Spatial Production through Pacific Destruction: Narrating the Marshall Islands during the Cold War

Between 1946 and 1958 the United States waged a nuclear testing campaign in the Marshall Islands, detonating 66 bombs in the Micronesian island region. The campaign initiated an international nuclear arms race and contributed significantly to the growth of a U.S. military industrial complex that would see the nation rise to the status of a military empire by the end of the Cold War. By the early 1960s, amidst public concern about radiation impact, the United States signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty and discontinued atmospheric testing. The military quickly shifted focus towards long-range missile testing, locating Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands as the prime target. Since the 1960s the missile installation on Kwajalein has developed into a primary strategic site for U.S. weapons development. While transforming Kwajalein into a missile testing range the U.S. military displaced the island's resident Marshallese population to the neighboring island of Ebeye. Over time, the population on Ebeye grew to include former Kwajalein residents as well as other Marshallese displaced by the expanding range of missile impact in the atoll. This growing urban population on Ebeye comprised the bulk of the service workers on Kwajalein, which simultaneously grew into a militarized suburban community of largely engineers and scientists. This paper will explore the production of space in the Marshall Islands during this era of U.S. weapons testing. My talk will address how space was produced and articulated in these zones of military destruction during the Cold War. How did the production of space in the Marshall Islands as destructible accommodate narrative ruptures when confronted with Marshallese challenges to this narrative during 1960s and 1970s protests? How do articulations of space in the Pacific amidst Cold War imperial practices unsettle militarized perceptions of the Pacific and accommodate alternative narrations by anti-colonial movements?