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Article: Payback time.(residents of the Marshall Islands are seeking compensation for nuclear testing done during the Cold War)
- Article from:
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
- Article date:
- March 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I'M IN A HIGH-RISE OFFICE IN CENTRAL Honolulu and attorney Davor Pevec is showing me photos of the damage to his clients' property. There's quite a stack of them, aerial shots mostly, and Pevec is slowly laying them out on the boardroom table as if he were dealing solitaire.
We're looking at a tropical atoll--a necklace of tiny coral islands surrounding a wide lagoon. It's called Enewetak and in the 1950s the United States detonated 43 nuclear weapons here, perforating the reef with gigantic blast craters, vaporizing entire islands, and spreading radioactive debris across the atoll. One picture shows the mile-wide crater left in the reef by the world's first ...