On Writing The Bomb
by Theodore Taylor

The Bomb has waited for paper and ink for almost half a century, twisting and turning in my mind since the months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In late 1945 the U.S. Navy began searching for a suitable place to explode the world's fourth and fifth nuclear bombs. The site chosen was Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands of the western Pacific, twenty-two hundred miles from Hawaii.
Operation Crossroads sounded interesting. Almost one hundred unmanned warships would gather in the atoll's lagoon for two "shots" - one aerial, one undersea. Navy officials wanted to know if the ships would survive the cataclysmic force of nuclear explosions. Animals would take the place of human crews on the target ships. Goats would be tethered on the open decks; guinea pigs and five thousand rats would be inside the ships, along with cancer-prone white mice. Some of the goats and pigs would be shaved and smeared with antiflash compounds. (Goats and pigs have skin similar to humans'.) All would be exposed to radiation.
In early February 1946 I boarded the USS Sumner, an ancient submarine tender that had been converted for geodetic survey work. She had printing presses aboard for making navigational charts. A combat veteran of the Pacific war, she'd run with the invasion fleets. For Crossroads our crew would rechart Bikini lagoon, erect navigational towers, plant buoys, and destroy the coral heads that rose from the sea bottom, which could be hazardous to the incoming target vessels. The Sumner was the first Crossroads ship to arrive.
The atoll waters were a bright cobalt blue, and the sands of the main island, Bikini, were a stunning white. Palm trees fluttered in the warm wind. I remember the stillness and peace, the incredible beauty. Outriggers glided around the lagoon. Fish jumped. Seabirds winged by.
I remembered thinking: Are we really going to drop an atomic bomb on this beautiful place?
There were four drag teams, each operating a forty-foot boat, seeking out those dangerous coral heads, locating them so divers could place dynamite charges to blow them up. I commanded one of those teams.
On February 10, 1946, an amphibious aircraft landed near the Sumner carrying the military governor of the Marshall Islands - a navy commodore, one rank below rear admiral. He went ashore to inform the 160-odd natives that the navy needed their atoll for testing two atomic bombs. Knowing they were a religious people, the commodore invoked God to persuade the islanders to go temporarily to another atoll. God would approve of such a move; it would help mankind understand atomic power. Most of the people meekly agreed. After all, the navy had freed them from Japanese occupation. White men had ships and guns and aircraft; the Bikinians grew coconuts and speared fish. They could return home in several years, it was said. They were lied to, willfully or not.
A few days later I went ashore and circled the entire island of Bikini, from the lagoon shore to the ocean barrier reef. I visited the village, with its thatch-roofed houses. The people were still friendly and smiling, though they were losing their homeland in what would become a modern Trail of Tears. I felt ill as I took a landing craft back to the Sumner.
On March 7, less than a month after the commodore first visited, a landing ship tank (LST) backed away from the beach carrying the entire population of Bikini Atoll and all of their worldly possessions. For hundreds of years their people had slept on pandanus mats on the sand, and their possessions were indeed few.
As the LST passed near the Sumner, the people wre singing a hymn, looking back at their island. They were bound for Rongerik, an uninhabited atoll 120 miles away. I remember their voices, their faces. There wasn't a dry eye on our ship, and most of us were hardened combat veterens.
A half-century later the surviving displaced islanders and all of their children and grandchildren are still nuclear nomads. Their homeland is still poisoned by radioactive fallout; cesium 137 lies deep in the sands.
The Bomb is loosely based on what occurred at Bikini Atoll. I found the book terribly difficult to write.

Theodore Taylor
Laguna Beach, California
Text copyright 1995 by Theodore Taylor
Copyright 1995 Harcourt Brace & Company