Transpacific Nuclearism, Archipelagic Feminism, and Antinuclear Struggles in the Pacific

This paper examines the transpacific nuclear industry of the US and Japan and the decolonization and denuclearization movements that coalesced in response. In one respect, the story echoes familiar themes in Cold War historiography, namely, the circulation of scientific knowledge and peoples as forms of “soft power,” the revival of Japan as an industrial engine in East Asia. Yet there is another dimension of this story, that of a persistent settler colonialism, in which Native lands and peoples rendered as past were mobilized anew for mid-century militarist projects. Places such as the Mariana Islands, Palau, Bataan, and Diné Territory formed the underside of this transpacific economy where uranium mining, nuclear weapons storage and testing, nuclear fuel processing and waste dumping were concentrated. In part one of this paper, I show how Cold War development was made possible through a patchwork of contested Native sovereignties, encompassing various colonial geographies that US and Japanese officials conjured as co-dependent spaces for resource extraction and other “wastelanding” purposes. In part two, I focus on the activism that emerged in response to Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste around the Mariana Islands in the early 1980s. Through a reading of pamphlets and literature of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific and newspapers such as Micronesia Support Committee Bulletin, I show how activists pursued a praxis of what Ayano Ginoza calls “archipelagic feminisms” and articulated the interlocking struggles against colonialism, nuclearism, environmental destruction, and gendered violence in and across the Pacific.