High court won't hear appeal by Marshall Islanders

The Supreme Court said Monday it won't hear an appeal brought by Marshall Islanders who want to sue the federal government for blowing up and irradiating their land in the Pacific Ocean during the early years of the Cold War.

The long-running dispute now goes to the Congress, where hearings are expected soon on the damages to health and property caused by 67 nuclear tests detonated in the Marshall Islands. The islands were a U.S. protectorate under the United Nations during the late 1940s and 1950s.

Part of the overall dispute involves Brookhaven National Lab, which studied and treated Marshall Islanders affected by bomb radiation for 43 years.

"This closes the door legally," said Jonathan Weisgall, an attorney who first filed a lawsuit about the claims in 1980. "Now the next step is to turn to Congress."

The Supreme Court turned away the appeal from the people of Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll, both part of the Marshall Islands. The Nuclear Claims Tribunal, a review board set up by the United States and the Marshallese governments, previously agreed to pay the people of Enewetak $385 million and the people of Bikini $563 million for the loss of their lands. Only a token of the award has been paid.

Waiting in the wings are the people of Rongelap - awarded $1 billion in 2007 by the tribunal - who were monitoring how the Bikini Atoll residents' lawsuit proceeded through the U.S. courts. The 2007 tribunal decision found that Brookhaven Lab doctors returned residents to Rongelap in 1957 even though they knew it was still highly contaminated from a 1954 hydrogen bomb test, and failed to share that information with the islanders.

The lab used the residents' return as a chance to study the flow of radioactive toxins through the body. In its April 2007 ruling, the tribunal wrote that the islanders' continuing to live on contaminated islands "supported scientific research and military defense concerns."

U.S. Energy Department officials say they and Brookhaven officials responded properly as more information was learned about radiation on Bikini and Rongelap. During the past 40 years, about $500 million has been spent in construction and cleanup projects in the islands, according to federal officials.

Last August, Newsday's review of once-secret Cold War records filed with the tribunal showed Brookhaven Lab minimized the potential dangers in the return in the early 1970s of dozens to Bikini, as they had done with Rongelap.

The cancer death of an 11-year-old boy, born on Bikini in 1971, was linked later to radiation exposure he received while living there, according to tribunal records.

A hearing about the Marshall Islands damages claims is expected next month, said a spokesman for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, Pacific, and the Global Environment.

With The Associated Press