I read a TIL post about it and I was curious about whether or not America tricked the inhabitants out of their islands purposefully?
Just figured we should add on that Bikini Atoll was not the only place used by the US for nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific.
While Bravo Shot does appear to be a case of extreme negligence exposing un-evactuated island populations, US navy personal, and Japanese fishermen to dangerous levels of radiation, in the case of Enewetak Atoll representatives for the US navy did clearly deceive the island populations promising that they could return after the testing- and though thirty years later some were allowed to return- they found the islands completely changed and unfit for large scale habitation. Like many other Marshallese peoples whose islands have/still are used by the US military for munitions testing, many of their descendants have become dislocated and displaced.
If the OP is interested in reading further about these current/past/prevailing issues, I would recommend some of the following.
More of an anthropological review- Carucci is concerned primarily with the populations from Enewetak and does a good job explaining why the island leader initially assented to allowing their islands to be used for testing and their belief that they had done so to allow for “peace and freedom for all humanity.”
Niedenthal looks at how the isolation and remoteness of Bikini Atoll (and this is a common story) which had protected the island from much outside interference or colonialism, made it the perfect site for post WWII nuclear colonialism. The story of the Bikini and Enewetak islanders intersect in the overview when US investigations on Rongerik, where the Bikini islanders had been relocated, revealed that people were suffering greatly from malnutrition and starvation. An attempt to move them to another island failed when the US Government relocated islanders from Enewetak to that island so they could perform nuclear testing on Enewatak.
Barker’s goal is to write the history of nuclear testing the stresses the ways in which the Bravo test altered the health, environment, language, economic, politics, and social organization of the Marshall Islands; but a history in which the Marshallese are not just helpless victims rendered powerless by the events in their land, but as fighters and advocates for their communities and their future. The Marshallese have fought attempts by the US to buy silence, minimize, and keep secret the nuclear testing program and its aftereffects on the Marshallese community and landscape.
This is actually a government report about strategic situations in the Pacific. I include it on this list because it helps highlight the lasting diplomatic fallout for nuclear testing in the Pacific- especially US fears regarding the Nuclear Free Pacific movement as the US ended its direct colonial control over the Trust Territories of the Pacific.
Weisgall is focused specifically on Bikini and the Operation Crossroads testing. He argues that it revealed not just the devastating power of the bomb to sink ships and wreck land, but the danger of fallout and the lingering threat of the bomb blast even after the detonation. The bomb proved itself as a killing instrument, a genocidal weapon, more prone to taking out civilians than targeted military strikes. The US turned the Bikini islanders into Nuclear Nomads in their ignorance and arrogance in detonating dozens of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. US scientists and military officials were playing with fire and had already demonstrated a complete ignorance of the effects of the atomic bomb, arguing the radiation poisoning in Japan was propaganda, a trumped up hoax.
They did not expect the fallout to be as extensive as it was during the Bravo shot (they had a poor model of multi-megaton fallout formation, among other factors), and it was that test that did the primary contamination of the inhabited islands.
There is no evidence of malice that has ever come forward. There is a case to be made for negligence, perhaps.