Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus exposes the darkest secret in American nuclear history—sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands that decimated a people and their land. 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. Displaced from the only homes they had known, the native tribes that inhabited the serene Pacific atolls for millennia before they became ground zero for America’s first thermonuclear detonations returned to homes despoiled by radiation—if they were lucky enough to return at all. Others were ripped from their ancestral lands and shuttled to new islands with little regard for how the new environment supported their way of life and little acknowledgement of all they left behind. But not even the disruptive relocations allowed the islanders to escape the fallout.

About the Author :
Walter Pincus reported on intelligence, defense, and foreign policy for The Washington Post from 1966 through 2015. He was among Post reporters awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Among many other honors were the 1977 George Polk Award for articles exposing the neutron warhead, a 1981 Emmy for writing a CBS documentary on strategic nuclear weapons, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy for columns on foreign policy. Currently a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief, he lives in Washington, DC.

Review :
[An] excellent book. . . . Elegantly written and meticulously researched, Pincus's book contains a wealth of novelistic detail. . . . No national leader in the world today has seen a nuclear explosion, much less the detonation of a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb. . . . When announcing the destruction of Hiroshima, President Harry Truman described the atomic bomb as ‘a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed.' Pincus laments that ‘Truman's dramatic picture of what one atomic bomb could do has faded from peoples' minds.' Blown to Hell is a vivid—and needed—reminder. —Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus's scathing exposé of how our nation's nuclear pioneers devastated the people of the Marshall Islands is a tour de force. Using previously undiscovered declassified intelligence, Pincus's ground-breaking reporting rewrites the history of the birth of the Atomic Age, revealing America's complicity in an astounding cover-up on an unimaginable scale. Blown to Hell is a spell-binding scientific detective story, must reading for anyone who wants to learn about one of the worst governmental abuses in US history. —Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Washington Correspondent and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent/Anchor In riveting detail, Walter Pincus recounts the tragic encounter of a pre-modern people with history's most powerful nation. He pierces the secrecy that shrouded America's nuclear weapons tests and reveals the huge risks and outright deceptions officials willingly embraced. For those exposed, it was an awful reality. For us, it should be a timely and chilling warning. —Jerry Brown, former California governor and executive chairman of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Every voter should read this revelatory book. After all, we're all responsible for our government! —Gloria Steinem Walter Pincus has taken on the vital and largely ignored subject of our nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. Long overdue, this work will find its place on the bookshelves of policy makers, historians, and military planners. I certainly wish it had been available to me as I took over US Strategic Command. It would have provided a perspective not otherwise available. —General Eugene E. Habiger, USAF (Ret.), former Commander in Chief of United States Strategic Command For more than half a century, Walter Pincus has been among our greatest reporters and most persistent truth-tellers. Blown to Hell is a story worthy of his talents—infuriating, heart-breaking, and utterly riveting. —Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Liberation Trilogy The final lesson of Blown To Hell is clear—only by banning nuclear testing forever will we reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear war, and achieve the goal of a more peaceful world free of nuclear weapons. —Senator Edward J. Markey, Co-chair of the Congressional Working Group on Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control 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.... 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.... 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. —Publishers Weekly