Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report - Hardcover

Johnston, Barbara Rose; Barker, Holly M

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1598743457 ISBN 13: 9781598743456

Publisher: Routledge, 2008

Synopsis

The hydrogen test-bomb Bravo, dropped on the Marshall Islands in 1954, had enormous consequences for the Rongelap people. Anthropologists Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker provide incontrovertible evidence of physical and financial damages to individuals and cultural and psycho-social damages to the community through use of declassified government documents, oral histories and ethnographic research, conducted with the Marshallese community within a unique collaborative framework. Their work helped produce a $1 billion award by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal and raises issues of bioethics, government secrecy, human rights, military testing, and academic activism. The report, reproduced here with accompanying materials, should be read by everyone concerned with the effects of nuclear war and is an essential text for courses in history, environmental studies, bioethics, human rights, and related subjects.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"This powerful, sad, outrageous, important, spellbinding book is a dramatic history of America's second nuclear war, the one the United States Government waged with nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific against the Marshallese people, and with our own military personnel-the Atomic Veterans, who were ordered to participate in the atomic and hydrogen bomb tests of the postwar years. The consequences were devastating for both the natives and service personnel alike, the cover-ups were criminal, and the lessons are palpable and relevant today. The Rongelap Report is at the top of my 2008 required reading list for both candidates and voters. That includes you!" -Martin J. Sherwin, PhD, Pulitzer-Prize winning author (with Kai Bird) of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Consequential Damages of Nuclear War lays bare one of the cruelest chapters in modern history, where the people of the Marshall Islands were used as unwitting human guinea pigs for 67 nuclear blasts in the South Pacific, their homelands drenched by wave after wave of radioactive fallout and its deadly legacy of cancers, birth defects and infertility. Here is a disturbing and unflinching chronicle of official lies, broken promises and felonious governmental indifference to horrific human suffering, cultural genocide and environmental ruin. Yet this terrifying story is not entirely grim. The pages pulse with the defiant voices of the Marshallese people themselves, who courageously refuse to play the passive role of atomic victims. At last, Johnston and Barker have given us a transcendent tribute to the heroic resistance of these nuclear nomads." -Jeffrey St. Clair, cofounder of CounterPunch and author of Born Under a Bad Sky

"Consequential Damages of Nuclear War is a testament to why anthropology matters. Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker bring heart, mind, memory and conscience to document a tragic past that many would have preferred be forgotten. Their careful scholarship and representative activism boldly declares the promise of engaged applied anthropology."- David Price, PhD, Saint Martin's University

From the Inside Flap:

The hydrogen test-bomb Bravo, dropped on the Marshall Islands in 1954, was one of scores of col-war nuclear tests that blanketed the nation with fallout. Johnston and Barker reveal the horrific history of human rights violations endured by the Marshallese, as well as their long struggle for reparations.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1598743457
• ISBN 13: 9781598743456
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312