Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus exposes the darkest
secret in American nuclear history--sixty-seven nuclear tests in the
Marshall Islands that decimated a people and their land.
The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall
Islands--an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground
for over sixty US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that
America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war
years. It was here--with the 1954 Castle Bravo test over Bikini
Atoll--that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand
times more powerful than Hiroshima. And it was here that a native people
became unwilling test subjects in the first large scale study of nuclear
radiation fallout when the ashes rained down on powerless villagers,
contaminating the land they loved and forever changing a way of life.
In Blown to Hell, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus
tells for the first time the tragic story of the Marshallese people
caught in the crosshairs of American nuclear testing. From John Anjain,
a local magistrate of Rongelap Atoll who loses more than most; to the
radiation-exposed crew of the Japanese fishing boat the Lucky Dragon;
to Dr. Robert Conard, a Navy physician who realized the dangers facing
the islanders and attempted to help them; to the Washington power
brokers trying to keep the unthinkable fallout from public view . . .
Blown to Hell tells the human story of America's nuclear testing
program.
Displaced from the only homes they had known, the native tribes that
inhabited the serene Pacific atolls for millennia before they became
ground zero for America's first thermonuclear detonations returned to
homes despoiled by radiation--if they were lucky enough to return at
all. Others were ripped from their ancestral lands and shuttled to new
islands with little regard for how the new environment supported their
way of life and little acknowledgement of all they left behind. But not
even the disruptive relocations allowed the islanders to escape the
fallout.
