THE Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has filed unprecedented lawsuits against all nine nuclear-armed nations of the world for their failure to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament, as required under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968).
The suits were filed against all nine nations at the International Court of Justice, with an additional complaint against the United States filed in US Federal District Court.
The people of the RMI continue to suffer today from US nuclear weapon tests that took place on their territory in the 1950s and 1960s. I well remember in 1986 meeting a woman called Analong Lijon from the Marshall Islands, which had been the scene of US nuclear tests. There had been 26 explosions, including the then largest ever, the Bravo "event", equivalent to 1000 Hiroshimas. As a little girl, she wondered at "snow" falling from the sky after the explosion on Bikini island.
She had suffered six miscarriages; her sister had carried 13 dead babies. She described a nightmare world where women gave birth to "jellyfish" babies, and one in eight live births were grossly deformed.
Later, she gave testimony before the UN, and said: "Of my family, these are the survivors: Father. Mother. Brothers Tomi, Freddi. Sister Api. These are the dead: Sisters Lijon, Sari, Mata. Brothers Wili, Kunio, Paul, Apolo. This is our history: blindness, thyroid tumours, miscarriages, jellyfish babies. Mental retardation, sterility. Lung cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer. Sarcoma, lymphoma, leukemia.
"I do not weep for my lost babies. Two stillbirths. Three jellyfish - glassy, pulsing discoids that made the nurses sick. I no longer weep for the dead. The dead do not care. We are the people of the Marshall Islands. We are your experiment."
We owe it to these innocent victims, and to humanity to scrap Trident now.
Brian Quail,
2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.
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