Johnston Atoll 🏳

The Boston-based brig Sally accidentally grounded on a shoal near the islands, and captain Joseph Pierpont published an account in American newspapers the following year with an accurate description of Johnston and Sand Islands and part of the reef. He neither named nor claimed the atoll, leaving it unappropriated. The episode marks the atoll's entry into Western navigational knowledge.

The ship's journal recorded the discovery of two very low islands with a dangerous reef to their east, fixing their latitude and longitude. The sighting gave the atoll the name it still bears. It provided the first formal cartographic identification of the group.

The Act allowed American citizens to take possession of uninhabited and unclaimed islands containing guano deposits. It became the legal vehicle through which Johnston Atoll was claimed for the United States two years later. The statute underpins the atoll's status as a US insular possession.

Later in the same year the Hawaiian king cancelled the lease he had granted after being informed the atoll had already been claimed by the United States. The withdrawal effectively conceded the contest to American guano interests. Johnston Atoll thereafter drifted into US hands.

In March 1858 William Parker and R. F. Ryan, having chartered the schooner Palestine expressly to find the atoll, located guano deposits and claimed Johnston Atoll for the United States under the Guano Islands Act — the first American assertion of sovereignty over the island. The claim set up an immediate contest with the Kingdom of Hawaii, which annexed the atoll the same year, but it was the United States that went on to mine the atoll's guano deposits until the late 1880s.

Sailing on the Kalama under royal commission, Allen took down the US flag, claimed the atoll for Hawaii, and renamed it 'Kalama', with the smaller island called 'Cornwallis'. The Palestine's captain re-hoisted the American flag on 22 July, and on 27 July the atoll was declared part of Kamehameha IV's domain. Rival claims left sovereignty briefly contested.

Parker's widow sued for title based on her late husband's development work on the atoll. The claim was rejected because Parker had sold his share several years earlier. The ruling closed off private proprietary claims to the atoll.

Operating under the Guano Islands Act, American operators exhausted the phosphate deposits that had prompted the original claim. With its only commercial resource depleted, the atoll's value became strategic and scientific rather than extractive. Later leasing attempts for guano proved uneconomic.

The Royal Navy vessel mapped the atoll to assess its suitability for a submarine telegraph relay. The investigation was abandoned when the cable route was instead run via Fanning Island. Johnston thus missed an early role in Pacific communications.

By this date American possession was consolidated and a US Territorial Government administered the atoll. The arrangement provided the legal framework for subsequent leases of the island for agriculture and guano gathering. It confirmed Johnston's incorporation into the American Pacific.

The lease required planting coconut trees and forbade the use of explosives for fishing and the destruction or capture of birds — early conservation conditions. The lessee soon abandoned the project. On 9 August 1918 the lease was reassigned to a Honolulu-based Japanese fishing company, which built a shed and tramline for guano removal before also giving up as uneconomic.

Sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture and the Bishop Museum, teams aboard USS Whippoorwill and USS Tanager surveyed the atoll from July, using a Douglas DT-2 floatplane for pioneering aerial photography and mapping. A thorough biological survey recorded seabirds, lizards, insects, hermit crabs and abundant reef life. The findings underpinned the atoll's designation as a bird refuge three years later.

The order placed the atoll under the Department of Agriculture as a refuge and breeding ground for native birds, and it was added to the National Wildlife Refuge system that year. It was renamed the Johnston Island National Wildlife Refuge in 1940. Conservation status has coexisted, often uneasily, with military use ever since.

Vascular Plants of Johnston and Wake Islands appeared, based on collections from the 1923 Tanager Expedition. It established the baseline flora record for the atoll. Later introductions, such as Pluchea odorata brought from Honolulu in the 1940s wartime aviation period, could be measured against it.

Because the Department of Agriculture had no ships and the Navy wanted the atoll for strategic reasons, jurisdiction passed to the Navy under the 14th Naval District at Pearl Harbor to establish an air station, while the Interior Department retained the bird refuge. This began seventy years of continuous US military control. It transformed a remote seabird island into a forward Pacific base.

Patrol Wing Two carried out minor construction in 1935, and in 1936 the Navy began the first of many works to expand the land area, erecting buildings and a boat landing on Sand Island and blasting coral for a 3,600-foot seaplane landing. Seaplane squadrons flew from Hawaii to Johnston from November 1935. These works started the physical remaking of the atoll.

Work created three dredged seaplane landings, a parking area linked by a 2,000-foot causeway, barracks for 400 men, a mess hall, underground hospital, radio station, water tanks and a 100-foot control tower. A further ten acres of parking was added in December 1943. The base gave the United States a patrol-aviation node between Hawaii and the central Pacific.

Construction of a 4,000-by-500-foot runway with barracks, mess halls, cold storage, an underground hospital, a fresh-water plant and fuel storage began by September and was finished by 7 December 1941. In December 1943 the 99th Naval Construction Battalion lengthened it to 6,000 feet. The airfield made the atoll a key trans-Pacific staging point.

The order established a defensive sea area out to the three-mile limit and an accompanying Naval Airspace Reservation, barring all but authorised US government ships and aircraft. It sealed the atoll off from civilian access on the eve of the Pacific war. The restrictions defined access to Johnston for decades.

USS Indianapolis was unloading marines, civilians and stores at the atoll when Japan struck Pearl Harbor on 7 December. On 15 December a submarine that had taken part in that attack shelled the atoll from outside the reef, hitting the power station and other buildings without casualties, with further bombardments on 22 and 23 December. Coastal artillery returned fire and drove the submarine off each time.

In July 500 men of the 5th and 10th Naval Construction Battalions took over from civilian contractors, expanding fuel storage and water production and adding facilities. The 5th Battalion left in January 1943 and the 99th arrived that December. Military construction capacity now drove the atoll's growth.

The atoll served as a submarine refuelling base and an aircraft refuelling stop for American bombers crossing the Pacific, including the B-29 Enola Gay, and hosted Air Transport Command aeromedical evacuation flights to Hawaii. After V-J Day in August 1945 the traffic reversed, and by 1947 over 1,300 B-29 and B-24 bombers had passed through en route home. The wartime peak demonstrated the atoll's logistic value.

The USAF took over administration of Johnston Atoll, beginning an era in which the island served nuclear testing, anti-satellite and space-recovery missions. Control later rotated among defence agencies before returning to the Air Force in 1999. The Air Force mission finally ended in 2004.

A five-year permit granted to the Treasury in January 1957 allowed the Coast Guard to operate a Long Range Aid to Navigation transmitter, and the LORAN-A station was commissioned that November, transmitting around the clock from 1958. The new rate between Johnston and French Frigate Shoals gave far better position fixing on the Oahu–Midway shipping lanes. It made the atoll part of Pacific navigation infrastructure.

During Operation Hardtack in 1958 administration of the atoll passed to the Commander of Joint Task Force 7 between April and August, and two 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs, Teak and Orange, were lofted by rocket to high altitude on 1 and 12 August. Johnston Island also became the launch site for 124 sounding rockets reaching up to 1,158 kilometres. The atoll served as a national high-altitude and space nuclear test site through 1962.

The original LORAN-A station on Johnston Island ceased operations on 30 June 1961 as a new station on Sand Island began transmitting from a 180-foot antenna, following December 1959 approval for LORAN A and C sites there. The Johnston Island permit was terminated in 1962. Sand Island then carried the navigation mission for three decades.

Following a late-February 1961 decision to use Johnston Island as the SAMOS programme's film capsule descent and recovery zone, work started on four buildings. Radar-equipped JC-130 aircraft based there retrieved parachuting film canisters in mid-air, supporting the covert Corona and Gambit reconnaissance systems. The centre also recovered radioactive data pods from nuclear test missiles.

Eight PGM-17 Thor missiles were fired as part of Operation Dominic, producing four successful high-altitude detonations — Starfish Prime, Checkmate, Bluegill Triple Prime and Kingfish — plus the atmospheric shot Tightrope on 3 November, the final American atmospheric nuclear test. Starfish Prime, a 1.4-megaton burst at 400 kilometres on 9 July, generated auroras visible in Hawaii, disrupted Hawaiian power and communications by electromagnetic pulse and damaged seven satellites. The series established the atoll as the centre of US high-altitude nuclear experimentation.

The aborted Starfish launch of 20 June was destroyed at about 10.6 kilometres altitude, scattering plutonium-contaminated warhead and missile debris over Johnston and Sand Islands, and the Bluegill Prime destruct on the pad on 25 July demolished the launch complex and spread plutonium by blast, fire and smoke. Bluegill Double Prime misfired and was destroyed on 15 October, adding further pollution. The contamination remained a defining environmental liability for the island.

Johnston Atoll was announced as a planned site for the Air Force's Rocket Cargo programme, which aims to deliver military cargo anywhere in the world within hours using reusable rockets. Two landing pads are to be built supporting up to ten reentry vehicle landings a year over four years. The plan would return the atoll to an experimental military role after two decades of abandonment.

A survey team identified an invasion of Anoplolepis ants threatening vital seabird colonies in 2010, and the 'Crazy Ant Strike Team', camped in a former fallout shelter, cut numbers by 99 per cent by 2013. Complete eradication was confirmed in 2021. The atoll retains the world's largest red-tailed tropicbird colony, with 10,800 nests recorded in 2020.

Using the Antiquities Act, the proclamation protected Johnston Island together with six other Pacific islands, encompassing 696 acres of land and over 800,000 acres of water and containing the existing national wildlife refuge. President Obama's administration extended protection in 2014 to the whole Exclusive Economic Zone by banning commercial fishing. A 2017 review by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended permitting fishing beyond the 12-mile limit.

After an ill Taiwanese fisherman was transferred from the vessel Sheng Yi Tsai No. 166 to the buoy tender Kukui, the Coast Guard swept debris from the Johnston Island runway to land an HC-130 Hercules from Kodiak, Alaska, and fly him to Oahu. The episode illustrated the strategic loss of the decommissioned strip as a mid-Pacific emergency landing option.

Winds exceeding 100 mph passed directly over the deserted atoll while twelve people, including a USAF contractor sampling groundwater contamination, were present. All twelve survived by sheltering in the JOC building, which had been designed to withstand a category IV cyclone. The event demonstrated both the atoll's exposure and the durability of its last structure.

Cleanup and closure of the chemical weapons disposal facility ended in May 2005.

The atoll was listed for auction as a possible residence, vacation getaway or eco-tourism site with several deed restrictions, including the unique zip code 96558 once assigned to Armed Forces in the Pacific. The offering excluded running water, electricity and use of the closed runway. The sale was withdrawn, leaving the atoll in federal conservation hands.

With cleanup finished the USAF moved to periodic monitoring only, though some land remained under Air Force and Defense Threat Reduction Agency control for environmental and plutonium purposes. Administration of the atoll passed to the Pacific Remote Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex, with outer islets and water rights managed cooperatively by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Conservation displaced defence as the atoll's primary function.

Structures including JACADS were removed in 2003 and the runway marked closed; the last flight for official personnel left on 15 June 2004, after which the island was deserted. Only the Joint Operations Center built in 1964, chemical bunkers and a Quonset hut remained, the JOC gutted that year in an asbestos abatement project. Seventy years of continuous military occupation ended.

About 45,000 tons of plutonium-contaminated soil was collected into a fenced 24-acre area on the island's north, and from June to 11 November 2002 the material was buried in a landfill created within the former Thor Launch Emplacement No. 1. A 61-centimetre coral cap sealed the site and permanent markers were placed at each corner. The 'Pluto Yard' remains the repository of the atoll's nuclear legacy.

Every munition held at Johnston Island was demilitarised and its agent incinerated at JACADS, followed by destruction of legacy hazardous waste from storage and cleanup. JACADS itself was demolished by 2003 and the island stripped of remaining infrastructure. The atoll's most dangerous mission ended in verified disposal.

The station closed on 1 July 1992 and all Coast Guard personnel, equipment and property left that month, ending a 35-year navigation mission. Whip antennas were removed and the 625-foot LORAN tower was demolished on 3 December 1992. Satellite navigation had made the system redundant.

A Refuge Manager and a biologist were posted full-time to handle mounting biological, contaminant and resource-conflict issues alongside the military mission. Their presence marked the reassertion of the wildlife refuge purpose. It laid groundwork for civilian management after base closure.

Planning for the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System began in 1981 and construction in 1985, with operational verification testing starting in June 1990. Four testing periods required by Public Law 100–456 ran until March 1993, proving reverse-assembly incineration and environmental compliance, and full-scale operations began in August 1993. JACADS became the prototype for the entire US chemical demilitarisation programme.

Following a 1986 agreement between the two governments, merchant ships left West Germany in October 1990 and arrived at Johnston Island on 6 November. Unloading took nine days but unpacking and storage continued into 1991, and a small number of Second World War era weapons from the Solomon Islands were also stored. The atoll absorbed the residue of the American chemical arsenal in Europe.

The survey documented plutonium and americium contamination left by the 1962 Thor missile aborts, concentrated near the destroyed launch emplacement, the lagoon and Sand Island. The Air Force also began research into removing dioxin from soil contaminated by stored Agent Orange. These studies framed decades of remediation planning.

Herbicide drums were brought from South Vietnam and Gulfport, Mississippi, to the 'Agent Orange Yard' on the island's northwest corner, totalling 1.8 million gallons plus 480,000 gallons later transferred from Gulfport. Leaking barrels and spills during re-drumming contaminated the storage area and lagoon with dioxin. The stock was incinerated aboard the Dutch ship MT Vulcanus during Operation Pacer HO in summer 1977.

In 1971 the US Army made Johnston Atoll a chemical weapons storage site under Operation Red Hat: rockets, mines, artillery projectiles and one-ton bulk containers of Sarin, VX, vomiting agent and mustard gas were shipped from Okinawa with the 267th Chemical Company, amounting to about 6.6 per cent of the US arsenal. They were held in the high-security Red Hat Storage Area of hardened igloos, warehouses and guard towers, making Johnston the Pacific repository of American chemical munitions. The atoll was maintained as a chemical weapons storage and disposal site until late in 2000.

Congress recast Johnston Atoll's military purpose, and the Army leased 41 acres to store chemical munitions withdrawn from Okinawa. In December 1970 the Secretary of Defense also suspended missile launches and non-essential flights on the Surgeon General's advice, immediately ending Air Micronesia's commercial service. The atoll's role shifted from testing to hazardous storage.

In October 1970 the programme was moved to standby status as an economy measure amid the Vietnam War, and the Thors were withdrawn to mothballed storage at Vandenberg. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty's ban on interference with national means of verification barred attacks on Soviet reconnaissance satellites. The Johnston anti-satellite mission ceased on 10 August 1974 and the programme was formally discontinued on 1 April 1975.

The ship surveyed the route and laid 769 nautical miles of cable with 45 repeaters between Makua, Hawaii, and Johnston Island Air Force Base. The link gave the atoll secure high-capacity communications for its nuclear and space missions. A satellite communications ground station was added in 1993 to augment capability.

Over four years the atoll hosted bioweapons trials as elaborate and costly as the first hydrogen bomb tests, involving fleets of ships and barges carrying hundreds of rhesus monkeys. In February to April 1965 the Deseret Test Center's DTC 64-4 'Shady Grove' released live Francisella tularensis, Coxiella burnetii and Bacillus globigii against Army and Navy vessels southwest of the island in nine aerial and four surface trials, then four further aerial trials. The programme made Johnston a central node of US offensive biological research.

The camera station, built along the Sand Island causeway, was functioning by 1965 and contributed to the Space Detection and Tracking System. Operations continued until 1975, when the remaining Air Force stations were contracted out, and the camera was moved to Daegu, South Korea around 1977. GEODSS optical tracking sites rendered the technology obsolete.

Smithsonian bird teams working aboard a US Army tugboat discovered a new tick-borne virus in Ornithodoros capensis ticks in a common noddy nest on Sand Island. Related to influenza, it was designated Johnston Atoll Virus. The find came from survey work preceding Pacific biological warfare trials.

By this date Johnston Island had grown from 46 to 596 acres and Sand Island from 10 to 22 acres, while dredging created the wholly new North (Akau) and East (Hikina) islands of 25 and 18 acres. The engineering transformed a natural atoll into a largely artificial military platform. It also entangled contaminated fill within the new land.

Ratification ended atmospheric testing but the treaty's Safeguard C provision required maintaining Johnston Atoll as a 'ready to test' above-ground nuclear site should atmospheric testing be resumed. The mission preserved facilities and funding at the atoll for three decades. Congress appropriated no funds for Safeguard C in 1993, ending it.

Modified Thor missiles returned from Britain were deployed at Johnston Island as the second operational US nuclear anti-satellite weapon system, a capability kept secret even after deployment. Eighteen further suborbital Thor launches followed between 1964 and 1975, including four satellite-inspection 'Alternate Payload' flights in 1965–1966. The atoll thereby became a front line of the early space arms race.

Troops scrubbed the launch pad and revetments, carted debris away and removed the top layer of coral, dumping contaminated rubbish in the lagoon; over 550 drums were dumped in the ocean between 1964 and 1965. A ramp built from contaminated fill, holding perhaps ten per cent of the test device's plutonium, was later buried in a 25-acre landfill during 1962 dredging. Further dredging in 1963–1964 expanded Johnston Island from 220 to 625 acres and recontaminated additional ground.