Capitol Hill Restoration Society

Village Voices – Atomic Testing in Marshall Islands

Posted on February 3rd, 2016

Bikinis, Atom Bombs, and U.S. Debt to the Marshall Islands– Thursday, March 10, 2016 from 7-8 p.m. at the Northeast Library, 330 7th St. NE.

Do you remember the protest song by Tom Lehrer, popular in the 1960s, with the lyrics:  the bomb that drops on you/ gets your friends and neighbors too And when the air becomes uranious/we will all go simultaneous

We on the U.S. mainland were spared atomic bombs, but in the U.S. territory of the Marshall Islands the air really did become poisonous.  Between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. conducted 67 atomic tests in the Marshall Islands; including one on March 1, 1954, when U.S. exploded “Castle Bravo,” the most powerful nuclear bomb the U.S. has ever detonated.  Sixty-two years later, Trudy Peterson will talk about the nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, the lasting effects on the Islanders, and the still unresolved debt of the U.S. to compensate for their suffering.

Capitol Hill Village is sponsoring a series, “Village Voices”, for the community to meet and learn from each other in informal, free, public discussions about a range of social, economic and political topics. The series is free, open to the public and does not require (but does prefer) registration. To register, call 543-1778 or email: info@capitolhillvillage.org with your name and number attending.