A Drink Called Paradise: Nuclear Legacy in the South Pacific

Extract

When I first did readings from this book years ago, I explained to audiences what I knew about the contemporary South Pacific: that nuclear fallout has produced many babies without bones or anus or eyes or left them with extremely small heads and thus the “jelly babies” I describe are real, how hundreds of Tahitians and Marshall Islanders die every year from radiation-caused cancers in hospitals in Paris and the U.S., how a boat tours the Pacific monitoring the results of the three hundred plus atomic and hydrogen bombs dropped on the humans there in tests, how the Pacific Islanders make ideal test candidates, living in the largely uninhabited “wastes” of the Pacific and having a terrific rate of reproduction because of their belief in pleasure in paradisiacal surroundings.