Description
During the Cold War Western powers detonated over 300 nuclear weapons in the Pacific. This paper asks what conditions enabled the West to designate the Pacific as a sacrificial zone, while seeking to understand how people today inhabit and navigate the nuclear landscapes left behind by nuclear testing. To answer these questions, I critically draw on Alfred Runte’s seminal work on so-called ‘worthless lands’ in the American imagination to argue that the nuclear geography of the Pacific is best understood as partially overlapping and constantly shifting layers of extraterritoriality. Focusing specifically on the Marshall Islands, this paper argues that nuclear testing was made possible through a set of political, military and scientific practices that inscribed parts of the region as worthless territory that could be set aside (‘extraterritorialized’) for the purpose of nuclear experimentation. The classification of nuclear sites as worthless is not a stable one, however, and has been subject to contestations about the exact boundaries of extraterritorial sites and/or attempts to expand upon their extraterritorial character by adding new layers that set aside and claim these sites for nuclear waste storage, offshore tax zones, or world heritage sites intended for global cultural consumption. The paper ends with a few conceptual reflections on the idea of layered nuclear extraterritoriality and suggests the notion could be usefully extended to also include the biosphere, atmosphere and cryosphere.
