A world war has begun. Break the silence.
I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of
Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people
where I have been, they ask, "Where is that?" If I offer a clue by referring to "Bikini", they say, "You mean the swimsuit."
Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the
nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear
devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands
between 1946 and 1958 - the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day
for twelve years.
Bikini is silent today, mutated and
contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing
moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive
with radiation. My shoes registered "unsafe" on a Geiger counter.
Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall
away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen
bomb they called "Bravo". The explosion poisoned people and their
environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.
