A new report on the United States nuclear weapons testing legacy in the Marshall Islands highlights the lack of studies into important health concerns voiced by Marshallese for decades that make it impossible to have a clear understanding of the impacts of the 67 nuclear weapons tests.

The Legacy of US Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands, a report by Dr Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, was released late last month.

The report was funded by Greenpeace Germany and is an outgrowth of the organisation’s flagship vessel, Rainbow Warrior III, visiting the Marshall Islands from March to April to recognise the 40th anniversary of the resettlement of the nuclear test-affected population of Rongelap Atoll.

• READ MORE: Legacy of US nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands created global radiation exposure: new study
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

Dr Mahkijani said that among the “many troubling aspects” of the legacy is that the United States had concluded, in 1948, after three tests, that the Marshall Islands was not “a suitable site for atomic experiments” because it did not meet the required meteorological criteria.

“Yet testing went on,” he said.

“Also notable has been the lack of systematic scientific attention to the accounts by many Marshallese of severe malformations and other adverse pregnancy outcomes like stillbirths. This was despite the documented fallout throughout the country and the fact that the potential for fallout to cause major birth defects has been known since the 1950s.”

Dr Makhijani highlights the point that, despite early documentation in the immediate aftermath of the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb test and numerous anecdotal reports from Marshallese women about miscarriages and still births, US government medical officials in charge of managing the nuclear test-related medical programme in the Marshall Islands never systematically studied birth anomalies.

Committed billions of dollars
The US Deputy Secretary of State in the Biden-Harris administration, Kurt Cambell, said that Washington, over decades, had committed billions of dollars to the damages and the rebuilding of the Marshall Islands.

“I think we understand that that history carries a heavy burden, and we are doing what we can to support the people in the [Compact of Free Association] states, including the Marshall Islands,” he told reporters at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Nuku’alofa last year.

“This is not a legacy that we seek to avoid. We have attempted to address it constructively with massive resources and a sustained commitment.”

Among points outlined in the new report:

• Gamma radiation levels at Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, officially considered a “very low exposure” atoll, were tens of times, and up to 300 times, more than background in the immediate aftermaths of the thermonuclear tests in the Castle series at Bikini Atoll in 1954.
• Thyroid doses in the so-called “low exposure atolls” averaged 270 milligray (mGy), 60 percent more than the 50,000 people of Pripyat near Chernobyl who were evacuated (170 mGy) after the 1986 accident there, and roughly double the average thyroid exposures in the most exposed counties in the United States due to testing at the Nevada Test Site.

Despite this, “only a small fraction of the population has been officially recognised as exposed enough for screening and medical attention; even that came with its own downsides, including people being treated as experimental subjects,” the report said.

Women reported adverse outcomes
“In interviews and one 1980s country-wide survey, women have reported many adverse pregnancy outcomes,” said the report.

“They include stillbirths, a baby with part of the skull missing and ‘the brain and the spinal cord fully exposed,’ and a two-headed baby. Many of the babies with major birth defects died shortly after birth.

“I realise now that your entire career is based on our illness. We are far more valuable to you than you are to us. You have never really cared about us as people — only as a group of guinea pigs for your government’s bomb research effort. For me and for the other people on Rongelap, it is life which matters most. For you it is facts and figures. There is no question about your technical competence, but we often wonder about your humanity. We don’t need you and your technological machinery. We want our life and our health. We want to be free.” – Nelson Anjain to Dr Robert Conard in 1975.

On Marshall Islands Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day this week, we acknowledge the historical contribution of late Nelson Anjain, a nuclear survivor and champion for nuclear justice in the Pacific.

On this date, 1 March 1954 – 67 years ago, his home of Rongelap Atoll was brutally exposed to radioactive fallout from the hydrogen bomb codenamed Bravo, conducted by the United States government on the nearby Bikini Atoll.

His family had first-hand experience of the bomb. His relative John Anjain recalled the day of the blast:

“…[S]omething very strange happened. It looked like a second sun was rising in the west. We heard a noise like thunder.

“We saw some strange clouds over the horizon … In the afternoon, something began falling from the sky upon our island. It looked like ash from a fire. It fell on me, it fell on my wife, it fell on our infant son.”

The Rongelapese were only evacuated three days after the explosion by American officials. However, three years later in 1957, the people of Rongelap were returned. The United States government falsely assured them of its safety.

Many years later, the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s “expert” on Rongelap and Utirik, an American named Dr Robert Conard had callously stated that the unexposed Rongelapese returning with exposed Rongelapese to fallout in 1957, made an “ideal comparison population” for studying the effects of radiation.

The Rongelapese were considered “convenient guinea pigs” as “the only population to have been exposed to high-level, whole-body radiation without also suffering physical and psychological trauma from the nuclear blast itself, as had been the case in Nagasaki” (Gale, 1973).

In May 1975, as the newly appointed Magistrate of Rongelap, Anjain sent this powerful letter to the American Dr Robert Conard. Anjain had been motivated to write the letter after the tragic passing of his nephew, Lekoj Anjain from leukaemia and witnessing many others in his community suffer from a devastating array of cancers, thyroid, and reproductive health issues.

The original letter was written after Anjain gained regional support for his cause as an activist who travelled (without travel documentation) to Japan and Fiji upon the New Zealand peace yacht Fri in 1975.

Call for victims assistance
Alongside a cadre of Marshallese politicians and activists at the time, he spread the call for victims assistance for the impacted communities, who desperately needed improved financial compensation and medical care for the harms knowingly committed by the US government.

It was a critical time when the Marshall Islands and the rest of the states composing the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) were negotiating their pathways towards political self-determination.

Nelson Anjain attended the Nuclear Free Pacific Conference in Fiji in 1975 alongside a vocal delegation of Micronesian activists: Dino Jones of Guam, Martin San Nicolas of the Northern Marianas, Moses Uludong of Palau, and Carl Young of Guam.

The conference was important in introducing the South Pacific to the North Pacific’s previously unheard of sovereignty struggles.

Nelson Anjain and the American scholar Roger Gale alerted peoples of the South Pacific to the Marshallese’s struggles and recent resistance to American medical racism. In 1971, a team of doctors from the Japan Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs attempted to examine them on the invitation of representatives like Ataji Balos for the Congress of Micronesia.

In 1972, the Rongelap people had firmly refused medical examinations by the United States unless independent doctors would do so.

After hearing Anjain’s story and needs, the Conference for a Nuclear Free Pacific with 93 representatives of 22 Pacific and Pacific-rim countries strongly endorsed the Rongelap people’s attempt to gain independent medical aid.

Environmental remediation
Anjain continued to be associated with the regional Nuclear Free Pacific (later renamed to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific – NFIP) movement and regularly participated in regional conferences and nurtured connections with Pacific kinfolk within the group. At the significant conference in Hawai’i in 1980, Anjain raised the need for environmental remediation of the oceans and lands. He stated:

“You know, in our islands, everything is contaminated, we just know. But 20 something years ago, doctors told us that everything is all right except coconut crab, but that’s not true. We just found out this year that that’s not true. Many people I know have stomach cancer, thyroid and leukemia, and also when we walk around the island, my feet burn all over.”

This time, he travelled with fellow Marshallese, including Lijon Eknilang and Almira Matayoshi from Rongelap, Norman Matthew from Utirik, and Alvin Jacklick from Kwajalein. Darlene Keju Johnson, who would later become another champion for Marshallese health rights, was also in attendance.

Memorably, this was a transformative experience for all participants. Again, the conference reaffirmed proposals for supporting and carrying out a medical survey independent of the Brookhaven program.

Anjain persists in the regional memory as a fighter for nuclear justice for the Marshallese and the greater Pacific. Through initiating meaningful grassroots connections via kinship gatherings across Asia and the Pacific, Anjain, as global hibakusha, brought the Marshallese plea for justice to international audiences.

Marshallese truth-telling and courage in speaking back to the empire paved the way for vital articulations of the urgent need for victim assistance and environmental remediation.

As we remember the victims of nuclear weapons and acknowledge that further work to repair the harm is still required, we also remember the historical resistance the Marshallese waged and their exceptional offerings to the regional movements for nuclear justice, independence, and demilitarisation in the Pacific.

Talei Luscia Mangioni is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. She was born and raised on Gadigal land of the Eora Nation and is of Fijian and Italian descent. Her current scholarship aims to chart the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement across Oceania through historical ethnography, weaving archival records and material objects with oral histories of activists and artists. This article, first published by The New Outrigger, has been republished here with permission of the author.

• Gale, Roger (1973). “Our Radioactive Wards: No One Warned the Micronesians.”

Indonesia’s Presidential Chief of Staff Moeldoko has claimed that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had expressed his consent to bringing back to life the suspended military Joint Special Operations Command (Koopsusgab) tasked with countering terrorism.

The team, which included and will again include personnel of the Army’s Special Forces (Kopassus), the Navy’s Denjaka squad and the Air Force’s Bravo 90 special force, would be put on standby and be ready to be mobilised at any time when terror threats emerged, Moeldoko said.

“This joint force was well trained and prepared in terms of its capacity, and it could be deployed anywhere on the country’s soil as fast as possible […]. Its role would be to assist the National Police,” Moeldoko said.

READ MORE: Jokowi to issue perppu if House fails to revise terror law

His statement has followed a recent string of terrorist attacks that has thrust Indonesia into a state of paranoia.

The joint force was first established under Moeldoko when he served as the Indonesian Military (TNI) commander in 2015. The special command’s operations, however, were suspended under the leadership of Moeldoko’s successor, retired General Gatot Nurmantyo.

Further tasks of the special command would be discussed between TNI commander Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto and National Police chief General Tito Karnavian, with the latter to have the final say on whether it needed the assistance of the TNI’s special team or not, Moeldoko said.

“This operation must be carried out for preventive purposes, so that the public can feel safe […]. We [the security apparatus] are ready to face any kind of situation, so people should put their trust in us and not worry,” he said.

Planned amendment
The revitalisation of the joint force did not require any new regulations, Moeldoko said, adding that the details about the command’s tasks would be adjusted with the planned amendment to the 2003 Terrorism Law.

The announcement came as the House of Representatives and the government began to clear up contentious articles that had caused deadlock in the deliberation of the Terrorism Law revision, including the legal definition of terrorism and the military’s level of involvement in counterterrorism operations.

A greater level of involvement has stirred debate among experts and human rights activists.

Seven ruling parties and the government had agreed on a definition of terrorism that included acts that had “political and ideological motives and threaten national security”, United Development Party (PPP) lawmaker Arsul Sani said.

More leeway
It is widely believed that such a definition would provide leeway for greater involvement of the TNI in counterterrorism efforts.

As the government and the lawmakers appear to be on the same page now, observers expect the bill to be passed into law in the near future.

Jokowi has recently said he would issue a regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) on the Terrorism Law if the House failed to conclude deliberations on the bill by June.

Members of a committee tasked with deliberating the bill said it was the leading opposition Gerindra Party and the Democratic Party, both political parties with strong military influence, that had demanded the inclusion of the contentious provisions.

“We support [the terrorism bill],” Gerindra chairman Prabowo Subianto said during his visit to the House.

Deliberation of the bill is believed to have been stalled mainly because of a tug-of-war between the TNI and the police, which led to division among political parties factions into pro-TNI and pro-police camps.

• More Indonesian stories