islands remain heavily contaminated with radiation. We wait and we wait, not knowing when we can return home.

Now you know why March is a time of sadness and memory for the people of Bikini. Thank you.

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Hon. Senator Tomaki Juda, youngest son of King Juda, who was the traditional Bikini leader, was elected for the first time in 1972 as Mayor and served until 2000 when he was elected Senator after the death of Henchi Balos. He was reelected in November of 2003. [elected every 4 years]
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Read "A Short History of the People of Bikini Atoll" HERE.