COLUMN ONE : Paradise Lost: Now It’s a Dump : No longer idyllic, the Marshall Islands may take U.S. garbage for a fee. Squalor, disease and birth defects are rife.

When government officials decided last summer to open the first garbage dump in this tiny mid-Pacific nation, residents argued bitterly over where to put the two-acre eyesore. The only surprise was why.

“Everybody wanted it on their land,” recalled Ronald Cannarella, a local environmental official. “It was an incredible fight.”

The reason is that trash means landfill. And land, or the lack thereof, is crucial in a country that occupies only 70 square miles on hundreds of tiny coral atolls and islands scattered over half a million square miles of ocean.

Most Marshalls are just sand and palm trees, so low to the crashing surf that much of the country literally disappears at high tide. Rising seas from a warming atmosphere, the so-called “greenhouse effect,” could someday cover the rest.

All of which helps explain why the leaders of this dirt-poor country 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii now are considering a far more daunting dump: 20 square miles of lagoons filled with millions of tons of trash imported from California and Washington.

President Amata Kabua and the Parliament have tentatively endorsed a small Seattle-based company’s proposal to pay millions to the Marshalls to build one of the world’s biggest trash heaps. They also backed another offer, later withdrawn, to import and store high-level U.S. nuclear waste.

“We want to be part of a solution to a U.S. problem,” explained J. B. Kabua, who is the president’s son, secretary of foreign affairs and head of environmental protection. “Bilaterally, the U.S., they’ll show us more respect. They’ll say, ‘These people are stupid, but they’re determined.’ ”

If such schemes sound surprising, they would only be America’s latest legacy to the Marshall Islands after more than 40 years of U.S. dominance, first as U.N. trustee and now as chief financial backer.

Far from the idyllic isles seen in travel brochures, the Marshall Islands today are struggling with a grim reality. Doctors see infant malnutrition usually associated with Ethiopia. Half the population of 43,000 is under age 15. And more than half those already eligible to attend public high schools cannot: There is no room.

Here on Majuro, the capital and commercial center, most residents live 10 to a room in dilapidated shanties. Few have toilets or electricity. Children play beside rotting garbage and rusting car wrecks, while flies swarm over soiled diapers on the beach. There is no real agriculture or industry.

Several hundred miles away, local workers for the U.S. military live on a squalid, overcrowded island called the “Slum of the Pacific.” And thousands of Marshallese suffered cancer, chromosome damage, birth defects and other medical problems from U.S. nuclear bomb tests, including the largest hydogen bomb ever exploded above ground.

“It’s shameful,” said a former Peace Corps worker and longtime resident who asked not to be identified by name. “As an American, I’m ashamed of what we’ve done.”

“This place was the absolute in naivete and innocence when we arrived,” he added sadly. “It was ours. It could have been a model to the Third World. It’s a paradise lost.”

The United States arrived in force in February, 1944, when Marines waded ashore to begin beating the Japanese back across the Pacific. Three years later, the United States took formal charge of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands under U.N. auspices. Military control was so strict that non-Marshallese civilians were barred until the mid-1960s.

The reason was nuclear weapons. From 1946 until 1958, the United States detonated 66 atomic bombs at Bikini and Eniwetok atolls, the most massive atmospheric testing program in history.

Hundreds of islanders suffered severe burns, hair loss and vomiting. On Rongelap, which was covered by snowy clouds of radioactive coral dust after the 15-megaton “Bravo” hydrogen bomb blast on Bikini in 1954, doctors found that 96% of children under 10 suffered thyroid abnormalities. Most required surgery.

Long-Term Effects

But a recent government review of 23 medical studies indicates that devastating long-term effects are still showing up.

A 1986 study showed that 91% of 314 Marshallese tested had radiation-induced blood disorders. More than half those tested in another study had chromosome damage. Other researchers reported vastly increased rates of genital and thyroid cancer, leukemia and cataracts. One report found double the normal rates of stillborns and miscarriages, including strange, spineless fetuses.

“I had four cases where my newborn babies lived for some hours and then died,” Almira Matayoshi, a Rongelap native, testified last August. “One time, I gave birth to a baby without any bones. I did not have problems like this before the bomb.”

“People here call them ‘jelly babies,’ ” explained Wayne Briscoe, lawyer for the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which conducted the hearing.

The tribunal was established in June, 1988, after Congress agreed to pay $150 million into a trust fund to settle all claims from the tests. So far, more than 3,000 Marshallese have applied for compensation. About 5,000 may be eligible, Briscoe said.

The tribunal has identified 13 forms of cancer that automatically draw compensation. Other money will go for medical studies and to landowners.

“In Bikini and Eniwetok, a number of islands were completely vaporized,” Briscoe explained. “Other islands can’t be returned to for thousands of years.”

Plutonium-contaminated topsoil and debris was buried under an 18-inch-thick concrete dome on Runit Island in Eniwetok. “It’s off-limits for 50,000 years,” Briscoe said. “But the concrete will only last 300.”

Despite that, President Kabua contacted Congress early last year and offered to store more high-level U.S. nuclear waste. Although Kabua later withdrew the offer, Kessai H. Note, Speaker of the Nitijela, the nation’s Parliament, said the proposal had merit since the United States might be forced to upgrade the Runit storage site.

“A lot of atolls are already contaminated,” Note said. “A couple more containers of nuclear waste won’t make much difference.”

Deadly Chemical

Other officials suggested luring tourists to dive on scores of Japanese and U.S. ships sunk in Bikini’s lagoon in the war and the nuclear tests. The U.S. Park Service is helping prepare maps, but tourists may not exactly flock to islands where deadly cesium 137 contaminates even the coconut trees.

Self-governing since 1986, the Marshall Island government still depends on the United States for nearly two-thirds its budget, mostly from rent and other payments for the missile-testing facility on Kwajalein Atoll.

Still off-limits to civilians, Kwajalein is described by visitors as a transplanted American suburb, with neat bungalows, well-tended gardens, movie theaters and three baseball diamonds planted between huge radar dishes, missile silos and tracking stations. About 3,000 Americans, mostly contract workers, live on the island.

About twice a month, U.S. officials say, an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile is test fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, and splashes into Kwajalein’s 900-square mile turquoise lagoon.

The base also directs “Star Wars” tests of anti-ballistic missiles and lasers.

But three miles away, the Marshallese who work on the base, and thousands of others, live on the most crowded island in the Pacific. Long called the “Slum of the Pacific,” Ebeye island has 9,000 people crammed in tiny tin-roofed shanties and plywood lean-tos, all on a treeless island one mile long and 600 feet wide.

“Shacks, wall-to-wall, wave-to-wave,” said a Canadian who runs one of the few stores on Ebeye. “It’s an overcrowded slum.”

Like most slums, alcoholism, suicide, teen-age pregnancy and gangs have proliferated. Still, conditions improved after a tropical storm destroyed hundreds of homes in early 1988. A U.S. development program built the first sidewalks, paved roads, water desalination plant and electric generator.

If Ebeye has improved, residents in the capital and commercial center on Majuro, actually a 30-mile-long string of narrow islands linked by bridges, are still waiting.

So many people rely on imported American “junk” foods, rather than local fish or fruit, that doctors estimate that one-third of the adults suffer from diabetes. One American resident recalled seeing a group of workers sit down for lunch recently: “a bag of doughnuts and a tub of margarine.”

“You see a lot of babies being fed iced tea out of bottles, or Kool-Aid, or cheese balls,” he said.

In Majuro Hospital, Dr. Jan Riemers sees two to four infants “on any given day” hospitalized for kwashiorkor or marasmus, severe protein-calorie malnutrition that produces the spindly, starved bodies usually seen in famines. Other children suffer night blindness from Vitamin A deficiency.

“I see one child a month die of malnutrition,” said Dr. Riemers, a North Dakota native who has lived here for three years.

Some mothers simply mix weak formula with water, rather than breast feed.

“Basically, they feed them white water,” Dr. Riemers said, starting to cry. “I see kids who die of malnutrition wearing $2 Pampers. It’s outrageous.”

In 1988, after repeated epidemics, health officials finally began the first campaign to inoculate children against tetanus, diphtheria, polio and measles. But typhoid and dengue fever continue to rage. And doctors confirmed at least 700 cases of syphilis last year, including three out of six infants born at Majuro Hospital one day in November.

There is also a less visible toll.

“Traditionally, this place was not violent,” Dr. Riemers said. “Now I see a lot more knifings, shootings, beatings. I have a lot more women come in and say their husbands beat them.”

Such conflict is new. Traditionally, Marshallese avoid confrontation, or challenging clan chieftains.

“Think of survival on a small atoll,” explained Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal. “It’s like being on a tiny boat. There had to be ways of avoiding conflict. Otherwise everything would collapse.”

Trash From L.A.

Thus, there was no local outcry when Parliament authorized President Kabua last March to negotiate a deal with Admiralty Pacific Inc. pending feasibility studies. The newly created company had proposed paying $56 million a year to import nontoxic trash from Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Spokane, Wash., starting this June.

But no studies have yet begun, and the status of the proposal is somewhat unclear. In a telephone interview from Seattle, Admiralty President James A. Thompson said the project is “going fine.”

“It absolutely is not dead,” Thompson said.

But Daniel R. Fleming, former Admiralty executive vice president, insisted in an interview from Oakland that the project is “a dead issue.” He said he and key investors quit Admiralty last July 7 after Thompson secretly proposed shipping nuclear waste as well.

“It got real messy,” he said. “People weren’t being honest.”

Fleming said the proposal lacked proper safeguards to prevent dumping toxic or hazardous waste. Also, he said, the plan to ship 17 million tons of trash was largely rubbish anyway. “To do that, you’d never have an Admiralty ship out of sight from one another across the Pacific,” he said.

Thompson denies those allegations, and says he fired Fleming for spreading false reports. “We’ve got a super project under way,” he said. “We’re not carpetbaggers.”

Back in Majuro, the former Peace Corps worker says the confusion merely confirms his concern.

“You can’t protect these people from the outside world,” he said. “It’s open season on the Marshalls.”