Bikini islanders return ... and remember

Press, 22 July 1986, Page 10

Bikini islanders return ... and remember

NZPA-AP Eneu, Marshall Islands

On a lonely beach overlooking pristine waters that 40 years ago teemed with United States military ships, a tiny band of men and women paid homage yesterday to what speakers called victims of the atomic age. The sombre ceremony commemorated the anniversary of the United States’ first post-World War n nuclear test codenamed Operation Crossroads. According to a United States lawyer attending the commemoration, Jonathan Weisgall, one of the two nuclear detonations, called Baker, was the first United States nuclear disaster. After the underwater detonation, according to official Government records, a radiological survey team discovered doses of plutonium on target and support ships anchored in the lagoon at Bikini atoll.

The support ships were

ordered out of the area and a third nuclear test shot was cancelled.

Six men who took part in Operation Crossroads were at Eneu Island, about 3380 km south-west of Hawaii, for the anniversary. They were joined by 30 Bikinians, who were displaced for the test, and others interested in seeking Government compensation for soldiers and civilians who might have been exposed to radiation from the Baker detonation.

“This is a historic union between the Bikinians and atomic veterans, both of whom are victims of the atomic age,” said Gordon Erspamer, a San Francisco lawyer. His father, a navy officer who was part of a hydrographic survey team after the Baker detonation, died of leukemia in 1980 at the age of 56. David Bradley, an outspoken critic of nuclear testing and of what he

called United States Government neglect for treatment of radiation victims, said: “We are all more or less victims of this nuclear mania and obsession.”

A radiological safety officer during the Crossroads test, Mr Bradley;is a lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

“I am ashamed of the general neglect of my Government toward the Bikinians and radiation victims,” he said. f The Bikinians were moved off their island in March, 1946, to make way for a series of 23 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958 in their atoll. They have not been able to return to their radiologically. contaminated islands. t