Documentary Pick: Radio Bikini (1988)
A lot people assume after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one ever suffered again due to the detonation of an atomic bomb. Sadly, those people are wrong. Almost exactly one year after the first nuclear weapon ever was test fired at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the U.S. Navy, scientists and international observers gathered off the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to conduct thorough experiments about the impact of nuclear blasts on military assets. The navy evacuated the islanders, filled the lagoon with decommissioned ships, placed live stock on the decks, and detonated two bombs a month apart. And that’s where the story begins…
Using declassified military footage, archival news reels, radio broadcast recordings and new (for 1988) interviews with a couple of people who were there, Radio Bikini builds a time capsule that’s positively magnetic and insightful, showing how naive we were in those early days of the nuclear age. The average layman now knows that you don’t go traipsing into ground zero mere hours after a nuclear blast without protective gear on, let alone go swimming in irradiated water with dead fish, but that was then as it were. The raw footage of sailors nonchalantly walking about deck of a destroyer hollowed by nuclear fallout is one of the gobsmacked cringe moments that got Radio Bikini its Academy Award nomination for best documentary.
It’s fitting to return to real-life nuclear horrors as Godzilla tears up the box office once again, and although this is a documentary, there’s still a lot to be fearful of. Sure, there’s the military footage featuring the burnt out husks of ships that likely survived World War II, and the horrible fate of the sheared goats – both the ones that were killed and the ones that survived – but like any good horror movie director, Robert Stone saves a big twist for last. Along with Bikini natives chief Kilon Bauno, the only other interviewee is former U.S. Navy sailor John Smitherman, who is shot close-up through most of the film, but in the final segment, the camera zooms out to reveal that he has a permanently swollen left hand, and both his legs amputated. All as a direct result of his radiation exposure.
That’s the great chilling effect of Radio Bikini, a journey to the corner of American history where jingoism meets ignorance, and resulting in lives horribly altered for dozens of servicemen and hundreds of Bikinians who can never go home again. The atom bomb was sold as the pinnacle of modern ingenuity and innovation, but it has a dark and disastrous consequence of its invention, and this film is a reminder of that. The word “Bikini” is now synonymous with fun in the sun, paradise, but seeing this documentary will make you mindful of the word’s real origin and its implication: paradise lost.
