From 1961 through 1966, I was a frequent flier to one of the more remote outposts of the American empire, a speck of coral and sand called Johnston Island. It was a refueling stop on the route between Hawaii and Kwajalein, Marshall Islands, where my family lived on a missile base.
Johnston, 800 miles southwest of Hawaii, was uninhabited until it was taken over as a naval air station around the beginning of World War II. When I stopped there with my parents, sisters and brother, the inhabitants were 100 percent male. They were a ragtag outfit, military men and contractors, part of the Pacific Missile Range.My impressions are of cement buildings, quonset huts, palms, intense blue sky and fierce heat. If you were arriving in the winter, the blast of light, humidity and temperature was overwhelming. A shark circled lazily in a large open-air aquarium that was formed of a concrete enclosure.
You would gratefully walk from the old four-engine MATS plane toward the shade and fans of the administration building to wait an hour while the plane's fuel tanks were being filled.
Often, men on duty at Johnston were stuck there without feminine companions for a year or a year and a half. Bearded, often bare-chested, tan, wearing ragged cutoffs, go-aheads (now called thongs) and pith helmets, they would line up whenever the plane from Hawaii landed, which was every week or so.
They'd practically form a gauntlet to ogle the women as our families walked to the administration building.
Today, everything has changed on Johnston. It's no longer a sleepy island purgatory. Johnston is the focus of America's nerve-gas destruction. As the Deseret News discovered, women work there now - undoubtedly a civilizing influence.
Research at Tooele Army Depot provided the background needed to build the Johnston Island incinerator. Last month, a shipment of gas-filled artillery shells headed from Germany on its way to Johnston for destruction.
They were just the first of an estimated 100,000 shells stored at the American base at Clausen, West Germany. The removal will cost about $83.1 million, with $52 million of the cost borne by the American taxpayer and the rest by Germany.
The program is of international concern. In March, Protestant and Catholic church officials, meeting on Majuro, Marshall Islands, accused the United States of the "misuse of the Pacific as a dumping site for nuclear and chemical wastes," according to the Reuter news agency.
"I think the concerns that are being expressed in the Pacific have been largely ignored by the powers that be and by the media on the mainland," said Steve Erickson, Salt Lake City, a spokesman for the anti-nuclear group Downwinders.
He worries that high winds and waves might flood the atoll, spreading toxic material into the ocean.
"Another major concern is the transportation of these weapons from West Germany across Europe and then across the seas to Johnston - whether that can be accomplished safely."
When the stockpile is burned, Erickson fears, dioxins and furans may be released into the atmosphere. "When this stuff lands in the ocean it gets absorbed by the plankton and other microorganisms in the upper layer of the ocean."
These fears of another kind of fallout are grounded in reality.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Deseret News discovered that eight accidents at the pilot plant in Tooele in 1983-87 allowed nerve gas to vent into the atmosphere. The accidents released up to 73 times the legal hourly limit of nerve gas.
Disposing of our nerve gas is a tremendously difficult problem. An accident in the Pacific would have incalculable consequences for the world.
Yet if the European stockpile isn't destroyed at Johnston, where should it go? Tooele Army Depot? The fairest and least dangerous solution the Pentagon could come up with for nerve gas stored at bases in this country was to build incinerators and burn it where it was kept.
In the case of West Germany, it is inconceivable that the gas was shipped there against the will of the German government. The Germans wanted the protection the chemicals were supposed to afford - and so they should host the incinerator, too. After all, the TAD stockpile - which amounts to 10,757 tons of nerve gas and blister agent - will be destroyed here in Utah.
The Pacific Ocean is not our personal puddle. The ocean touches many other countries, and its resources are vital to the world.
Just as it is wrong for the United States and France to detonate nuclear bombs in the open air in Polynesia, it is wrong to risk the safety of the Pacific by using Johnston Island as the incinerator for diabolical chemicals.