How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster

[CloudWatcher]

5. We need to step up and do right by these people.

Thanks for posting! There is so much wrong here. From casual human tests (highlights mine):

U.S. government documents from the time show that officials weighed the potential hazards of radiation exposure against “the current low morale of the natives” and a “risk of an onset of indolence.” Ultimately they decided to go forward with the resettlement so researchers could study the effects of lingering radiation on human beings.

“Data of this type has never been available,” Merrill Eisenbud, a U.S official with the Atomic Energy Commission, said at a January 1956 meeting of the agency’s Biology and Medicine Committee. “While it is true that these people do not live the way that Westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”

... to ridiculously ineffective containment of radioactive waste (buried in an unlined pit that is degrading and leaks):



To an expert that says not to worry, because the situation is already horrific:

But Hamilton went on to assure them such a scenario was not cause for alarm. Enewetak lagoon is already so contaminated, he said, that any added radiation introduced by a dome failure would be virtually undetectable — in the lagoon, or in the wider ocean waters.

Much more awful details in the excellent LA Times article.

We're better than this. Or at least we should be.