an al-jazeera after what i want to east the pacific's nuclear time. in twenty twelve al-jazeera traveled to iraq people here are definitely scared to speak on camera they're saying that if they talk to us they think they'll be arrested down the line to take the pulse of a country ravaged under us occupation some of these graves are completely destroyed it's one of the most holy and sacred sites in all of iraq to turn into a battleground between the mehdi army and the americans six years on rewind returns to iraq after the americans at this time on all jews in. the marshall islands is the tiny pacific nation with a very big problem for. once ground zero for america's cold war atomic testing it's been left with a toxic radioactive legacy. now rising sea levels threaten to small the

islands and if that happens deadly nuclear waste will be released into the ocean. and steve check out on this episode of one when we investigate how one of the world's smallest countries is paying for the actions of a global superpower. we're halfway between a stray year and hawaii. in the middle of a seemingly endless pacific ocean. below us chains of mostly uninhabited islands the together form the nation of the marshall islands. for which is nothing yes no no no route the bridge on the right. the way we know it much a part of my family was carried out some of the biggest history.

spread over two million square kilometers of the central pacific the marshall islands is a scattering of more than a thousand islands and eyelets. few people have heard of in a we talk but it's the ground zero of us nuclear testing in the pacific. all. the welcome sign he said what we've come to see but when you know what it really is if you would want to visit this place. the settle is a roof over the islands so remote that there's no regular transport in or out it'll be a week before our plane returns if we're lucky. it's a stunning place but it's the dark secret.

this is a place whose atomic past is. seed into its present the people of in a way talk were forced into exile by the atomic full well allowed to return after three decades and new generation is learning about the traditions and customs of this place. they have also been told about america's toxic legacy and how it lies under john darm. i m. they are interesting some are they understand that we have a voice in our in our aisle and that is what people are using. they know that there's a tomb because they have been there so the dawn you call of the term we call

it the. we sit out the next morning to see for ourselves. after nearly two hours we approach one of in a way talk at holds forty islands. what we've come to see is hard to spot from the beach only from the air can you get a true sense of the sky a lot of what the united states military calls the dawn or. the diamond is actually a dump it contains the toxic leftovers of some of the most powerful atomic bombs in history america's cold war legacy it is a tomb of nuclear waste the dome is completely unlabeled there's no fence there no

guards there people can go there if they want and there's nobody to stop them but they let me up and make you write about them by the way i mean that. i. was. i. the nine hundred forty six to nine hundred fifty eight the united states detonated dozens of atomic bombs in the marshall islands. and was in a way talkies hardly knowing its closest neighbor three hundred kilometers to the east became synonymous with nuclear fallout. its name is bikini and on. my own going on the water you in the shock wave coming toward the camera bottom line.

i'm from the camp. right now i don't think i'll be able to come in it's just not clean enough for us it's not. one of the countries loves traditional never gators else and killen is adrift living in exile because he's not allowed to return home to bikini. ahead of the atomic testing there in the one nine hundred forty s. the united states told elson killen's family and the one hundred sixty seven people of his asshole that they had a duty to the world to leave their islands. it was a moment film by the military's p.r. unit twenty six. all right now james when you count them that the united states government now wants to trying this great force and there's something going

on man. and that this experiment here are the first step in that direction and i was. ready and willing. every. where you count them and giving you that everything being in god's hands it cannot be other than good. god and here by the way i had i was thinking of them i should leave you are my kind of the. god was out of there are no magic through it all well for me the yankees my god all right there was the impacts of twelve years of nuclear testing in the marshall islands included increased rates of thyroid and other cancers and the permanent exile of people from their home islands . in one thousand nine hundred six is part of

a deal to give the marshall islands independence. the u.s. paid one hundred fifty million dollars later an independent tribunals awarded more than two billion dollars to victims of the testing program less than four million was ever played. the tribunals office in the capital murder zero is no longer operating with most claims unresolved sitting in files gathering dust. the u.s. government policy on the nuclear weapons legacy in the marshall islands is to simply downgrade and dismissed health hazards as not existed or in significant. johnson is the publisher of the marshall islands journal the country's only newspaper for three decades he's been a passionate advocate for the local people his wife. was a famous nucleus of five who died of cancer aged just forty five it really makes

us wonder if marshall islanders will ever get justice from the nuclear weapons tests that were conducted here and just this is the right word it's really important to understand that that a lot of nuclear contaminated material was tossed into a crater left over from a bomb test a coral atoll essentially and a coral atoll by its nature is porous. when the us was getting ready to clean up and leave in the one nine hundred seventy s. they picked the pit that had been left by one of the smaller atomic explosions and dumped a lot of this plutonium and other radioactive waste into the pit and covered it over with an eighteen inch thick dome and left.

the dome was never meant to be anything but a temporary solution to the problem of atomic waste at almost every stage of its construction safety was sector feist to save money. michael gerard is a u.s. climate change specialist who's visited the dawn the bottom of the dome is just what was left behind by the nuclear weapons explosion. it's permeable soil there was no effort to line it and therefore the seawater is inside the dome already they see sometimes washes over it and you know you know our storm and united states government has acknowledged that a major typhoon could break it apart and cause all of the radiation in it to disperse. you can see why ruin its remoteness made it seem like

a good place for the dawn and it's contaminated contents. but like most of the islands of the marshals rooters is barely a major above sea level at its highest point when the storm was built in the light nine hundred seventy s. there was no factoring in sea level rises caused by climate change now every day when the tide rolls out as it is now ready o. active isotopes from underneath the dime roll out with it that though it's the connection between the nuclear age and the climate change it'll be very devastation even if it relate to it we're not talking just the marshall islands we're talking the whole city. i think it's really telling. that the ocean is rising and it's and it's it's making this nuclear waste leak out because in a lot of ways this climate change issue has also been revived revitalizing

a lot of conversations about our nuclear legacy every time someone talks about climate change you can't ignore our nuclear legacies it's link. is a poet and climate change activist. she's proud of her marshallese heritage. it's my home it's where i'm from that's where my family's from my ancestors they've been here for thousands of years and and there's also just nothing like you and your else and it's part of why i am. a rising leader of a nation kathy jett no kid you know was invited to the twenty fourteen united nations climate change summit in new york to speak about how the marshall islands is on the front line in the battle against rising sea levels the marshall islands and compass is more than two million square kilometers of ocean i mean it's the

united nations these are world leaders from all over and it was the first time that i was able to share something that i was i cared about you know something about the islands. and what she shared was a poem about climate change dear much of a poem addressed to her infant daughter who are a seven month old son rise of gummy smile you are bald as an egg and bald as the buddha you are thighs that are thunders shrieks that are lightning so excited for bananas hugs and our morning walk along the loop. dear much of filipino i want to tell you about that lagoon lady lounging in the gloom lounging against the sunrise men say that one day that lagoon will devour you they say it will not the shoreline to at the roots of your bread fruit trees gulp down rows of the walls and crunch through your island shattered bones lots of filipino don't cry mommy promises you no one will calm and devour you now once drowning baby no one's moving no one's

losing their homeland no one's going to become a climate change refugees. in a place known for so to speeches in poker face diplomacy heavy jet gnocchi genius pledged to her daughter to fight climate change leave me to tears. i mean when they all stood up i kind of thought they were just being polite but i just found out earlier that's life that doesn't happen all the time. some estimates put the sea level rise here in excess of sixty centimeters by the end of this century that's enough to inundate three quarters of the country so. now we're on alert every time there's a high tide is the water will come over and flood our houses you know crash against homes are destroyed homes it will dry the crops and you know that didn't ever

happen before you know we're getting a lot of more extreme weathers like droughts too and so it's just gotten a lot worse in the past couple years. it will kill a reef so we kill so reef a kill so fish kill so food and you know marshall has a very very limited line so this really nothing for us to survive on. so i would you know i was sitting there a short time i cannot give you the year but. we will gradually probably start moving out to the clock is ticking before you it really is it is ticking. for many marshallese the dome on rumor tile and remains a potent symbol of the threat of climate change it may be made from half meter thick concrete panels but as we've seen elsewhere the ocean is likely to win out over concrete every time. the radiation levels of the people of in

a we talk the supposed to be monitored here in this space age us built lab on the main island but when we visit the machine for assessing radioactive exposure isn't working. and as we're about to find out it's not just the people of the marshall islands who are living with the fallout from what happened here all those years ago. this was the side of the largest nuclear cleanup in united states history four thousand young soldiers toiled he for years to fill in the bomb crater underneath this dime among the more than eighty thousand cubic meters of contaminated soil and debris with plutonium one of the most toxic substances on the planet. the many of the young soldiers who worked here there was a high price to pay. those

young men and now in their fifty's and sixty's and few in the united states know this story. the suburban sprawl of less vegas feels like another world away from the remote emptiness of in a way talk at all but the dome is something former u.s. soldier g.-man drole can never forget and neither can he forgive i've never even heard of it and we talk i never do that there were forty three nuclear tests and it was radioactive that it all so we landed. everybody kind of pretty much flipped out on a phone no because right after the radioactive i was told i was going to visit tropical paradise for six months of the service. a specialist in the army's eighty fourth in geneva talian mandrel was one of thousands of u.s. soldiers sent to help clean up in

a way talk at all in the one nine hundred seventy s. a thousand workers from the u.s. armed forces are giving the northern islands a facelift striving to dig and scrape away the radioactive soil and debris this u.s. news story shows soldiers on in a week talk wearing radiation suits b.g. mandrel says this was just a show for the t.v. cameras there was no special here issued we were just issued our normal warm weather gear which we've been sure to teacher tat in the jungle and that's enough and were you given right to active decontamination truck no none whatsoever was there any safety equipment no if people do come back to rhode island they'll be risking perhaps the hottest radiation on earth this island won't be fit for human habitation again for at least twenty four thousand years unrooted island site of the daum soldiers were exposed to one of the most toxic substances known in the result of a bomb test gone wrong one of the attempted nuclear weapons explosions didn't work

and so the who put tony and rather than having a nuclear blast was just broken apart by the conventional explosives leading to a about four hundred little chunks of put tony and that were spread all around the top those four hundred chunks were put in plastic bags and tossed into the crater underneath the dime well they have this round of walk around pick up loose pieces for instance and just gather up whatever we could throw in a pile and i never had any clue that dust could literally get into your lungs. but these girls are dealing with every day all of us were. declassified u.s. government documents reveal that washington knew the troops would be exposed to patani i'm on router tile and this secret cable from one thousand nine hundred eighty two talks about the existence of solid plutonium bearing chunks on the island surface it warned that the quantity of plutonium was undoubtedly large and

that a presented a new and serious concern. many of the u.s. soldiers in particular who worked at and we talked have since come down with illnesses that they say were caused by their work there. jim mandrel is one of those soldiers for years he suffered from a myriad of complaints he says a link to his service on in a way talk he had his gallbladder out shortly after that a. seventy pound tumor cancerous tumor in his abdomen i suffer from roughly four year forty five years as well from the going to. close that is far more liberal there watching good news the problem for former cleanup workers like jim enthrall is that unlike the other u.s.

soldiers involved in the atomic tests the government does not recognize them as atomic veterans this means the four thousand clean up veterans have no special health care coverage many lumbered with crippling medical bills washington argues safety precautions on in a way top are exemplary the workers radiation exposure fell below recommended limits and that their illnesses and the time they spent on and away talk and not linked i mean these people were in the army what choice that they are they were told go clean up any way they want. i think mostly they're trying to get health coverage medical care because they've got just out there some of them have terrible bills really high bill bills from from hospitals because of their treatment. there has never been a formal study of the health of in a way talk with because that one informal survey reported that hundreds suffered problems such as cancer is brittle bones and birth defects in their children.

are has a guy i didn't think of me saying in hospital you know i tell yeah yeah i just am here are you feeling. strange that. i might have had some damages done to another part of my body when they were putting in the stomach mannerism in a way to veteran cain cassock knows all about hospital bills we meet in hawaii although by the time i arrived kane has been rushed to intensive care with a brain aneurism as a twenty four year old he was working at a u.s. air force base in hawaii when he was asked if he was interested in running the military exchange on an idyllic pacific at all called in a we talk. that's it. my whole vision in life was to live on a deserted tropical south pacific island what's what you tell the lord. it came

through. this would be no posting to paradise not long after arriving on in a way talk came kazik realized he was living and working in the middle of a messy nuclear cleanup one centered on the dime on route island. it was a very dirty operation and the same below calls that transported this filthy filthy filthy horrible atomic waste to ruin it the boys are on these boats you can see the crap going on their faces in their body you know you cannot get away from them. like you mandrel ken kesey says he was never given any safety gear old training he says the thousands of young marine sent into the cleanup had no idea of what they were exposed to it's a total secret we didn't even know the guys didn't know none of those guys would would be in an area that's so contaminated if they knew about it and we were lied to and our boys work six month tours on

a dirty island and the government says you were never there. came kesey has undergone nearly forty surgeries for cancerous lesions which he blames on his time and i know we talk but he in g.-man droll count themselves lucky america dumped all of their worst rubbish to the marshallese and at the end in them with it's a disgusting shame. and it. it looks makes us look bad. m f but not even the rest of the people of the united states but they are welcome in their simplicity and their pleasure and their kind of family and willing to cooperate although i don't understand the wild of nuclear energy and imagine we deal. with a dome embodies injustices in many different ways.

the fact that all these weapons worst voter there the fact that this plutonium was left behind the fact that the workers who work there have not been compensated. and very importantly the fact that the entire nation is endangered by sea level rise which is caused mostly by the greenhouse gas emissions the major emitting countries of which the us was historically number one these are an accumulation of the justices. these are situations where the marshallese people are almost are you drinking e.p.a. eggs or they're just seen as disposable we're seen as disposable in both of these situations we're disposable our lives no matter the war matters nuclear bombs matter our lives no matter whose money matters gas not. profits not.

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