Youth delegates from nuclear-affected countries – from Japan to Kazakhstan to the Pacific – are gathering in the Marshall Islands to mark the 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo nuclear test.
On March 1, 1954, the United States conducted its largest ever nuclear weapon test, codenamed Castle Bravo.
The nuclear test contaminated four of the atolls in Marshall Islands, with the fall-out from the blast still impacting the health and well-being of residents today.
Youth representatives from other nuclear-affected areas, including Japan and Kazakhstan, will be in the capital Majuro for a week of digital storytelling workshops centred around Nuclear Survivors Day.
Rico Ishi is the co-ordinator of the youth delegates attending the Nuclear Futures workshops.
She says one of the aims of the workshops is to generate interest among young people who may have forgotten their parents’ survival stories.
AUDIO: Marshall Island’s youth recall nuclear past (ABC News)
Inspiring youth
“When you come down to the third generation it really depends… some people don’t even know, some people are fully active and are enthusiastic of those issues,” Ishi told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat.
“We want to inspire more youth who have the similar background but are not fully interested yet.”
Ishi says while revisiting the stories would be painful, it was important to remember the past.
“There are some pains you have to take to achieve something more important, something more important for the future generation to come, those memories shall not be forgotten,” she said.
The thermonuclear explosion in the Marshall Islands contaminated four inhabited atolls called Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap, and Utrik.
The local populations, many of whom suffered prolonged illness from their exposure to the fall-out, were evacuated to other atolls and have been unable to return home for decades.
We want to train these future community leaders to help them collect the histories of their families and the community, so that they can continue recording, preserving and sharing these stories.
The workshop is principally funded through the Nuclear Futures creative arts programme which is assisted by the Australian government.
Australian multimedia artists Jessie Boylan and Linda Dement will help facilitate the Marshall Islands workshop.
Nuclear Futures
Nuclear Futures creative producer Paul Brown said the workshop was an early outcome of a three-year creative arts programme responding to the atomic age and its legacy and recognising the resilience of survivor communities.
Workshop co-convenor and associate professor Robert Jacobs, from the Hiroshima Peace Institute, says the recent Fukushima reactor meltdown was a reminder for the need to remember the nuclear past.
“We want to train these future community leaders to help them collect the histories of their families and the community, so that they can continue recording, preserving and sharing these stories,” Professor Jacobs said.
“In many ways the unfolding tragedy of the Fukushima reactor meltdowns and contamination reprises the historical failure of governments from the cold war and beyond to respond to the needs of civilian populations.”
Castle Bravo: The largest US nuclear explosion
Below: Daniel Drageset's audio profile of the Darlene Keju Johnson biography
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
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