Praise for Pacific:

‘Winchester does a virtuoso job. … A giant Aladdin’s rug, which he then gamely invites his readers to climb aboard’ New York Times

‘Revealing … delightful … fascinating … highly recommended’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘Fascinating, provocative, and at times, mildly terrifying. … The hallmarks of Winchester’s best work—a fertile, curious mind, impeccable research and command of complex material—are on full display here’ Miami Herald

‘Winchester writes books like someone telling a good yarn around the fireplace … by interweaving history, fascinating trivia, and acute observation’ New York Times Book Review

‘Winchester has a smooth and easy prose style, one that is trustable and clear … He excels at guiding the reader with a contagious sense of wonder’ Boston Globe

‘[Winchester is] a terrific raconteur with a knack for making connections that might have eluded you between events behind the headlines. … Where Pacific opts to go, it goes with savvy and verve’ Seattle Times

‘Winchester has prodigious gifts as a popular historian and an explainer of faraway events’ Los Angeles Times

‘Provocative … and lively’ Wall Street Journal

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

First published in the United States by Harper in 2015

Copyright © Simon Winchester 2015

Jacket design by Gregg Kulick.

Photographs and illustrations © Getty Images

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Simon Winchester asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work

Engraving of the Pacific on title page by Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.

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Source ISBN: 9780007550777

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007550784

Version: 2016-09-20

For Setsuko

Look East, where whole new thousands are!

—ROBERT BROWNING, WARING

Nick Springer/Springer Cartographics LLC.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Praise for Pacific

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Maps and Illustrations

PROLOGUE: THE LONELY SEA AND THE SKY

AUTHOR’S NOTE: ON CARBON

Chapter 1 THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA

Chapter 2 MR. IBUKA’S RADIO REVOLUTION

Chapter 3 THE ECSTASIES OF WAVE RIDING

Chapter 4 A DIRE AND DANGEROUS IRRITATION

Chapter 5 FAREWELL, ALL MY FRIENDS AND FOES

Chapter 6 ECHOES OF DISTANT THUNDER

Chapter 7 HOW GOES THE LUCKY COUNTRY?

Chapter 8 THE FIRES IN THE DEEP

Chapter 9 A FRAGILE AND UNCERTAIN SEA

Chapter 10 OF MASTERS AND COMMANDERS

EPILOGUE: THE CALL OF THE RUNNING TIDE

Note on Sources

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Simon Winchester

About the Publisher

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of the Pacific—Political

The plutonium bomb Helen of Bikini

Alvin Graves

Masaru Ibuka

Movie poster for Gidget

Duke Kahanamoku

Hobart Alter

Colonel Charles Bonesteel III

The USS Pueblo

The Pueblo’s surviving crewmen, led by Captain Lloyd Bucher

Youngsters’ performance in North Korea

The RMS Queen Elizabeth, in her heyday

The RMS Queen Elizabeth, sabotaged in Hong Kong

Helicopter during the evacuation of Saigon

Hong Kong’s “retrocession”

Destruction by Cyclone Tracy in the city of Darwin

Typhoon Haiyan

Sir Gilbert Walker

Map of the Pacific—Physical

The El Niño Phenomenon

Gough Whitlam

Jørn Utzon

Alvin

The tectonic architecture of the Pacific Ocean

Black smokers

Inhabitants of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef

A Hawaiian feather cloak, an ahu’ula

The short-tailed, or Steller’s, albatross

“The Pacific Garbage Patch”

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo

The carrier USS Kitty Hawk and a Chinese Song-class diesel attack submarine

Map of the Western Pacific: U.S. and Chinese Military

The Nine-Dash Line

Chinese constructions in the South China Sea

The USNS Impeccable

Admiral Liu Huaqing

Andrew Marshall

Hokule‘a

PROLOGUE: THE LONELY SEA AND THE SKY

Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke

Into pale sea—look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet . . .

arched over to Asia, Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleeping

Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.

—ROBINSON JEFFERS, FROM “THE EYE,” 1965

United Airlines Flight 154 leaves Honolulu International Airport just after dawn three times a week, bound ultimately for the city of Hagåtña, the capital of the island republic of Guam. If the northeast trades are blowing at their usual steady twelve knots, the jet will take off to the east, into the low morning sun over Waikiki, and those passengers on the aircraft’s left side will see the wall of skyscraper hotels along the beachfront and be able to glimpse down at Doris Duke’s great seaside mansion, Shangri-La. Once the plane is two miles high above the crater of the dormant Diamond Head volcano, it will begin to make a long and lazy turn to the right.

If the morning haze is light, passengers on the right side now can sometimes glimpse the bombers and heavy transport planes lined up on the flight line of Hickam Field, and maybe a flotilla of sleek gray warships will be gliding slowly through the lochs of Pearl Harbor. There will be some suburbs clustered between the shore and the slopes; there will be a skein of rush-hour traffic crawling along on H-1, the main thruway into Honolulu; and behind these urban images will rise ranges of mountains, razor-sharp aiguilles dotted in places with white radar domes.

With every one of its seats invariably filled, the plane will then clear its throat and tilt its nose ever higher, and once at five miles high, it will set its autopilot to a southwesterly course, heading out initially over two thousand miles of clear blue, unpeopled ocean. As the climb flattens out, and the aircraft passes through a final stratum of small puffballs of cloud, in a blink the island behind fades, is suddenly gone from view, and all below is just sea, endless empty sea, with many hours of emptiness ahead.

The ocean beneath is almost unimaginably vast, and illimitably various. It is the oldest of the world’s seas, the relic of the once all-encompassing Panthalassic Ocean that opened up seven hundred fifty million years ago. It is by far the world’s biggest body of water—all the continents could be contained within its borders, and there would be ample room to spare. It is the most biologically diverse, the most seismically active; it sports the planet’s greatest mountains and deepest trenches; its chemistry influences the world; and the planetary weather systems are born within its boundaries.

Most see this great body of sea only in parts—a beach here, an atoll there, a long expanse of deep water in between. Just a few, mariners mostly, have the good fortune to confront the ocean in its entirety—and by doing so, to win some understanding of the immense spectrum of happenings and behaviors and people and geographies and biologies that are to be found within and on the fringes of its sixty-four million square miles. For those who do, the experience can be profoundly humbling.

Captain Cook wrote that by exploring the Pacific he had gone “as far as I think it is possible for man to go.” To traverse it today, two and a half centuries later—to set a course from Kamchatka to Cape Horn, to pass between the Aleutians and Australia, to make a ten-thousand-mile crossing from Panama to Palawan—is to experience a sense of the frontier that is lacking almost everywhere else on the planet. And not simply for its immensity, but also for the pervasive sense, even today, of confrontation with the unknown and the unknowable. The British Admiralty’s revered chartroom bible, Ocean Passages for the World, still cautions sailors embarking on a crossing, “Very large areas of the Pacific Ocean are unsurveyed, or imperfectly so. In many areas no sounding at all has been recorded . . . the only safeguards are a good lookout, and careful sounding.”

United 154, operated most days by one of the more battered old planes from United’s Hawaiian stable, is known locally as the island hopper, makes its journey along almost six thousand miles, and takes some fourteen shuddering hours to do so. It skitters southwestward, then westward, then northward, stopping along the way at five places—all of them islands, scattered among three different countries—that are even less familiar to most than is Guam’s one city of Hagåtña.

UA154’s first stops, of half an hour or so, are on the flat atolls of Majuro and Kwajalein in the Republic of the Marshall Islands; it then does the same at runways that have been squeezed into the more dramatically mountainous and jungle-draped topographies of the islands of Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk, in the Federated States of Micronesia.

A scant few passengers travel all the way to Guam. There is much getting off and getting on, and luggage of daunting sizes and bewildering shapes is brought on and taken off at each stop. The crew members, leather-skinned old-timers who have some passing acquaintance with the local island languages, are obliged by United to make the entire journey. They will have recited their seat-belt and tray-table hymns no fewer than twelve times before final touchdown, and seem almost comatose with relief on their arrival in Guam.

In the popular European imagination, the Pacific Ocean contains many of the elements that are to be found along that six-thousand-mile passage between Honolulu and Hagåtña. In every stopping place, it is invariably warm, tropical; both the sea and the sky are intensely blue, the air is sweetly breezy, and there are white sands and coral reefs and sparkling fish of vivid colors darting between the anemone fronds. The roads are decked with bougainvillea and flamboyants and orchids and parrots, with papaya trees and palms of incredible profligacy that drip with dates and bananas and coconuts. Palm trees are central to Pacific imagery: they are to be seen leaning slightly off the vertical, under the endless press of the trade winds, and thereby offering a picture-perfect and theatrically green backdrop for every beach scene; a frame for other equally familiar images of curling waves and spume; or as a border to an empty ocean panorama with its distant gatherings of surfers waiting patiently for the rollers to break and the seas to begin to run.

Such is in evidence everywhere, at every stop, on the United island hopper’s run. Hawaii, the starting point, is of course the quintessential exemplar of the mixing of what outsiders see as Polynesian magic and transpacific migration. From Polynesia there is the plangent sound of the ukulele, the sight of the grass skirt, the blossom in thick black hair tipped behind the ear, the nut-brown skin, the dancing, the dancing, the dancing.

Yet when I lived for a while in Manoa, on the eastern side of Honolulu City, it was not so much Polynesian culture that lapped into every corner of my life as the cultural influences of the farther side of the Pacific Ocean.1 There was a Japanese grocery store down the street, a Burmese restaurant next door, and every other person on the bus seemed to be from Manila. I kept hearing Korean spoken in the elevators, and met Chinese migrants in the most unexpected places: the elderly man who cut what remains of my hair was from Kowloon, and had been a waiter for decades on the Coral Princess, a Hong Kong–flagged liner that once shuttled between Sydney and Tokyo, by way of Jakarta, Port Moresby, Manila, and Shanghai.

Nonetheless, Polynesia rather than Pacific Asia is the current preferred affect of Hawaii. Polynesia is the impression one likes to carry away, as the islands fade astern or over the horizon. Hula, luau, aloha, lei, ohana—the best-known words from a lexicon constructed from the thirteen letters of the Hawaiian alphabet—hear them, and you know in an instant which ocean you’re in.

This place—though an American state since 1959 (the other Pacific state, Alaska, was similarly admitted almost eight months before), and much changed as a consequence—is still in its perceived cultural essence the Pacific of its Western devotees. Hawaii manages still, deep down, to evoke some of what was felt by Gauguin during his time in the Marquesas, or by those who brought Omai of Ra’iatea to London, or by those gently compassionate scholar-administrators such as Arthur Grimble, famed for his once-favorite memoir of Pacific life, A Pattern of Islands.

Hawaii’s shopping malls and warplanes and mountaintop telescopes and aircraft carriers and its legions of resident oceanographers and meteorologists may give the impression that the islands have fully entered and embraced the modern era. Yet, culturally, Hawaii is still Polynesia, linked firmly to Easter Island and the Cook Islands and Aotearoa (“the Land of the Long White Cloud”), New Zealand. Hawaii, for all its apparent intimacy with the American mainland, still resonates with the old Pacific stories of Herman Melville, of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is still emotionally connected to the Pacific that so enchanted poets such as Rupert Brooke, who spent seven idyllic months two thousand miles farther south, in Tahiti, and memorialized it in lines that, once heard, are long remembered:

Taü here, Mamua, Crown the hair, and come away! Hear the calling of the moon, And the whispering scents that stray About the idle warm lagoon. Hasten, hand in human hand, Down the dark, the flowered way, Along the whiteness of the sand, And in the water’s soft caress, Wash the mind of foolishness.

They may well be. But the Pacific of Brooke’s “soft caress” is soon swallowed up as United 154 soars ever westward each morning, into what swiftly becomes much darker territory—both metaphorically and actually.

Some fifteen hundred miles on from Honolulu, the flight crosses the International Date Line, and the day on board is instantly transmuted into tomorrow. Wristwatch date windows have to be changed, and diary pages flipped forward; the shadows at each airport stop lengthening, so the next day’s afternoon steadily begins to take over from the past day’s morning.

The date line, a necessary evil for maintaining a system of timekeeping in a spheroidal and interconnected world, was originally set down here, right in the middle of the Pacific. It could have arrowed straight from north to south, like an antimeridian to Greenwich, on the opposite side of the globe; but since it was going to make calendric mayhem in whatever populated place it passed through, the delegates to the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC, in 1884, designed it to zigzag this way and that around the islands and minor republics and kingdoms that got in its way, or were near to it.

At the time this was done, the Pacific was a commercially comatose expanse of sea, with neither aircraft nor telephone cables in place, its international trade limited mainly to the peddling of copra, whale oil, and guano. The existence of an ephemeral line that magically decreed it to be noon on a nonworking Tokyo Saturday while it was still breakfast time on a potentially busy California Friday had scarcely any effect on such matters as the trade in guano futures. In the days long before arbitrage became all the rage, the date line was no more than an idle conceit, something for the stewards on long-haul ships to tell their passengers, who found “gaining a day” or “losing a day” to be greatly amusing.

Today, however, when snap decisions in Japan can urgently affect financial doings in San Francisco, the line has become something of an inconvenience. A Friday decision can’t always be made, because where it needs to be made, it is Saturday. It need not have been so: back in 1884, because of arguments over the siting of the prime meridian, with the apoplectic French naturally opposed to its running through a suburb of London, a genial Canadian time zone expert named Sandford Fleming suggested that the prime meridian be placed in the middle of the Pacific instead, and the date line made to run from pole to pole, where the Greenwich line does today. His idea was ridiculed; but today some few remember him fondly, and would also like to see the date line moved into the Atlantic, to minimize the nuisance it causes in the commercially busiest ocean in the world.

Yet this is no more than technical stuff. There is quite another kind of darkness into which United 154 flies, a more metaphorical darkness, and one that helps paint a rather fuller picture of today’s Pacific Ocean.

Once across the line, the plane leaves the ethnic limits of Polynesia. The Marshall Islands, of which Majuro is the capital, are part of the sprawling archipelagos of Micronesia. Together with the prettily named Carolines and the Marianas, these hundreds of small islands in the northwestern quadrant of the ocean—some of them tall and volcanic; most of the Marshalls low atolls of coral, and lethally vulnerable to the ever-rising seas—present en bloc a troubling example of the recent history of the ocean and its people. Of what can happen to a place and a population subjected to the casual exploitation of foreigners who, all too frequently in recent centuries, have seen the ocean’s immense blue expanse as having been created for their convenience alone.

For the islanders, it has been a bewildering cavalcade of misfortune. The populated specks of Micronesia have existed under perhaps the most complex colonial history of anywhere in the ocean. This ancient and settled culture first felt the impress of outsiders in 1521, when Magellan landed in the Marianas and predestined Guam’s seizure by Spain—leading to the establishment there of the very first formal European possession in the Pacific. The oldest native civilization in the region, the Chamorros—who had migrated from Southeast Asia as many as four millennia before—were all but destroyed, either by illness or at the hand of these European invaders. Their numbers dwindled to just a few thousand; their language briefly teetered on the edge of oblivion. And yet the sad saga of Micronesia had only just begun.

Germany was next in line to take an interest in the region, driven first by the needs of commerce and then by the pressing demands of pride, expansion, and empire. Spain initially balked at the impertinence of a Northern European rival trying to muscle in on its territory, but eventually acquiesced, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the Marshalls and the Carolines, settled by German traders who established copra and cotton plantations there, came to be administered by German governors. They were protected by a blue-water navy of sorts, the German East Asiatic Squadron, a cruiser force of six ships that eventually settled a fixed base in the docks of Tsingtao,2 in China’s Shandong province.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the United States opted to take Guam from Spain, and placed a coaling station there for the convenience of its own fleet. To add to this confusing amalgam, Britain began to nibble away at the eastern parts of Micronesia and took the Gilbert Islands for its own, together with the Ellices, which were nearby (though ethnically Polynesian, like Hawaii and Tahiti and points south and west).

Thus might this cumbersome patchwork of island disarrangement have long remained, but for the outbreak of the Great War. Japan had joined forces with Britain from the very beginning of the conflict, and its navy moved quickly to police the sea-lanes of the western Pacific, at the very least to stop all the German trade there. An immediate task was to chase away the German navy and to occupy what some in Tokyo saw as the commercially interesting and strategically important Micronesian islands. By October 1914, Japanese forces had almost all the islands firmly under their control—with long-term implications that would become much clearer only in the aftermath of the Second World War.

This was to be the third formal occupation of Micronesia. Tokyo newspapers of the time regularly showed photographs of bearded and be-medaled Japanese governors opening sugarcane mills and schools and railway lines on island after island. Such images fed into a general Japanese affection for Nan’yō, the South Seas, and almost certainly helped foster the belief in Japan’s inherent right to govern an even larger part of the region—governance that would eventually be employed, as it happened, for a wider and more sinister purpose. “It is our great task as a people to turn the Pacific into a Japanese lake,” cried a noted historian and Diet member, Yosaburo Takekoshi, toward the end of the Great War. “Who controls the tropics controls the world.”

Back then, few others knew why Tokyo so keenly wanted to occupy Micronesia, other than to sate the widespread nineteenth-century romantic yearning for the South Seas, fanned by the turn-of-the-century popularity of vernacular novels featuring wahini and tropical flowers and pink-hued coral beaches. It was a while before the sentiments of men such as Takekoshi took root, but when they did, such attitudes were swiftly hijacked by soldiers who were much more aggressively nationalistic.

Many in the West were uneasy with the knowledge that the Japanese had taken the Micronesian islands from the Germans by such stealth. It turns out there was ample reason for concern. After 1941 and the attacks on Pearl Harbor, on Malaysia, on Hong Kong, these now formidably well-equipped and well-defended islands (Pulau, Chuuk, Jaluit, and the two Marshall Island atolls to which United 154 was now heading, Majuro and Kwajalein) could be used as bases from which to attack Western forces. And it was clear the Japanese had been preparing them for such roles since back in the 1930s, confirming Western suspicions that Japan’s intentions in taking the islands had been for military domination all along.

I once sailed close by the islands, aboard a Japanese ore-carrying ship. She was the Africa Maru, belonging to Sumitomo Metal, and she was carrying 135,000 tons of rich Australian iron ore from the Mount Newman mine in Western Australia up to the blast furnaces of Kashima, to the east of Tokyo. The steel that would be made soon would be pressed into the bodies and axles of Nissan Sentras and Toyota Corollas, no doubt.

The ship’s captain, a friendly man named Shigetaka Takanaka, asked me up to the bridge one day as we threaded our way through the islands, with Yap and Palau far away to port, Chuuk similarly distant to starboard. He was poring over his nautical chart, a large-scale sea map that indicated the position of all these islands, and of his homeland to the north, and which was titled—whether out of optimism or nostalgia, I couldn’t tell—“The Whole Nippon.” He pointed out those smaller islands that were close enough to see on the radar. One we spotted through binoculars, if hazily: a lone mass of green, possibly the islet of Ifalek or the three-island atoll of Lamotrek. Captain Takanaka gestured around the horizon. “Ours, once upon a time,” he said softly. “All of it. We were given them by the League of Nations. But then they were taken away.” He seemed genuinely regretful.

They had been taken away, indeed, and at a terrible price. American forces recaptured them in the spring of 1944, atoll by atoll, in a stuttering series of appallingly bloody set-piece battles that have since passed into military legend. Chuuk was one of the last outposts for the defeated Japanese: their surrender was not taken until September 1945, almost a month after the great formalized surrender ceremony staged in Tokyo Bay, aboard the USS Missouri. The islands of Micronesia—by some estimates nearly three thousand of them, a mere one thousand square miles of dry land peppered across fully three million square miles of sea—have been American, in essence, ever since. The fourth imperial occupation, some might argue.

And the native people have won precious few benefits from all the centuries of foreign attention. Critics claim, not unreasonably, that all that was brought by the years of foreign trespass in the Micronesian islands has been death, disease, and dependency; its residue remains, and it is not a pretty sight.

Particularly on the atoll known as Kwajalein.

United 154 lands there, its second stop out from Honolulu. Most people are forbidden to disembark, and must remain in the parked aircraft, trusting that its cooling system will survive the punishing afternoon heat. But I had left Honolulu that morning with a permit to land, issued by a forward outpost of the U.S. Army.

For Kwajalein is an army base. Since the 1960s it has operated as a center for mid-ocean rocketry, and it is currently the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. Few are allowed to get off the plane, fewer still to linger on the atoll, because the site is festooned with a costly array of ultrasecret high-technology apparatus, and is peopled with hundreds of high-technology staff, soldiers, and scientists, who are performing clandestine tasks with the equipment, all officially bent on helping keep America safe from whatever are deemed currently the world’s most dangerous threats.

The atoll is one of the world’s largest, with a lagoon of eight hundred square miles surrounded by almost one hundred islands, slivers of sand and coral that peek just a few feet above the surf. Inside the atoll, the sea is pale blue—the wreck of the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which turned turtle as it was being towed to haven there, a damaged war prize,3 is plainly visible. Outside the atoll, the sea is night dark, as the waters off the reef edge plunge thousands of feet down. There are the leaning palm trees, the endless rollers, the sound of seabirds, the roasting sun, the white-hot sand.

The actual Kwajalein Island is at the atoll’s southern end, and it serves as the headquarters for this cruelly isolated base. The island extends three miles or so from tip to tip, is a quarter of a mile wide, and sports the base’s aerodrome, water tower, and softball field. In other ways, it is as cheerless and institutional a place as any army base. The majority of those stationed there are civilian contractors, mostly from Alabama, many of them employed by an Alaska-based company that won the management contract from the Pentagon.

Some half dozen times a year, clients, customers, users of the Kwajalein facilities—they are called by many names—fire missiles from pads at Vandenberg in California and Kodiak in Alaska toward the atoll, to see how well they work. The rockets, of many different kinds and weights and speeds and newness, with many different kinds of warheads, all dummies of course, roar in and are tracked, measured, noted, and scored by the long-range telescopes and radars with which Kwajalein is equipped. It’s all a multimillion-dollar game of darts, the accuracy of the weapons’ splashdowns measured in inches, after a four-thousand-mile flight.

Once in a while specialist soldiers on Kwaj, as most call their unlovely home, will fire their own missiles up toward the incoming warheads, and score how well they knock them down, creating their own multimillion-dollar skeet shoot—that has implications, all are assured, for the preservation of world peace.

The rocketry on Kwajalein is impressive, beautiful even—a nighttime test in particular can be quite memorable, with streaks of what looks like orange tracer fire lighting up the sky, and enormous plumes of phosphorescent water where the missiles hit the ocean. But what is seldom seen by visitors is the other side of Kwajalein—where the islanders themselves are obliged to live.

For almost no Marshall Islanders are permitted to stay overnight on Kwajalein Island. They have to leave each evening on a U.S. Army ferryboat, and are shuttled three miles northward up the lagoon, to the island of Ebeye—twelve thousand men, women, and children compelled to live on a squalid eighty acres of slum houses, in what is one of the most densely populated places on earth.

It is a pullulating, smelly, fetid, and degrading place, in appearance more like a slum in Bombay or Calcutta than a community in a country that enjoys “free association” with the United States. There is little by way of a proper sewage system. The schools are ill-equipped; the children—and half the population is under eighteen—ill-educated. The most common disease is diabetes, type 2; the one supermarket, run by a genial Irishman on contract to a company in Guam, sells improbably vast tonnages of sodas and Spam.

Melancholy sights are everywhere. Since there is no Laundromat on Ebeye, those wishing to wash their clothes must come on the ferryboat to Kwajalein and use machines set up in a wire-enclosed compound outside the security fence, while the workers who have permission, and the uniformed Americans who live on the base, cycle past just feet away. There is no mortuary on Ebeye, either; the dead must be brought to Kwajalein, placed in a freezer outside the chain-link fence, and stored there beyond America proper, awaiting burial.

Seldom are the realities of the first and third worlds placed so tantalizingly close to one another—even the realities of Mexican poverty are largely out of sight to most passersby beyond the iron fences in Arizona. But on Ebeye, the separation of the two cultures is cruelly and harshly visible, just inches apart—and with the shame of it made all the more damning because the islands—the entire atoll, the neighboring islands, the entire republic—make up the country that is the birthright of the very people who are now being denied access to it.

This is the Marshall Islands, and these are the Marshall Islanders. Yet international agreements signed in U.S. government offices thousands of miles away have decreed that these men and women and their thousands of children are now forbidden to inhabit large parts of their own island homeland. They must perforce wash their clothes and attend to their dead and be otherwise separated behind chain-link fences, while Alabamans and other strangers on the far side of the same fences come and go on the Marshall Islands quite as they please.

Moreover, there is also the matter of the Money. The U.S. government has a long-term agreement with the government of the Marshall Islands to lease eleven of the islets that rise around the Kwajalein lagoon. Kwajalein Island itself is the biggest and most important of these; but at the north end of the atoll, the outcrop of Roi-Namur has a large airfield also; and many gigantic radar installations and telescopes; and impossibly large long-range-missile-spotting cameras, too—and a small, dignified cemetery for the Japanese war dead (with bones still being found, often frustratingly indistinguishable from the bones of dead American marines). Nine other islands also have launch pads and sensor arrays and target crosses painted on thick concrete pads, which some of the Vandenberg birds, as they are called, are supposed to hit.

For all this, the Marshall Islands government receives many millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars each year—$18 million under the current agreement, on a lease that expires in 2066, with a twenty-year extension. There is a meta-agreement, too: a much more substantial sum is paid by Washington based on what is known as the Compact of Free Association, which essentially gives all the component island groups of Micronesia (of which the Marshalls are one) a guarantee of additional financial aid in exchange for the United States’ being able to make use of the islands more or less as Washington wishes (the “more or less” being somewhat open to negotiation).

But the $18 million annual payment for the use of the Kwajalein islands is earmarked specifically for Kwajalein, which leads any visitor to the pressing question: where does all the money go and why are places such as Ebeye Island such sinks of squalor and poverty? It is a mystery, and it hints at much that is wrong, and has been wrong for generations. Every islander to whom I spoke about it tended to look at the ground and try to change the subject. I got only vague answers that usually mentioned something about the peculiar tribal arrangements of the Marshall Islanders, the traditional structures of power and authority, and the behaviors of the local kings and tribal chiefs, men who are widely respected and deferred to and who often hold elected positions of power.

There are mutterings, too, about the cost of maintaining large houses in Hawaii, which many of the senior figures in the Marshall Islands are said to own. But little is said or written directly about the dispiriting situation of so much poverty in a place where such an abundance of American government money has been so liberally sprinkled about. One University of Hawaii academic who wrote a book purporting to expose this very evident corruption was delayed for years, awash in threatened lawsuits. And though the book was eventually offered for sale, the publisher insisted it be heavily bowdlerized so as not to offend any of the local chieftains.

To add to the general wretchedness of the Marshalls, there is also the nagging matter of Bikini, a lonely but infamous atoll two hundred fifty miles farther north, but also part of the republic. In its pre-atomic existence Bikini was so typically Pacific that it could well have been on a National Geographic cover or a cafeteria poster or the jacket of an old South Seas novel—but it has since become notorious around the planet, ever since the first nuclear weapons were exploded there, back in the late 1940s. The evident misappropriation of funds on Kwajalein, and the fate of the Kwajalein islanders who are forbidden to live on most of their own atoll, constitutes a sorry enough story. But it pales in comparison with the fate of the Bikinians, on whose homeland most of America’s atomic weapons were to be exploded. It is a continuing saga of dispossession also, since these islanders, too, are exiled from home, compelled to live hundreds of miles away, and (as we shall see in the pages that follow) in all too many cases suffering from a florid array of ailments of body and mind. Theirs is a tale—dispiritingly familiar in this corner of the ocean—from which no one in authority emerges with any measureable degree of credit.

The Pacific is an oceanic behemoth of eye-watering complexity. A near-limitless range of human and natural conditions exists within its borders, as one would expect of something so unimaginably enormous. Arthur C. Clarke once remarked, with droll prescience, that a space traveler, upon seeing our planet, would say that calling it Earth was a grave misnomer, since most of it is so obviously Sea. He must surely have been thinking of the Pacific, since its blue expanse entirely dominates the planet.

Its dimensions are staggering. It occupies almost one entire hemisphere. Looking westward, from Panama, and from where Balboa stood on his high peak in the Isthmus of Darién, across to the first encountered landmass of the eastern Malaysian coast, there are more than 10,600 miles of uninterrupted sea. From north to south, from the fogs and shivering waters of the Bering Strait down to the ice cliffs of Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica, is nearly nine thousand miles. The sixty-four million square miles in between fill almost one-third of the planet’s surface. Forty-five percent of the planet’s total surface waters are found in the Pacific Ocean, and seven miles down, it has the earth’s deepest trenches. In short: everything about the Pacific, the last ocean to be found by Western man, presents an unchallengeable superlative.

It is also not easy to get into, or out of, and this difficulty insulates it from the rest of the world’s oceans. Except for vessels bold enough to try the Bering Strait, between Russia and Alaska, or the gale-whipped seas that fringe the Antarctic, the Pacific enjoys no entranceway that is more than three hundred miles wide. Ships trying to enter from the Indian Ocean must make their way through a litter of islands scattered between Malaysia and Australia, the so-called Maritime Continent. Except for the Strait of Magellan, far down south, there is no natural entrance whatsoever on the American side. Only the Panama Canal, that narrow funnel gouged artificially through the isthmus in the early twentieth century, permits carefully sized ships from the Atlantic the luxury of a quick and easy transit.

The vast distances inherent in the Pacific’s geography have consequences seldom known elsewhere. Consider the Republic of Kiribati, for instance, once the British-run Gilbert Islands. Its one hundred thousand inhabitants are spread over fully 1.35 million square miles of ocean. Two thousand miles from Tarawa, its administrative capital, lies Kiritimati Island—the Christmas Island where the British tested their atom bombs back in the 1960s, without evacuating any of the locals. Not only are these five thousand Kiribatians inconveniently distant from their country’s capital, but they also are on the other side of the equator from Tarawa, and live on the day-before side of the International Date Line. So a summer Sunday on Tarawa is a winter Saturday on Christmas. Small wonder Kiribati struggles, having to cope with such logistical madness. It is one of the world’s poorest countries: the seaweed and copra and fish it harvests are too expensive for most locals, so many of its menfolk are obliged to work abroad or to crew on long-distance cargo ships, remitting their paychecks home, both to keep their families in victuals and in the hope of keeping their country’s pitiful economy alive. Size can be impressive, or it can be an impressive nuisance.

The Pacific is an ocean of secrets. Castaways, runaways, fugitives of all kinds people its recent history: the first islands that a sailor heading north from the Strait of Magellan encounters are those volcanic relics of the Juan Fernández group—where the Fifeshire buccaneer Alexander Selkirk was marooned for four years, his adventures later memorialized by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe.

Much of the dirty business of the modern world has been conducted within the confines of the Pacific. The nuclear testing—by the United States in the Marshall Islands, by Britain on the Gilbert Islands, by France in its remaining Polynesian possessions—is well enough known. In 2008, when a secret American reconnaissance satellite got into trouble in orbit and needed to be shot down, the military ordered a navy ship specializing in missile attacks to bring it down over the Pacific, supposing the ocean to be so vast that it would be harmless there. The Marshall Islanders complained about what they saw as the Pentagon’s cavalier attitude, insisting that they lived in the ocean, as did millions of other islanders, and it was not some empty space on which any dangerous test might be performed at will. As it happened, the satellite was brought down locally, and the hydrazine rocket fuel hurt no one.

Still other experiments of equivalent unpleasantness have taken place on the U.S. Navy’s tiny islets of Johnston Atoll, some seven hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. United 154 flies above them, though they are seldom pointed out, and there is even less notice of what has gone on there. For years, any passing yachtsman, in mid-ocean, was confronted by huge signs warning him to move on—nothing to see here, “Deadly Force Authorized”—and patrol boats stiff with heavily armed naval guards would cruise offshore, keeping all the curious at bay.

Strange things went on there. Rockets carrying atomic weapons accidentally exploded, contaminating the island with plutonium and americium. Almost two million gallons of Agent Orange from Vietnam were stored there, and then their storage carboys split open, adding to the toxic mix. The atoll was next used for testing biological weapons, and after another accident a quantity of the bacilli that cause tularemia and anthrax were released upwind, and the island was contaminated once again. Then, in 1990, a huge incinerator was built that would destroy such chemical weapons as the United States still admitted to possessing. According to Pentagon statements, the list included: “412,000 bombs, mines, rockets and projectiles . . . four million pounds of nerve and blister agents . . . only one recorded incident for every 200,000 man-hours worked.” Then, in 2000, all work was stopped, the plant was broken up and carted away, the remaining pollution was said to have been cleaned up, and Johnston Island, ten times as big (thanks to landfilling) as it was when it was first found, was abandoned and offered up for sale. That’s when it was invaded by a vicious type of ant. Nowadays, passing yachtsmen—initially lured to the island out of curiosity, since they would no longer be confronted by armed police—like to stop there, if briefly. The island has become a National Wildlife Refuge, a memorial to the utter despoliation of the sea.

All this, of course, relates just to the Pacific’s islands, to some of the speckles and shards of territory that lie within the confines of the ocean. The stories to be found here and in a thousand other islands not so far mentioned are complicated enough, as the strange island-hopping odyssey of United 154 suggests. But to get a sense of the ocean as a whole, into this patchwork need to be stitched the fantastic cultural diversity and enormous power and scale of the countries that lie around the ocean, along its famous—and famously volcanic, and so infamously unstable—Pacific Rim.

Thanks to the dominant cultural bias of modern history, there is a topsy-turvydom inherent in any description of the rim. On its western side are the Eastern peoples: Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, and countless more if one chooses to push the ocean’s frontiers westward toward Indochina and India. On the eastern side are the national admixtures of the various migrated and now notionally Western peoples: Canadians, Americans, Central Americans, Colombians, Ecuadoreans, Peruvians, Chileans. Around the south and beyond to Oceania are the more newly settled outsiders of modern New Zealand and Australia. The aboriginal peoples—Native Americans, Aleuts, Inuit, Maori, Australian indigenes, the Canadian First Nation, and a host of others, all genetically Pacific peoples as we now know—remain dotted around or within the rim, where their recent experiences have become conjoined with those of the Polynesian islanders, the inhabitants of Melanesia and Micronesia, and so have been protected or decimated, exploited or revered (but never left alone), as the various histories of the newcomers have unfolded.

And to be stirred into this mix of peoples and cultures and politics and ambitions is a formidable array of other phenomena besides. There is the constant, complex, and often spectacularly violent interplay of tectonics, with volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis in deadly abundance. The lands, seas, and seafloors of the Pacific are home to all manner of exotic and unfamiliar and yet-to-be-discovered wildlife. Mineral wealth exists in and around the Pacific in quantities that are beyond the most extravagant of human dreams—wealth that, if exploited, would bring a raft of unanticipated consequences. The environment, fragile everywhere, seems somehow to display a more obvious fragility in the Pacific, with its thousands of square miles of delicate corals, with its all-too-vulnerably low-lying atolls, with its cyclones and typhoons that are so much more vicious and destructive than even the worst to be found elsewhere.

For all its apparent placidity, the Pacific seems today to be positioned at the leading edge of any number of potential challenges and crises—whether they relate to politics or economics, to geology, to weather, to the supply of food, or to the most basic questions about the number of people that this planet can support.

The future, in short, is what the Pacific Ocean is now coming to symbolize. For if one accepts that the Mediterranean was once the inland sea of the Ancient World; and further, that the Atlantic Ocean was, and to some people still remains, the inland sea of the Modern World; then surely it can be argued that the Pacific Ocean is the inland sea of Tomorrow’s World. What transpires across these sixty-four million square miles of ultramarine ocean matters, and to all of us. Hence the need to write about it.

But how? How best to corral all that is important about the new Pacific—and by this I mean the Pacific in toto, the ocean considered shore to shore, pole to pole, and not just the modern and very limited convention of “Asia-Pacific,” which I do not want this book solely to be about—into a single comprehensible and digestible volume? What structure might suit this ocean’s story best?

For months it all seemed to me to be too overwhelmingly confusing—the body of water too monstrous, its narrative too insuperably challenging in its variety and vastness. Until one day, and quite by chance, when I came across a slim volume which was published in Germany almost a century ago, and which seemed to offer me a way, a structural vade mecum.

I came across it while I was reading as much as I could about those two very early Europeans who had reached out first to see, and then to cross, the ocean that had hitherto existed only in their respective imaginations. The men have become legends: there was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who first sighted its blue gleam below him from Darién in September 1513; and there was Ferdinand Magellan, who seven years later made transit across Patagonia through the strait that now bears his name, entered the Pacific, named it mare Pacifico, and then sailed clear across it into history (and, as it happens, to his own unanticipated and violent death).

Not surprisingly, the stories of both men have been told by many. As I was doing my own reading I came quite by chance and in quick succession across two accounts, both by the same author, that seemed possessed of a certain luminous quality, and were markedly different from all the others in scope, in scale, and in style. Both were by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig—a 1920s writer mostly forgotten now, though his appearance as “The Author” in Wes Anderson’s 2014 movie The Grand Budapest Hotel has lately revived his memory, somewhat.

It was Zweig’s succinct and poetic account of Balboa that I found particularly alluring. It was contained in a book, published in 1927, that has perhaps suffered under more titles than any book deserves. In its original German it was Sternstunden des Menschheit, or Great Moments of Humanity. The first English translation was The Tide of Fortune, and then came Decisive Moments in History, and most recently, Shooting Stars. But whatever the book was called, its essence remains the same: it was a slender collection of ten ruminative essays, each one turned to perfection, about what Zweig considered to be seminal moments in the tide of human experience.

The writer chose his subjects eccentrically, but always interestingly. Balboa’s expedition across the isthmus was first; the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo another; Scott’s failed expedition to the South Pole, a third. He then wrote of Handel’s composing The Messiah, of the fall of Byzantium, the death of Cicero and the writing of “La Marseillaise.” He told also an extraordinary version of the saga of Lenin and the sealed train that had taken him through war-torn Europe to Finland Station, to stage his Russian Revolution. The result is a tumbling mélange of a book, quite charming and, even if perhaps lacking in academic rigor, one that quite transfixed me.

So after many attempts to corral the wealth of material about the Pacific Ocean into one manageable whole, I chose for this account to attempt to ape the master, to create a modified version of Stefan Zweig’s approach of almost a century ago. I decided I would sift through the events of the modern Pacific to try to find my own galaxy of shooting stars—of truly pivotal moments in the story of this vast acreage of ocean. I would choose a scattering of happenings each of which, to me at least, seemed to betoken some greater trend, and which might tell in microcosm a larger truth about the Pacific than the moments themselves suggest.

From a mass of such occurrences I could distill and weed and cull, and then decide which of the remainder truly said something significant about how the ocean, and the perception of the ocean, was developing and perhaps evolving: which events, in other words, indicated the direction in which the Pacific was shifting, as it moved to play its defining role in the future of the world.

So I made a list. I scoured newspapers and history books and databases and academic papers, and came up with some hundreds of more or less notable occurrences between January 1, 1950—a date chosen for a reason I will explain later—and the time I began to write this book, in the summer of 2014.

The cutting room floor was eventually to be buried under a blizzard of possibilities. I was fascinated, for instance, by the postwar reincorporation of the Japanese into the mainstream of Pacific life, and thought that stories from the aftermath of the notorious internment of Japanese American citizens might illustrate their welcome return to the world stage. I thought, more trivially, of the opening of a slew of Pacific Disneylands, first in Anaheim in 1955, then in Tokyo in 1983, and in Hong Kong in 2005, and wondered about the spread of America’s cultural impress on the people around and within the ocean. I thought about the lasting social consequences of the staging of Olympic Games in such Pacific cities as Melbourne, Tokyo, and Seoul. I wondered similarly about the social effects of invention of the Boeing 747-400, a plane made on the Pacific coast, an aircraft built specially to cross the entire ocean without refueling, in one bound.

The list went on and on. What of the significance of pollution—so poignantly symbolized by the Minamata disease that was identified in May 1956? What of the impact of the first television service that began in Australia, in September, four months later? Of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles that erupted in 1965? The My Lai Massacre that took place in Vietnam in March 1968, and the shooting of Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 6 of that same year? The time when more than seven hundred members of the Unification Church were married in a ceremony in Seoul in 1970, and when twenty-six members of the Heaven’s Gate cult neatly killed themselves in San Diego in 1997? What followed on from Richard Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972—the first by an American president—and from Queen Elizabeth’s visit later on, in 1986? What of the consequences of the Chilean Communist Party’s formation in 1979? Or the disappearance of the “Dingo Baby” near Ayers Rock in Australia in 1980? The time when President Marcos was overthrown in the Philippines in 1985? The death of the last Hawaiian black-faced honeycreeper in 2004? News that a bridge had been built over the Eastern Bosphorus in Vladivostok in 2012? Or the curious time when Tonga, in 2014, signed a military agreement with the Nevada National Guard?

Rich though all this might be, there was still richer fare to consider. In the end, I chose just ten singular events, some of them portentous, some more trivial, but each appearing to me to herald some kind of trend. They showed, and in chronological order, a series of developments that, when accumulated as one, depicted an image, perhaps more pointillist than precise, of the ocean as it had arranged itself in the past sixty-five years; and that also hinted at the way the ocean might evolve through the near future. The wisdom or otherwise of these choices is what, of course, will determine whether this portrait of the ocean is judged to be fair and right. Naturally I hope it is considered so.

I decided to begin with the acceptance of a singular and distasteful reality: that the Pacific, despite what Ferdinand Magellan experienced when he first sailed into it, is anything but a pacific ocean; it is in fact, and more than any other, an atomic ocean. More dangerous than that, it is the ocean where most of the world’s thermonuclear weapons have been tested, and has been ever since the beginning of the story, in January 1950. The story of Bikini and of the hydrogen bombs then tested there allows for neither praise nor admiration. At the same time, though, it serves as a reminder of the terrible toll atomic weaponry has already exacted on humankind—mostly to innocent Japanese civilians, of course—and so is part of the ocean’s story, helping to define its past, present, and future.

Then, in a more cheerful vein, I chose the invention, four years later, of the transistor radio and the subsequent formation of the Sony Corporation. It seemed to me that these and other connected events of the early 1950s not only illustrated the energy, tenacity, and technical brilliance of the postwar Japanese, but also demonstrated the beginning of a pattern of eastbound transpacific trade that still dominates the ocean’s story to this day. Maybe the early Japanese technicians were eventually to be overtaken in some fields by the Koreans, and the Koreans in turn by the Chinese, but the endless procession of heavily laden cargo ships passing eastbound, inbound, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge is testament to a trend that was started by Japan, and to the long-ago makings of a tiny wireless set that would fit inside a cunningly enlarged shirt pocket.

Surfing—not so trivial as it may initially seem, just like the charmingly slight American film that made it popular in what would shortly become the biggest of all surfing markets—is a gift from the Polynesian Pacific that is today worth billions. This ancient, graceful pastime of wave gliding, once so central to the aristocracies of Hawaii and Tahiti, deserves proper consideration—in the same way that football and cricket must not be overlooked elsewhere—to help fathom the ocean in which it was born, and the peoples who gave it birth.

I have traveled in North Korea several times, and in 1987 was sorely frustrated in an attempt to walk the entire length of the peninsula when, after three hundred miles, my way forward was firmly blocked by frontier fences and a pair of burly American sentries. Once, and very briefly, I harbored some small secret sympathy for a North Korean regime that in its earliest days was guided by an intense desire to follow its own path to economic and cultural independence; now the regime has become such a byword for domestic cruelty and international insanity that it can hardly be ignored. Its role as perpetual irritant is an unattractive aspect of today’s Pacific, but a crucial one.

The reincorporation of Japan and the other native Pacific peoples—of American Indians, Australian aboriginals, Maori, and Pacific Islanders—into the running of their ocean’s affairs has been matched, in more recent years, by the steady, though seldom peaceable, withdrawal of colonial powers from the region. To begin this chapter, I chose one symbolic event, the sabotage and fatal fire on a British ocean liner in the waters of a British Pacific colony, to allow me to tell the stories of a number of colonists’ retreat: the French from Indochina; the Americans from Vietnam; the withdrawal elsewhere of the Dutch and the Portuguese; and from everywhere remaining, the otherwise near-ubiquitous British. The Pacific peoples are more firmly on their own at last, as they should have been for centuries past.

Except, maybe, in Australia. The role that this one continental country will play in the future remains a mystery to most—in Australia as among its millions of neighbors. Australia is an overwhelmingly non-Pacific nation on the western edge of the ocean: Does it fit? Can it fit? Will it exert a regional force for good, in the short term or the long term, or ever?

Then there are the more technical considerations: of the Pacific as the fons et origo of the world’s weather patterns; of the Pacific as the bellwether of the environmental dangers the planet as a whole must necessarily confront; of the Pacific as the epicenter of most of the world’s lethally dangerous tectonic mayhem; and in part as a consequence of that, of the Pacific as the source of almost unimaginably vast undersea resources, which the world can plunder or preserve as it wills.

Then, most crucially of all, there is China—the world’s most populous nation, fast ascending to the ladder tops, to the summits, of almost every measurable feature of modern humankind. This proud and ancient and imperturbable nation lies on the far side of the Pacific from America, the most powerful nation the world has ever known; it is easy to imagine that both are now glissading toward a rivalry and a possible confrontation that could easily end less than well for either party.

And then there is the sea itself, the fathomless expanse of vastness—of Robinson Jeffers’s “staring unsleeping Eye of the earth”—which the islanders know and care for, even if so many outsiders manifestly do not. The Pacific Ocean—now almost freed from its former European control, yet brimming with new disputes, a region that is tectonically and meteorologically dangerous—is in serious environmental peril, is ringed with nations undergoing immense internal change, is unimaginably busy with commerce, has come to be at the forefront of science and self-discovery, but is at the same time also peopled by many clinging tenaciously to its old ways, as well as by civilizations, East and West, that seem steadily to be beginning to understand one another, and all this is occurring in a setting of philosophical and spiritual renewal and among fantastic yet threatened beauty.

It is the most turbulent ocean in the world, and an expanse of sea that should be central to all our thoughts. Is the ocean to be a place of coming war? Is it to be our eventual savior, a place so beautiful and fragile that its sheer vastness will one day demand that we pause in our careless and foolish behavior in the rest of the world? Or will it be something in between: a pillar of hope and example and good sense poised between East and West, on which, for good or ill, we construct humanity’s future?

The book that follows is an account of this modern Pacific, the story of the development of the ocean in the sixty-five tumultuous years that began on January 1, 1950.

1 Statistics bear out the easily forgotten reality that whites—haoli, in the vernacular, a word uttered with some disdain—are a minority on the Hawaiian Islands. Their 336,000 (in 2010) are matched by almost half a million from countries around or within the Pacific Ocean, including 200,000 Filipinos and 185,000 Japanese. Eighty thousand only are native Hawaiians.

2 Tsingtao beer, its brewery long overseen by a German brewmaster, remains the most visible reminder of the kaiser’s historic influence in eastern China. While the beer retains the old Wade-Giles transliteration of its name, the city itself is now restyled Qingdao.

3 There can be few more impressive examples of German engineering than this eighteen-thousand-ton, thirty-two-knot (and exceptionally beautiful) warship, since she survived not only innumerable strikes by RAF bombers during the war, but also two nuclear tests in the Bikini atoll lagoon, where she was placed as a target for one air-dropped bomb and for a massive underwater weapon called Helen of Bikini. Still floating after the second test, but fiercely radioactive—all her crew would have died—she was towed to Kwajalein, developed a leak, and capsized, her enormous guns falling out of their barbettes and onto the seafloor. One of her screws has now been placed in a museum; the others remain visible at low tide. Prinz Eugen will never be salvaged, however, since her steel is still lethally contaminated.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: ON CARBON

New Year’s Day 1950 was a Sunday, and by and large, as the clocks ticked and chimed and boomed their way into the first year of the century’s fifth decade, the world seemed to have settled into a fairly stable place, with memories of the Second World War starting to fade, and scant suggestion of any of the turmoil soon to come.

The Japanese, still busily repairing their country and still occupied by American forces, had some small reason for good cheer that day, with the ending of their custom of declaring children to be one year old at birth and of everyone adding a year to his or her age each January 1. This change meant that all eighty million Japanese would not become numerically older on this day: a forty-year-old would wait until his next actual birthday before becoming forty-one. For a brief while that morning, all Japanese were said to have suddenly felt younger.

There was smaller cheer for New Yorkers. The canned music that had flooded the concourse of Grand Central Terminal for the previous three months, and that had whipped silence-loving commuters into a mutinous fury, was turned off, and forever. Riders on the New York Central regained their sanity; the calm of the everyday hubbub was resumed. For a while, some relieved New Yorkers were said to feel suddenly younger, too.

And in England, a teapot lid maker named Elizabeth Hulme and a man from Lancashire named James Jackson, whose job was listed as “mule spinner,” said to be a textile-related occupation, were each given awards for the contributions they had made to these crafts, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In Britain nothing else of great significance occurred, according to the day’s newspaper accounts.

Beyond, in the outside world, most of the men of note then charged with running the world could count on remaining some time yet in power. Truman, Atlee, Stalin, Adenauer, Franco, Tito, Perón—even comparative newcomers such as Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong—were all, for now, lying easy in their beds. There were similarly complacent kings and queens and princes in abundance, from Egypt to Tonga and Kathmandu, together with an emperor in Japan, a shah in Persia, and a grand duchess in Luxembourg, mostly respected, occasionally revered, and all, for now, reigning in comparative comfort.

Yet there were shifts in the wind. The grandest of the world’s monarchies was still England’s, with the incumbent, King George VI, still technically able to say that he reigned over a quarter of the world’s population, with his empire still in rude good health. Except that just three weeks into the New Year, his hold on one of those dominions would weaken when, as expected, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed India to be a republic. And farther still around the world, a little-known Vietnamese Communist named Ho Chi Minh would, at the year’s beginning, commence a series of negotiations with China and the Soviet Union that would eventually ensure that the French would be turfed wholesale out of Indochina, and would leave Asia forever.

But these small hints aside, if cracks were beginning to appear in the settled order of the world, they were only hairline, visible to few, and troubling to almost no one.

Except, that is, for one development that is still marked indelibly on that New Year’s Day of 1950, and that came to be regarded in a pair of ways: as being, first, of the gravest moment and, second, of lasting, perhaps even everlasting, scientific significance.

Three months previously, on September 3, 1949, a Geiger counter mounted in the nose of an American B-29 weather-monitoring plane that was flying reconnaissance missions in the western Pacific between Yokota in Japan and Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, began to chatter furiously. Puzzled technicians swarmed to examine the records and soon determined that atomic radiation seemed to be pouring into the sky, from somewhere.

Two days later a second plane, based in Guam, flew over the same route and picked up signs of even more radioactivity: barium, cesium, and molybdenum fission isotopes were found in the upper atmosphere, signatures that suggested that either there had been a nuclear accident somewhere to the east of the plane’s track or someone had exploded an atomic weapon.

It turned out to be the latter. An atomic bomb known in Russia as First Lightning and elsewhere, eventually, as Joe 1, had been exploded by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union five days before, in an experiment conducted at a hitherto unknown and subsequently top-secret nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan. The successful exploding of the bomb, which was modeled on, looked uncannily like, and was in fact slightly more powerful than the plutonium weapon dropped by the Americans four years previously over Nagasaki, stunned the outside world. Few Americans and few of their allies thought the Soviets would be able to catch up with the United States in terms of nuclear capability for many more years. But as was discovered a decade later, Moscow had a spy in Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs; and though debate continues to this day about how valuable the information was that this brilliant young Briton passed to the Soviets, it is generally agreed that, perhaps more than any other spy before or since, Klaus Fuchs changed world history.

For by allowing the Soviet Union to construct nuclear weapons, and ultimately to make hydrogen bombs and all the other terrible paraphernalia of the nuclear age, his gift of secrets permitted the Cold War between East and West officially to commence—with the consequence that for the next half century, and perhaps for longer still, the planet lived in the shadow of the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation.

There was another consequence of this development, however—that to this day is of great significance to the scientific community and, as it happens, has some bearing on the structure of this book. It concerns radioactive pollution.

The explosion in the atmosphere over the coming Cold War years of hundreds upon hundreds of atomic bombs—big and small; fission and fusion; to be launched by missiles or dropped by aircraft or fired from guns; made by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, or perhaps Iran—would contribute to the pollution of the earth’s atmosphere by myriad poisonous and radioactive decay products. Until atmospheric testing was banned in 1963, the world was living under a blanket of increasingly radio-polluted air, with effects that would be likely to last for thousands of years.

Crucially, one of the many products created by atomic explosions is the unstable radioactive isotope of carbon known as carbon-14.

This isotope is already naturally present in the world (its presence caused by cosmic ray bombardment), in extremely tiny but measurable amounts. Compared with the amount of normal, nonradioactive carbon-12 in the air, about one part in a trillion is carbon-14.

Plants absorb this carbon during photosynthesis, and animals that consume the plants absorb it, too. So while an animal or a plant is alive, its cells contain both carbon-12 and carbon-14, and in the same ratio as exists in the atmosphere.

However, once the plant or animal dies, its cells stop absorbing carbon—and at that precise moment, the ratio of the two isotopes begins to change, for the simple reason that carbon-14 is unstable, and begins to decay. The isotope has a half-life of 5,730 years, meaning that after that period, half of it will have vanished. After another 5,730 years, half of what remains will have disappeared, and so on and so on. And, it is important to note, the changing ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in the dead animal or plant can be very accurately measured.

What followed this discovery—first made in 1946 by a University of Chicago chemist named Willard Libby, who would win the Nobel Prize for it—was the realization that by measuring the amount of carbon-14 remaining in a dead creature or plant, it should be possible to date, and with some precision, just when that plant or animal died. Thus was born the technique of carbon dating, and it has been in use ever since, a vital tool of archaeologists and geologists in determining the age of found organic materials.

The technique requires one constant, though: for any age calculation to be accurate, the baseline ratio of naturally occurring carbon-12 and carbon-14 has to be a real baseline—it must, in other words, stay the same as it always has been. The figure accepted by Libby and his colleagues and used as the base was the aforementioned one to a trillion: one atom of carbon-14 to one trillion atoms of carbon-12. With that figure firmly in place, the age calculations could be made, and reliably.

But then came the unexpected. As soon as the testing of atomic bombs began in earnest in the 1950s, that baseline figure suddenly began to change. The bombs created immense mushroom clouds of lethal chemistry. They thrust, among other things, a sizable amount of extra carbon-14 into the atmosphere, upsetting the baseline figure and causing the dating calculations suddenly to go awry.

Radiochemists around the world monitored the situation, and as the levels of new carbon kept increasing, test by test, year by year, they kept on writing algorithms to correct the distortions caused by the bombs. But as more and more bombs produced more and more unstable carbon, the situation was fast becoming complicated, irritating; and for a world that placed value on near-absolute precision, it threatened to render age determinations so inaccurate as to be useless.

To address this problem, a decision was reached that would unscramble matters. A date was chosen before which radiocarbon dating could be regarded as accurate, because the baseline was constant. Radiocarbon results that were achieved after that selected date would continue to be regarded with suspicion.

And the date selected—of what is now known as the start of the standard reference year, or the Index Year—was January 1, 1950. Before January 1950 the atmosphere was radiochemically pure. After January 1950 it was sullied, fouled by bomb-created isotopes. So this date, this otherwise unexceptional Sunday when Ho Chi Minh began his campaign in Vietnam, when the Japanese started recalculating how old they were, the day the music died in Grand Central Terminal, would become for scientists a new Year Zero.

The choice of the date was scientifically elegant, logical, and precise. And it would soon spread beyond the world of science alone. For it would have an impact on the entire question of what was meant by the use of the simple word ago.

Science had until this point never been involved in the creation of human calendars. The fact that these words are being written in the year 2015 has to do, not at all with science, but with the decidedly nonscientific and imprecise concepts of myth, faith, and belief. For, in refining the meaning of ago, most of the Western world would employ the initials BC and AD. It was said that something occurred a number of years “before Christ,” or in the Year of the Lord, “Anno Domini,” as in AD 2015.

But this was, of course, contentious to non-Westerners, to nonbelievers. It was a kind of notation that would fall foul of those for whom Jesus Christ meant little; and so in recent times other circumlocutions were offered to help soothe hurt feelings. There was BCE, most commonly, which referred to “before Christian Era” or, for the secular-minded, “before Common Era.”

Yet even this was still a fudge, still woefully imprecise, still essentially based on myth. And BCE did not appeal to scientists, especially once carbon dating and other, more precise atomic dating techniques had been discovered. So they eventually came up with the idea of using the initials BP, “before present.” The Wisconsin ice age, for instance, had its culmination fifty thousand years BP.

All that the acceptance of this new notation required was an agreement on just when was present? So, in the early 1960s, a pair of radiochemists came up with an answer. They suggested the use of the same standard reference year, the Year Zero moment of January 1, 1950.

Their suggestion seemed logical, neat, appropriate. Everyone, more or less, agreed. So that date is now accepted well-nigh universally among scientists for the ephemeral concept that is fleetingly known as the present. And the present begins at the start of January 1950.

And it seemed to me also the ideal date to use for beginning a description of the modern Pacific Ocean.

Other dates were briefly beguiling, to be sure. It could be argued that the new Pacific truly began its unfolding at the end of the Second World War—so I could have chosen the date of the Japanese surrender, September 2, 1945. Or else I could have selected Mao Zedong’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a momentous and solemn occasion that was staged on October 1, 1949, and that would eventually turn the Pacific into a cauldron of contention. I briefly also thought of using the date of the detonation of America’s most powerful hydrogen bomb, the so-called Castle Bravo test of March 1, 1954, a moment of some symbolism.

Yet I kept coming back to the idea of the “beginning of present,” which just seemed to have an elegant simplicity about it. The date has a strict scientific neutrality to it. It is an agnostic moment, agreed to and understood by all. And for this book, it turned out to have an added geographical bonus, a coincidence.

For nearly all the carbon-14 pollution that was sent up into the skies and that caused the scientific community to create the concept of “present” and “before present” in the first place came as the result of explosions that occurred in the Pacific. Bombs that went off in Bikini and Enewetak, Christmas Island and Woomera, Semipalatinsk and Lop Nor, Mururoa and Fangataufa, all in or around the ocean, were the prime pollutants, the original cause of the problem.

This made it all the more appropriate, it seemed to me, to choose that moment—the hinge, the dividing line, between purity and impurity—as the start line for this account. The story of the ocean of tomorrow, in other words, begins at the start of the present.

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