Opposing Nuclear Weapons Testing in the Global South: A Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACT

During the Cold War, nuclear weapon states outsourced their nuclear testing programmes to their hinterlands or overseas territories. Countries such as the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), France and the Soviet Union conducted more than 750 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, Australia, the Algerian Sahara, French Polynesia and Kazakhstan, respectively. In these cases, nuclear activities did not go unchallenged as they affected people’s health and the environment. To different extents, nuclear testing met with opposition from local, regional and international actors. A comparative perspective on anti-nuclear movements – in different regions and time frameworks – that struggled against nuclear colonialism in the form of nuclear testing highlights the impact left by anti-nuclear movements in the Global South, which is relevant to discussions on how the non-proliferation regime is structured today.

KEYWORDS:

• nuclear testing
• social movements
• environmental justice
• nuclear colonialism
• peripheralisation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the journal’s editors, the guest editors of this Special Issue and the three reviewers for the thorough reading and the insights to improve the original manuscript.

Notes

1 Non-NPT states such as India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, and North Korea has conducted six tests since 2006.

2 The Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs is an international organisation for nuclear disarmament whose members include scholars and public figures. The Pugwash Conference won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for their efforts on nuclear disarmament.

3 The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) restricted the sharing of nuclear information with other countries, including wartime allies.

4 This would be critical decades later when the Labor Party was in power with Robert Hawke and Paul Keating in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. Both Labor Party leaders raised Australia’s international commitment to non-proliferation by pushing forward initiatives such as the South Pacific nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ), the Australia Group and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).

5 The current States Parties to the Treaty are: Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

6 It is worth recalling that when France conceded independence to Algeria in 1962, the Evian Accords between them granted France control of the Sahara for a few more years. For more details see Narzhan and Hennaoui (2023, this Special Issue).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Exequiel Lacovsky

Exequiel Lacovsky is a Research Associate at The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.