Transcript
MATTHEW BOLTON: There has been some compensation given to American veterans of the US nuclear tests and there has been limited compensation to some veterans elsewhere, but there's been very little help to the i-Kiribati people who were living on Christmas Island during the time of the tests and they have pretty horrifying stories of their experiences during that time. Many of them attribute health problems that they have today to the testing, and many of their children and grandchildren also report health experiences that are consistent with having relatives exposed to ionising radiation. So one of the difficulties is that there hasn't been consistent monitoring of radiation levels, there was some studies done in the '70s and the '80s, but there hasn't been much follow up. So one of the things we're trying to call on governments to help with is to help the people of Kiribati know better the situation that they're in. There needs to be proper environmental studies and public health kind of studies and monitoring that is ongoing and can give people the information they need.
JAMIE TAHANA: So the locals there are experiencing, what, higher rates of leukaemia similar to what other nuclear veterans or people who have been in other similar areas? And what treatment do they have there? Because it's a very small hospital on Kiritimati, do they even have an oncology doctor or whatever?
MB: It's difficult to tell because there hasn't been systematic data gathering and that is one of the things, I think, that's really important. There needs to be systematic assistance to help that information be gathered. So we're sort of identifying a gap - people themselves are reporting problems but there hasn't been kind of sufficient attention to helping them with that. And of course, as you point out, there isn't an oncology unit at the hospital on Christmas Island, people have to go to like Hawaii or they have to go to New Zealand, but that's expensive and involves a lot of travel, if you're sick you might not want to go that far, and it also involves a visa for some people, particularly going to the United States.
JT: Yeah so that lack of research into this must make it difficult for Kiribati in terms of claiming compensation or aid for this or whatever when the countries that dropped the bombs continue to insist that it was clean and that every measure was taken to prevent this. Of course, they've argued through various courts that these high rates of cancers and whatever can't be proven to be directly related to the nuclear tests.
MB: Yeah, so one of the things that the new treaty does which I think is very helpful is that it takes the conversation out of a kind of litigation framing and into a humanitarian framing. And so rather than seeing this as a kind of fight in a courtroom over what exactly forensically happened and who is to blame for that, the framing is about how our people are affected; how are they suffering? How are they coping? How can we support their coping? How can we assist them and give them the information they need? It is just about the fact of ionising radiation, there's also a kind of psychological impact of having witnessed detonations, the kind of long term anxiety of fearing what might be there waiting for you in your bloodstream, the kind of cultural trauma that this does, the harm to the land, the harm to the animals and the plants and your environment, and you have this sense that there has been this great trauma. Not only to yourself, but also to your island and your people. What we're calling for is a framing of harm that is more expansive, more inclusive, and more humanistic than one that would be found in a courtroom. That means also, because this treaty frames nuclear weapons as an affront to all of us, an affront to the principles of humanity and our public conscience, and that means also then that it is the responsibility of all of us to address this: it's not just a problem of the victim and the perpetrator, but all of us who are people and who have a sense of humanity have an obligation to those who have been harmed in all of the ways that human beings and their environments can be harmed.
JT: But should it not be a responsibility for the perpetrator that detonated these radiative weapons to pay for the cleanup or the costs or whatever, which is what the Kiribati and Fiji veterans are arguing for right now? They're [the nuclear states] not even part of this treaty, they boycotted the negotiations for it, I guess...
MB: ...Yes absolutely it should be on them to have a special responsibility to assist those that they have harmed. But in the same way that it's one thing to have something be written into a treaty and it's another thing to make sure that it occurs. And so the research that we were doing in Kiribati and also Fiji talking with survivors, talking with associations and talking with government officials who have been involved in trying to address this issue, we are trying to understand what can be done to put some pressure and focus and attention on the harms that have been done and what needs to be done in the future. It's a scandal, it's a travesty that the deep-seated racism of Britain, the US and France imposed the costs of their nuclear programmes on indigenous peoples and peoples that they had colonial control over, and now is the time to - I mean it's always been the time - but now especially we have a kind of normative framework to deal with this, and so all of us need to chip in to try to help those who are in Kiribati, in Fiji, in French Polynesia and Marshall Islands. Those places particularly have suffered the consequences of Cold War nuclear policy.
