Uploaded November 2020 | Updated September 2026, 11 hours ago
This program is set in the remote Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, which the United States took over as a United Nations ‘trust territory’ in 1945 with an obligation to ‘protect the population’s health and wellbeing’. From 1946 to 1958, the US exploded the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day in the islands, contaminating its people and environment.
Filming on irradiated Bikini Atoll, which cannot be safely inhabited today, perhaps ever, Pilger describes the testing in 1954 of the world's first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Bravo, which vaporised an entire island, leaving a dark chasm a mile wide in Bikini's beautiful lagoon. The inhabitants had been moved to a nearby atoll, Rongelap, where the ‘unexpected’ fallout endowed them with multiple cancers.
Declassified documents describe a secret programme originally designed to test the effects of radiation on mice and used in the Marshall Islands on human beings. A US Atomic Energy official of the time describes the island of Rongelap as ‘by far the most contaminated place on Earth’.
The human guinea pigs were regularly monitored and underwent scientific examination. Many suffered thyroid cancer, deformities appeared in babies and countless survivors of the original blast died from radiation poisoning. A claims tribunal was set up and quickly ran out of money. The most moving interviews in the film are with islanders, mostly elderly women, who have survived, precariously, in poverty.
Today, the largest of the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein, is home to one of the United States’s most secretive bases, a missile launch pad designed as a ‘stepping stone to Asia and beyond’ and aimed at China.
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This show is an excerpt from a longer show:
The Coming War on China - John Pilger - Part 2
youtu.be/lFvVuOrERCI
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Tags: Pacific Islands, Marshall Islands, Atomic Bomb, Contamination, Environment, Radiation, Testing, Cancer, Military, United States, China,
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YouTube Link
youtu.be/h1qjlCAE_DM
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Also, this show is available for local public TV stations to broadcast.
Phone your local public TV station (LPTV) to request they broadcast this film to your local community. Your station can download the film in TV broadcast format, HD or SD, from www.PEGMedia.org . This film is available for broadcast from any LPTV station in the country - and world. Stations that use Telvue, DVDs or other media can contact us for instructions.
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This program is set in the remote Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, which the United States took over as a United Nations ‘trust territory’ in 1945 with an obligation to ‘protect the population’s health and wellbeing’. From 1946 to 1958, the US exploded the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day in the islands, contaminating its people and environment.
Filming on irradiated Bikini Atoll, which cannot be safely inhabited today, perhaps ever, Pilger describes the testing in 1954 of the world's first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Bravo, which vaporised an entire island, leaving a dark chasm a mile wide in Bikini's beautiful lagoon. The inhabitants had been moved to a nearby atoll, Rongelap, where the ‘unexpected’ fallout endowed them with multiple cancers.
Declassified documents describe a secret programme originally designed to test the effects of radiation on mice and used in the Marshall Islands on human beings. A US Atomic Energy official of the time describes the island of Rongelap as ‘by far the most contaminated place on Earth’.
The human guinea pigs were regularly monitored and underwent scientific examination. Many suffered thyroid cancer, deformities appeared in babies and countless survivors of the original blast died from radiation poisoning. A claims tribunal was set up and quickly ran out of money. The most moving interviews in the film are with islanders, mostly elderly women, who have survived, precariously, in poverty.
Today, the largest of the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein, is home to one of the United States’s most secretive bases, a missile launch pad designed as a ‘stepping stone to Asia and beyond’ and aimed at China.
--
This show is an excerpt from a longer show:
The Coming War on China - John Pilger - Part 2
youtu.be/lFvVuOrERCI
--
Tags: Pacific Islands, Marshall Islands, Atomic Bomb, Contamination, Environment, Radiation, Testing, Cancer, Military, United States, China,
--
YouTube Link
youtu.be/h1qjlCAE_DM
--
Also, this show is available for local public TV stations to broadcast.
Phone your local public TV station (LPTV) to request they broadcast this film to your local community. Your station can download the film in TV broadcast format, HD or SD, from www.PEGMedia.org . This film is available for broadcast from any LPTV station in the country - and world. Stations that use Telvue, DVDs or other media can contact us for instructions.
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