Description
Although France’s Centre for Experimentation in the Pacific (CEP) has faced local and global criticism for testing 193 atomic devices in French Polynesia from 1966 to 1996, many of the 1,200 residents of the Hao atoll feel nostalgic about their nuclear military past. The Hao population experienced substantial socio-economic change when their atoll was transformed into a major military-logistic base for France’s nuclear testing program. On the local level, the CEP represents an agent of positive change, introducing lucrative job opportunities, free access to electricity, and a vibrant island life with nightclubs and numerous leisure activities. Based on ethnographic research conducted on the Hao atoll in fall 2019, this paper examines the interplay between nuclear nostalgia, the unseen nature of radioactive pollution, and the enduring power of the French nuclearism discourse. Using an anthropological lens, this paper shows the extent to which colonial Cold War nostalgias underlie calculated, imperialist memory politics, masking the nuclear realities of decades of ruination and slow violence. I argue that nostalgia for the nuclear testing era needs to be understood as a means that has been shaped and exploited by the French State and its military for the legitimization of its nuclear testing program. My study offers an alternative analytical angle to the general understanding of how people experience and make sense of the radioactive afterlife of the Cold War in French Polynesia.
