Project 4.1 is a secret medical investigation by the United States government on the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands who were exposed to radiation after the nuclear test at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. Americans did not expect such an effect from radioactive contamination: miscarriages and stillbirths among women doubled in the first five years after the tests, and many of those who survived soon developed cancer.
The US Department of Energy commented on the experiments: "… Research on the effects of radiation on humans could be carried out in parallel with the treatment of radiation victims." And further: "… The population of the Marshall Islands was used in the experiment as guinea pigs."
Let's find out in more detail about those events
More than 65 years ago, the United States began nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Castle Bravo is an American test of a thermonuclear explosive device on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll (Republic of the Marshall Islands, associated with the United States). The first of a series of seven Operation Castle challenges.
During this test, a two-stage charge was detonated in which lithium deuteride was used as a thermonuclear fuel. The energy release from the explosion reached 15 megatons, making the Castle Bravo the most powerful of all US nuclear tests. The explosion led to severe radiation contamination of the environment, which caused concern throughout the world and led to a serious revision of the existing views on nuclear weapons.
For many decades, this topic has been a kind of taboo for the Western world, especially for the United States, which has been testing "devilish", as the islanders themselves called it, weapons under good intentions "in the name of peace and security on Earth." However, in 2006, during international events dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the sad date, at the UN level, a decision was made to officially investigate all the circumstances and consequences of the American tests for the aborigines and the environment.
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During this time, several dozen expeditions of scientists, as well as activists, members of non-governmental environmental organizations and human rights activists were sent to the Marshall Islands. UN officials also took part in the study of the problem. The synthesis, conclusions and recommendations will be presented to the Human Rights Council at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva by Special Rapporteur Kalin Gergescu.
As you know, the Americans tested the first atomic bomb in the atmosphere on July 16, 1945 - on their own territory, near the town of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Then - on the inhabitants of Japan: the nuclear apocalypse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been celebrated annually since August 1945. After that, the US authorities decided to test new weapons away from their own territory. The choice fell on the sparsely populated, lost in the Pacific Ocean, the Marshall Islands, which were under UN control immediately after World War II, and after the explosions of two American atomic bombs on Bikini Island in 1946, custody of them was transferred to the United States. The White House has made serious commitments: "to protect the inhabitants of the islands from the loss of their lands and resources" and "to protect the health of the inhabitants of the patronage.
How exactly the Americans “defended” the people entrusted to them and their lands became obvious from the declassified in 1994, as well as recently official documents. It turned out that this “guardianship” attracts people to an international tribunal. “Between 1946 and 1948,” Anthropologist Barbara Johnston, author of The Danger of Nuclear War: A Report on Rongelep Atoll, told me, “The United States tested 66 nuclear bombs on or near the Bikini and Enivitok Atolls, atomizing the islands from the inside and, according to declassified documents hitting the local population."
The total explosive power in the Marshall Islands was 93 times higher than all American atmospheric nuclear tests in the Nevada desert. It is equivalent to more than 7000 bombs dropped by the United States on Japanese Hiroshima.
In March 1954, a secret test, codenamed "Bravo", was conducted on Bikini, the results of which stunned even the military. The island was practically destroyed by a hydrogen bomb, which was a thousand times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. “On the eve of this test,” environmental activists Jane Goodall and Rick Esselta told reporters, “weather conditions deteriorated, and on the morning of the test, the wind blew directly on American warships and on several inhabited islands, including Rongilep and Utrik. However, despite the fact that such a wind direction posed a danger to the people living on these islands, the bomb was detonated. Huge clouds of sand, white ash settled on several atolls, affecting people, including a small number of Americans there."
In general, according to estimates from declassified US materials, as a result of nuclear tests, about 6.3 billion curies of radioactive iodine-131 were released into the atmosphere over the Marshall Islands. This is 42 times more than the 150 million curies released as a result of the tests in Nevada, and 150 times more than 40 million curies after the Chernobyl accident. (According to experts, the emissions at the Japanese nuclear power plant "Fukushima" today range from 2.4 to 24 million curies, and they are still in the process.)
July 1946: A mushroom cloud forms after the initial Atomic Bomb test explosion off the coast of Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands.
However, documents show that it was not only the local population that suffered from the secret nuclear tests. In 1954, the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) also fell under the "distribution" near the Bravo Island. All 23 crew members received severe radiation exposure. One of them, Kuboyama Aikishi, died a few weeks later. (The Americans, on the other hand, gave the Japanese antibiotics to treat the crew who suffered from the radiation.) At the same time, the inhabitants of the islands were not warned about testing, they were not taken at least for this time to a safe place. They, unknowingly, experienced the virtually lethal health effects of nuclear explosions.
According to Barbara Johnston, unsuspecting irradiated aborigines from Rongelep Island were resettled after testing and became objects for the Americans to conduct top-secret research on the effects of radiation on human health (Project 4.1). Even then, the consequences of radiation penetrating into the human body were ascertained and documented, but these people did not receive any treatment. Also, the results of the movement and accumulation of radioisotopes in the marine and terrestrial environments of Rongelep and other northern atolls were not made public at that time.
In 1957, the irradiated natives, as reported in the recently released US documentary Nuclear Savagery. The islands of the secret project 4.1 (by Adam Horowitz) were returned with great fanfare to their homeland, where they built new houses in the affected area. This was, say the filmmakers of the film exposing the US authorities, a planned experiment. (In the USSR, something similar happened in 1986 after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant - then, at the request of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, houses were built in the affected territories for migrants.) American medical scientists observed an irradiated population of people in natural, so to speak, conditions of acquired radioactivity. Officials from the Department of Defense and the US Atomic Energy Commission were in charge of all this.
Every year, doctors landed on the islands to investigate the deteriorating health of the local population using X-rays, blood tests and other methods. The results were thoroughly documented and kept in military and medical records under the heading "Top Secret".
People on the islands of Rongilep and Utrik received skin burns and lost their hair. But then a US Atomic Energy Commission report to the press said that several Americans and Marshalls “received a small dose of radiation. But no burns were observed. Everything went well. In the closed report of the authorities it was indicated that 18 islands and atolls could be contaminated by radionuclide fallout as a result of tests within the Bravo project. A few years later, a report from the US Department of Energy noted that, in addition to the 18 mentioned, other islands were also contaminated, with five of them inhabited.
In 1955 (at the height of nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands), at the initiative of a group of renowned nuclear physicists, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation was established. There was a wave of protests in the United States itself. More than two thousand American scientists in 1957 demanded that the authorities immediately stop nuclear weapons testing. About ten thousand researchers from more than four dozen countries sent a letter of protest to the UN Secretary General.
However, in response to a legitimate demand from the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands to stop nuclear testing and destruction of the islands, Great Britain, France and Belgium proposed an agreed draft resolution, which cynically stated that the United States has the right to conduct nuclear tests in trust territory "in the interests of global peace and security."
However, nothing strange. By that time, both Britain and France were already conducting their own nuclear tests with might and main, and a ban on such tests by the United States would automatically put an end to their own nuclear development. Therefore, despite the protests of the world community, the United States continued nuclear explosions in the Pacific Ocean.
The Soviet Union, which tested its own atomic bomb in August 1949, also took part in the campaign against nuclear tests in the Pacific. In 1956, the USSR declared a moratorium on testing, apparently believing that the still few nuclear countries would follow suit. But instead of sitting down at the negotiating table and deciding whether to end the tests or at least a temporary moratorium on them, the United States and Great Britain conducted 30 new explosions, including in the Marshall Islands. The last "mushroom cloud" covered the sun over them in 1958.
The first tumors of the thyroid gland appeared in the inhabitants of Rongelep in 1963, 9 years after the testing of one of the most powerful hydrogen bombs. Due to nuclear tests, about a thousand inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, according to independent international experts, have died from cancer and other diseases. Only 1,865 people were officially recognized by the US authorities as victims of American nuclear tests. They were paid over $ 80 million in compensation. More than 5,000 islanders have not received any compensation, since the American authorities did not consider them victims of a nuclear strike or radioactive contamination. Now, apparently, this injustice will be corrected.
But the trials, terrifying in terms of consequences for humans and the environment, might well have not been. In general, the whole world history could have gone differently if the UN had accepted the International Convention on the Prohibition of the Production and Use of Weapons Based on the Use of Atomic Energy, proposed by the USSR in June 1946 (even before the start of the first nuclear test on the Marshall Islands). for the purpose of mass destruction”. But this document remained a draft. Neither the United States nor its allies were prepared for such a turn of events. They hastened their other development - an unprecedented race of new weapons - nuclear - began. And some islands and their inhabitants (not Americans, moreover) for the authorities of the emerging superpower did not matter.
Only five years later, in July 1963, after exhausting negotiations between the USSR, the US and Great Britain, the unprecedented "Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water" was signed. According to Russian experts, published in the Atomic Energy Bulletin, by that time about 520 nuclear tests in the atmosphere had already been carried out on the planet. The USA and the USSR detonated more than 210 atomic and hydrogen bombs, Great Britain - 21, France - 50 and China - 23. France continued testing in the atmosphere until 1974, and China until 1980.
In 1994, the 1953 Bravo Avenue was discovered, which included a reference to draft 4.1, and was clearly written before the impact occurred. The US government replied that someone just went back to the list of projects and inserted draft 4.1 there; thus, according to the US government, all actions in the Marshall Islands were not deliberate.
While most sources do not believe the exposure was intentional, there is no dispute that the United States scrutinized the subjects being tested without obtaining their consent. This Marshall study was useful in some cases for their treatment and in other cases it was not.
In 2010, it was estimated that, by subgroup, the projected proportion of cancers attributable to fallout radiation from all nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands is 55% (with an uncertainty range of 28% -69%) among 82 people exposed to 1954 year.