ATOMIC AGE: Look Homeward, Angel

Last week the U.S. Navy was embarrassed. It had a king on its hands who wanted to go home. There was no need of a plebiscite; the king had all of his 164 subjects with him in exile, and they wanted to go home, too.

King Juda, the Paramount Chief of Bikini, and his gentle, easy-living and pious (missionary-converted) people had gracefully consented to move when the Navy told them that a monstrous Thing would blast their island. Rongerik, some 100 miles to the southeast, was just as large, just as green as Bikini, and it had more coconuts and pandanus fruit. By last week Rongerik’s huts had tin roofs and wooden floors; there was a big water cistern, a radio, a fine council house. But Rongerik was not home.

The Navy had counted on terrible destruction at Bikini to forestall homesickness. But the bomb, terrible enough by white men’s standards, had not felled a single spindly palm on Bikini’s scraggly head. The surrounding water was still dangerously radioactive last week—but that meant nothing to King Juda. In his plea to Commodore Ben Wyatt, the Kwajalein commander, King Juda recalled how wonderful the fishing had been at home on Bikini.

“All I can tell them,” said Wyatt to U.S. newsmen, “is that they can’t gohome now.”