The many faces of Bikini

Bikini Atoll

Microwaves By Jack Niedenthal

Majuro—It had been nine years since I last set foot on Bikini Atoll, and as our liveaboard vessel, the Taka, pulled into the lagoon waters, I felt a familiar ache flow into my chest.

A visit to Bikini Atoll, for me, has always bordered on the unearthly. There is just something about those islands—once you’ve been there—that makes you feel as if they have permanently become part of who you are.

The expansive beauty, the historical ghosts, the unique paradoxical resilience in evidence all around you, all combine to lodge emotionally sharp, unforgiving hooks into your soul. That last time I visited here was with my then six-year-old grandson, Jucooli’o.  

When we first arrived on Bikini Island, I took him to a wide, gorgeous stretch of lush jungle. With a sweeping motion of my hand, I explained that everything he could see was his—his birthright, his inheritance and, sadly, in a sense, also his burden because of the radiological cleanup work left undone from the U.S. nuclear and thermonuclear testing carried out from 1946 to 1958.

This visit, like all my previous ones, was layered with great memories coupled with contradictions. Bikini is a place of staggering natural splendor even though it was once the site of incomparable devastation. Today, the island functions as a

natural sanctuary while also standing as a horrific sacrifice zone for all of humankind.

And so, I dove once again into the haunted spaces of history—literal and figurative—exploring land-based and underwater sites most people only ever get to read about.

My first dive of the trip was on the massive CV-3 Saratoga, an aircraft carrier the size of the Titanic. She lies upright, a humungous steel tomb beneath the sea, a relic of the 1946 Baker test, the first underwater nuclear explosion conducted by the United States during Operation Crossroads. I managed Bikini’s land-based dive program for the people of Bikini from 1996 until 2008, when regular flights by Air Marshall Islands became too unreliable to sustain the operation. Since then, diving Bikini has become a liveaboard-only experience. My last dive on the Saratoga was in 2007.

Descending onto Sara’s seemingly endless flight deck, I was struck by how time finds a way to stand completely still down there. Amid the rusted steel beams and collapsed hangars, life abounds. Reef sharks gracefully and confidently glided toward us, while clown fish played in anemones on the deck.

We shifted our attention to the southern part of the atoll, as this excursion was not focused on Bikini’s unparalleled sunken nuclear fleet—remnants of the first two weapons tests that once ranked as the world’s sixth-largest fleet—but rather to the outer reefs, which were being filmed for the IMAX production “Ocean Dreams” by Deep Sea Productions.

We decided to do a dive in the ZUNI crater, the site of a 1956 hydrogen bomb test. At 3.5 megatons, the blast was over 230 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The crater, eerily serene, initially looked barren, a vast boring bowl of white sand dotted with small growths of coral stretching into depths of about 27 meters. I noticed a shark following us as we entered the bottom of the crater, and for a time besides the fella checking us out, it felt as if a void had swallowed all signs of life.

Nam Island, in the northwest corner of the atoll, offered a different kind of reflection. It was here, on the morning of March 1, 1954, that the 15-megaton Bravo test was detonated—the largest U.S. thermonuclear test ever conducted, a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII. The detonation vaporized three islands, carved a mile-wide crater into the reef, and hurled tons of radioactive ash into the atmosphere.

The horror of that day remains subtly etched into every corner of this island.

The plan was to journey into the center of Nam, as I had done some 20 years ago, but intensely thick jungle had taken over. Machete-less, we didn’t even give it a go. Remarkably, life has returned there, too—birds, crabs, fish. The irony is always the same: destruction begets resilience, but at what cost?

A few days later, we dove the famous Bikini Shark Pass on the southwest side of the atoll. In all my years of managing the dive program, I had only ever chummed the water and watched from the safety of a boat deck as a boiling clutter of hungry sharks tore through their meal. This time, I jumped in. Yes, there were sharks, but no chaos, no frenzy, just the ominous, adrenaline-charged presence of these powerful creatures.

Days later, after all the diving, I returned to Bikini Island and made yet another solemn visit to the graveyard. The ancestors are buried there, their spirits an eternal reminder of our sacrifice. The Bikinians of that era were promised that, if the islands “didn’t turn into glass,” they could return once the land was considered safe. Commodore Ben Wyatt told them after church on a Sunday that they would be cared for “no matter where they were—be it adrift on a raft on the sea or on a sandbar—as if they were America’s children.”

Indeed, when asked to give up their homeland “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars,” Bikinian leader Juda repeatedly responded with the same phrase: Men otemjej rej ilo bein Anij (“Everything is in the hands of God”). The Commodore obviously didn’t like that reply; on film, he used 26 takes in a feeble attempt to prod Juda into saying something different, something less ominous. Once the Commodore realized that Juda was not going to change his response, regardless of how he phrased the question, the frustrated American stood up, dusted off the back of his trousers, and blurted into the camera, “Everything being in God’s hands, it cannot be other than good.”

When we pulled up the anchor and departed Bikini for the 26-plus-hour boat ride back to Ebeye, Kwajalein, a familiar heaviness returned to my heart—because I never know when I will be able to return. Perhaps never, perhaps in a month, maybe that’s part of the magic of the place.

I have a dream of bringing a large group of younger Bikinians here, letting them walk their land as my grandson did years ago, stand on their ancestral lands, dive into the craters of their own story to gain firsthand experience, and understand where they came from. Let the presence of their homeland change them. Let their islands make them aware of what their people sacrificed in the name of world peace.

Bikini is many things. A paradise. A proving ground. A broken promise. For the people of Bikini, it is still their home, their Jolet jen Anij, their Gift from God. 

Jack Niedenthal, former Secretary of Health & Human Services for the Marshall Islands, has lived and worked in the country for 44 years. He is the author of “For the Good of Mankind: An Oral History of the People of Bikini” and president of Microwave Films, producer of six award-winning feature films in the Marshallese language. Married to Regina, a Bikini Islander, for 37 years, they have five children and eight grandchildren. He currently serves as consultant to the people of Bikini Atoll and program director of the Pacific Media Institute. Send feedback to jackniedenthal@gmail.com

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