Nuclear Exodus - Rongelap Islanders on board the Rainbow Warrior. Photo/video: David Robie
Flashback to 1987: NUCLEAR EXODUS: THE RONGELAP EVACUATION
The legacy from US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands has provided a media backdrop to last week's 44th Pacific Islands Forum in Majuro. Here is a short documentary made by David Robie and his Aroha Productions team and broadcast by Television New Zealand.
The item was published in the New Zealand Listener as a documentary preview on 2 May 1987 before the film was screened on TVNZ's Tagata Pasifika:
By Pamela Stirling, editor of the NZ Listener
The Rongelap Islanders of Micronesia have been described as the first victims of World War Three.
Many of them remember March 1, 1954, as the day it "snowed" on their atoll, as deadly fallout dusted down from a 15 megaton thermonuclear test, codenamed Bravo, held on Bikini Atoll.
Since then Rongelap people have suffered leukaemia deaths, cancers, thyroid tumours, miscarriages, deformed children and births described as "jellyfish" babies.
A noted American researcher has predicted that everyone who was aged under 10 when the contamination occurred will die of cancer.
This award-winning, 12-minute film tells the story of their contamination, and of their evacuation three decades later by the peace ship Rainbow Warrior to Mejato Island, 150 km away. Scripted and co-produced by Pacific affairs writer David Robie, Nuclear Exodus is a damning indictment of the nuclear machine.
