Sorry, you’re not allowed to access this page. Contact Yelp if you keep experiencing issues. Los Angeles and 500 miles how far is big bear from los angeles of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.
Here in the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome holds more than 3. 1 million cubic feet — or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of U. Nowhere else has the United States saddled another country with so much of its nuclear waste, a product of its Cold War atomic testing program. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes. Enewetak Atoll, where the United States not only detonated the bulk of its weapons tests but, as The Times has learned, also conducted a dozen biological weapons tests and dumped 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site. It then deposited the atoll’s most lethal debris and soil into the dome.
Tides are creeping up its sides, advancing higher every year as distant glaciers melt and ocean waters rise. Officials in the Marshall Islands have lobbied the U. American officials have declined, saying the dome is on Marshallese land and therefore the responsibility of the Marshallese government. I’m like, how can it be ours? Hilda Heine, the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, said in an interview in her presidential office in September. The garbage inside is not ours.
To many in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome is the most visible manifestation of the United States’ nuclear legacy, a symbol of the sacrifices the Marshallese made for U. They blame the United States and other industrialized countries for global climate change and sea level rise, which threaten to submerge vast swaths of this island nation’s 29 low-lying atolls. Michael Gerrard, a legal scholar at Columbia University’s law school. The United States is entirely responsible for the nuclear testing there, and its emissions have contributed more to climate change than those from any other country.
Over the last 15 months, a reporting team from the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism made five trips to the Marshall Islands, where they documented extensive coral bleaching, fish kills and algae blooms — as well as major disease outbreaks, including the nation’s largest recorded epidemic of dengue fever. Marshallese leaders acknowledge that America doesn’t bear full responsibility for their nation’s distress. But they say the United States has failed to take ownership of the environmental catastrophe it left behind, and they claim U. A Times review of thousands of documents, and interviews with U. Marshallese officials, found that the American government withheld key pieces of information about the dome’s contents and its weapons testing program before the two countries signed a compact in 1986 releasing the U.