Securing the American Family in the Marshall Islands: Domestic Containment on Kwajalein and U.S. Cold War Imperialism

Four months after his speech outlining the doctrine of Cold War containment, President Truman signed the Trusteeship Agreement taking control of Japan’s former colonies in Micronesia in July 1947. The U.N. agreement sanctioned a contradictory mission for the U.S. to support the region's inhabitants towards self-determination while simultaneously using their islands for U.S. national security. Exemplifying which of these missions would take priority during the Cold War, Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls was designated a key missile testing range in 1959. During the early 1960s, American scientists and engineers migrated to Kwajalein to analyze data on intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base. They relocated their families to this island in the Central Pacific, which emerged to house sophisticated radars and missile launch pads alongside small town suburban amenities. The army replicated a U.S. suburban landscape on Kwajalein to create a familiar domestic space that would help recruit the nation’s top scientists and engineers to relocate their families so far from home. American family life on Kwajalein was supported by Marshallese service workers who were excluded from living on Kwajalein in 1951. Thereafter, this indigenous workforce commuted daily to Kwajalein from the nearby island of Ebeye to help maintain a portrait of American domesticity on Kwajalein. Housing the military’s segregated service sector and those Marshallese the army displaced for missile testing purposes, Ebeye’s crumbling infrastructure under U.S. colonial neglect posed a portrait of insecurity contrasting Kwajalein’s image of domestic containment.

This paper examines the discourse of national security informing U.S. imperial expansion through Micronesia during the Cold War and the local manifestations of this discourse on Kwajalein Island. I explore how Americans and Marshallese supporting this broader Cold War mission negotiated dual landscapes of security and insecurity on the ground (or coral) in the Marshall Islands.