Jocelyn Linnekin

A Nuclear Pacific

The nuclear history of the Pacific begins with two central facts. The test sites were on Islands remote from Western population, and Islanders were politically subordinated to the nuclear powers. The American tests contaminated and destroyed land, and left physical injury and psychological disturbance among groups of Marshall Islanders whose lives have revolved around the bomb since the 1940s. Towards the end of the war in the Pacific, the Americans expelled Japan from the scattered islands of Micronesia in a series of bloody battles. The United States exploded sixty-six nuclear weapons in the northern Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, including the most powerful and contaminating bombs in the history of American testing. As in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, colonialism and nuclear testing have gone together in French Polynesia. The Conference for a Nuclear-Free Pacific in Fiji in 1975 initiated an organised movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.