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Title details for Blown to Hell by Walter Pincus - Available

Blown to Hell

America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders

by Walter Pincus
Chris Abernathy
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall Islands—an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground for over sixty US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war years. It was here—with the 1954 Castle Bravo test over Bikini Atoll—that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. And it was here that a native people became unwilling test subjects in the first large scale study of nuclear radiation fallout when the ashes rained down on powerless villagers, contaminating the land they loved and forever changing a way of life.
In Blown to Hell, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus tells for the first time the tragic story of the Marshallese people caught in the crosshairs of American nuclear testing. From John Anjain, a local magistrate of Rongelap Atoll who loses more than most; to the radiation-exposed crew of the Japanese fishing boat the Lucky Dragon; to Dr. Robert Conard, a Navy physician who realized the dangers facing the islanders and attempted to help them; to the Washington power brokers trying to keep the unthinkable fallout from public view . . . Blown to Hell tells the human story of America's nuclear testing program.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 16, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781666156157
      • File size: 371412 KB
      • Duration: 12:53:46

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 20, 2021
      Pulitzer winner Pincus, a former national security reporter at the Washington Post, debuts with a shocking account of the destruction wrought by atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958. The largest of these tests, the Castle Bravo detonation near Bikini Atoll in 1954, was “a thousand times as large as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima” and scattered radioactive material over inhabited islands more than one hundred miles away. Pincus delves into the race with the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons and the selection of Bikini Atoll (which was evacuated) as a testing site, and shows that U.S. government officials were more concerned about the costs of relocating people from other inhabited atolls than the danger of nuclear fallout. As a result, adults and children living on Rongelap and Utirik atolls were exposed to radioactive ash and contaminated drinking water in the aftermath of the Castle Bravo test, and went on to suffer low white blood cell counts, thyroid tumors, and numerous cancers. Though granular government and military details slow the narrative, Pincus makes a persuasive case that in “seeking a more powerful weapon for warfare, the U.S. unleashed death in several forms on peaceful Marshall Island people.” Readers will be appalled.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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