A VIEW IN PERSPECTIVE, 1946-1963
Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, represents, in miniature, a world that has experienced all the forces, immediate and residual, that can result from nuclear detonation.
Bikini in 1946 was the scene of the first peacetime tests of atomic weapons. One of these tests involved the detonation of an atomic device under water, in the heart of the atoll’s aquatic circulatory system. Bikini also was used for 5 years, from 1954 through 1958, for the testing of thermonuclear[8] devices. Its islands and reefs were burned by atomic heat, and the waters of its lagoon were contaminated by deposits of radioactive fallout. Thus, for almost a score of years, Bikini, a small outcropping of coral in the mid-Pacific, was identified with the earliest experiments in nuclear explosion.
Through the years of testing and later, Bikini also was the site of repeated biological investigations. Teams of scientists examined Bikini annually from 1946 to 1950 and from 1954 to 1958. Then in 1964, after an interlude of 6 years in which Bikini was undisturbed either by weapons tests or human visitors, scientists went there again to make a comprehensive ecological resurvey.
The scientists found in the Bikini ecosystem, in low but perceptible amounts, residual traces of radioactivity deposited by the tests. On certain islands, craters dug by nuclear explosions still gaped in the reefs. The test islands still bore nuclear scars, and in some areas of the lagoon corals and algae had been killed by silt stirred up by the detonations. But Bikini’s life system clearly was in a process of healing. Large islands were covered by regrowths of vegetation; on some, the masses of morning glory, beach magnolia and pandanus were growing so densely that field parties had extreme difficulty cutting paths through them. Bikini Atoll, scientists believed, needed only clearing and cultivation to make it once again suitable for human habitation.
Autoradiograph of a plankton sample collected from a Pacific lagoon a week after a 1952 test.
What, then, may be concluded from the Bikini case? A final answer still cannot be phrased. It is not a conclusion to say that nature and time have permitted recovery, reassuring though such knowledge may be. It becomes important to know the processes of recovery. Meantime, it is helpful to examine the Bikini case in the context of developments during the period from the end of World War II to the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.