14 DAY TRIAL // A panel of US appeal judges ruled on Friday that the US government did not have to pay for the damage it had caused on two Pacific atolls, Bikini and Enewetak, places where the country ran an extensive nuclear testing program between 1946 and 1958, detonating more than 67 warheads. At the height of the Cold War, this display of power helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, so naturally no one now seems to be willing to pay the price for the devastation America left behind in its former territories.
In 2006, the inhabitants of the two small atolls located in the Marshall Islands sued the US government for $1 billion in compensation for destroying their islands. No clean-up was done after the tests, and all the locals were evicted from their homes in order to make way for the military. It would seem that not only communist regimes like China take the measure of forcefully removing people out of their homes, if this serves their interests.
Most likely, the situation wouldn't have been the same if the Army had evacuated the city of New York, but, seeing how it conducted its tests as far off from the main land as possible, it would stand to reason that no one at home is interested in the hardships some people had to endure on account of national security.
During a 1986 test settlement agreement with the US government, the Nuclear Claims tribunal was formed, which awarded the inhabitants of the two islands a fund of $150 million for their hardships, while at the same time stipulating that the compensation constituted "the full settlement of all claims, past, present and future."
This is the decision the judges have based their new ruling on, saying that they cannot pass judgment on a matter that is outside their respective jurisdiction. However, the attorneys of the inhabitants say that the ruling does not exonerate the United States of the harm it has caused to some of its citizens. In the end, the US did won the Cold War, and the Soviet Union collapsed, but then America never went through the trouble of cleaning up its own mess, and properly compensating the people that had suffered.