On the last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior prior to its sinking by French agents in Auckland harbour on 10 July 1985 the ship had evacuated the entire population (320) of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands.

After conducting dozens of above-ground nuclear explosions, the US Government had left the population in conditions that suggested the islanders were being used as guinea pigs to gain knowledge of the effects of radiation. Cancers, birth defects and genetic damage ripped through the population; their former fisheries and land are contaminated to this day. Denied adequate support from the US, they turned to Greenpeace with an SOS: help us leave our ancestral homeland; it is killing our people. The Rainbow Warrior answered the call.

Human lab rats or our brothers and sisters?

Dr Merrill Eisenbud, a physicist in the US Atomic Energy Commission, famously said in 1956 of the Marshall Islanders: “While it is true that these people do not live, I might say, the way Westerners do, civilised people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”

Dr Eisenbud also opined that exposure “would provide valuable information on the effects of radiation on human beings.” That research continues to this day.

A half century of testing nuclear bombs

Within a year of dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US moved part of its test program to the central Pacific. Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands was used for atmospheric explosions from 1946 with scant regard for the indigenous population.

In 1954 the Castle Bravo test exploded a 15-megaton bomb – one thousand times more deadly than the one dropped on Hiroshima. As a result the population of Rongelap was exposed to 200 roentgens of radiation, considered life-threatening without medical intervention. And it was.

Total US tests equalled more than 7000 Hiroshimas. The Clinton administration released the aptly-named Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (

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