Introduction: Resistance and Survival – The Nuclear Era in the Pacific

ABSTRACT

For many decades, historians, researchers, and participants have documented the history of the nuclear era in the Pacific Islands. They have highlighted the legacy of health and environmental impacts of 50 years of nuclear testing by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France between 1946 and 1996. Most official histories of Pacific nuclear testing present extensive technical detail of the development of nuclear weapons, evidence of inter-departmental rivalries, and vivid portraits of the scientists who built the Bomb. This state-sponsored literature, however, makes limited reference to the lived experience of the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites, or the Indigenous peoples whose land and waters were used for the testing programmes in Oceania. Despite a growing international literature on the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, the history of Pacific Islander resistance to the nuclear testing programmes is more fragmentary. In response, the authors in this special issue have foregrounded the agency of Indigenous activists, rather than the Western allies who campaigned alongside the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. Their contributions add to a growing body of personal testimony by Indigenous nuclear survivors and resisters from around Oceania. This special issue includes a 1954 petition from Marshall Islanders to the UN Trusteeship Council, an example of the protests by Islanders that began in the 1950s, pre-dating the rise of the wider NFIP movement in the 1970s. Other articles highlight Fiji’s early foreign policy and the importance of the debate over nuclear testing in the formation of the South Pacific Forum; the importance of culture in Pacific anti-nuclear activism, through song, poetry, graphic design, and community theatre; the role of the regional NFIP movement in linking local struggles to the wider regional context, through pan-Pacific, Indigenous-led activism around self-determination; and connections between the NFIP movement and solidarity movements in the Global North.

Key words:

• Nuclear testing
• Pacific
• Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP)
• self-determination
• colonialism
• historiography

Acknowledgements

This special issue of the Journal of Pacific History was inspired by a series of panels at the 2021 Pacific History Association (PHA) conference in Fiji, with thanks to USP historian Nicholas Halter. Thanks also to Adrian Muckle and JPH editors Frances Steel and Ryan Tucker Jones, who welcomed this special edition, and anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback. The introduction draws on my reporting as a correspondent for Islands Business magazine (Fiji), with thanks to editors past and present. As a former staff member of the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre – the secretariat of the NFIP movement – I acknowledge my debt to colleagues too numerous to mention, but give special thanks to former PCRC directors Lopeti Senituli, Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, and Tupou Vere.

Notes

¹ Don A. Farrell, Tinian and the Bomb – Project Alberta and Operation Centreboard (Tinian: Micronesian Productions, 2018).

² Jean-Marc Regnault, La Bombe française dans le Pacifique – L’implantation 1957–1964 (Papeete: Scoop, 1993). See also Renaud Meltz, Alexis Vrignon, and Sylvain Mary, ‘Imperial Resurgence: How French Polynesia was Chosen as the Site for the French Centre for Pacific Tests (CEP)’, Journal of Pacific History (hereinafter JPH) 58, no. 3 (2023); Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon, ‘Polynesian Agency and the Establishment of the French Centre for Pacific Tests’, JPH 58, no. 4 (2023).

³ Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

⁴ Sue Rabbitt Roff, ‘Hiding Britain’s H-bomb Secrets’, letter to The Guardian, 28 Dec. 2018; Sue Rabbitt Roff, ‘Why are Files on British Nuclear Weapons Development in Australia being Removed from Public Access at the UK National Archives?’, Pearls and Irritations, 23 Jan. 2020.

⁵ Présidence de la Polynésie française, ‘Essais nucléaires – la majorité des archives désormais ouverte à la consultation’, Media Release, 23 Nov. 2022 ; Nicolas Barotte, ‘Essais nucléaires en Polynésie: l’armée ouvre ses archives’, Le Figaro, 18 Nov. 2022. For case studies on the ongoing challenges of accessing French government archives, see Marco de Jong, Nic Maclellan, and Carla Cantagallo, Challenging Nuclear Secrecy: A Discussion of Hierarchies, Ethics and Barriers to Access in Nuclear Archives (Oklahoma: Nuclear Truth Project, 2023), 13–14, 23–6.

⁶ J.L. Symonds, A History of British Atomic Tests in Australia (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985); Lorna Arnold, A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapons Trials in Australia (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1987); Lorna Arnold, Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); Lorna Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

⁷ Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb, xi.

⁸ Some key works include Marie-Thérèse and Bengt Danielsson, Moruroa mon amour (Paris: Stock, 1974), republished in English as Poisoned Reign (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986); Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Glenn Alcalay, ‘The Ethnography of Destabilization: Pacific Islanders in the Nuclear Age’, Dialectical Anthropology 13 (1988): 243–51; Jonathan Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994); Bruno Barrillot, Les essais nucléaires français 1960–1996 (Lyon: CDRPC, 1996).

⁹ Holly Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2004); Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report (Santa Monica: Left Coast Press, 2008); Martha Smith-Norris, Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands During the Cold War (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016).

¹⁰ Elizabeth Tynan, Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story (Sydney: NewSouth, 2016); Frank Walker, Maralinga: The Chilling Expose of Our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of Our Troops and Country (Sydney: Hachette, 2016); Nic Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017); Sue Rabbitt Roff, Making the British H-Bomb in Australia – From the Monte Bellos to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics (self-published, 2021); Elizabeth Tynan, The Secret of Emu Field (Sydney: NewSouth, 2022); Paul Grace, Operation Hurricane (Sydney: Hachette, 2023).

¹¹ Bruno Barrillot, L’héritage de la bombe: Polynésie-Sahara 1960–2002 (Lyon: CDRPC, 2002) ; Jean-Marc Regnault, Le nucléaire en Océanie, tu connais? – Les essais atmosphériques (Papeete: Api Tahiti, 2021); Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, Toxique – Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Paris: PUF/Disclose, 2021); Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon, Des Bombes en Polynésie – les essais nucléaires français dans le Pacifique (Paris: Vendémaire, 2022).

¹² For discussion, see Nic Maclellan, ‘Nuclear Testing and Racism in the Pacific Islands’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, ed. Steven Ratuva (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 885–904.

¹³ For analysis of the threat of radioactive contamination to ecological frameworks, see Elizabeth de Loughrey, ‘The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific’, Cultural Geographies 20 (2013): 167–84; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations’, in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235–53.

¹⁴ See, e.g., Ian Campbell, A History of the Pacific Islands (St Luscia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 217–18; Deryck Scarr, The History of the Pacific Islands (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990), 298, 355–6; Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein-Smith, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 343–45; Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211.

¹⁵ Yoko Ogashiwa, Microstates and Nuclear Issues: Regional Cooperation in the Pacific (Suva: USP Institute of Pacific Studies, 1991).

¹⁶ Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Stewart Firth, ‘Strategic and Nuclear issues’, in Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the 20th Century, ed. K.R. Howe, Robert Kiste, and Brij Lal (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994); Stewart Firth and Karin von Strokirch, ‘A Nuclear Pacific’, in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 324–57; Stewart Firth, ‘Nuclear Testing’ and ‘Nuclear Free Pacific’ in The Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia, ed. Brij Lal and Kate Fortune (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 256–68.

¹⁷ Roy H. Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Moruroa (London: IB Tauris, 1997).

¹⁸ For example, Vijay Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement: Problems and Prospects’, in The Pacific: Peace, Security and the Nuclear Issue, ed. Ranginui Walker and William Sutherland (London: United Nations University and Zed Books, 1988), 185–95; Kevin Clements: Back from the Brink: The Creation of a Nuclear-Free New Zealand (Sydney: Allen & Unwin New Zealand, 1988); Ogashiwa, Microstates and Nuclear Issues.

¹⁹ Zohl de Ishtar, Daughters of the Pacific (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1994); Cita Morei, ‘In Defence of our Nuclear-free Constitution’, in Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women, ed. ‘Atu Emberson-Bain (Suva: Marama Publications, 1994), 219–22.

²⁰ David Stone, ‘The Awesome Glow in the Sky: The Cook Islands and the French Nuclear Tests’, JPH 2, no. 1 (1967); J.W. Davidson, ‘French Polynesia and the French Nuclear Tests: The Submission of John Teariki’, JPH 2, no. 1 (1967); Walter Johnson and Sione Tupouniua, ‘Against French Nuclear Testing: The A.T.O.M. Committee’, JPH 11, no. 4 (1976); Stewart Firth, ‘The Nuclear Issue in the Pacific Islands’, JPH 21, no. 4 (1986); Karin Von Strokirch, ‘The Impact of Nuclear Testing on Politics in French Polynesia’, JPH 26, no. 2 (1991).

²¹ There are no papers in edited JPH or PHA collections, such as Brij Lal, ed., Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1992); Brij Lal and Peter Hempenstall, eds, Pacific Lives, Pacific Places: Bursting Boundaries in Pacific History (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 2001); Brij Lal, ed., The Defining Years: Pacific Islands, 1945–1965 (Canberra: Division of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, 2005).

²² Robert Aldrich, ‘Writing the History of the French Pacific’, in Lal, ed., Pacific Islands History, 79–91. The history of the CEP, however, is addressed throughout Aldrich’s France and the South Pacific Since 1940 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993).

²³ For the UK tests, e.g., Losena Salabula, Josua Namoce, and Nic Maclellan, Kirisimasi – Na Sotia kei na Lewe ni Mataivalu e Wai ni Viti e na vakatovotovo iyaragi nei Peritania mai Kirisimasi (Suva: Pacific Concerns Resource Centre, 1999); Gerry Wright, We Were There (New Plymouth: Zenith Print, n.d.); Roger Cross and Avon Hudson, Beyond Belief: The British Bomb Tests: Australia's Veterans Speak Out (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2005); Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb.

²⁴ Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese; Johnston and Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War; Giff Johnson, Nuclear Past, Unclear Future (Majuro: Micronitor, 2009).

²⁵ Giff Johnson, Don’t Ever Whisper – Darlene Keju: Pacific Health Pioneer, Champion for Nuclear Survivors (Majuro: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013); Sylvia Frain, Fanohge Famalåo’an and Fan’tachu Fama’lauan – Women Rising: Indigenous Resistance to Militarization in the Marianas Archipelago (e-publication, Guampedia.com, 2017).

²⁶ John Taroanui Doom, A he’e noa i te tau: Mémoires d’une vie partagée (Papeete: Editions Haere Pō, 2016); Christine Weir, ‘The Opening of the Coconut Curtain: Pacific Influence on the World Council of Churches through the Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Pacific, 1961 to 2000’, JPH 54, no. 1 (2019).

²⁷ Michael Hamel-Green, The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty: A Critical Assessment (Canberra: ANU Peace Research Centre, 1990); Michael Hamel-Green, ‘The Implications of the 2017 UN Nuclear Prohibition Treaty for Existing and Proposed Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones’, Global Change, Peace & Security 30, no. 2 (2018): 209–32; Michael Hamel-Green, ‘Anti-Nuclear Campaigning and the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone (Rarotonga) Treaty, 1960–85’, in Proceedings of the 14th Biennial Labour History Conference, ed. Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber (Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2015), 51–62.

²⁸ Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal, eds, Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015).

²⁹ ‘The Chief Petty Officer – Ratu Inoke Bainimarama’ in Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb, 125–34.

³⁰ Nic Maclellan, ‘Bainimarama Condemns Nuclear Testing “Atrocities”’, Islands Business, 27 Aug. 2021.

³¹ ‘The High Chief – Ratu Penaia Ganilau’, in Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb, 147–56.

³² Jean-Marc Regnault, Oscar Temaru - L’océanie au cœur (Papeete: Api Tahiti, 2020).

³³ Teburoro Tito and Christian Ciobanu, ‘“Tavita i vs. Koriate iaon te Boom Ae Mwakaroiroi” means “David vs. Goliath on the Nuclear Bomb”’, Outrider, 16 Feb. 2022.

³⁴ Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

³⁵ Teresia Teaiwa, ‘bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans’, in Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Sweat and Salt Water – Selected Works [compiled and edited by Katerina Teaiwa, April Henderson, and Terence Wesley-Smith] (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021), 110–26.

³⁶ Epeli Hau‘ofa, ed., We Are the Ocean – Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

³⁷ Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, in Hau‘ofa, ed., We Are the Ocean, 49.

³⁸ Sylvia Frain and Rebecca H. Hogue, ‘This Steinlager Ad Distorts the Truth about Anti-Nuclear Protest in the Pacific’, Stuff, 16 Dec. 2020. For another example within the global Black Lives Matter movement, see Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Pepsi Pulls Kendall Jenner Ad Ridiculed for Co-opting Protest Movements’, The Guardian, 6 Apr. 2017.

³⁹ Over nearly 40 years, France’s attack against the Rainbow Warrior has generated journalistic accounts, histories of the last voyage, and websites featuring interviews with crew members. Richard Shears and Isabelle Gidley, The Rainbow Warrior Affair (North Sydney: Unwin, 1985); Michael King, Death of the Rainbow Warrior (Auckland: Penguin, 1986); David Robie, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior (Auckland: Little Island Books, 2015); Eyes of Fire – Thirty Years On, https://eyes-of-fire.littleisland.co.nz/ (accessed 17 Oct. 2023).

⁴⁰ Disclosure – in a past life, the author was active in the NFIP movement and worked in the NFIP Secretariat in Fiji, the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC).

⁴¹ One example can be found in a debate published in The Contemporary Pacific, where a history of the nuclear era by French academics Paul de Dekker and Jean-Marc Regnault was met with fierce rebuttal from Mā‘ohi activists Gabriel Tetiarahi and John Taroanui Doom, along with critiques by the author, researcher Bruno Barrillot, and historian Stewart Firth. See ‘In Quest of Dialogue on a “Hot” Subject’, The Contemporary Pacific 17, no. 2 (2005): 336–83.

⁴² Interview with Marie-Thérèse Danielsson, Papeete, Tahiti, Sept. 1999. For Danielsson’s memories of Pouvanaa, see Nic Maclellan, ed., No Te Parau Tia, No Te Parau Mau, No Te Tiamaraa – For Justice, Truth and Independence (Suva: Pacific Concerns Research Centre, 1999), 18–19. See also Marie-Thérèse and Bengt Danielsson, Moruroa mon amour (Paris: Stock, 1974).

⁴³ Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, The Pacific Way: A Memoir (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Center for Pacific Islands Studies, East–West Center Pacific Islands Development Program, and University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 170.

⁴⁴ Hone Tuwhare, No Ordinary Sun (Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1964); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Solar Metaphors: “No Ordinary Sun”’, Ka mate ka ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics 6 (Sept. 2008): 52.

⁴⁵ Rebecca H. Hogue and Anais Maurer, ‘Pacific Women’s Anti-Nuclear Poetry: Centring Indigenous Knowledges’, International Affairs 98, no. 4 (July 2022): 1267–88.

⁴⁶ Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, ‘History Project’, in Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 20–3; Jessica Schwartz, ‘Radiation Songs and Transpacific Resonances of US Imperial Transits’, Journal of Transnational American Studies 11, no. 2 (2020): 153–71.

⁴⁷ Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Leora Kava, and Craig Santos Perez, Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022).

⁴⁸ Both statements are included in Appendix 3 of the Nuclear-Free Pacific and Independence Movements Conference Report, published jointly by the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) and Pacific People’s Action Front (PPAF), August 1979.

⁴⁹ Karen Nero, ‘The Material World Remade’, in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 359.

⁵⁰ For the effects of British nuclear testing on Indigenous people in South Australia, see Yami: The Autobiography of Yami Lester (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1993); Yalata and Oak Valley communities with Christobel Mattingley, Maralinga: The Anangu Story (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009); Christobel Mattingley, Maralinga’s Long Shadow: Yvonne’s Story (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016); and Heather Goodall, ‘Damage and Dispossession: Indigenous People and Nuclear Weapons on Bikini Atoll and the Pitjantjatjara Lands, 1946 to 1988’, in The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History, ed. Ann McGrath and Lynette Russell (London: Routledge, 2021), 419–42.

⁵¹ For many years, Giff Johnson of the Marshall Islands Journal, and Jack Niedenthal of the Bikini Atoll Council, have recorded Marshallese memories of the US tests. Giff presents a moving portrait of his late wife Darlene in Don’t Ever Whisper. Jack Niedenthal records many Bikinian memories in For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and their Islands (Majuro: Micronitor, 2001).

⁵² Losena Salabula, Josua Namoce, and Nic Maclellan, Kirisimasi – Na Sotia kei na Lewe ni Mataivalu e Wai ni Viti e na vakatovotovo iyaragi nei Peritania mai Kirisimasi (Suva: Pacific Concerns Resource Centre, 1999).

⁵³ Pieter Van der Vlies and Han Seur collate Polynesians’ testimony during 30 years of nuclear testing in the French Pacific in Moruroa and Us (Lyon: CDRPC, 1997), a collection also available in French, German, and Tahitian.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nic Maclellan

Nic Maclellan – Journalist and researcher in the Pacific Islands, correspondent for Islands Business magazine (Fiji). [email protected]