Site Presented By
Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Something wild is happening on Christmas Island, once ground zero for nuclear test explosions.
By David Wolman
Read more: Environment, Adventure, Science, Nuclear Weapons, Environment & Science, David Wolman
Photo by David Wolman
Today, sooty terns swarm over the cracked cement foundations where, 50 years ago, British and U.S. personnel detonated nuclear weapons above Christmas Island.
Aug. 31, 2008 | CHRISTMAS ISLAND -- Driving south on Christmas Island's lone north-south road, Tonga Fou and I are heading to the spot where, 50 years ago, the British military detonated a couple of thermonuclear weapons. Fou, 81, smokes USA Gold Full Flavor 100 cigarettes. As he runs a leathery hand across his forehead, he recalls his experience during one of the test explosions.
Crowded onto a military vessel in case of an emergency evacuation, Fou huddled with his wife and two children. The blast shook the boat, as if it had been shoved by a deity, and everyone winced as their ears popped. About a minute after the detonation, Fou wandered on deck, looked up and thought the world was coming to an end. "It was just terrible," he says. "The mushroom cloud was beginning to come up, with these bright colors, like breaking waves of fire, going up, bigger and bigger, until the sky was all red."
Between 1957 and 1962, this former British colony in the equatorial Pacific played involuntary host to 30 nuclear explosions conducted by the British and U.S. militaries. Code-named Operation Grapple, Britain's tests at Christmas (also known as Kiritimati) and neighboring Malden Island ranged from a 3,000-kiloton explosion 8,200 feet in the air and far out to sea, to a 24-kiloton "balloon-suspended air burst over land." (For comparison, the bomb dropped at Hiroshima had about a 15-kiloton yield.) With thousands of troops, weekly DDT spraying to keep fly populations at bay, and a steady stream of boats and airplanes delivering ever more provisions, it's safe to say that the Cold War's tenure on Christmas Island didn't exactly follow the mindful traveler's dictum: Take only pictures, leave only footprints.
But things change, even in places where WMD have inflicted their catastrophic toll. The Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963, brought an end to U.S. and British testing in the region. In the '70s, the British government followed up at Christmas with Operation Hard Look, investigating whether radioactive fallout might be found on the island and, if so, determining what to do with it. They didn't find any, although there was no shortage of trash -- abandoned vehicles and drums, mostly, decaying rapidly in the humid climate.
In 1975, American surveyors drew the same conclusion about lingering radioactivity. Still, for goodwill, to avoid future liability, or both, the British recently carried out a cleanup operation on Christmas, carting away tons of decades-old debris, most of which had been concentrated in a junkyard next to the village of Banana and totaled more than 30,000 cubic yards of material. Last May, the final shipment of waste was loaded onto a vessel bound for the U.K.
Fou is the last living person on Christmas Island who was here when the nukes, nuke scientists and soldiers came to town. Now only fragments of that era remain: old truck tires stacked as a makeshift fence between village huts, concrete platforms where buildings once stood, a rotted wooden backboard on a metal pole -- what was once a basketball hoop for recreating servicemen -- and a crumbling church constructed of dead coral and concrete.
What can be found in abundance, however, is nature. In the intervening decades since the era of nuclear-weapons testing, the natural world has quietly rebounded. Today, Christmas Island, Bikini Atoll and other Cold War proving grounds, like Monte Bello north of Perth, Australia, constitute some of the most ecologically intact corners of the world, emitting not radiation but a peculiar allure; it's atomic tourism with a naturalist spin.
Marine biologists diving at Bikini have returned with glowing reports. Inspecting a mile-wide crater left by a hydrogen bomb that exploded with a force 1,000 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, researchers recently found the lagoon to be 80 percent covered by thriving corals, with some species growing into huge, treelike formations.
Karen Koltes, a coral specialist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, says reefs around places like Bikini "are among the few examples left in the world of what an ecosystem looks like absent human presence and exploitation." (Unintentionally pouring on the irony, scientists will sometimes employ the word "pristine.") This nature-despite-nukes contrast can be seen at other former test sites, such as the waters surrounding Alaska's Amchitka Island where, 40 years ago, the U.S. conducted three underground explosions. The same is true of the desolate dunes of a former French test site in Algeria, and even the scrublands inside the fence at the Nevada Test Site.
Radioactive materials are long-lasting, which is what makes them both scary and misunderstood. The smoke detectors in your home likely contain a radionuclide called americium. But the reason to worry about them has nothing to do with radioactive material and everything to do with whether the detector's battery is working. Contrary to popular belief, previously bombed geographies are not transformed into lifeless, poisoned landscapes for the next 50,000 years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki look just like every other bustling Japanese city, and crawling around in the grass of a city park there is no different than doing so in Seattle or Milan, Italy, or Auckland, New Zealand, at least as far as radiation hazard is concerned.
But that's not to say everything is peachy with former nuke test sites. Radioactive fallout, and the dizzyingly complex study of it, depends on factors such as microclimates, local geography, wind, altitude of detonation, size of the bomb and environmental conditions on the ground like soils, rock type and vegetation. There are places in the Pacific you don't want to go and probably can't -- that's why they're off limits. The same is true for parts of the Nevada Test Site and other detonation locations.
Submit