Marshall Islands To Sue India, Pak. Over Nukes

• Marshall Islands seek to persuade the UN’s highest court to take up a lawsuit against India, Pakistan and Britain which they accuse of failing to halt the nuclear arms race.
• In 2014, the Marshall Islands, a Pacific Ocean territory with 55,000 people, accused nine countries of “not fulfilling their obligations with respect to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament”.
• They included China, Britain, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the U.S.
• The government of Marshall Islands said by not stopping the nuclear arms race, the countries continued to breach their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — even if the treaty has not been by signed by countries such as India and Pakistan.
• In March 2014, the Marshall Islands marked 60 years since the devastating hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, that vapourised an island and exposed thousands in the surrounding area to radioactive fallout.The 15-megaton test on March 1, 1954, was part of the intense Cold War nuclear arms race and 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Bikini Islanders have lived in exile since they were moved for the first weapons tests in 1946.

Marshall Island ,US and Nuclear bomb:

• In March 1944, about a month after defeating the Japanese occupiers during World War II, the US government obtained the exclusive right from a local leader to indefinitely control the Marshall Islands for “the sum of ten dollars.” In January 1946, the Bikini Atoll became the site for the first nuclear weapons tests following the war. After nuclear testing ended in 1958, the Marshalls group, then a trust territory of the United States, was left with obliterated islands, huge craters, and widespread radiological contamination.
• The damage did not end with nuclear testing. In the 1960s, islands of the Enewetak Atoll were stripped of topsoil and used for explosive crater experiments, to see how US missile silos would hold up to enemy missiles. In October 1968, the US Navy conducted a biological warfare experiment in which Staphylococcal enterotoxin B, a virulent bacterium, was released over the Enewetak Atoll from fighter aircraft. The pathogen proved to be harmful to experimental animals over a 1,500 square mile area. Since the late 1950s, the Kwajalein Atoll and lagoon have served as an anti-ballistic missile launch site for testing against possible missile attacks. Nearly every US intercontinental ballistic missile was test fired at Kwajalein. Now home to the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, the $4 billion US Air Force complex on Kwajalein is considered a key strategic asset for anti-ballistic missile testing, military space projects, and intelligence gathering.
• Even though the last nuclear test was 57 years ago, radioactive contamination continues to have dominant impacts on this little nation. For citizen of Marshall Island nuclear testing is not a historical event, as they continue to deal with the huge environmental and human health costs." Areas on which countless generations depended for their food remain off limits because of radioactive fallout and will be so for many years to come. The United States considers it too expensive to remediate these areas for human habitation. As a result, many Marshallese nuclear exiles live on the island of Ebye, one of the most crowded, unsanitary areas in the world, where declarations of disease emergencies are common.
• The most significant health and environmental impacts of US nuclear activities in the Marshalls were caused by six thermonuclear weapon tests conducted between March 1 and May 14, 1954 and known as the Castle series. Totaling some 48 megatons of explosive force, they had enormous negative impacts around the world. The first explosion, known as Bravo, produced an explosive yield of approximately 15 megatons—or 1,000 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Because of its size and other factors, Bravo also spawned what the US Radiochemical Society describes as “the worst radiological disaster in US history.”

By: Vishal