Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 37

Bidding ^Tarewell to Bikini^^ 33 therefore most of the fish, because they ate all the little bits and pieces of her remains. The rest of her body, which was left on the island, poisoned all the ground water and edible foods like the pandanus and coconuts. I myself recall how funny the local food tasted on Rongerik, but we all knew this was because of Litobora, the evil demon of poison (Niedenthal, 50-51). In the years after Operation Crossroads, National Geographic turned its attention from testing in the Pacific to two other areas: progress in nuclear science and medicine, and the adventures of nuclear-powered submarines. In the 1950s and 1960s the magazine featured such essays as “Man’s New Servant, the Friendly Atom,” (January 1954), “The Arctic as a Sea Route of the Future (January 1959), and ""Triton Follows Magellan's Wake,” (November 1960). National Geographic did not cover the Bravo thermonuclear test in 1954 which rained fallout throughout the Marshall Islands and devastated the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel the Fortunate Dragon. To continue to recover what happened to the Marshallese we must turn once again to sources other than National Geographic. Holly Barker, who interviewed Marshallese exposed to the Bravo test, explains Instead of numbers and geographic locations, a Marshallese history of the nuclear weapons testing includes descriptions of the fear and chaos that descended on the villages that experienced the Bravo test. . . the immediate onslaught of nausea and flu-like symptoms, and burns deep enough to expose the bone.. . the humiliation of the decontamination process and the flagrant disregard for Marshallese as people or their customs. . . It is a history of being lied to and ignored by the U.S. government (Barker, 58). A Marshallese doctor on Likiep interviewed by Barker recalls: We woke up in great terror, not understanding what was happening. Many thought they were witnessing the end of the world. A short while after the sky lit up an indescribable sound shook the island. It was so great that it seemed as if the island would split into a million pieces. Standing outside, the intensity of the sound almost knocked me over. Some concluded that maybe the “Big War” that foreigners kept telling us would happen between the United States [