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POWER IS SOVEREIGNTY, MISTER BOND
“Ah, Mr. Powers … welcome to my hollowed-out volcano,” says Dr. Evil, gesturing to his elaborate underground base on a tropical island. The scenario, from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, is instantly recognizable. The deranged supervillain, his island lair, the threat of world destruction—it’s so familiar you forget how bizarre it is.
Of all the potentially menacing locales, why do our most ambitious evildoers, the ones bent on world domination, seek out remote specks of land in the middle of seas and oceans? You’d think the qualities of islands that make them desirable vacation spots—their distance from population centers, their relaxed pace of life—would ill suit them as launchpads for global conquest. After all, Napoleon’s adversaries sent him to Elba to exile him, not to encourage him to have another go.
It’s true that there has long been an association with islands and malfeasance, at least in Western fiction. It’s not hard to think of examples of islands as lawless and dangerous spaces, such as Treasure Island (1883), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), or Skull Island in King Kong (1933).
World domination from an island, though—that’s different. As far as I can tell, it’s a more recent literary phenomenon. As far as I can tell, it begins with Bond.
Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, knew about islands and the villainy they engendered. During the Second World War, he served as the assistant to Britain’s director of naval intelligence. In 1943 he traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, for a high-level naval intelligence conference with the United States. The Caribbean was then in dire straits, tormented by German submarines that evaded the Allied navies. Rumors floated that the U-boats were finding safe berth at a secret harbor built by Axel Wenner-Gren, a Swedish multimillionaire who had established himself on an island in the Bahamas.
Wenner-Gren was a shadowy figure, moving, as one of his chroniclers put it, “behind the curtains of history, profoundly influencing the course of events.” He was a striking physical specimen, with piercing blue eyes, snow-white hair, bronzed skin, and ramrod-straight posture. He’d made his first fortune manufacturing vacuum cleaners, but his sprawling multinational business empire grew to incorporate munitions, matches, wood pulp, planes, monorails, banking, telecommunications, and, ultimately, computers. The Disneyland and Seattle monorails were built by Wenner-Gren’s company. Telmex, the Latin American telecommunications company (now the core of the fortune of the world’s-richest-man contender Carlos Slim), was founded by Wenner-Gren.
Wenner-Gren had left Sweden for the Bahamas, apparently for tax reasons. There, he’d purchased the bulk of an island, established an estate called Shangri-La, and anchored his yacht, the largest in the world, equipped with state-of-the-art radio communications.
“He is too big for Sweden,” a magazine from his home country wrote. “He is an international power.”
Wenner-Gren did, it was true, have a foreign policy all his own. He theorized that science and rationality were bringing forth an era of peace. To nudge the new age along, he backed one of the period’s many spelling reform schemes, Anglic, in the hopes of turning English into a global language. He also pursued peace by serving as a back-channel emissary between British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Hermann Göring, the second-in-command in the Nazi leadership. Wenner-Gren was, in fact, one of the last diplomatic links between Britain and Germany before Hitler invaded Poland.
Wenner-Gren’s ties to Göring threw a pall of suspicion over him. “I have not a shred of evidence, but I have a very strong feeling that this man acts as a spy for the German government,” the U.S. undersecretary of state reported. The FBI put Wenner-Gren under surveillance, the U.S. government froze his accounts, and wild accusations flew. It was said that he was helping Nazis transfer wealth, that Göring had sneaked a mysterious bundle onto Wenner-Gren’s yacht, or that every member of the yacht’s crew was a spy.
It surely didn’t help that the FBI was aggressively investigating a member of Wenner-Gren’s coterie, Inga Arvad, a Danish beauty queen sometimes mistaken for his mistress. Arvad was a favorite of the Nazi leadership; Hitler had judged her to be the most “perfect example of Nordic beauty” he’d ever seen, and he had hosted her in his private box during the 1936 Olympics. Whether that meant she was spying was hard to say. The main revelation from the FBI’s round-the-clock surveillance was not that Arvad was consorting with Nazis, but that she was conducting a torrid, involved affair—one the FBI recorded on tape—with a young naval ensign named John F. Kennedy. (When Kennedy was elected president, J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI’s dossier on Arvad as blackmail to ensure his reappointment as FBI director.)
This was the hotbed of international intrigue Ian Fleming encountered in 1943.
The accusations that Wenner-Gren had built a secret harbor for German U-boats proved false. Still, Fleming found the whole rum-soaked milieu irresistible. “When we have won this blasted war,” Fleming told his friend, “I am going to live in Jamaica. Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.”
He bought an estate there, Goldeneye, named after one of the intelligence operations he’d participated in during the war.
Jamaica was, for Fleming, one of those “blessed corners of the British empire,” a place where brown-skin natives still served drinks at the club and the fantasies of colonial life could be indulged for just a while longer. In 1956 Britain lost control of the Suez Canal, an incident that foretold the end of the empire. (“In the whole of modern history I can’t think of a comparable shambles,” wrote Fleming.) It was to Jamaica that prime minister Anthony Eden repaired to recuperate from that defeat. He stayed at Goldeneye.
Fleming spent every winter in Jamaica from 1946 until his death, in 1964. It was where he wrote all the Bond books. Jamaica was also where Fleming conducted an affair with a rich widow named Blanche Blackwell, who was in turn having an affair with Fleming’s neighbor, Errol Flynn. Scampering underfoot at Goldeneye was Blackwell’s young son, Chris, who would later grow up to found Island Records and launch the reggae musicians Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Peter Tosh onto the world scene. (After Fleming’s death, Bob Marley bought Goldeneye, but he deemed it “too posh” and sold it to Chris Blackwell, who owns it now.)
Fleming set three Bond novels in Jamaica, though none captured the scene as vividly as Doctor No (1958). After a group of assassins destroy the British Secret Service’s radio station, severing the connection between Jamaica and England, Bond is dispatched. The clues point to a nearby island. A guano island, as it happens.
Fleming’s readers probably knew little of guano, but he was eager to remedy their ignorance. When Bond first arrives in Jamaica, the colonial secretary sits him down for a lecture on guano’s history (“Bond prepared to be bored”). This, remarkably, lasts an entire chapter. The secretary unspools the whole story, starting with the British-Peruvian monopoly and working his way up to Fritz Haber’s invention of ammonia synthesis.
“Bitten off a bit more than you can chew on guano,” he natters on. “Talk to you for hours about it.”
The point, as he comes to it, is that there are small, uninhabited islands scattered around the Caribbean. And one has been purchased by a mysterious international figure, Doctor Julius No.
It’s hard not to see Axel Wenner-Gren in the figure of Julius No. The two are tantalizingly similar: physically striking, obsessed with science, loyal to no country, eager to meddle in world politics, and possessors of vast fortunes. Wenner-Gren even insisted on being called “Dr. Wenner-Gren,” by dint of an honorary doctorate from a Peruvian university.
And, of course, both owned Caribbean islands. In the novel, Doctor No tells Bond how he bought his island and developed it into “the most valuable technical intelligence center in the world.” From it, he can use radio to monitor, jam, and redirect the United States’ missiles (“I can bend the beams on which these rockets fly, Mister Bond”), claiming for himself the arms of a superpower.
The fact that it is an island matters enormously to Doctor No. “Mister Bond, power is sovereignty,” he explains. “Who in the world has the power of life or death over his people? Now that Stalin is dead, can you name any man except myself? And how do I possess that power, that sovereignty? Through privacy. Through the fact that nobody knows. Through the fact that I have to account to no one.”
If there was one moment in literature when the switch was thrown, this was it. Fictional islands before Doctor No were the godforsaken outskirts of civilization. After it, they were centers of global power.
The films took the idea and ran with it. The private island looms large in the film of Dr. No, a film for which Chris Blackwell worked as a location scout. Similar locales can be found in other Bond films: Thunderball (filmed on Wenner-Gren’s island), You Only Live Twice (rocket base under a Japanese volcanic island), Diamonds Are Forever (offshore oil rig), Live and Let Die (small Caribbean island dictatorship), The Man with the Golden Gun (private Thai island), The Spy Who Loved Me (giant sea base), and Skyfall (abandoned island). There is also a sequence in the 2006 Casino Royale shot, as was Thunderball, on Wenner-Gren’s island.
The world of James Bond contains much that is absurd. The exploding pens, shark tanks, and endless procession of round-heeled female helpmeets seem more the fruits of Fleming’s seasoned imagination than insights into actual espionage. Yet with the island thing, Fleming was onto something.
Just as he saw, islands are instruments of world domination.
They hadn’t always been that way. Though the United States had begun its overseas expansion by collecting guano islands, its interest waned after they were scraped clean. In 1904 a State Department official announced that the United States claimed “no sovereign or territorial rights over guano islands”—a bizarre statement, even more so because it was apparently unprovoked.
Civil servants cannot single-handedly de-annex parts of the United States. Still, the statement captured the prevailing mood of the time. The United States was actively interested in colonies and was fighting a bloody war to hold on to its largest one, the Philippines. But remote atolls and sandbars meant much less. Washington made no objection and perhaps didn’t even notice when other powers set up shop on some of its guano islands.
This blithe attitude may have served in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but new technologies endowed islands with new significance. Aviation meant they could serve as landing strips; radio meant they could host transmitters. In 1935 the State Department announced that it was annexing Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands in the central Pacific. Two days later, it hastily rescinded the announcement. The United States didn’t need to annex those islands, officials clarified with embarrassment. A consultation of the records had revealed that it already owned them.
It was a telling oversight, one that captured well the shambolic character of U.S. imperial administration. But it changed nothing from a strategic perspective. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called in Ernest Gruening, then the head of the Division of Territories and Island Possessions, for a chat about those islands. “Are we in an acquisitive mood today?” Roosevelt asked.
Gruening assured the president he was.
Roosevelt sent Gruening on a Pacific tour. As Gruening saw it, legal claims dating from the nineteenth century weren’t enough. To “maintain the sovereignty of the United States,” he believed, the guano islands must be actively colonized. And so, playing the part of one of history’s last conquistadors, Gruening set off to plant the flag in the soil and claim the islands in the name of his country.
The plan, undertaken in secret starting in 1935, was to visit the Pacific guano islands, raise a flag, install a plaque, and drop off “colonies” of four or more Hawaiians on each. Why Hawaiians? “Because of their adaptability to prevailing conditions,” Gruening explained. Thus the finest products of the Kamehameha Schools in Hawai‘i were deposited in small groups on remote islands, with drums of water, crates of canned goods, and instructions to ward off invaders.
It didn’t go perfectly. Arriving on Canton Island, Gruening’s men found a British radio operator there. “I am instructed to inform you that this is British territory and to protest against your raising the American flag,” he said. But they hoisted the flag and dropped off the Hawaiians anyway.
Howland Island was of special interest, as it was to be a stop in the aviator Amelia Earhart’s round-the-world journey (she died en route to it). But to tame it, the Hawaiians would have to deal with an out-of-control rat population—the same rats that had tormented the island’s guano miners some eighty years earlier. The settlers used red quill powder as a poison. The powder killed the rats but acted slowly enough that the island’s few other animals were able to regurgitate it.
Ernest Gruening (back row, right) and four Hawaiian colonists on Howland Island
The resulting scenario was surreal, half Heart of Darkness, half Salvador Dalí. At the very least, it would make a striking diorama: four Hawaiians eating out of crates, waiting for a famous aviator who would never arrive on a tiny, poisoned island that was littered with guano, crab vomit, and dead rats. And the Stars and Stripes flapping crisply in the breeze.
There was a comic air to the reconquest of the guano islands. Yet, zooming out, we can see the event as an important inflection point in U.S. history. Tiny islands such as Howland proved to be, just as Roosevelt and Gruening foresaw, extremely useful. They and other small pockets of land became the mainstays of the United States’ territorial empire.
Small specks of land acquired special importance in the twilight of formal empire. The global tide of decolonization washed most imperial arrangements from the map, but it left a few nooks and crannies, nearly all small islands. Large colonies could hope for self-sufficiency and launch nationalist movements to seize it. Small ones could not. For them, as Luis Muñoz Marín had observed, independence might mean economic suicide. And for places as small as Guam on the U.S. Virgin Islands, to stage armed revolutions would be actual suicide.
Similar calculations ran on the other side of the equation. Synthetics, international standardization, and the technologies of movement had alleviated the pressure on rich countries to colonize, since colonial products became both less necessary and easier to get through international (rather than imperial) trade. But geopolitics did not entirely vanish. Great powers still played games on the maps. It’s just that with the advent of planes and wireless, they no longer needed to bother with difficult-to-hold populated colonies, as they had in Captain Mahan’s day. They could focus instead on small pockets of control.
The United States, in other words, did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather, it reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe. Today there are roughly eight hundred such bases, some of the most important of them on islands.
The pointillist empire today: Known U.S. bases beyond the mainland
It’s telling that the guano islands were recolonized at the same time as the Philippine commonwealth was being established—i.e., just as the largest colony was put on track for independence. It’s as if the United States, standing before the world map, put down the imperialist’s paint roller and picked up the pointillist’s brush.
Gruening’s Gilbert and Sullivan–style adventures in the Pacific in the 1930s marked the turn toward pointillism. The Second World War locked the trajectory in. That war gave the United States more than two thousand overseas base sites. And it was hard to imagine giving them all back.
Right at the war’s end, Harry Truman announced that his country coveted no territory. It was an anodyne statement, nearly identical to those his predecessors had often made. Yet this time it triggered what the State Department called a “storm of comment” from the press, Congress, and military leaders. What about the bases? they asked. Surely Truman wasn’t going to let them go, was he?
Truman hastily clarified. The United States would take no colonies, he explained, but it would “maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.” (It was straight out of Tom Sawyer, one critic cackled: “We seek no territorial expansion or selfish advantage except maybe a few battered old bases that nobody else wants and that aren’t much good anyhow.”)
This was the new way. As the United States loosened its grip on large colonies, it grabbed bases and small islands more tightly. In the Philippines, it refused to leave entirely after independence. Instead, it insisted, as the price of reconstruction aid to the Philippines, on receiving ninety-nine-year leases on select base sites.
It was the same in Puerto Rico. Washington allowed gubernatorial elections and commonwealth status, but it clamped down on the eastern island of Vieques, which the navy turned into a sort of Caribbean Pearl Harbor. Around ten thousand of the poorest Puerto Ricans lived there, and many had their homes taken. Pedro Albizu Campos regarded the surrender of Vieques as the “vivisection” of Puerto Rico. As a community leader described Vieques, “We are the lamb that has been sacrificed so that the big island lives comfortably.”
On Guam, increased rights and citizenship came at the cost of a massive military buildup—today, more than a quarter of the island is military bases. Hawaiian statehood was accompanied by the military takeover of the smallest of Hawai‘i’s major islands, Kaho‘olawe, for use as a firing range and bombing site. Dwight Eisenhower, as president, had sought something similar in Alaska. His idea was to grant statehood but cleave off the strategically valuable portion of the territory, which would remain in military hands.
The same dynamic prevailed in Japan. The United States occupied the main islands until 1952 but continued to hold strategically useful outer islands for far longer. It kept Iwo Jima until 1968, Okinawa until 1972. Even today, with Okinawa back in Japanese hands, the U.S. military still dominates its landscape. “The military doesn’t have bases on Okinawa,” a naval officer has explained. “The island itself is the base.”
Then there were Japan’s mandated islands in Micronesia, which the United States had seized during the war. In the postwar settlement, they were taken from Japan and collectively placed under the authority of the United Nations as a strategic trust territory. Yet because those lightly inhabited islands (with some thirty thousand people living on them) were of great strategic value, Truman insisted that the United States have supervisory power. It got that power, and with little UN oversight.
In 1958, the same year Fleming published Doctor No, a naval officer named Stuart Barber rolled all this into a strategic plan. Decolonization, Barber argued, was sweeping the globe, making it harder for Western powers to secure access to foreign lands. So, rather than claim colonies or negotiate with decolonizing nations, Barber suggested that the United States seek out “relatively small, lightly populated islands, separated from major population masses” for its bases.
This was Barber’s “strategic island concept,” and it gave a name to what the United States was already doing. It underscored the point that in this new pointillist empire, colonialism was a liability, not an asset. The best bases were those that didn’t enmesh large populations. They were places where, in the words of Doctor No, the United States would have to “account to no one.”
Or, as Albizu put it, “The Yankees are interested in the cage but not the birds.”
What, specifically, could the United States do with an island base? A good example is the Swan Islands, a small cluster of three islands in an isolated patch of the Caribbean, not far from the fictional location of Doctor No’s island. The Swans were in the first batch of guano islands the United States had claimed.
The guano ran dry, but after the Second World War, Washington found other uses for the Swans. The USDA used them to quarantine imported livestock suspected of carrying foot-and-mouth disease. In the 1950s the CIA secretly took over Great Swan and built a landing strip and a fifty-thousand-watt radio transmitter. That extremely powerful transmitter could reach South America, allowing the United States to cover with its radio beams territory inaccessible by ground.
Soon after the CIA built its radio station, a mission of armed Honduran students traveled to Great Swan to liberate the islands and claim them for Honduras. They had no idea of the CIA’s presence, and the agency was determined to keep them in the dark. GIVE THEM PLENTY OF BEER AND PROTECT THE FAMILY JEWELS was the frantic cable from Washington (i.e., don’t let them discover the broadcasting equipment). Marines sped to the island to repel the invasion.
The episode that followed is best appreciated by reading the cable traffic from Swan to Washington:
Swan to HQ: HONDURAN SHIP ON HORIZON. BEER ON ICE. TALKED TO STUDENTS. THEY CONFABING. HAVE ACCEPTED BEER.
Swan to HQ: STUDENTS MIXING CEMENT IN WHICH THEY INTEND TO WRITE “THIS ISLAND BELONGS TO HONDURAS.” ONE GROUP MALINGERING, LISTENING TO EARTHA KITT RECORDS AND DRINKING FIFTH BEER.
Swan to HQ: STUDENTS HAVE JUST RAISED HONDURAN FLAG. I SALUTED.
Swan to HQ: BEER SUPPLIES RUNNING LOW. NOW BREAKING OUT THE RUM. THESE KIDS ARE GREAT.
Swan to HQ: STUDENTS HAVE EMBARKED FOR HONDURAS. LIQUOR SUPPLY EXHAUSTED. FAMILY JEWELS INTACT.
In the end, the students were permitted to sing the Honduran national anthem, take a census, and raise their flag (on a CIA-supplied pole). The students left, never realizing who their drinking buddies were. Or that a contingent of marines had been waiting, ready to start shooting if the beer didn’t work.
The family jewels were worth protecting. In 1954 the CIA had successfully used radio to spread fake news during a coup it helped stage to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected but left-leaning government. With its transmitter on Swan Island, it could run an even more secure and sophisticated operation, this time directed at Fidel Castro’s socialist regime in Cuba. Through “Radio Swan,” which posed as a privately run station, the United States promulgated false news reports and trolled the Cuban government. Castro and his lieutenants were “pigs with beards,” Raul Castro was “a queer with effeminate friends.” Radio Havana Cuba shot back that Radio Swan was “a cage of hysterical parrots.” Hysterical or not, Radio Swan boasted fifty million regular listeners throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America.
In 1961 the United States sent seven ships of paramilitaries to invade Cuba—the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The day before the invasion, Radio Swan sowed confusion with cryptic messages designed to confound Castro: “Look well at the rainbow.” “The fish will rise very soon.” “Chico is in the house. Visit him.” During the invasion, Radio Swan issued orders to nonexistent battalions to give courage to the rebels and spread fear among the authorities.
When this became public, journalists snickered over the resemblance between the operation and the plot of Doctor No. But the similarities may have been more than coincidence. The director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, gushed about the Bond novels and owned a complete set—a gift from the author. Moreover, Dulles had solicited Ian Fleming’s advice on how to dislodge Castro. To his colleagues’ surprise, Dulles had given every sign of taking that advice seriously.
The Bay of Pigs debacle forced Dulles into retirement and blew Radio Swan’s cover, but the CIA still found uses for the islands. In the 1980s the agency outfitted Great Swan with a port to off-load cargo intended for its favored political allies. Munitions, uniforms, parachutes, and other matériel flowed from the island to the rebels in Nicaragua who sought to bring down the leftist government. Great Swan was where right-wing paramilitaries trained, where Rhodesian mercenary pilots took off for their airdrops over Nicaragua.
The CIA island was in fact a central node in the vast and distinctly not-legal plot to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. That plot in its fullness incorporated arms dealers, drug traffickers, Middle Eastern governments, religious organizations, Cuban exiles, retired generals, and Rambo-style soldiers of fortune. Had such a multifarious scheme appeared in one of Fleming’s novels, it might have strained his readers’ patience. It is a victory for the forces of concision that today we know it simply by two words, albeit incongruous ones: the Iran-Contra affair.
In the 1958 novel Doctor No, guano is ubiquitous. Bond observes the thickly flocking birds, watches the miners, and smells the stink of the stuff. His love interest, Honeychile Rider, gets covered in it (she is “powdered white … except where the tears had marked her cheeks”). At the end of the novel, Bond defeats Doctor No by burying him in a guano pit, the villain’s “screaming lungs stuffing with the filthy dust” until he dies.
In the 1962 film version, however, there is no trace of guano. Instead, Honeychile gets covered in “radioactive contamination.” Doctor No’s base is powered by a nuclear reactor, and Bond triumphs in the end by triggering a meltdown, drowning Doctor No in the pool containing the overheating reactor and wrecking the island. (That Bond’s action would quite likely have turned Jamaica and its environs into a Chernobyl-style fallout zone goes narratively unexplored.)
The film’s introduction of the nuclear theme was not a random choice. There is a special connection between nuclear weapons and islands, one that has placed the world’s greatest instruments of destruction on some of its most remote locales. The very distance of small islands from large populations has made them ideal sites to test and store nuclear devices.
When the United States tested its first atomic bomb, scientists used the New Mexican desert. But for subsequent tests the Atomic Energy Commission sought places far from the mainland. “We just took out dozens of maps and started looking for remote sites,” recalled one of the naval officers tasked with the hunt for islands. He lit on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Conveniently, it belonged to the Micronesian islands that the United States had seized at the end of the war (which would soon become the U.S.-supervised strategic trust territory).
Less conveniently, the atoll was populated; it had 167 inhabitants. What would become of them? The navy made a great show of asking them to leave. It filmed a meeting between the military governor of the Marshalls and King Juda of the Bikini Marshallese. In the film, which was shown widely, the Marshallese solemnly consider the request. “We will gladly go,” Juda answers. “Everything in God’s hands.”
The reality wasn’t so clean. “We didn’t know what was going on,” remembered Kilon Bauno, one of the Marshallese who was there. “We were very confused … Back then I had no idea what an atomic bomb was. None of us had.” The navy’s film, it turned out, showed not the actual discussion, but an awkwardly staged reenactment. After a few tense retakes, Juda stormed off.
Nevertheless, the Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.
Réard unveiled the bikini on July 5, 1946. The day before, the Fourth of July, was another historic day: the independence of the Philippines. The high commissioner, in his speech, couldn’t resist spelling out the connection between decolonization and the atomic tests of a few days before. The Philippines was finally independent, he proudly announced. Nevertheless, he reminded, “all nations have yielded some of their independence, of their absolute independence, to the airplane, the radio, and the atom bomb.”
The Bikini Marshallese, removed from their home, were placed on the atoll of Rongerik. Within two months, their food and water started running out. They asked to return home to Bikini.
Of course, they couldn’t. Not only was their homeland radioactive, but the military had no intention of abandoning its valuable testing site. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-six more nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and the next-door atoll of Enewetak. To the proverbial Martian looking on from space, it must have appeared that humanity was for some indiscernible reason waging furious, unrelenting war on a string of sandbars in the middle of the Pacific.
One such test at Bikini was of a hydrogen bomb, the “Bravo shot” in 1954. Its fifteen-megaton yield was twice as large as expected, and unusually strong winds carried the fallout well beyond the cordoned-off blast zone. Had it detonated over Washington, D.C., it could have killed 90 percent of the populations of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York within three days.
On Rongelap, more than a hundred miles from ground zero, islanders watched radioactive white ash fall from the sky like snow. (Eighty suffered from radiation poisoning, and the island had to be evacuated for three years.) A Japanese tuna fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, also outside the blast zone, was engulfed in the fallout. All twenty-three of its crew members got radiation poisoning, and one died.
The Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson proposed halting open-air bomb testing for fear of the cancer risks (a later study by the National Cancer Institute confirmed that nearby Marshall Islanders had endured cancer-causing levels of radiation exposure). Richard Nixon dismissed this as “catastrophic nonsense.” Cornelius Rhoads, who by then had moved on from experimenting on Puerto Ricans to become the most prominent cancer researcher in the country, agreed with Nixon. “We have no prudent course except to continue the development and testing of the most modern weapons of defense,” Rhoads wrote in a letter cosigned by eleven leading scientists.
Henry Kissinger, the country’s most esteemed civilian nuclear expert, voiced the prevailing attitude in blunter fashion. “There are only 90,000 people out there,” he said, referring to Micronesia. “Who gives a damn?”
Kissinger was right; few on the U.S. mainland cared about Micronesia. But had he visited Japan, he would have seen a nation that very much gave a damn.
When the radiation-sick crew of the Lucky Dragon limped back to port carrying a catch of radioactive tuna, it ignited a media frenzy. Japan was a country with firsthand experience of radioactive fallout. Rumors flew that the irradiated fish had made their way onto the market. The tuna industry briefly collapsed.
The Japanese government conducted tests of the fallout (something the U.S. government declined to do). It found alarming levels of radioactivity in seawater as far as two thousand miles away from Bikini and strong radioactivity in the rain that fell on Japan.
The emperor himself began traveling with a Geiger counter.
Fishmongers and sushi shopkeepers protested the United States’ nuclear testing. Women in the Suginami ward in Tokyo circulated a petition to ban atomic and hydrogen bombs entirely. In a month, they collected more than 260,000 signatures, nearly two-thirds of the population of the ward. In a year and a half, 20 million signed it.
Among those swept up by the antinuclear movement was a young film producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka. He would later go on to produce such high-end classics of Japanese cinema as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but in the year of the Bravo shot Tanaka had something else in mind. He hired the director Ishirō Honda, who had traveled through Hiroshima in 1945 and seen the devastation firsthand.
Gojira, the phenomenally popular film Tanaka and Honda made, was about an ancient dinosaur awakened by U.S. hydrogen bomb testing. Gojira first destroys a Japanese fishing boat—a thinly veiled Lucky Dragon—before attacking and irradiating a Bikini-like island called Odo. Gojira, who is said to be “emitting high levels of H-bomb radiation,” then turns on Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to the city.
As films go, Gojira isn’t subtle. It’s full of talk of bombs and radiation. “If nuclear testing continues, then someday, somewhere in the world, another Gojira may appear” are its somber final words.
That message, however, got lost in translation. Gojira was remixed for the United States, using much of the original footage but splicing in a white, English-speaking protagonist played by Raymond Burr. What got cut out was the antinuclear politics. The Hollywood version contains only two muted references to radiation. And it ends on a much happier note: “The menace was gone,” the narrator concludes. “The world could wake up and live again.”
The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.
The Japanese were right to be nervous. Despite all the duck-and-cover warnings about Soviet strikes on Cincinnati and Dubuque, the real front lines of nuclear confrontation were the overseas bases and territories. Hundreds of nuclear weapons, we now know, were placed in South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Throughout most of the sixties, there were more than a thousand on Okinawa. Johnston Island, one of the guano islands Ernest Gruening had recolonized, bristled with nuclear-armed Thor missiles. An unknown number of nuclear weapons were stored in Hawai‘i, Alaska (including on the Aleutian Islands), and Midway.
Arming the bases brought the United States’ nuclear arsenal closer to potential war zones, making its threats more credible. It also distributed risk. With the U.S. stockpile spread widely, Moscow couldn’t target the mainland alone. If it wanted to eliminate the United States’ retaliatory capability, it would have to strike the bases, too, making the operation vastly more difficult.
Yet while nukes on bases protected the mainland, they imperiled the territories and host nations. Flying nuclear weapons around the bases—something the military did routinely—risked catastrophic accident. Even when the weapons stayed put, their presence turned the bases into tempting targets, especially since overseas bases were easier for Moscow to hit than the mainland was. Arming the bases was essentially painting bright red bull’s-eyes on them.
A sense of the risk can be gained by considering the Arctic base at Thule in Greenland. Greenland was a colony of Denmark, having roughly the same place in the Danish Kingdom as Puerto Rico had in the United States. This made it an attractive locale for bases, as Greenlanders’ protests counted less with the Danish government than those of Copenhageners. When Washington’s gaze fell on the village of Thule as a base site, the Danish government obliged by removing the indigenous Inughuit community there. The Inughuits were dropped off unceremoniously with blankets, tents, and the very best of wishes in “New Thule,” some sixty-five miles north.
The virtue of Thule was that it was close enough to the Soviet Union that from there, the United States could lob missiles over the North Pole at Moscow. The drawback was that the Soviets could fire missiles back. The Soviet premier warned Denmark that to allow the United States to house its arsenal at Thule—or anywhere on Danish soil—would be “tantamount to suicide.” Nervous Danish politicians incorporated a “no-nuclear” principle into the platform of their governing coalition: the United States could have its base, but no nukes.
Despite this, Washington pressed the issue. When the Danish prime minister didn’t explicitly object, U.S. officials took his silence for winking consent and secretly moved nuclear weapons to Thule. Soon the air force began covertly flying nuclear-armed B-52s over Greenland daily. This was part of an airborne alert program to keep armed planes aloft and ready to strike the Soviet Union at all times—the subject of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, filmed partly over Greenland.
The general responsible for the program readily conceded how much danger this placed Greenland in. Thule, he told Congress, would be “one of the first ones to go” if war came. Even without war, it faced peril. In 1967, three planes carrying hydrogen bombs made emergency landings on Greenland. The next year, a B-52 flying near Thule with four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs crashed, hard.
The plane plowed into the ice at more than five hundred miles an hour, leaving a trail of debris five miles long. Nearly a quarter million pounds of jet fuel ignited, setting off the conventional explosives in all four bombs. Those bombs were supposedly “one-point safe,” meaning that the explosives around the core could go off without detonating the bomb, so long as they didn’t go off simultaneously (which would violently compress the core and trigger nuclear fission). Yet some bombs in the arsenal had proved not to be one-point safe, and a lot could go wrong in a crash, especially with weapons that fell below today’s safety standards, such as those at Thule.
The accident at Thule didn’t set off a nuclear explosion. It did, however, spew plutonium all over the crash site. The air force scrambled to clean up the mess before the ice thawed and carried radioactive debris into the ocean. The recovered waste filled seventy-five tankers. Had an accident of that scale happened over a city, it would have been mayhem.
Could that have happened? Yes. The Thule plane crashed on Greenland, one of the world’s most sparsely populated landmasses. But the same airborne alert system carried planes over one of the most densely populated landmasses, Western Europe. Two years before the Thule accident, a B-52 crashed over the Spanish village of Palomares while carrying four hydrogen bombs, each seventy-five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Part of the plane landed 80 yards from an elementary school, another chunk hit the earth 150 yards from a chapel. The conventional explosives went off in two of the bombs, sowing plutonium dust into the tomato fields for miles.
The third bomb landed intact. But the fourth? It was nowhere to be found. Officials searched desperately for nearly three months. The hunt had “all the makings of a James Bond thriller,” The Boston Globe reported. In fact, it bore an unnerving resemblance to Thunderball, the Bond film about missing nuclear weapons that was dominating the box office at the time. When the military finally found the bomb resting on the seabed, it proudly showed it off for the cameras—the first time the public had seen a hydrogen bomb.
It looked, Time noted approvingly, “just the way it looked in Thunderball.”