Home to Bikini

The gentle, uncomplaining people of Bikini did not protest the decision to take their atoll away from them, perhaps forever. When American officials told of great atomic explosions that would devastate their paradisal speck of coral, sand and palms, Bikini's Magistrate Juda took counsel. "If the U.S. Government needs to use our houses for the goodness of mankind," Juda decided, "then by the kindness of God we are willing to go."

And so, in the spring of 1946, the 161 inhabitants of Bikini sailed away. They carried a few pandanus leaves for thatch and their Bibles and Congregational hymnals. Their unhappy migration took them first to nearby Rongerik atoll, then to Kwajalein, and finally to Kili, the inhospitable, rocky, isolated islet where they have scratched out a poverty-stricken existence for the last 21 years.

Last week President Johnson decreed an end to the exile of the Bikinians, now a scattered community of 500. After 23 atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, the last in 1958, the poisons of nuclear radiation have dissipated from the sand and sea around their native atoll, and the Bikinians can at last return to their home.

It will cost perhaps $1,000,000 to make Bikini habitable again. Thick, matted underbrush must be cleared and coconut palms planted to replace trees seared by atomic blasts. Two islets where tests were conducted have been blown off the map. Bikinians may have to forgo eating land crabs and pounded arrowroot, two delicacies that retain dangerous radioactive isotopes. But the overall level of radiation is now no higher than that of the city of Denver, and the Bikini lagoon teems with edible fish. It was the lagoon that they missed most during exile at Kili, where thundering waves often made fishing impossible.

Magistrate Juda, who led the Bikinians during most of their 22-year sojourn as castaways of the Atomic Age, will not be going home. He died of cancer four months ago.

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