double exposure
INTRODUCTION
At its essence, a memorial should symbolically represent the memory and legacy of individuals, peoples, and events to preserve a remarkable history. In recognition of significant endeavors and cultural touchstones, memorials are uniquely diverse in ideology: honoring experiences and illuminating sacrifices to materialize a consciousness with proportion and abstraction. When lived experiences and individual memories fade, the influence and impact memorials have for subsequent generations resonates in ways that fit changing perspectives about their history. Since Maya Lin’s transformational design for the Vietnam Memorial in 1982, this shift in conveying significance is now more oblique, conveying messages that transform over time through a physical presence. It encompasses more than a singular idea or representation, and evokes understanding through an artifactual experience learned by sharing the same space. The discovery and rediscovery of a memorial’s meaning is solidified through relationships that are open to interpretation, challenging its immediate context and offering the possibility for reconsideration.
Approaching a memorial for the ‘last nuclear bomb’, these ideas are refocused as the conceptual embodiment of this contemporary model. It envelops the events of the past with an image that advocates for nascent change— where comprehending messages and meanings are deciphered through examination of more than one perspective. Rather than finding synchronicity in the different viewpoints, the coexisting narratives of the nuclear age are diachronic in their shaping of history and continue to evolve as time passes. The design of the memorial presents this as a parallax, refocusing structure and ground as artifactual systems in oppositional dialogue.
On August 6, 1945 United States Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr. and Captain Robert A. Lewis released ‘Little Boy’ a 15 kiloton bomb over the city of Hiroshima in Japan. The first of its kind to be used in warfare, the device’s implosion-based design allowed for the nuclear fission of explosive force from approximately 140 lbs (64 kg) of highly enriched uranium. The explosive ‘blast’ it created would be the result of electromagnetically heated air sending a lethal pressure wave of 5 psi (lbs/sq in) in all directions. Veering slightly northwest of the city center, it detonated approximately 2000 feet (600 meters) above the ground, projecting a force that obliterated almost all matter within a 1 mile (1.6 km) radius. Creating a ‘fireball’ of heated air approximately triple the size of a soccer pitch, and a wave of thermal radiation of up to 4000 degrees Celsius—over twice the melting point of iron and steel— inflicting third-degree burns on people within 2.2 miles (3.5 km). Of approximately 350,000 people living in the city at the time, it is estimated that 70,000 perished in the initial blast— one fifth of the population. Those who survived the explosion at ground zero, would suffer the adverse effects of its percussive radiation. Within five years the estimates grew to 200,000 fatalities directly traced to the explosion. Shortly afterwards, a Japanese report estimated that 66,000 buildings were damaged or completely destroyed by the weapon and its effects: roughly 67% of the city’s structures. Deployed only weeks after its initial testing, ‘Little Boy’ was first of its kind, and despite only reaching 1.5% of its potential nuclear fission reactivity, razed a city. Three days after the devastation created in Hiroshima, another aircraft detonated a second bomb over the city of Nagasaki— with an explosion 40% larger.
In the following year, young soldiers in the occupying troops of both cities would make pilgrimages to the hypocentre sites, interested in seeing the damage in person and collecting ‘bomb souvenirs’ as heirlooms. Arriving just eight months after, World War II reporter John Hersey was the first journalist to reveal the true aftermath of the bomb in Hiroshima, documenting the radioactive impact on its people and environment in ‘Hiroshima’ published in the New Yorker on August 31, 1946. His first hand accounts, interviews, photographs and reports publicly presented some of the first glimpses of the devastating effects and caused international alarm for the long-lasting and unknown consequences of using nuclear weapons.
Location:
Program: Memorial
Seventy years after the event, geologist Mario Wannier visited the southern shores near Hiroshima on Miyajima Island and Motoujina Peninsula. Discovering small fragments of metal, glass beads, and rubber-like particulates in his collected sample he sent his findings to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for analysis. Reflecting the same composition of minerals emitted in the explosion, a unique mixture of particles contained steel, concrete, rubber and stone. Highly pressurized and super-heated, these matters vaporized into the air above the city, forming spherically molten material—spherules— as the cloud’s condensation met the atmosphere, eventually gaining enough mass to fall back to the ground. Dubbed ‘Hiroshimites’ these particulates scatter the beach sands in regions surrounding the explosion site. A separate group of researchers at the Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source studied the mineralogy and chemical signature of the globular matter, and likened it to glassy beads often formed in meteor impacts. This atomic minutiae was estimated to consist of 2,200 to 3,100 tons for every square kilometer (0.4 sq mi) of the beach sand’s surrounding Hiroshima.
As a test detonation for ‘Little Boy’, the bomb was the first nuclear explosion ever recorded, and was the initiation for expansive testing to continue atomic research and weapons production. Detonated from only 100m above the ground, the radiation from the Trinity test spread out more forcefully from the ground into the air, creating a cloud that ascended over an area about 250 miles long and 200 miles wide. In New Mexico, the spread of radiation affected crops and livestock and contaminated the water supply— much of which was left untreated for fear of public panic and would be consumed by the rural populations living in the area.
Like Hiroshima, the sands at the Trinity test site also formed uniquely shaped glassy substances containing traces of nuclear material named ‘trinitite’, which like ‘hiroshimites’ rained vaporized material into the atmosphere. Though much of it was buried, the military tactics for testing nuclear weapons changed to reduce the dispersal of radiation. As weapons of war, the novel use of nuclear devices presented more potential for armament and munitions manufacturing, however this production relied upon their continued testing. In the aftermath of World War II, President Harry Truman would establish the Atomic Energy Commission replacing the wartime efforts of the Manhattan Project with a joint venture of civilians whose mission focused on the development of the nuclear arsenal alongside the Department of Defense. Between 1946 and 1962 – the U.S. conducted a series of naval operations that detonated more than 200 bombs both above ground and underwater. Providing information that increased the sophistication of the weapons design, they were studied in real-world atmospheric conditions outside of ‘the lab’. Globally, nuclear powers in France, the United Kingdom, and Russia would parallel this approach, identifying target regions in foreign lands as test sites. Selected because they were deemed to be geographically ideal, experimental operations would occur in Algeria, Western Australia, and Kazakhstan. For AEC and DoD officials, this criteria would be met in the newly acquired Pacific Islands.
Offering the most remote locations, the Marshall Islands featured ring-like atolls with relatively small populations and large open water lagoons. On January 24, 1946 Bikini Lagoon was selected as the site for two new detonations, Able and Baker, on a fleet of target ships. Shortly after this announcement, 167 resident islanders were gathered by the newly appointed United States military governor of the islands, Navy Commodore Ben H. Wyatt to be informed of their relocation in the coming weeks. Following this brief encounter, the residents of the island would subsequently endure an exodus that dispersed their formerly indigenous history in the area, as the degradation of their home lands all but destroyed any habitable possibility. For over half a century, their displacement to uninhabited islands and military outposts would become common practice, as the conditions of the resettlements were exacerbated by underdeveloped provisions and continued exposure. Initially relocated nearly 128 miles (206 km) east to the uninhabited Rongerik Atoll their exile would only last two years before moving again. Consistently enduring food shortages and malnutrition, suffering repeated inclement atmospheric radiation and military occupation, subsequent settlements on Kwajalein Atoll would end up being a six month sojourn.
In 1948, they were relocated to the small, isolated island owned by the U.S. Trust Territory located 425 miles south of Bikini, called Kili Island. Attempts for resettlement in the late 1960's to atolls effected by radiation would be pursued under recommendations from the Atomic Energy Commission that it was safe for habitation after the nuclear operations concluded. However within just ten years, it was discovered by the U.S. Department of Energy that the environmental burdens of radiation were still in full effect limiting both subsistence farming and commercial fishing— and by 1978, residents were conclusively relocated to Majuro Atoll, where many former Bikinians live today. Since this final relocation, Marshallese leaders from both Kili Island and Majuro Atoll would lead efforts for class action lawsuits on behalf of Bikini island residents against the U.S. government for damages incurred during their nuclear testing operations. Confronted with the continued responsibility of containment, the Marshallese efforts for aid and compensation for the cleanup its restitution have only moderately been met by United States efforts—even after political independence of the Islands in 1986. For the Marshallese community and their leaders, the dismantling of their cultural heritage in the region is both psychological and artifactual, as the elusive measures and forlorn attempts for financial and moral indemnity on nuclear states is unyielding.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) was first settled by Micronesian navigators, originally called Rālik-Ratak for their leeward and windward chains of atolls. The name ‘Marshall’ is a derivation of British Captain William Marshall with Captain Thomas Gilbert, whose expeditions mapped the areas as a cohesive entity in 1788. Recognized as three cultures, the Pacific Islands includes Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia— of which includes the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a small atoll nation of coral islands. Consisting of ‘iroij—irojii’ chiefs, and ‘kajoor’ commoners, the Marshallese are a culture of ‘jowi’s’, a clanship that inherits an evolving history of shared languages, influences, and lands. Like many Pacific and Micronesian cultures, land is the focal point for social organization. Supervised by the head of each clan, and iroij chief, control over lands and its resources are determined through inheritance of matrilineal descent.
Probably the most well-known Marshallese arts are identified as ‘amimono’, a Japanese term for handmade crafts by the people of the islands— including stick charts once used for oceanic navigation in outrigger canoes, cylindrical and conically shaped fishing traps, and finely woven baskets, trays, fans, and tapestries made from pandanus and coconut fiber. Finely woven and intricately patterned mats are a cultural expression found in nearly every Marshallese household. Known as ‘jaki-ed’, this a handcrafted dress mat is an expression of koro im an kol, an attribute bestowed on all Marshallese women at birth granting opportunity to develop their unique talents and creativity— and is a uniquely expressive practice symbolic of the national identity that permeates jowi culture. Jaki-ed are woven from wūnmaan̄, a variety of pandanus fiber, which is boiled, sun-dried, tendered into strips in a plait-like weave.
