Humans have inhabited the Enewetak Atoll for at least 2,000 years. Europeans first visited the island. It had only been visited by a dozen or so ships before the establishment of the German colony of the Marshall Islands in 1885. Along with the rest of the Marshalls, Enewetak was captured by Japan in 1914 and mandated to them by the League of Nations in 1920. The Japanese mostly ignored the atoll until World War II. In November 1942, they built an airfield on Engebi Island, which was used for staging planes to the Carolines and the rest of the Marshalls.
When the Gilberts fell to the U.S., the Japanese Army’s 1st Amphibious Brigade came in to defend the Enewetak on January 4, 1944. They were unable to finish their fortification before the February invasion by the U.S., which captured all the islets in less than a week of combat operations. After the war, the residents were evacuated, often involuntarily, and the atoll was used for nuclear testing as part of the U.S. Pacific Proving Grounds. The bodies of United States servicemen killed in the Battle of Enewetak and buried there were exhumed before testing commenced and returned to the United States to be re-buried by their families. This was not the case for the indigenous people. Some 43 nuclear weapons were tested at Enewetak from 1948 to 1958. The first thermonuclear hydrogen bomb test, code-named Ivy Mike, was held in late 1952 as part of Operation Ivy, and it vaporized the island of Elugelab in the north of the Atoll leaving a beautiful water filled crater.
The people began returning in the 1970s, and on May 15, 1977, the U.S. Government directed the military to decontaminate the islands. This was done by mixing the contaminated soil and debris from the various islands with Portland cement and burying it in one of the blast craters. The crater was at the northern end of Runit an island on the eastern side of the atoll. Beneath this concrete dome, shown below, on Runit Island (part of Enewetak Atoll), built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards (84,927 cubic meters) of radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot (9 meter) deep, 350-foot (107 meter) wide crated created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test (Note the people atop the dome). This continued until the crater became a spherical mound 25 feet (7.6 m) high. The crater was then covered with an 18-inch (460 mm) thick concrete cap, dubbed “Cactus Dome”. All services participated in this effort. The U.S. government declared the islands safe for habitation in 1980.
In 2000, the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal awarded in excess of $340 million to the people of Enewetak for loss of use, hardship, medical difficulties and further nuclear cleanup. Note that this award does not include the approximately $6 million annually budgeted by the U.S. for education and health programs in the Marshall Islands.
