Frank Zelko

On Sunday, February 10, 1946, Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, a pint-sized naval officer from Williamsburg, Kentucky, and the United States’ commander of the Marshall Islands, stepped onto the beach on Bikini Atoll with a Bible in his hand. A former college football player and star athlete, Wyatt became one of the Navy’s first pilots in the 1920s. Legend had it that in 1936, while lost in the clouds over Germany, he landed his plane on the Nuremberg airfield during a Nazi rally. A decade later on the other side of the world, Wyatt’s task was to persuade the Bikinians—all 167 of them—to leave their home and relocate to another island 125 miles away. The US military needed a place to test a mighty bomb developed by its scientists, Wyatt explained, and this device—the most powerful weapon ever created by mankind—would, paradoxically, lead to the end of all warfare. By agreeing to abandon the island, Wyatt gravely intoned, the Bikinians would be like the children of Israel, whom the Lord saved from their enemy and led into the Promised Land.¹

The Americans were the latest in a succession of colonial powers to claim the Marshall Islands. Understandably, the Bikinians were awed by the power of the US military, which rid them of the stricter and more brutal Japanese rulers who had controlled the islands since the end of World War I. Unlike the Japanese, the US Navy fostered goodwill, providing Bikinians with food, supplies, and free medical treatment, as well as building a store, elementary school, and a medical dispensary on the island. Nevertheless, despite Wyatt’s friendly tone, it was clear to the locals that “no” would not be an acceptable answer. Furthermore, as pious Christians—American and Hawaiian missionaries had converted them in the mid-nineteenth century—the Marshallese were receptive to biblical analogies. After a short deliberation, Chief Juda Kessibuki reported their decision: “If the United States government and the scientists of the world want to use our island and atoll for furthering development, which with God’s blessing will result in kindness and benefit to all mankind, my people will be pleased to go elsewhere.” This, at least, was how the Navy portrayed the encounter.²

Prior to the US nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, the planet had experienced only three atomic explosions: the initial Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945 and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month. The United States emerged from World War II as the world’s dominant military power and with a monopoly on atomic weaponry. Unsurprisingly, military strategists and scientists were keen to conduct further tests. The newly acquired islands in one of the remotest parts of the planet appeared to offer an ideal location, and Bikini Atoll was chosen as the first site. As comedian Bob Hope wryly observed: “As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn’t been touched by war and blew it to hell.”³

Beyond its military implications, however, US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands also had several unexpected environmental, political, and social consequences. In historian Paul Boyer’s words, “it was Bikini, rather than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which first brought the issue of radioactivity compellingly to the nation’s consciousness.”⁴ For the Bikinians—and Marshallese in general—the use of their home as a nuclear testing ground had an utterly devastating impact on their way of life and long-term health.⁵ Beyond that, the dozens of atomic and thermonuclear weapons that the US military detonated in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958—all of them atmospheric—propelled radioactive particles into the stratosphere, where they hitched a ride on jet streams and gradually contaminated the entire planet with radioactive fallout. As evidence of this contamination accumulated—for example, in the form of strontium-90 deposits in milk and children’s teeth—the peace and anti-nuclear movements began to focus increasingly on the environmental impacts of nuclear weapons testing.⁶

Ironically, the ecological worldview that undergirded this incipient environmentalism was bolstered by a seminal environmental impact assessment conducted in 1954 in the Marshall Islands. The investigators were two of the most promising young ecological scientists of the era, the brothers Eugene and Howard Odum. Their study, which was fully funded and backed by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), confirmed their holistic and cybernetic theory of how nature functioned. Ecosystem ecology dominated ecological thought for the next two decades, in large part due to the persuasive research and arguments of the Odum brothers. This holistic view of nature—in which humans and their technology were part of a closed circuit of natural cycles and processes—inspired popular environmental writers such as Rachel Carson. By the 1970s, it was the worldview that propelled Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear protests against US and French testing in the Pacific, as well as its subsequent global environmental campaigns. For all these reasons, nuclear testing in the remotest parts of the Pacific played an important role in the history of environmentalism.

By 1945, a team of crack European and American scientists, with ample assistance from the US government and military, had successfully harnessed the power of the atom. Among many questions raised by the bomb, the issue of control was perhaps uppermost: what group or agency should be in charge of directing and coordinating atomic research and deciding what use it should be put to? As Hiroshima burned, President Truman urged Congress to pass legislation to create a new commission, to be controlled largely by the military, that would concern itself primarily with weapons production. Many in the scientific community, however, were alarmed at the prospect of extending military control of atomic power into peacetime. Senator Brien McMahon, a Democrat from Connecticut, came up with a solution: the new agency—the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—would be composed entirely of civilians and would concern itself with the potential non-military uses of atomic energy, as well as with weapons development. However, the generals easily circumvented McMahon’s effort to ensure civilian control of atomic energy; many of the commissioners were high-ranking military officers who simply stepped down from active duty to assume their new role, and the agency’s military division quickly became its dominant branch, commanding 70 percent of its budget and prioritizing weapons development for the next thirty years.⁷

Naturally, testing atomic weapons became one of the AEC’s major concerns. In this sense, Bikini Atoll’s misfortune was due primarily to its remoteness from other areas of human habitation and its relative proximity to Kwajalein Atoll, where the United States had already built a military air base and ship anchorage. The AEC conducted the first two tests, code-named Able (July 1, 1946) and Baker (July 23, 1946), with little concern for the safety of those involved, be they the Marshallese residents of nearby islands or US military personnel. The Navy placed numerous decommissioned and captured enemy battleships in the Bikini lagoon as part of the test, many with pigs, sheep, and goats strapped to their decks. Within hours of the first blast, military commanders sent fifteen thousand soldiers, with virtually no protective gear, into the lagoon to survey, hand-scrub, and decontaminate the ships. The government’s insistence on maintaining secrecy made it difficult to obtain independent information about the effects of the tests; few journalists were permitted to witness the blasts and the subsequent cleanup, and government officials vetted their stories before they could be published.⁸

Over the next sixteen years, the AEC conducted another 108 atomic and thermonuclear bomb tests in remote regions of Oceania. The size of the blasts increased exponentially, generating a total yield of approximately 151 megatons. The tests during this period constituted approximately three-quarters of the overall yield generated by all US testing between 1945 and 1992.⁹ The largest blast by far, which also took place on Bikini, was the Castle Bravo thermonuclear detonation of 1954. Despite realizing that the wind conditions were unfavorable and would likely spread radioactive fallout throughout inhabited regions, the US government went ahead with the test as scheduled. The fifteen-megaton yield was considerably larger than scientists had anticipated. Several hours after the blast, a fine white powder fell from the sky onto Rongelap, an island about ninety miles to the west of Bikini. To children of the tropics who had only heard about snow via Christmas stories, the fallout looked like snowflakes. A few minutes of happy frolicking exposed them to 175 rad of radiation and a lifetime of ill health and suffering (the maximum total body dose recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection is 0.5 rad per year).¹⁰ After two months, the US government finally decided that Rongelap was too dangerous to inhabit. It relocated the locals to Ejit Island in the Majuro Atoll, where they experienced a polio epidemic and subsisted on canned food. As consolation, the former residents of Rongelap could reflect on the fact that Bravo’s monumental force offered AEC scientists many special research opportunities and helped further their understanding of radio-ecological principles.¹¹

By the mid-1950s, it was clear that nuclear detonations of one megaton or more propelled radioactive materials high into the stratosphere, potentially dispersing them over much of the planet.¹² Among the most troubling byproducts of nuclear fission spread by the blasts was strontium 90, a radionuclide with a half-life of twenty-eight years. Strontium 90 accompanies calcium, with which it has a chemical affinity, through the food chain from soil to vegetables. It eventually accumulates in the bones of animals, where it effectively functions as a constant source of low-level internal radiation, significantly increasing the risk of bone cancer and leukemia. The body of every human now contains strontium 90, and forensic scientists can date human remains as pre- or post-Bravo, based on traces of militarized radioactive carbon in teeth.¹³

Throughout the 1950s, the AEC continued to insist that nuclear testing “created no immediate or long-range hazard to human health outside the proving ground.”¹⁴ Such reassurance, however, proved hollow and was soon undermined by the AEC’s own research. In 1958, a group of AEC-contracted Columbia University scientists conducted a worldwide study of bone samples. The results flew in the face of the commission’s sanguine assurance: in one year, the average level of strontium 90 in children had increased by 50 percent, and children under five had concentrations that were twenty times higher than those in adults over twenty years of age. Although the AEC insisted that such levels remained below the acceptable maximum, the media and the general public became increasingly skeptical. Time magazine, for example, reported that many scientists felt that the maximum had been set far too high, while the New Republic opined that the world had “suddenly become a small sphere too restricted in surface area for the ‘safe’ testing of super-bombs.”¹⁵

That same year, Barry Commoner, a Washington University scientist and anti-nuclear campaigner who would go on to become one of the most influential environmentalists of the late twentieth century, published “The Fallout Problem” in Science.¹⁶ Commoner explained what nuclear fallout was and outlined its likely long-term impact on human health and the environment. The global ecological and health consequences of Pacific nuclear testing dramatically illustrated the interconnectedness of the world’s natural systems, an insight Commoner would later summarize as one of the four primary laws of ecology.¹⁷ As the implications of fallout became increasingly clear, pacifist organizations that had protested nuclear testing since its inception began to focus increasingly on its environmental impact.¹⁸ Furthermore, Quakers such as Albert Bigelow, inspired by Gandhi’s nonviolent direct action protests against British imperialism, started planning voyages to the Marshall Islands in order to “bear witness” to nuclear testing. They adopted the slogan “No contamination without representation.” None of them managed to reach their goals before being arrested, but their actions inspired future voyages such as those of Greenpeace in the 1970s.¹⁹

At the same time as the AEC was inspiring scientists and anti-war groups to launch campaigns against nuclear testing and the danger of fallout, it was also the chief sponsor of the branch of science that would provide environmentalists with the tools and the worldview that prompted them to challenge not only the AEC but industrialism in general. Broadly speaking, the trajectory of science since the mid-nineteenth century was increasingly mechanistic and reductive. Technological breakthroughs allowed scientists to study and manipulate organisms at the cellular level. The reductionist science of the laboratory identified diseases and promised cures; it split apart and recombined molecules into useful new materials and products. Given their efficaciousness, it is not surprising that reductionist values and assumptions became increasingly pervasive to the point of seeming self-evident. In a time of rapid industrial expansion and growing consumerism, they offered a form of science that was on the one hand practical and result-oriented, but which also promised insight into the most fundamental levels of life and matter.²⁰ From this perspective, atomic research was the apotheosis of modern science: it focused on the smallest known units of matter in order to maximally leverage the power of nature for military and industrial purposes.

Reductionism, unsurprisingly, spawned an oppositional trend toward a more holistic approach to science. By the mid-twentieth century, the branch of science that best represented this view of nature was ecology.²¹ Arthur Tansley, an English botanist and one of the pioneers of modern ecology, argued that nature could best be understood as a series of interlocking ecological systems—a pond, a forest, the biosphere—each of which could be studied as a “whole.” How could scientists understand these systems without resorting to reductionism? The key, according to the methodology developed by Eugene Odum, a young ecologist at the University of Georgia, was to examine the energy circuits and material flows that connected biotic and abiotic phenomena into a single interacting entity. And the easiest and most accurate way to measure such circuits and flows was by following radioactivity. Radioactive tracers could be used to measure the movement of materials and the flow of energy through an “ecosystem.” The Odums “labeled” plants at the bottom of the food chain with radioactive isotopes. Then, at various intervals, they sampled consumers in the system for radiation. Radiation ecology, as this practice became known, enabled scientists to isolate individual food chains and determine how long it takes for energy to move through the ecosystem.²²

Odum’s holistic ecosystem ecology was, from its very inception, intimately linked with atomic research. In 1951, scientists began working on the hydrogen bomb that would be detonated on Enewetak Atoll in 1952. In order to help produce the tritium and plutonium necessary for the first full-scale thermonuclear explosion—to be code-named Ivy Mike—the AEC constructed a nuclear facility on the Savannah River in South Carolina. Odum received AEC funding to conduct an ecological survey of the region before and after the plant became operational. And he was far from being the only ecologist to benefit from AEC largesse. The commission also funded ecological research at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee, as well as at numerous universities and research stations throughout the country. Like environmentalism, therefore, modern ecology was very much a product of the nuclear age.²³

In July 1954, the AEC contracted Eugene Odum to study the impact of radioactive fallout on a coral reef adjacent to Enewetak Atoll. He invited his younger brother, Howard, a recent Yale PhD who had worked under the renowned ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, to accompany him, and the two spent six absorbing and fruitful weeks assaying a local reef. Altogether, the AEC conducted forty-three tests on Enewetak. The Odums began their research two years after Ivy Mike, the 10.4-megaton thermonuclear blast that had completely obliterated Elugelab Island and turned it into a giant crater. The 15-megaton Bravo test had taken place on Bikini, which was 190 miles to the east, three months prior to their arrival. And just two months before their field work began, Enewetak had been the stage for Nectar, a 1.69-megaton blast that was part of the same series as Bravo. Such was the degree of radioactivity in the area that the Odums could produce an autoradiographic image of a piece of coral by merely laying it on photographic paper.²⁴ Like many AEC-funded scientists, the Odums were seemingly oblivious to the moral and political implications of their work. Instead, they viewed the irradiated reef as a unique opportunity “for critical assays of the effects of radiations due to fission products on whole populations and entire ecological systems in the field.”²⁵

In addition to determining the environmental impact of nuclear testing, as per the AEC’s request, the Odums planned to use Enewetak to investigate a complete ecosystem with the intent of measuring its overall metabolism—the chemical processes that maintain a living system, something that nobody had done before.²⁶ Using a small raft as a base, the brothers waded and dove their way around their chosen reef for hours at a time, including several night dives. “All in all,” Eugene wrote several years later, “there is no better way to become impressed with the functional operation of a community than to put on a face mask and explore a coral reef.”²⁷ “Functional” was a key term in the Odums’ lexicon. Most ecologists up to that point had taken for granted that investigators would painstakingly develop a thorough familiarity with the majority of species in the ecosystem they were studying in order to be able to describe its structure. The Odums, however, could identify very few species on the reef. Moreover, they firmly believed that such detailed knowledge was not necessary in order to trace energy flows and measure a system’s metabolism. In other words, an ecologist could understand the way an ecosystem—especially a radioactive one—functioned without necessarily having intimate familiarity with all of its components. Furthermore, the reef research validated their theory that natural selection favored ecological stability or, in layperson’s terms, the balance of nature. “It seems clear,” they concluded, “that the vast coral reef community is highly productive and not far from a steady state balance of growth and decay.”²⁸ This belief in ecosystem stability, orderly succession, and mutualism was shared by Evelyn Hutchinson and other prominent mid-century ecologists, and the Odums’ Enewetak research appeared to provide the empirical data to confirm it.²⁹

The Odums’ landmark ecological study, “Trophic Structure and Productivity of a Windward Coral Reef Community on Eniwetok [sic] Atoll,” won the 1956 Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America, inspiring numerous similar studies of mutualism and influencing ecology for the next several decades.³⁰ Aldo Leopold, the seminal environmental writer of the first half of the twentieth century, had urged scientists to study the “fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.”³¹ The Odums’ study fit well with Leopold’s injunction. Although they may not have been fully aware of the metaphysical implications of their theory, philosophers like Baird Callicott subsequently noted how ecosystem research, and the theories it supported, undermined more atomistic scientific worldviews in favor of one that was relational, holistic, and based on ebbs and flows rather than individual organisms.³² From a more practical perspective, Eugene Odum was convinced that his brand of functional, holistic ecology, by broadly measuring the metabolism of whole ecosystems, was well suited to the kind of environmental impact studies that would be increasingly necessary as the United States embarked upon a large-scale nuclear energy program.³³

The Odums’ Enewetak research constituted an important addition to the second edition of Eugene’s textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology, published in 1959. From the publication of the first edition in 1953 until well into the 1970s, Fundamentals was by far the most popular and influential textbook in university ecology courses, selling over 112,000 copies by 1970.³⁴ By then, according to Time and Newsweek, ecosystem had become a household word.³⁵ In her 1962 classic, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson employed the concept to describe how chemicals moved along food chains, explicitly comparing pesticide fallout to nuclear fallout and arguing that numerous products of the chemical industry were irreparably disturbing the balance of nature.³⁶ In 1963, Barry Commoner and a group of other scientists changed the name of the Committee for Nuclear Information, which they had formed in 1958, to the Committee for Environmental Information.³⁷ The change signaled the committee’s emerging interest in a host of broader environmental issues, in the process demonstrating how ecosystem ecology had amplified anxieties over nuclear fallout into broader concerns about human impact on the global environment.

Despite the popularity of Fundamentals, some scientists found Eugene Odum’s metaphors and concepts deeply problematic. Most evolutionary biologists, for example, were convinced that individual fitness was the key to understanding how life functioned and evolved. They were thus deeply suspicious of the group adaptation theories embedded in Odum’s ecosystem concept, as well as the notion that the elements of nature “cooperated” in an effort to achieve a balanced state. Nevertheless, Odum’s metaphors resonated with broader cultural trends. His insistence that even a spacecraft constituted an “ecosystem,” a self-contained “life support system” in which everything needed for survival was contained in a single vessel, was a powerful image for a public that was fascinated with the space program and beginning to see the first photos of the earth taken from outer space.³⁸ Furthermore, Odum was quite happy to see ecosystem ecology conflated with environmentalism; in fact, he actively promoted this conflation in numerous lectures and publications throughout the United States and the world, and his ecosystem evangelism resonated with students in particular. As his biographer Betty Jean Craige noted, “the left-leaning students who believed that ecology would enable them to ‘save the earth’ liked Odum’s environmentalist message, populist political posture, vision of nature as inherently orderly, and desire for a peaceful and harmonious society in which humans would cooperate with one another rather than compete.”³⁹

While the Marshall Islands bore the greatest brunt of weapons testing in the remote Pacific, it was not the only region to host multiple atomic and thermonuclear blasts. With the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which banned atmospheric testing among its signatories, the United States shifted its underground tests to the Aleutian Islands in the far north Pacific.⁴⁰ Meanwhile France, which was not a signatory, decided to continue atmospheric tests. Between 1960 and 1966, the French exploded seventeen bombs in Algeria. However, the Algerians’ anti-colonial struggle forced France to look further afield for test sites, and it eventually settled on an area of French Polynesia not far from Tahiti.⁴¹ Both US and French testing policies inspired numerous protest campaigns throughout the Pacific and the rest of the world. The most important and durable movement to emerge from these protests, at least as far as the history of environmentalism is concerned, was Greenpeace.

The founders of Greenpeace were products of both the anti-nuclear movement and the holistic worldview that spilled over from ecosystem ecology into environmentalism. The AEC and its French equivalent, the Centre d’expérimentation du Pacifique (CEP), were their chief antagonists, environmental vandals preparing for an unwinnable war and poisoning the planet from remote Pacific outposts where no civilians could witness their crimes. The founding of Greenpeace, which in its early years existed in a fluid state between a social movement and a non-governmental organization, is a complicated story, but the short version goes like this: In the late 1960s, numerous Americans found themselves living in Canada due, in one way or another, to various disagreements with their government’s foreign policy. In addition to young draft evaders, there were older immigrants from the WWII generation who wanted to ensure that their sons would not get drafted into the US military once they came of age. Others left because they found US preparations for nuclear war to be unconscionable. Quite a few were Quakers. In Vancouver, a fertile center of the Canadian counterculture, these older Americans came into contact with numerous hippies and radical activists who shared their misgivings about issues such as nuclear warfare and the malign influence of the US military-industrial complex. Many were also concerned about issues such as pollution, while some of the Americans were Sierra Club members.⁴²

This disparate array of anti-war activists, environmentalists, and the politically disaffected members of the counterculture were galvanized by US nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, a small grassy island in the faraway Aleutians. Apart from their general opposition to nuclear weapons and their concerns about fallout, many feared that the tests—conducted in a geologically unstable area—could set off earthquakes and a tsunami that would, in the words of journalist and Greenpeace founder Bob Hunter, “slam the lips of the Pacific Rim like a series of karate chops.”⁴³ Between 1969 and 1971, the tests inspired much opposition and numerous protests. On October 2, 1969, for example, thousands of protesters descended on the United States–Canadian border, disrupting the smooth flow of people and goods for the day. It was at one such protest on the British Columbia–Washington State border that the nucleus of the Greenpeace coalition was formed. It was here that two older American activists—Irving Stowe from Rhode Island and Jim Bohlen from Pennsylvania—met up with various student radicals and other young protest groups and decided to form an organization that would try to stop the next major nuclear test, scheduled for late 1971. They gave themselves the rather vivid, if somewhat clumsy moniker the Don’t Make a Wave Committee (DMWC) and began meeting regularly at Stowe’s house in Vancouver. After many fruitless discussions, Bohlen, recalling the Quaker efforts of the late 1950s, came up with a plan: they would charter a boat and sail it into the nuclear test zone, thereby bearing witness to the ecological crime and putting political pressure on both the US and Canadian governments.

Appealing to popular ideas of ecology and to broadly held notions of peace, security, and human rights, the DMWC used evocative slogans and pithy catchphrases that could be picked up by the media and that would resonate with the masses. For example, they characterized the AEC as “ecological vandals” and argued, “Amchitka may be the link in the chain of events which will bring human history to an end.”⁴⁴ Bohlen spoke of the US defense umbrella as a “death canopy for Canada,” while Stowe charged that the AEC was creating a “pocket of poison” on Amchitka that was “filled with the most lethal and terrible kinds of polluting radiation on the planet.”⁴⁵ The AEC, Stowe proclaimed, demonstrated “that power pollutes and nuclear power pollutes absolutely.”⁴⁶ Patrick Moore, a young ecology graduate student at the University of British Columbia, argued that if the US government wished to “indulge itself” and test a device it claimed was safe, “why not explode it in the geographic center of the United States in central Kansas?”⁴⁷

The Greenpeace, as the activists called their boat, set sail from Vancouver on September 15, 1971, bound for Amchitka. The twelve crewmen spent six weeks on the storm-tossed waters of the far north Pacific, stopping at numerous Canadian and Alaskan villages along the way. The AEC kept postponing the blast, most likely assuming that the protestors would not be foolhardy enough to sail their old halibut seiner through the churning October sea. With much down time, the core group of Greenpeace founders spent many hours in animated conversation about what they hoped to achieve and how their campaign might evolve into a larger movement. Their environmental discussions clearly show a metaphysical debt to the holistic ecology of Eugene Odum, particularly the moral and political inflection given to it by the likes of Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, as well as the spiritual dimension characterized by countercultural writers like Gary Snyder.⁴⁸ While hiking on the Aleutian island of Akutan, for example, ecology graduate student Patrick Moore began to gently dig into the island’s moss and soil with his bare hands. Others kneeled down and joined him, marveling at the miniature ecosystem that existed below the surface. Moore began to give a spontaneous lecture on the interconnectedness of life, how all species were, at base, interdependent. The reductionist view of nature that characterized modern science, Moore argued, had served to obscure this holism, which to the men kneeling in Moore’s little circle was never more apparent than at that moment. A wide grin appeared on Moore’s face as he found the perfect hippie metaphor to describe this holistic ecosystem. It means, he exclaimed jubilantly, “that a flower is your brother!”⁴⁹

In the end, the Greenpeace, stymied by the weather and the US Navy, never made it to Amchitka. Nevertheless, the campaign generated the embryonic stirrings of a broad international trans-political alliance. Despite their failure to reach their destination and the flakiness that characterized some aspects of the campaign, it was nonetheless a substantial achievement. Unlike similar voyages in the past, such as the Quaker anti-nuclear protests of the 1950s, the Greenpeace managed to attract considerable media attention. Furthermore, as well as employing the direct action tactics of its predecessors, the campaign, which was almost two years in the making, was instrumental in uniting two of the major social movements of the twentieth century—environmentalism and the peace movement.

From 1972 to 1974, Greenpeace continued its Pacific anti-nuclear campaigns, this time protesting against French testing on Mururoa Atoll near Tahiti.⁵⁰ In the process, core Greenpeacers from Vancouver traveled to New Zealand to organize a protest ship that would sail to Mururoa. Patrick Moore and Jim Bohlen went to New York to lobby the United Nations, while other activists flew to Paris and London to help organize protests there, before ending up at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, one of the groundbreaking events in the history of international environmentalism. In the process, Greenpeace activists established contact with anti-nuclear activists throughout North America, Australasia, and Western Europe, who embraced Greenpeace’s nonviolent direct action approach and their holistic ecological worldview.⁵¹

Greenpeace continued campaigning against French nuclear testing until the CEP detonated its 193rd and final bomb in 1996. Throughout almost a quarter of a century of protest, the French military expressed its irritation with Greenpeace by ramming its boats and, most notoriously, bombing the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1985 and killing one of the activists onboard.⁵² In 1975, Greenpeace broadened its environmental scope and began protesting Soviet and Japanese whaling, first in the Pacific and subsequently in the North Atlantic and the Antarctic. That Greenpeace had the capacity for such actions—or that it could even contemplate them in the first place—was due to the fact that it had cut its teeth protesting nuclear testing in the remote Pacific. The same could be said about its subsequent campaigns against offshore nuclear and chemical waste dumping and oil exploration. Ultimately, this influential approach to environmental activism has its origins in the Cold War and the AEC’s decision to test atomic bombs in the Marshall Islands. The fear of nuclear warfare and radioactive fallout prompted opposition from peace groups and scientists like Barry commoner, simultaneously forcing activists to consider how they could organize effective protests in remote parts of the Pacific Ocean. In addition, the commission’s support for ecology as an instrument for studying the environmental impact of radiation inadvertently promoted a holistic ecological worldview that would animate those who opposed the AEC and the kind of future it represented. In this sense, modern environmentalism is the AEC’s bastard child.

Thirty-one years after radioactive “snow” fell onto Rongelap, 95 percent of the population alive between 1948 and 1954 had contracted thyroid cancer, and a high proportion of their children suffered from genetic defects. In 1957, three years after its evacuation, the US government determined that Rongelap Atoll could be safely re-inhabited, so long as people stayed away from the northernmost islands and imported their food. Over the next three decades, the Rongelapese became convinced that their high rates of illness, premature deaths, and birth defects were due to continuous exposure to their island’s contaminated soil.⁵³ In response, the Parliament (Nitijela) of the Marshall Islands passed a unanimous resolution asking the US government to relocate the Rongelapese. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, the United States continued to insist that the island was safe and refused to offer assistance. The Rongelapese turned to Greenpeace for help. In May 1985, two months before the French blew her up, the Rainbow Warrior transported the Rongelapese and all their belongings to Mejatto, a small island on the western side of Kwajalein Atoll.⁵⁴ Though not exactly a happy ending, the relocation at least gave the people of Rongelap a measure of relief, as well as constituting a poignant reminder of the intertwined histories of Pacific nuclear testing, environmentalism, and the ecological health of the planet.