Paradise Regained

The former site of a nuclear test program, the Bikini Atoll is fast becoming a go-to paradise for wreck divers

In the aftermath of World War II, the intense rivalry of the Cold War produced an arms race among world powers for supremacy in nuclear weapons. To become operational, these weapons had to be tested. While the USSR had access to the vast deserts and frozen wastelands of Central Asia for this, the US, Britain and France turned to their colonial and occupied territories in the Pacific for ‘proving grounds’.

In five decades (1946–1996), 315 nuclear tests were carried out on islands and atolls across the central and south Pacific. One of these was Bikini, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands. Its very name (‘place of coconuts’) conjures images of a tropical paradise — a ring of tiny, coral cays edged by golden beaches and swaying palm trees, surrounding a turquoise lagoon. 

The Atoll

The Republic of the Marshall Islands, of which Bikini Atoll is a part, is an archipelago of 29 coral atolls, lying north of the equator about half-way between Australia and Hawaii. The atolls rise 6000m from the abyssal plain to no more than a couple of metres above sea level. Formed over millions of years by the accretion of coral reefs on a basalt core, falling sea levels exposed them about 4000 years ago.

The Bikini Atoll, the northern-most atoll at 850km from the capital, Majuro, includes 23 small islets encircling a 594sqkm lagoon with a natural depth of 60m at its deepest point. The largest islet is Bikini, with an area of 237ha and an elevation of about 2m. Most of the islands are joined by a shallow reef, breached by several deep channels on the southern side of the lagoon. Bikini and Eneu are the only islands that had a permanent population. 

Bikinian Culture

Bikini Atoll was first inhabited about 3600 years ago by Micronesians from the west, who navigated between the islands in canoes using traditional stick charts. They settled mainly on Bikini Island, living in simple thatched huts and exploiting the island’s natural resources — wood, coral, shell and plant fibres — for tools and building materials.

The islanders were accomplished boat-builders and seafarers who navigated in sturdy, double-prowed canoes made from planks of breadfruit trees. They were skilled fishermen, using techniques ranging from the simple hook and line to nets, traps, and spears. They fished alone or in groups, always accompanied by complex rituals and taboos that incorporated the spirit world in their daily lives. As farmers, they cultivated a variety of fruit and vegetables in the poor sandy soils and raised pigs and chickens to augment their seafood diet. A wide range of plants were used in traditional medicine.

Within their relative isolation, the Bikinians developed a tightly integrated society of extended families bound by traditions and spiritual beliefs. Status and wealth were measured by the amount of land an islander owned and a chief was selected from the ranks of the upper caste. This traditional way of life survived largely intact for centuries with minimal outside influence, until the US, with its apocalyptic technology, changed Bikinian culture forever.

End of Innocence

The Marshall Islands were first encountered in the 1520s by Spanish mariners, who later claimed them as part of the Spanish East Indies. But the islands derive their name from British naval captain John Marshall, who explored them with Thomas Gilbert in 1788. In 1885, Spain sold some of the islands to the German Empire and they became part of German New Guinea and exploited for copra (coconut) oil.

During World War I, the Marshalls were occupied and administered by Imperial Japanese forces under the South Seas Mandate (1920) from the League of Nations. At the start of World War II, Bikini became a strategic outpost until it was captured by US forces in early 1944. Shortly after the war ended, the US embarked on a program to develop and test nuclear weapons. The Marshall Islands were selected as the ‘Pacific Proving Grounds’ because of their remote location, sparse population, and established military bases.

Paradise Lost

The program began on Bikini Atoll with Operation Crossroads to determine the effect of nuclear explosions on naval warships. To that end, a flotilla of 95 obsolete ships was assembled in Bikini lagoon. Collectively the sixth largest navy in the world at that time, the test fleet comprised battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines, cruisers, destroyers, attack transports, and landing craft.

Operation Crossroads involved the testing of two 21-kiloton fission bombs in what one historian described as “the grandest scientific experiment ever, more exhaustively photographed, reported and measured than any previous event in history.”

In ‘Shot Able’ on 1 July 1946, a bomb named ‘Gilda’ was dropped from a B-29, exploding 158m above the lagoon, immediately sinking five ships. ‘Shot Baker’ followed on 25 July when a device was detonated 30m under the water. In less than a second, the explosion raised 2 million tons of water in a column one mile high and gouged more than 1.5 million cubic metres of material from the bed of the lagoon. Shock waves sank eight vessels. One eyewitness, a New York Times journalist, wrote that “the phenomenon was one of the most spectacular and awe-inspiring sights ever seen by man on this planet.”

Operation Crossroads was suspended on 10 August due to concerns over radioactive contamination and its effect on the personnel involved. The surviving ships were too ‘hot’ to work on and eventually had to be sunk. Bikini was not used as a test site for another 8 years, while the US continued its program at Enewetak Atoll, 350km to the west. 

Testing resumed with a series of thermonuclear blasts codenamed Operation Castle. Using fusion technology, these ‘hydrogen bombs’ were more compact and sophisticated — and vastly more destructive — than the earlier fission bombs.

The first test in the series, ‘Castle Bravo’, was carried out on 1 March 1954, when the device (‘Shrimp’) was detonated on the surface of the reef in the north-western corner of the atoll. With a yield of 15 megatons, the bomb was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nearly three times stronger than its creators anticipated. It remains the largest detonation ever conducted by the United States.

The blast obliterated three islets in the atoll, leaving a crater over 2km wide and 80m deep. A fireball of intense heat soared 40km above Bikini, sucking up millions of tonnes of irradiated debris that winds carried over 18,000sqkm of the Pacific Ocean. In the worst radiological disaster in the history of US nuclear testing, fallout rained down as ashy snowflakes on hundreds of islanders on nearby atolls, forcing their urgent evacuation and medical treatment. A Japanese fishing trawler (Lucky Dragon) was also affected, sickening all 23 crew, of whom one died a month later.

After Castle Bravo, 20 more tests were carried out on Bikini Atoll up to 1958, adding to the 44 on nearby Enewetak.

Nuclear Nomads

Before testing began, the 167 residents on Bikini Atoll were evacuated to Rongerik, a small uninhabited island 206km east of Bikini. Rongerik’s natural resources were meagre, the reef fish were poisonous and there was not enough fresh water. Within a year, the Bikinians were starving. 

In March 1948, they were evacuated to Kwajalein Atoll, where they camped in tents beside the airport runway for eight months before resettlement on Kili Island, 800km south-east of Bikini. This also proved a disaster. Kili is one of the smallest islands in the archipelago, with no fringing coral reef or sheltered lagoon. Its rocky shores are exposed to crashing waves that made launching canoes nearly impossible.

Food supplies were intermittent and unloading ships was continually hampered by rough seas. Shipments were augmented by emergency airdrops but food shortages remained chronic and, once again, starvation threatened the tiny community. In 1957, a satellite community was opened on Jaluit Atoll, 48km north of Kili, where food was more readily available, and some Bikinian families moved there on a rotating basis.

In 1968, scientists from the Atomic Energy Commission declared radiation levels at Bikini Atoll “do not offer a significant threat to health and safety”, and President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Bikinians to be resettled “with all possible dispatch.” Debris was cleared, houses were built, and food trees were planted. By the mid-1970s more than 150 Bikinians were again living on their island.

However, after 10 years dangerously high levels of radioactive isotopes in the well water and the residents’ bodies were detected. Bikini was reassessed as unsafe and, in 1978, the islanders were evacuated from the atoll a second time to resume exile on Kili and Ejit, a small islet in the Majuro Atoll.

Paradise Regained

In 1996, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Bikini Advisory Group found that, although the residual radioactivity on islands in Bikini Atoll was higher than on other atolls in the Marshall group, it was not hazardous to health. “By all internationally agreed scientific and medical criteria the air, the land surface, the lagoon water and the drinking water are all safe,” it said. 

But while the soil itself was safe to walk on, the danger lay in the plants that grew in it, taking up radioactive Caesium-137, and the animals that ate the plants. The radiation risk for humans was from eating locally grown produce or livestock over a long period.

In its final report, the IAEA did not recommend permanent resettlement of Bikini Island unless certain remedial actions were carried out. These included a comprehensive removal of topsoil and the periodic application of potassium-based fertilizer where edible crops are grown to limit the uptake of Caesium. In combination, these strategies would provide a radiologically safe environment permitting resettlement.

Neither of these solutions was cheap but the Bikinians had compensation from the US government under the Compact of Free Association (1986). Clean-up activities began in 1998, together with infrastructure improvements on Eneu and Bikini Islands in support of fledgling tourist operations. However, both were put on hold in 1999 when the US Environmental Protection Agency imposed a more stringent standard that significantly increased the cost of the work.

In 2001, the Bikinians complained to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which awarded $563 million in compensation. When the US government refused to pay, the islanders sued in the Supreme Court to compel payment but, in 2010, that court rejected their case, claiming it had no jurisdiction to rule on matters involving international agreements.

Clean-up operations have now stalled. Not only have the Bikinians been denied access to legally awarded compensation but changing social dynamics in the Marshall Islands now place more imperative demands on the public purse. The population has grown quickly and needs housing, food subsidies, education, and health care, all of which take higher priority over rehabilitating the remote and abandoned Bikini Atoll.

But nature may yet pave the way for the Bikinians’ return to their beloved atoll. A 2012 assessment by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that Caesium-137 levels in Bikini soil were dissipating at an accelerating rate, much faster than anyone had predicted. 

For the time being, Bikini is occupied by only a handful of caretakers who help visiting scientists with soil monitoring and guide dive groups around the lagoon. The remaining Bikinians, now numbering about 5400, are scattered throughout the Marshall Islands and abroad. They are still active in the management of Bikini Atoll through the Kili-Bikini-Ejit Local Government, which has power to make laws in respect of the atoll’s islands and waters extending 8km from the low water line.

The Natural Environment

The atoll basks in a tropical climate, tempered by trade-winds which prevail throughout the year. Air and water temperatures hover around 28 degrees and annual rainfall averages 1500mm, with a wet season from May to December.

The terrestrial environment has been greatly altered by the construction of the test infrastructure, atomic blasts that stripped away vegetation, and the removal of contaminated soil. The native vegetation, however, has proved remarkably resilient, with important species regenerating on some of the islands, providing vital roosting habitats for seabirds. Land fauna includes lizards, coconut crabs and 26 species of birds, of which several are ‘red-listed’ (threatened). Undisturbed by human presence, the avian populations have increased significantly over the years.

Bikini’s marine environment has made a truly remarkable recovery. It now provides one of the most pristine reef habitats in the Marshall Islands and a significant refuge for oceanic species declining in the northern Pacific. The atoll’s spectacular lagoon harbours a rich biodiversity, with 183 species of coral, 359 fish, sponges, giant clams, large numbers of sharks and migratory turtles.

World Class

On 3 August 2010, Bikini Atoll was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As a nuclear test site, it is an outstanding landmark in the course of human history. The sunken armada at the bottom of the lagoon, the gigantic Bravo crater and the disappeared islands all mark the advent of the Nuclear Age and the Cold War race to develop weapons of mass destruction. They also bear witness to the consequences of nuclear testing for affected communities in their physical displacement, loss of culture and health hazards.

The inscription recognises Bikini for its association with ideas and beliefs that characterized international relations during the second half of the 20th century — the escalation of military power based on nuclear weapons, the manipulation of geopolitical balance through Cold War alliances, and the spectre of nuclear holocaust as a deterrent to global conflict. Bikini also became the ideological banner for popular movements advocating disarmament and diplomacy based on peaceful negotiation rather than the threat of mutual destruction.

Tourism Today

The ‘ghost fleet’ at the bottom of Bikini lagoon is the focus of small-scale tourism which has earned Bikini a reputation as one of the premier wreck dive destinations in the world. 

In 2011, Indies Trader Marine Adventures began ‘live-aboard’ diving expeditions on the fully self-contained vessel Windward. That operation continues with the 23m Indies Surveyor, which can accommodate up to 12 passengers, and is fitted with specialised diving and safety equipment that includes an on-board decompression chamber. In 2018, Master Liveaboards also commenced dive charters to the atoll with Truk Master, a 34m twin-engine vessel with similar capacity and equipment.

A typical 14-day diving itinerary begins at Kwajalein, 430km north-west of Majuro. From the airport, passengers are transferred to Ebeye Island, where they board their charter vessel for the 400km (215nm) voyage to Bikini Atoll — a journey of about 25–30 hours. Conditions permitting, passengers are offered the opportunity to dive the wreck of the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen near Kwajalein before proceeding to Bikini.

Diving conditions inside Bikini Lagoon are excellent. There is no surf, the warm water has no discernible current and visibility is about 30m. Each dive is 1–2 hours’ duration to reach and explore wrecks at depths of between 30–55m. These long, deep dives are only suitable for highly experienced divers with appropriate technical skills and previous wreck experience. Due to the complexity of the dives and the necessary decompression stops during ascent, the program only permits two dives each day (morning and afternoon), with a minimum surface interval of 4 hours between dives.  

Before each dive, the cruise directors give a full briefing about the history of the vessel to be dived on, its unique characteristics and a comprehensive dive plan. About mid-trip, the program affords passengers an afternoon break, with the opportunity of a land tour on Bikini Island, followed by a beach barbeque. The charter season is between May and October, and the cost of these exclusive adventures is around $9000 USD, plus airfares, marine park, and port fees.

While world-class scuba diving is the main attraction, it is not the only aquatic activity possible at Bikini Atoll. It’s been more than 60 years since the last bomb was detonated and the reefs have regenerated magnificent underwater habitats filled with tropical sea life. Undisturbed for so long, these pristine waters provide some of the best reef snorkelling in the Pacific. Reef fish abound among the corals, attracting large pelagic predators from the surrounding ocean — dogtooth tuna, barracuda, giant trevally, and sharks — making Bikini lagoon a sportfishing paradise.

Private vessels may visit Bikini, but strict rules and safety requirements apply. They must be completely self-sufficient for living on board and be equipped with international communications gear. A permit must be obtained from the Kili-Bikini-Ejit Local Government before entering, and the party must be accompanied (at the owner’s expense) by a guide and a local government representative to ensure no artefacts are removed.

A New Treaty

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force on 22 January 2021. This is the first legally binding international law aimed at comprehensively eliminating nuclear weapons by banning their possession, development, testing, use and threatened use, while preserving the “inalienable right” of nations to develop and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

The Treaty was approved by a majority of states at a United Nations General Assembly in July 2017 but required ratification by 50 countries before it could pass into law. That milestone was passed in October 2020. To date, 86 countries have signed the Treaty, including 10 Pacific nations: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Samoa, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

For nuclear armed states joining the Treaty, it provides a framework for the verified and irreversible elimination of its nuclear weapons. None of the “nuclear powers” — the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea — has signed the Treaty, nor have many of the non-nuclear-armed members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Treaty complements existing international treaties on nuclear weapons, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It also bolsters the five agreements establishing regional nuclear-weapon-free zones, like the 1985 Treaty of Rarotonga in relation to the South Pacific. 

Although Australia is a party to all of these treaties, it has so far refused to sign the TPNW. Australia does not possess any nuclear weapons, but it subscribes to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence under its alliance with the United States, which is seen as key to our national security.

Yet, opinion polls reveal strong public support (79 per cent) for Australia joining the TPNW. Those in favour represent a wide cross-section of Australia’s social and political landscape — dozens of unions, religious, medical, humanitarian, and environmental organisations, and international legal experts. Some 88 federal parliamentarians from all sides have pledged to work for Australia to join the ban, and some local governments are also pushing for ratification of the Treaty.

Bikini Atoll Contacts

Kili-Bikini-Ejit Local Government

P.O. Box 1096

Majuro, Marshall Islands

W: bikiniatoll.online

Indies Trader Marine Adventures

PO Box 1396

Majuro, MH 96960, Marshall Islands

E: indiestrader@indiestrader.com

P: +692 625 4862

W: indiestrader.com/bikini-atoll/bikini-dive-trip/

Master Liveaboards

P: +66 (0) 76 367 444

E: info@masterliveaboards.com

W: masterliveaboards.com

Australian Embassy to Federated States of Micronesia

H & E Enterprises Building

Kolonia, Pohnpei

P: +691 320 5448

W: fsm.embassy.gov.au