Full and Final Settlement

Between 1946 and 1958 the United States detonated 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, almost all of them at Bikini and Enewetak in the Ralik chain, for a combined yield of something over a hundred megatons. On 21 October 1986 a treaty came into force that made the Marshall Islands a sovereign state in free association with the United States, and buried inside it, at Section 177, was a settlement of everything that testing had done. A trust fund of US$150 million would cover all claims arising from the programme — past, present and future. The lawsuits Marshallese plaintiffs already had running in American courts would be espoused by their own new government and terminated.

The tribunal the Marshallese then built to hand that money out awarded more than two billion dollars against a fund of a hundred and fifty million, and it went on awarding after it was obvious the money had gone. Forty years later Washington still describes the settlement as full and final, and Majuro still describes it as the largest unpaid debt in the Pacific. Both are honest readings of the same paragraph. That is what makes it worth reading.

Sixty-seven, and where the fallout went

The number flattens out something very uneven. One test accounts for a disproportionate share of everything that followed: Castle Bravo, fired at Bikini on the morning of 1 March 1954, was designed for something like six megatons and delivered fifteen, because the lithium-7 in its fuel turned out to be anything but inert. The fallout went east instead of dispersing at altitude as forecast. It fell on Rongelap and Utrik as a fine white ash that children played in, and on the Japanese tuna boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru well outside the declared danger zone; the boat's radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died that September. Rongelap was evacuated two days after the ash, resettled by the Americans in 1957, and lived on for another twenty-eight years under assurances the community stopped believing. They had asked Greenpeace to move them, and in May 1985, over about ten days and three trips, the Rainbow Warrior carried some three hundred people, their dismantled houses and a hundred tonnes of building material to Mejatto on Kwajalein. Seven weeks later French intelligence agents sank the same ship in Auckland harbour.

What Section 177 bought

The Compact of Free Association is a trade, and the American half of it is strategic. The United States takes responsibility for defence, keeps the right to deny military access to any other power, and holds the lease on the missile range at Kwajalein. In exchange the Marshall Islands receives budget support, access to a list of US federal programmes, and the right for its citizens to live and work in the United States without a visa — which is why there are more Marshallese in Springdale, Arkansas than on most atolls. Section 177 handled the testing separately: the $150 million trust would fund annual distributions to the four atolls formally recognised as affected — Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utrik — a medical surveillance programme, and a claims tribunal of the Marshall Islands' own creation. The associated agreement called the arrangement a full settlement of all claims, and provided that pending litigation in American courts be dismissed.

The agreement does not say the damage was worth a hundred and fifty million dollars. It says the argument was over, which is a different thing to buy, and it is the thing the United States was actually buying.

The tribunal that ran out of money

The Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established under Marshallese law in 1988 and sat in Majuro. It ran two dockets. The personal-injury docket worked from a schedule of compensable conditions with a fixed sum attached to each, and awarded a little under a hundred million dollars across roughly two thousand claimants; it paid most of that, because the individual sums were small enough to be payable. The property docket was the one that broke it. Judged against the standards the United States applies to its own contaminated land, the cost of making the affected atolls habitable again came out at Enewetak in 2000, Bikini in 2001, and Utrik and Rongelap after that, and the four awards together exceeded two billion dollars. Against them the tribunal was able to disburse a few million. It kept adjudicating anyway, and the reason was strategic rather than futile: an award handed down by a properly constituted tribunal, on evidence, is a number that exists. A grievance is not.

Changed circumstances

The drafters of 1986 had left a door. Article IX of the Section 177 Agreement allowed the Marshall Islands to petition the US Congress for further compensation if injuries came to light that had not been and could not reasonably have been known when the settlement was signed. The Marshallese filed that petition in September 2000, and their case rested on documents the Americans themselves had declassified during the 1990s. The papers showed fallout across far more of the country than the four recognised atolls, and they contained the full title of the medical programme run on the exposed Rongelap population: a study of the response of human beings exposed to significant beta and gamma radiation. There is no evidence anyone was irradiated deliberately. There is a great deal of evidence that people were studied for decades without being told that was what was happening to them. The State Department's evaluation went to Congress in November 2004 and concluded that the petition did not meet the legal test for changed circumstances, and that anything further was a matter of political discretion. Congress has not exercised it.

Runit

The most physical piece of the argument sits on Enewetak. Between 1977 and 1980 some four thousand American servicemen scraped contaminated soil and debris off six islands, pushed it into Cactus Crater — the hole left by a 1958 test on Runit — mixed it with concrete slurry and capped the lot with 358 concrete panels about half a metre thick. Around 85,000 cubic metres went in. The floor of the crater was never lined, and it is porous coral through which the lagoon moves as it pleases. The dome was handed over to the Marshall Islands and the Enewetak people were returned to the southern islands of their atoll; the northern ones, Runit included, remain off limits. The American position, restated in Department of Energy reviews including one in 2013, is that the sediment on the lagoon floor outside the dome is more contaminated than the material sealed inside it, so a breach would not meaningfully change local exposure. The Marshallese objection has never been that the arithmetic is wrong. It is that a structure was built, declared adequate, transferred, and thereby made someone else's.

In April 2014 the Marshall Islands filed applications at the International Court of Justice against all nine nuclear-armed states, arguing that they had failed the disarmament obligation in Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Six of the nine do not accept the court's compulsory jurisdiction and the cases against them went nowhere. The three that do — India, Pakistan and the United Kingdom — had the applications dismissed on jurisdictional grounds on 5 October 2016, by margins as narrow as the court can produce; the British case was decided eight votes to eight on the president's casting vote. The Compact's economic provisions were renegotiated in 2023 and funded by Congress the following spring, and the nuclear question was raised again in those talks and again handled as a separate matter. What survives, on the ground, is a public holiday. The first of March is Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day, offices close, and it marks the morning the ash fell on Rongelap — a settlement that one government considers concluded and the other has spent four decades declining to consider concluded, commemorated annually by the smaller of the two.