Bikini Atoll: Living with a Nuclear Legacy and Mediating Conflict with the United States Katelyn Homeyer Environmental Conflict Resolution Dr. Saleem Ali December 7, 2006 2 Introduction At the Northern edge of the Marshall Islands, located above the equator in the Pacific Ocean, Bikini Atoll composes a ring of islands that are no longer known to be safe for human habitation. After the native Bikini Islanders were relocated to surrounding islands beginning in 1946, the U.S. military used the atoll as a nuclear testing ground for twelve years. The resulting geographic destruction, radiation, and crowding of islanders has since plagued the people of Bikini and the hopes to return to their home islands have been marred by scientific uncertainty over the lasting impacts of 3 nuclear weapons testing. In their attempts to gain compensation for years of suffering, the Bikinians have filed numerous lawsuits, signed a significant and binding negotiation agreement in 1986, and have been awarded various trust funds to help remediate the land and aid in a potential resettlement process. Still, it is very questionable whether the reparations to date have and will be adequate to compensate both the Bikinians and the surrounding islanders who were grossly affected by over a decade of nuclear tests on and around the land of their people. Geography Bikini Atoll is a ring of 23 islands surrounding a lagoon in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which is comprised of 357,000 square miles of area within the geographic region of Micronesia. It is one of 29 atolls, along with five individual islands, that make up the 1,100 small, flat Marshall Islands that are found thousands of miles from any major landmass (Woodard, 1998). The first Micronesian settlers are said to have arrived in the Marshalls anywhere from 2,500 to 4,000 years ago. Though the Marshall government describes them as 鈥渃ontroversial,鈥?archeological finds discovered in Bikini Atoll in the late 1980鈥檚 have been carbon dated to 4,000 years before present, suggesting settlement around this time (Embassy of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, 2005). Because of their remote location, the Marshall Islands had no contact with the rest of the world until the 1600鈥檚, when the Spanish and

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