March 06, 2004
For whom the bell atolls: 50 years later
When I was six years old and we lived in Hawaii on the beach near Waikiki and my father was a colonel in the army, my parents used to have cocktail parties on the beach in our backyard with all the army couples and tiki torches and roast pig and hula dancers and then, in the middle of the night the sky would fill with all sorts of colors from an atomic bomb test in Enewetak, Bikini, or Johnston atoll. And everyone would cheer and toast like it was Fourth of July. It was 1961.
Stupid, stupid humans. Everyone so excited and blissful as atolls and people and ecosystems hundreds of miles away were callously obliterated. Over 1000 tests between 1946 and 1962. This year marks 50 years since the first really big test at Bikini Atoll. Some of the test sites are still not habitable. Here is an excellent article in the Honolulu Weekly that summarizes the sad facts.
Hi, this is Randy's mother, I just want to say that I well remember 1961, sitting in a lawn chair in our back yard at Ft. Kamahamaha, overlooking the Pacific. A tall, cool drink in my hand, friends gathered around, the palm trees swaying in the balmy Hawaiian breezes, waiting for "the show"! THE BIG BURST! BOOM.....silence. The entire horizon and the surface of the ocean ABLAZE IN ORANGE FIRE!! No one knew what to say...We idiots had no idea the damage we were doing. At least..... we were TERRIFIED.