Two weeks ago Newsday devoted eight full pages to a devastating indictment of how Brookhaven National Laboratory dealt with the people of the Marshall Islands.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States used the area of the Pacific where the Marshall Islands sit for nuclear weapons tests. Some 68 atomic and hydrogen bombs were detonated. The nuclear weapons had a disastrous impact on the Marshalls and many of their 50,000 residents. Indeed, Australian author Nevil Shute drew the inspiration for his book about nuclear devastation, On The Beach, from what happened.
BNL, established on Long Island by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 to do research in atomic science and develop civilian uses of nuclear technology, was put in charge of monitoring the radiation-affected people of the Marshalls.
I’ve written about—as did reporter Thomas Maier in the recent Newsday piece—the outrageous conduct of BNL in doing this. I’ve also hosted a television program, Marshall Islands: On The Beach, which can be viewed on YouTube by inputting that title.
As I wrote in this column in 1997, Dr. Robert A. Conard, who had been head of BNL’s Marshall Islands Surveillance Program, supported the relocation of people to Rongelap, an island especially hot with radioactivity, because, as he said in a BNL report: “Greater knowledge of radiation effects on human beings is badly needed…The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”
Mr. Maier in Newsday told the same story and cited the decision of a Nuclear Claims Tribunal set up by the U.S. which found “that the BNL doctors returned the residents to Rongelap…after a three-year absence even though they knew it was highly contaminated…
BNL used their return as a chance to study the flow of radioactive toxins through the body.”
The 2007 decision—which called for a $1 billion damage award that the Bush administration would not pay—said: “The people of Rongelap…with other Marshallese served as unwitting subjects in a series of experiments designed to take advantage of the research opportunities.”
In my work on this, I extensively interviewed Professor Glenn Alcalay, an anthropology professor now at Montclair State University, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s in the Marshall Islands and was appalled by what he saw—“a secretive human radiation experiment before my eyes” with the “key role played” by BNL.
In the mid-1990s, the radioactive mess created by nuclear reactors at BNL was finally coming to light and Mr. Alcalay was a member of the Suffolk County Task Force on BNL. He commented that he saw a “clear parallel” between his research involving the Marshalls and what he was finding out about BNL and Long Islanders. BNL, he charged then, “had consistently downplayed the effects of BNL radioactive emissions on the people of Long Island.”
Years have passed. Marshall Islanders are still suffering. Mr. Maier cited a 2004 National Cancer Institute study projecting many additional cancers among Marshallese—“a health crisis far beyond what BNL ever told the residents was possible.” Here on Long Island, because of the radioactive pollution caused by BNL and public uproar over it, BNL’s two reactors have been shut down.
But at BNL atomic power is still being pushed. An international workshop was held there last month on designing the “next-generation” of nuclear power plants. BNL’s director has joined with the directors of the other national nuclear laboratories in calling for a revival of nuclear power in the U.S.
The way BNL and the other national nuclear laboratories have functioned through the years proves a conservative thesis of what can happen when government sets up a facility: it seeks to perpetuate what it is up to, no matter what. A vested interested is created.
I’m delighted that Newsday, which through the years has been an uncritical cheerleader of BNL, published an extensive story about BNL that, as Mr. Maier noted, “remains largely untold.” There needs to be full exposure of the history—and current activities—of these federal nuclear laboratories which, using taxpayer dollars, have been up to some literally deadly pursuits.
Professor Alcalay, now completing a book, Atomic Atolls, Human Radiation Experiments in the Marshall Islands, commented last week that with the people of the Marshalls the U.S. “got what it wanted—a group of human guinea pigs to study the long-term effects of high-level radiation exposure”
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