Bikini Atoll

Obviously the temptation here is to play all sorts of cheap word games that contrast the  two piece swimsuit with the set of islands it is named after. The set of islands in the Middle of Nowhere that the US government decided to use as a nuclear test site. Back in the days when advertising executives had a sense of humour. But there is just something too sad about the whole business, and besides, I forgot to pack my own bikini, so really I would be in a position of pun weakness even before we began.

Apparently one quarter of the entire WORLDS supply of celluloid film was in Bikini for the first test in 1946. Have you seen any of it? In history’s greatest ‘look how big our cock is’ moment, America took the flagship battleship of the otherwise destroyed Japanese navy, their own 800ft aircraft carrier, and over 100 other ships and submarines and put them in the middle of Bikini atoll, then dropped an atomic bomb on them. For a laugh. And to see what would happen. And, lest we forget, to ensure world peace. God bless em.  

Beforehand, the 163 permanent inhabitants of the island (who had just got rid of a different brand of uniformed mafia, the army of Japan) agreed to move temporarily to another atoll until the smoke, plutonium and cesium 137 had cleared and maybe a fish or two had ventured back into the atoll.

But America just loved those giant mushroom clouds – good for morale – and in 1953 detonated Bravo, a 15,000 megaton bomb, that blew a crater a mile wide. In total, the amount exploded on Bikini and the next island, Enewatek, was equivalent 1.6 Hiroshimas every day for 12 years.*

So almost 60 years after the last bomb, and the ground is still radioactive, as are the plants, as is anyone who eats them. The amount of dollars needed to (try to) decontaminate the island is in the hundreds of millions, and what with this, global warming and a mass exodus of Marshallese to the USA, you can see why the US isn’t pulling out all the stops to get it done. The Bikinian people have been relocated four times to four different atolls, and are no closer to coming back to their island.

What freedom we have: with a sailboat and our own food and water we had the ability to go and have a look for ourselves (you could too!). It was sort of on our way, and wouldn’t it be cool to try and find some of those wrecks? So we struck out north east from Ailuk and after three days of sailing entered the atoll by the light of a sunrise that, to me at least, had nuclear overtones. We were used to the atoll  landscape by now -  long, thin islands with coral on the ocean side; dense coconut, pandanus and breadfruit trees cycling life, death, decay and rebirth in the middle; white sand beach and coral reefs on the fringe of a lagoon full of turtles, rays and sharks. Bikini was particularly beautiful though. More sand, more birds (all the rats killed in the bombs – every cloud…) less wind. Why couldn’t America have chosen somewhere a bit more ugly to do their testing? Would anyone really miss shoreditch?

I swam to shore and, just behind the treeline, found a massive grass runway, a few patches of concrete remaining here and there. The airport. In the middle, a ‘terminal’ – a two roomed building with a few brightly painted wooden blue benches like a Cornish bus stop, a scattering of rusting tractors and an electricity substation with no door and three large switches: ‘runway lights’, ‘terminal lights’, ‘pump’. Overhead, power cables ran from this building deeper into the island, and I followed them. Proper exploring! After a few hundred metres sat a workshop containing four smashed up American trucks circa perhaps 1990, and then further again what looked like a construction workers dormitory, calendars on the wall showing last inhabitation in 1997. Spooky even in broad daylight. A generator room, and then some two man dormitories lined up like a youth hostel, this one with posters of girls in non-bikini swimwear, another with posters of cars and a half empty bottle of soy sauce, another containing neat graffiti in marker pen, an old reading lamp and a few pages of the ‘Pacific Rim’ Newspaper. Then a large office full of manuals for various machinery, reels of fax papers, calendars on the wall, vines creeping in the open windows. A dining room and kitchen. 

There was no wine cellar, but there were a few jars of unopened peanut butter, one of strawberry jam, one of grape jam, and some other bits and pieces. The peanut butter was BLACK, as was the tabasco sauce, but the strawberry jam at least had a hint of red, and jam lasts forever, right? 18 years is like the blink of an eye for industrially prepared conserve. I took the strawberry, and a roll of toilet paper (we had run out), and swaggered like Indiana Jones back to the boat.

The jam, when opened, didn’t taste like radioactivity, but it didn’t taste of strawberries either. So we went fishing instead, all four of us swimming to a coral head perhaps 300 metres away. After a couple of minutes, a shark came and had a look, swimming towards me. I don’t know if is nurture or nature that stirs such feelings of menace from sharks, though their flat, wide head and unblinking yellow-green eyes definitely have something to do with it. I certainly felt menaced. I made myself big and waved my speargun at it as I had been taught and done before to good effect, but this one didn’t seem suitably put in his place, and started circling around underneath me. Tom appeared from behind me and made towards the shark as if to touch it with his spear, which usually really freaks them out, but the shark instead flicked away quickly then turned towards him, fins flattened and mouth open! Shit the bed. We retreated and I was greatly relieved when, after maybe 30 metres, it stopped following us and disappeared into the depths. Perhaps it hadn’t seen humans before and was used to defending its territory from any invaders. Perhaps it thought we were americans and was still angry about the tests (the shark in the picture isn’t the actual shark). 

Can you see the shark?

We didn’t have a fish, and on the way back tom speared, but not killed, a big fat jack. It proceeded to make little ‘help me I am dying!’ noises and thrashing around, bloodying the water. It was my job to get in between the fish and any sharks that might come to try and steal it, and I held my breath as Tom struggled to get it out of the water. No sharks… and then the fish was on the kayak and I was trying to get the spear out when Michael shouted ‘Shark!’ and I put my head in the water to see a different, bigger shark circling around underneath us, wondering why he could smell and hear but not see or taste dying fish. We repeated the waggling of guns and exiting of the situation.

A couple of days later we moved across the lagoon to the main village of Bikini, where seven workman monitor radiation levels in the coconut trees, run a generator, and keep the place clean. Like most of the villages we have shown up at, we didn’t know if they knew we were coming (we have to get permission to visit each island from the representatives in Majuro, but that doesn’t mean they let people on the island know), and in such a remote place there is less of a safety net if we (or they) had misguided intentions. And local knowledge is essential.  So the initial hello is important.

We must have done ok because that night we found ourselves in the back of a pick up truck, heading to a beach at the end of the island where the entire population (all seven of them) were fishing and barbecuing. We brought a fish and some biscuits but lit up when they put turkey and sausages on the barbeque. Wow! I don’t think I have every enjoyed a low grade frankfurter so much as that night, and it made me think that I should probably only eat meat when I am of a mind to enjoy it that much (my digestive system agrees).   

All the guys there are on 3 or 6 month contracts, and seem to be quite happy pottering around taking measurements, especially as it is the only outer island with large scale fridges and freezers and occasional deliveries of beer. The Marshallese are very gentle, thoughtful people, and these guys were like a tight family, so the perfect people to sit round a fire with.

The next day we were shown around the island, not much to see except bunkers that had variously housed cameramen, scientists, and animals (pigs, goats – to see what would happen to them…), and coconut trees labelled with numbers that were being monitored.

Another peaceful sleep under the stars and then we headed out try and find some shipwrecks. Once again, this felt like Actual Exploring. Even though all the wrecks were marked with buoys, we had no GPS locations and so had to take clues from various anecdotes and rough maps as to where to look in the 250 square miles of atoll.

It was a choppy day and when we found the first buoy it was a hard job attaching the boat to it, then getting in the water and diving down to see what the boat was. There were more and bigger sharks around, and I wasn’t in the mood to find out where the line between ‘curiosity’ and ‘threatening behaviour’ lay. Besides, I can’t free dive nearly deep enough to see more than a dark outline of each ship. Tom can, however, and he reported the first boat we dived on to be a small one, the second to be an upside down submarine, and the third a transport ship. Not what we were looking for. So we went around in circles for an hour or two and had almost given up when we saw two buoys 100 metres apart – the length of the Nagato, the Japanese battleship. We dived down and there she was! From one perspective, just a lump of rusting metal, from another a source of deep fascination and significance. Mine lay somewhere in the middle.

We knew that the Nagato was sunk next to the Saratoga, the huge aircraft carrier, and so found it easily. This hulk sank right side up, and the bridge is just thirty metres from the surface. Tom almost touched it, I could barely make it out.

And then we headed to shore – a place called ‘bird island’ on account of the thousands of birds that live there. It is little more than a sand spit with a few little bushes on it, but enough for birds and turtles to lay eggs, and we saw giant turtle prints moving up the beach at various points. Being so close to natural processes one can’t help but be sucked into wondering what it must be like to be a turtle, or a gannet, and look at them and try and work out the purpose of this or that behaviour, and on what level and in what way to they ‘think’. And all the objects washed up on these beaches offer the same opportunity for thinking about people. Especially when you find boats, or remains of boats. There were two on bird island – the rudder and part of decking from a big catamaran, and then further along I was amazed to find a raft – a few coconut trunks lashed together with rope and buoyed by some polystyrene fenders: all materials easily available on a deserted island. Was it some doomed attempt at escape by someone stranded, or the product of a school survival summer camp in Hawaii? By what route and on what currents did it get here? You can turn it upside down and look at it from all angles and never know.

Curiosity sated, we left Bikini island via ‘sharks pass’, and dangled the carcass of a big dogtooth tuna we had caught and filleted on the way. Within two minutes there were a dozen sharks following the boat, and we sat smug on top of our 30 tons of steel and pulled the fish out of the way every time a shark went for it. Eventually a big bastard came from the side and locked his teeth around it. We pulled on the rope so the shark’s head came out of the water, oblivious to us and intent on the fish head, yellow green eyes gleaming in the midday sun.

·         I read that a delegation of Bikinians once accepted an invitation to go to Australia where a group of Aborigines had been similarly moved off their land for British nuclear tests. ‘What british nuclear tests?’ thought I. Turns out we carried out almost 50 nuclear tests in Western Australia and in Christmas Island, Kiribati. According to the book, Jack Niederthal’s ‘For the Good of Mankind’, the local Maralingan group of Aborigines have been displaced since the 1950s with no compensation and ‘were exposed to radioactive fallout from these blasts… Prior to moving forward with the testing, British government officials sent out one man in a jeep to locate [and warn] hundreds of aboriginal people, all of whom were spread out and wandering over 100,000 square kilometres of south central Australian desert… after a series of tests, they found an aboriginal family, the Milpuddies and their pet dog, sleeping in one of the craters which had been formed only days before by a nuclear explosion. The military officials who discovered them threw them into a jeep, sped with them to an army camp, forced them naked into showers, shot their dog, and began testing them for radiation sickness… the aborigines called the phenomenon of the nuclear blasts the ‘Days of the Black Mist’'. No surprise this didn’t make it into our history books.