Bidding ^Tarewell to Bikini^^
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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 [