[T]he American militarization of science would usher in a new era of ecological thought […]. Western colonizers had long configured tropical islands into the contained spaces of a laboratory, which is to say a suppression of island history and Indigenous presence. This generation of AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] ecologists embraced nuclear testing as creating a novel opportunity […]. [T]he Pacific Islands have long been fashioned as laboratories for western colonial interests, from the botanical collecting of James Cook’s voyages to […] structural anthropology. […]
The declassification of a 1957 memo from Brookhaven National Laboratory’s medical researcher Dr [R.C.], the doctor in charge of testing and caring for the hundreds of Marshallese exposed to radiation, has confirmed suspicious that it was the islanders as much as the environment that were subject to an AEC experiment. To his colleagues he wrote, ‘The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.’ Arguments like this appear elsewhere in AEC records. For instance, the director of the AEC Health and Safely Laboratory described neighboring Utirik Atoll in 1956 as ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’ but that it will be ‘very interesting’ to get data from the environment and islanders when they are returned there. Referring to genetic tests about the impact of radiation on fruit flies and mice, he observed of the Marshall Islanders:
‘While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than mice.’ […]
In claiming Micronesia and expanding the American exclusive economic zone, Truman tripled the territorial size of the United States. […] [T]he oceanic territory, vital to US naval and airforce transit, represents three million square miles. […] With the advent of the far more powerful hydrogen weapons, the AEC in 1954 cordoned off an enormous area of the Pacific, banning the passage of ships or planes for 400,000 square miles. […] Estimated at one thousand times the force of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki […] [in] addition to spreading lethal levels of radiation over 5000 miles of the Pacific, Bravo’s fallout was detected in the rain over Japan, in lubricating oil of Indian aircraft, in winds over Australia, and in the sky over the United States and Europe. It caused the radiogenic illness of the crew of a Japanese freighter 1200 miles away. […]
When Rongelapese women began giving birth to babies without skulls and without skeletons […], infants with severe brain damage and missing limbs, scientists informed them that these miscarriages and defects were ‘to be expected in a small island population.’
Although scientists from the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine had ample evidence of the extensive radiological contamination of Rongelap, they allowed the islanders to return in order to deflect criticism of the AEC’s atmospheric testing program, and thus exposed the islanders to another 22 nuclear tests on Enewetak […].
The US military films of Micronesia [from 1951] […] juxtapose the modernity of America […] to ‘distant and primitive’ yet vitally important ‘test islands … a giant lab in the middle of an ocean.’ To quote this Hollywood-produced film: […] [A]n outdoor laboratory: Entewak Atoll in the Pacific. […] [T]hree years have passed, three years to bring new and improved atomic weapons to this secluded equatorial land […]. [Image of an American man with suitcase entering his car and waving goodbye to son and dog]. Now the proving grounds come alive like a university campus […] individual test islands, seemingly like so many science buildings on college grounds. […]
Even the foilage has been bulldozed ‘for elbow room’ as one AEC film declares […].
[T]he narrator declares, 'the islanders are a nomadic group, and are well pleased that the Yanks are going to add a little variety to their lives.’
All text above by: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey. “The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific". Cultural Geographies, Volume 20, Number 2, Special Issue: Islanding cultural geographies (April 2013), pages 167-184. First published 31 October 2012. At: doi dot org slash 10.1177/1474474012463664 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]
stormborns
prguitarman
romaincrisis
annaxmalina
titsay
baratheonpilled
izzy806
discoholicmusic
