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Marshall Islands ‘Tomb’ Awakens

From 1946 to 1958, the Marshall Islands were a nuclear testing ground. Contaminated soil from the 43 nuclear detonations on Enewetak Atoll were encapsulated in one of the bomb craters. The radioactive debris burial site was covered with an 18-inch thick concrete dome, locally known as The Tomb. The ravages of age and climate change have Micronesians worried that The Tomb’s crypt is opening.

The Los Angeles Times and Columbia University School of Journalism detailed The Tomb’s radiation resurrection possibility in an article entitled “How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster.”

It took 4,000 U.S. servicemen on Enewetak Atoll’s Runit Island three years to scoop up and entomb “more than 3.1 million cubic feet–or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools – of U.S. produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium,” said the Los Angeles Times article.

The Marshall Islands is a collection of 29 atolls across 1,156 islands. Today more than 50,000 people live on the islands. On March 1, 1954, the Pentagon conducted Castle Bravo and detonated a 15-megaton thermonuclear blast, the largest U.S. nuclear weapon ever detonated, over Bikini Atoll. Nerje Joseph, 72, was seven years old and living with her family in Rongelap Atoll on that day. She told the about “waking up and seeing two suns