Nuclear Bodies by Robert A. Jacobs

Author:Robert A. Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press

Equipment abandoned by the British at their nuclear testing base on Christmas Island, Republic of Kiribati (2017). Photo by author.

Teeua Tetoa, the leader of the association of hibakusha on Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in Kiribati, recalls how in 2003 British nuclear veterans and BBC reporters who had come to Christmas Island told the locals that they and their children had suffered from cancer as a result of the exposure to radiation during nuclear tests on the atoll, and that the Kiritimati people were likely to be similarly suffering. The Kiritimati did not immediately believe them, but “In 2009 and 2010 some of our kids died of cancer—many, many in our association. And then we remembered the time when they told us about the problem.”67 The Kiritimati hibakusha have unsuccessfully tried to seek compensation, medical care, and simply an answer to why the British came to their island on the other side of the world from the UK to test thermonuclear weapons.

In 1958 the United Kingdom and the United States signed the UK-US Mutual Defense Agreement, which “enables the two countries to exchange classified information to enhance each party’s ‘atomic weapon design, development and fabrication capability.’ ”68 The US, USSR, and UK observed a nuclear test moratorium from late 1958 to the summer of 1961. After the abandonment of the moratorium, this agreement facilitated the UK’s continuing nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, where the United States also resumed the testing of fission weapons. As per its policy, all American thermonuclear testing was kept in the Pacific. Since the United States was not inclined to resume testing at the heavily contaminated sites on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the Marshall Islands, they moved their thermonuclear testing to the UK site on Christmas Island and Johnston Atoll to the northwest.69 In 1962 the United States conducted twenty-two nuclear tests on or near the island, including five in the megaton range.

Algeria and French Polynesia (France)

France has tested 210 nuclear weapons and, like the UK, has never tested a nuclear weapon within its own borders. Disarmament expert Tariq Rauf has pointed out that while “France claims that all its tests have been conducted on ‘French’ territory,” that is just an imperialist claim that colonial spaces are actually part of France.70 As the French government was deciding to pursue nuclear weapons in the late 1950s, a key problem in determining a nuclear test site was that the French empire was declining and offered limited and often combative options for potential colonial locations. The preferred choice of the French military was in the Sahara Desert in the then French colony of Algeria. However, in 1954 the Algerians began a war of independence that made the investment in a large military infrastructure in the desert to stage and support nuclear weapon testing a questionable investment. Another option was French colonial holdings in the South Pacific, an area that the French had largely ignored and that lacked the infrastructure, such as airfields, power generation, and intact structures to house the materials and personnel to stage the tests.

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