The Pacific: They Want to Go Back to Bikini

THE PACIFIC

To most people today, the word brings to mind a fetchingly skimpy swimsuit. Few now recall that Bikini was the site of the world’s fourth atom ic detonation and the cradle of the hydrogen bomb. It has been 22 years since the atoll’s docile people were banished by the atom, and gentling nature and the passage of time have leached away Bikini’s residual radiation. Lush vegetation once more covers the island. Through their long exile, most of it on inhospitable, isolated, mosquito-plagued Kili Island, the 300 or so Bikinians have huddled in a beachfront slum, longing for their beloved strand of islets around a life-sustaining lagoon. They still cannot go home. The U.S. Defense Department wants to keep Bikini for a test site should the nuclear-testban treaty ever break down.

The Atomic Energy Commission has not yet revealed the results of a year-old survey of Bikini’s habitability, although a 1964 University of Washington study found that the atoll has made a remarkable recovery. The Interior Department, which runs the Micronesia Trust Territory for the U.S., may make a decision by the end of summer, perhaps earlier, under pressure from the United Nations Trusteeship Council, which is reviewing U.S. stewardship of the Pacific islands. The U.N. was prodded by a Peace Corpsman’s moving plea that urged: “If Bikini is free of radiation and is fit for human habitation, please call on the United States to return these people to their homes.”