Nuking Paradise

GPM # 82 Eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay, Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York. Back in the mid-1970s, Glenn Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific, site of 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. The biggest of those nuke tests was Bravo, the Pentagon’s first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954. Glenn Alcalay’s Marshall Islands sojourn was spent on Utirik, a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, Alcalay began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer. Fifty years after his Peace Corps stint in Utirik, Glenn Alcalay is in the midst of writing a book about the Marshallese people. The GPM sat down with Glenn in his home office, in uptown Manhattan, to talk about all this — and Donald Trump’s arguably unsurprising election back in early November. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Bikini Island, on Bikini Atoll (David Kattenburg)