Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester

tests. The rationale had all to do with the likely metrics of destruction. The success of the early atom bombs, even though their targets were cities, had quite spooked American admirals into suddenly believing that of all the main instruments of war, the surface ship at sea might be the most vulnerable to atomic destruction. Soldiers might perhaps hide in deep cement bunkers; aircraft might be swiftly flown out of harm’s way; but a surface ship (especially an enormous lumbering vessel such as an aircraft carrier) was entirely vulnerable to nuclear attack, and could possibly be sunk by a single bomb, and within minutes. It could neither run nor hide from a bomber coming at it with a weapon of such power. Consequently, the future of the American navy—of navies in general, in fact—might be at stake: for if an atomic weapon could sink all ships with such ease, then the capital ship itself would soon be an obsolete entity, no better than a knight in armor on an iron-plated charger.

      If, however, was key. No one knew if an atom bomb could actually sink an enormous naval vessel. It looked quite likely. But no one could be certain. So one of the guiding principles behind the early test program that President Truman now demanded was the need to elicit the truth. Could an atom bomb destroy a major capital ship: a battleship, an aircraft carrier, a heavy cruiser? The navy feared that its assets were the most vulnerable target; so the navy should conduct the tests.

      The mechanics of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime plan to make the first atom bombs, had left behind a well-oiled production line. As during the war, plutonium for the postwar tests would come from the giant plant at Hanford, in Washington State; the enriched uranium would come from the immense centrifuge farms in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and the design and final assembly of the gadgets, as they were initially termed, would continue at the laboratory in Los Alamos, in New Mexico. But where best to test them? The White House charged a vice admiral named William Blandy with finding the best place “to permit the accomplishment of the tests with acceptable risk and minimum hazard.”

      Wherever the bombs were to be tested had, first, to be in territory that was firmly under American control. Since one of the main concerns at the Pentagon was the effect such weapons would have on large warships, it seemed prudent to carry out the test in a sheltered lagoon in which test vessels could be anchored as targets and blasted with bombs. The chosen place should also have a very limited local population—as Admiral Blandy remarked, “[I]t was important that the local population be small and cooperative so they could be moved to a new location with a minimum of trouble.”

      Weather had to be reliable—most especially the winds, which had to be predictable at a range of altitudes up to a dozen miles, the height of the mushroom cloud’s pillar, since any sustained movements of air would determine where plumes of radiation from the pillars might end up. There was the question of remoteness: ideally it should be far away from shipping lanes and from the inquisitive, and yet not too remote, since it had to be within range of an airfield that could house the bombers that would carry any air-dropped weapons to be tested. The favored heavy bomber of the time was the B-29 Superfortress, with an average range of 3,700 miles. The perfect test site could thus be no more than half that number of miles from an airfield, to allow a journey out and back: 1,000 miles distant from the field seemed ideal.

      The search for such a place began in October; the choice had become clear by January. After the Pentagon discounted a number of remote spots in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea, the idea became more and more compelling to create a test site somewhere in the seemingly limitless expanses of the Pacific Ocean. There was brief but serious consideration of the biologically abundant Galápagos Islands—a move that, even in those relatively unsophisticated times, would have raised environmentalists’ eyebrows. In the end it was the Marshall Islands (which had lately become de facto American territory) that seemed best suited.

      The Marshalls were close to the ocean’s midpoint, far removed from sightseers. There was a large airfield at Kwajalein, ideal for B-29 operations. And while almost any of the twenty-nine atolls and five islands that make up the Marshalls might fit the bill, one group of islands above all others looked ideal. Two hundred fifty-six miles north of Kwajalein, at the northern end of the so-called Ralik Chain—the “Sunset Chain,” the western chain—of islands, there was Bikini.

      It was the chosen site for the enactment of a sorry irony. For once the Pacific war was fully over—once the unbearable sounds of battle, and the landing craft and the tanks and the gun emplacements and trenches, had gone away; and once all these things had been replaced by a half-forgotten quietude called peace, and there were lapping blue waters once again, and multicolored fish and white sands and green parrots and thermal-dancing frigate birds and coral reefs and ranks of palm trees leaning into the endless trade winds; once all such things had reestablished themselves as the hallmarks of the South Seas; and once they had particularly done so on tiny, pretty, peaceful, caricaturedly Pacific Bikini—Admiral Blandy and his team devised a plan to end all this, and turn Bikini and all her islands and their lagoon once again into a hellish gyre of ruin and mayhem.

      The ruin of this near-perfect paradise was quite deliberate, and it was achieved because the number of Marshallese was vanishingly small, while America, the victor in the recent conflict, was a huge and very visible nation of almost limitless power.

In 1946 only 167 Marshallese men, women, and children were living on the handful of habitable islands strung around Bikini’s substantial shark-filled lagoon. Like all Marshallese communities, they had a local leader, a chief, an iroij, named Juda Kessibuki. But neither the islanders nor their paramount chief had much chance of avoiding the near-total destruction of their homeland, because they were pitted against the will and recommendation of Admiral Blandy, a New Yorker whose prominent beak had earned him the nickname Spike2 and whose influence in the Pentagon and the White House was seemingly limitless. His motto was Pax per Potestatem, “Peace Through Power”—and this was essentially how he persuaded the Bikinians to leave their island and let the Americans ruin it forever.

      Admiral Blandy had made his formal choice of Bikini in mid-January 1946. It was promptly approved; and on February 10, Ben Wyatt, the middle-aged U.S. Navy commodore who had been appointed military governor of the Marshalls, flew out to the atoll on a seaplane to deliver the news to the 167 islanders. They should meet him on a Sunday, he said. After church. He was going to use “gentle words” to tell them.

      He would use a biblical story. Whether it was cleverly cynical manipulation or a sincere belief in the islanders’ innocence may never be known, but it was decided that the U.S. Navy should appeal to the Bikinians’ devotion to their Bibles, to the legacy of the Victorian missionaries who had passed by a century before.

      Commodore Wyatt gathered the islanders around him in a semicircle, under the shadow of a grove of coconut trees. Movies of the event show the ocean surf beating steadily in the background, waves crashing on the outer reef, the sky filled with high cloudlets and with seabirds whirling lazily on the currents. A number of American soldiers stood around, idly half-listening, half on sentry-go for the visitors.

      Wyatt took as his Sunday text the Book of Exodus, chapter 13, verse 14, which tells the story of God’s leading the Israelites out of Egypt, during those tense moments shortly before the parting of the Red Sea. To get the refugees to the desert crossing point, Wyatt quoted, “The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.”

      It was under the guidance of God that the United States of America, said the commodore, had constructed its own great pillars of fire and smoke, which could and would be used as a weapon “if in the future any nation attacked the peoples of God.” His puzzled listeners smiled weakly, but were silent. Wyatt went on: To make sure that such pillars of fire and smoke worked properly in the service of the Lord, it was now necessary to test them. To test them on Bikini. You have been chosen, the officer went on, to help America develop something created under God’s guidance, “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars.”

      It was thus necessary that for a short while everyone leave Bikini Atoll and go off with the navy to be housed elsewhere. “Would you be willing to sacrifice your island,” Commodore Wyatt pleaded, “for the welfare of