Introduction: Resistance and Survival – The Nuclear Era in the Pacific

ABSTRACT

For many decades, historians, researchers, and participants have documented the history of the nuclear era in the Pacific Islands. They have highlighted the legacy of health and environmental impacts of 50 years of nuclear testing by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France between 1946 and 1996. Most official histories of Pacific nuclear testing present extensive technical detail of the development of nuclear weapons, evidence of inter-departmental rivalries, and vivid portraits of the scientists who built the Bomb. This state-sponsored literature, however, makes limited reference to the lived experience of the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites, or the Indigenous peoples whose land and waters were used for the testing programmes in Oceania. Despite a growing international literature on the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, the history of Pacific Islander resistance to the nuclear testing programmes is more fragmentary. In response, the authors in this special issue have foregrounded the agency of Indigenous activists, rather than the Western allies who campaigned alongside the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. Their contributions add to a growing body of personal testimony by Indigenous nuclear survivors and resisters from around Oceania. This special issue includes a 1954 petition from Marshall Islanders to the UN Trusteeship Council, an example of the protests by Islanders that began in the 1950s, pre-dating the rise of the wider NFIP movement in the 1970s. Other articles highlight Fiji’s early foreign policy and the importance of the debate over nuclear testing in the formation of the South Pacific Forum; the importance of culture in Pacific anti-nuclear activism, through song, poetry, graphic design, and community theatre; the role of the regional NFIP movement in linking local struggles to the wider regional context, through pan-Pacific, Indigenous-led activism around self-determination; and connections between the NFIP movement and solidarity movements in the Global North.

Key words:

• Nuclear testing
• Pacific
• Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP)
• self-determination
• colonialism
• historiography

From the beginning of the nuclear age, the Pacific Islands played a central role in the development of Cold War nuclear arsenals for the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

The planes that carried atomic weapons to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 flew from Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands.¹ Then, for the 50 years between 1946 and 1996, the three Western powers conducted more than 315 atmospheric and underground nuclear tests and countless nuclear experiments across ten sites in the deserts of Australia and the islands of the Pacific. The names of these nuclear era sacrifice zones still resonate: Bikini, Enewetak, Monte Bello, Emu Field, Maralinga, Malden, Christmas, Johnston, Moruroa, Fangataufa. Across the region, people live with the health and environmental consequences to this day.

To analyse this period, this special issue of the Journal of Pacific History presents articles by four PhD students about the history of nuclear testing – and nuclear resistance – in the Pacific. They all highlight the agency of Pacific Island peoples, documenting the actions of governments and social movements that worked for nuclear disarmament in the second half of the 20th century. It is a history not of victimhood, but of resistance and survival.

The numbers in this nuclear era are stark. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshall Islands. In 1962, there were 24 further US atmospheric nuclear tests at Christmas (Kiritimati) Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, as well as five atmospheric airbursts and nine high-altitude nuclear tests, with warheads launched on missiles from Johnston (Kalama) Atoll and submarines.

Britain tested nuclear weapons in Oceania between 1952 and 1958. There were 12 atomic tests at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field, and Maralinga in Australia (1952–7). These were followed by nine hydrogen and atomic bomb tests in 1957–8 at Malden Island and Christmas (Kiritimati) Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony – today part of the Republic of Kiribati.

Between 1960 and 1966, in its north African colony of Algeria, France conducted four atmospheric nuclear tests at Reggane and 13 underground tests at In Eker in the Sahara Desert. After the 1962 Evian Peace Accord and Algerian independence, the French government continued underground testing, even as it began construction of a new testing site in the South Pacific, the Centre d'expérimentation du Pacifique (CEP).² Between 1966 and 1996, France conducted 193 atmospheric and underground nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in Mā‘ohi Nui / French Polynesia.

Histories of the Bomb

One problem for historians of the nuclear era is overcoming the cult of ‘national security’ that restricts access to many government archives.

The United States has long wavered between a culture of ‘restricted data’ and a tradition of public accountability and oversight that allows access to nuclear archives.³ In contrast, the cult of nuclear secrecy in the United Kingdom is much stronger: numerous historians studying the British nuclear testing programme have reported difficulties accessing government archives. In 2018, the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority withdrew previously available files relating to the development of British nuclear weapons in Australia and Kiribati.⁴ France only grudgingly opened many nuclear archives about French Polynesia to historians and researchers in late 2022, and continues to restrict access to files on the testing programme in Algeria.⁵

In the 1980s, this privileged state-sponsored accounts of the nuclear era. Official historians with access to restricted government archives began to document the history of US testing in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and UK testing in Australia and Kiribati (such as commissioned histories on the UK nuclear weapons programme by J. L. Symonds and Lorna Arnold).⁶ These official histories of Pacific nuclear testing present extensive technical detail of the development of nuclear weapons, evidence of inter-departmental rivalries, and vivid portraits of the scientists who built the Bomb. This state-sponsored literature, however, often makes limited reference to the lived experience of the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites, or the Indigenous peoples whose land and waters were used for the testing programmes.

In her official history of the UK thermonuclear weapons programme in Kiribati, for example, Lorna Arnold wrote:

We should have liked to have written more about these dramatic events and the experiences of the thousands of test participants, many of them young National Service men, most of whom had never been abroad or flown in an aircraft before their long flight to Christmas Island. That would be another book … .⁷

Angered by these silences, anthropologists, lawyers, priests, and historians began to write passionate critiques of state policy, highlighting the cost and consequences of radioactive fallout. Their works in the late 20th century began to document an alternative understanding of the nuclear era in the Pacific.⁸

Over recent decades, melding archival research, anthropological analysis, witness accounts, and survivor testimonies, a range of writers have developed more critical studies that challenge government perspectives. US authors have documented the response of Marshall Islanders to the US atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini and Enewetak atolls (an issue highlighted by the 1954 Marshallese petition reproduced in this edition).⁹ More than 70 years after the start of the British testing programme, journalists and historians are also shining new light on the lived experience of service personnel and Indigenous communities in Australia and Kiribati, drawing on UK, Australian, and Pacific archives.¹⁰ Despite crucial archival research by French activists such as the late Bruno Barrillot, detailed studies of France’s nuclear testing programme have come much later. Recently opened archives have allowed new insights into French policies, and the four articles in this special issue highlight regional resistance to French testing in the South Pacific since the 1960s, more than the earlier US and UK programmes in Micronesia.¹¹

These more committed studies have highlighted the tendency for official histories to gloss over the way that colonial troops and local labourers were given the difficult, dangerous, and dirty tasks in this vast scientific and industrial enterprise, while doctors and scientists conducted medical experiments on irradiated Islanders, without free, prior and informed consent.¹² Nuclear histories are increasingly blurring into broader political ecology, where the relationships between human rights and environmental justice overlap with concern about the ecosphere – especially the protection of reefs and aquatic life in the vast Moana, and the leaching of Cold War pollutants into the marine environment.¹³

Despite a growing international literature on the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, however, the history of Pacific Islander resistance to nuclear colonialism is more fragmented. Many general histories of Oceania published in the late 20th century make brief mentions of nuclear testing, but only scant or disparaging references to anti-nuclear protest.¹⁴ The exceptions include a 1991 study of Pacific government anti-nuclear policies by Yoko Ogashiwa,¹⁵ and the work of historian Stewart Firth, who made a broad sweep across the ‘nuclear playground’ in 1987, amplified in the chapters he contributed to edited Pacific histories during the 1990s.¹⁶

There is just one book-length study from 1997 that purports to document the history of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement.¹⁷ However, this volume was prepared without input from participants, covers only a fragment of the vast reach of this pan-Pacific network, and includes many factual errors. There were also early scattered memoirs of anti-nuclear campaigns by participants, which detail campaigns in specific countries¹⁸ or on particular themes, such as the role of women in Indigenous anti-nuclear campaigns.¹⁹

From the 1960s to 1990s, the Journal of Pacific History (JPH) only averaged one article every decade about nuclear history (although there were many book reviews on the topic). Most of these studies were focused on the French nuclear programme conducted between 1966–96, with less attention paid to the previous US and UK programmes.²⁰ In many workshops of Pacific historians discussing new arenas for investigation, the history of the nuclear era passed unnoticed.²¹ In a 1991 JPH workshop, an eminent historian of the French Pacific colonies presented a paper on ‘Writing the history of the French Pacific’, but Moruroa and Fangataufa (let alone Mā‘ohi anti-nuclear protest) did not rate a mention!²²

Post-Testing Investigations

Over the last 25 years, following the final nuclear test at Moruroa atoll in January 1996, there has been renewed interest in Pacific nuclear history.

Sympathetic journalists and researchers have collated oral testimony from the thousands of military personnel who staffed the nuclear test sites. These books, more journalistic than scholarly, were often initiated to support veterans’ campaigns for recognition, compensation, and reparations.²³ Scholars and activists have detailed the networks of US bases and installations in Hawai‘i, Guam, New Zealand, and Australia that are crucial to the deployment of forces and nuclear warfighting strategies.

As the Republic of the Marshall Islands initiated the Nuclear Claims Tribunal to adjudicate compensation claims for damage to health and property, US authors such as Holly Barker, Barbara Rose Johnston, and Giff Johnson documented the legacies of atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini and Enewetak atolls.²⁴ Today, these authors continue to collaborate with young Marshall Islanders through networks such as the USP Marshall Islands Students Association (MISA4thePacific) or as youth advocates with the RMI National Nuclear Commission, who in turn are collecting stories from their elders.

The role of women as the backbone of many Pacific campaigns has been captured by authors across Micronesia.²⁵ Other writers have documented the crucial advocacy against nuclear testing by the Student Christian Movement, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), and the international ecumenical movement.²⁶ Michael Hamel-Green has explored the development of the 1985 Rarotonga Treaty for a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (SPNFZ) and its relevance today.²⁷

At a time when there is growing interest in political biography across the Pacific Islands,²⁸ the personal impact of nuclear testing on Pacific leaders is an under-researched element of this story.

There are many personal connections to the nuclear era amongst regional politicians that influence their attitude to contemporary nuclear debates. For example, Ratu Inoke Bainimarama led the first contingent of Royal Fiji Volunteer Naval Reserve (RFVNR) sailors to witness the 1957 UK hydrogen bomb tests on Malden Island.²⁹ Today, his son, former Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama, is a passionate supporter of nuclear disarmament, even as a retired rear-admiral and military coup leader.³⁰

As a child, former Kiribati President Anote Tong lived on Fanning Island, less than 200 miles from the Kiritimati test site, at the time of Operation Grapple – the British H-Bomb testing programme. The late Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau witnessed a UK nuclear test on Malden Island, and the children of Fiji’s former governor general and president continue to support Fijian nuclear veterans in their quest for compensation from the UK government.³¹

Leading Mā‘ohi politician and former President of French Polynesia Oscar Manutahi Temaru worked on Moruroa Atoll as a customs officer.³² Former President of Kiribati Teburoro Tito was an early NFIP activist as a student leader at the University of the South Pacific (USP) – later in life, as Kiribati Ambassador to the United Nations, he has played a crucial role in a Kiribati–Kazakhstan initiative to develop a funding mechanism for assistance to nuclear survivors under the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).³³

New-Generation Historians

Many younger historians now analyse the anti-nuclear movement in the context of Pacific self-determination, decolonization, and the cultural mobilization of the late 20th century. Their writing is in part inspired by seminal writers who have left us all too soon: the late Tracey Banivanua Mar on the importance of anti-nuclearism in Pacific decolonization;³⁴ Teresia Teaiwa on the gendered implications of nuclear policy;³⁵ and Epeli Hau‘ofa, who tied the identity of Pacific Islanders to their sense of place and environment in the vast liquid continent.³⁶

In his essay ‘The Ocean in Us’, Hau‘ofa argued that in the modern era, collective identity as Pacific Islanders was reinforced and reaffirmed through struggles against nuclear testing, the dumping of nuclear waste, and other threats to the ocean environment:

On issues of this kind, the sense of a regional identity, being Pacific islanders, is felt most acutely. The movement towards a nuclear free and independent Pacific, the protests against the wall of death driftnetting, against plans to dispose of nuclear waste in the ocean, the incineration of chemical weapons on Johnston Island, the 1995 resumption of nuclear tests on Moruroa, and, most ominously, the spectre of our atoll nations and low-lying coastal regions disappearing under the rising sea level – all are instances of a regional united front against threats to our environment.³⁷

The new historiography of the nuclear era comes at a time when the climate justice movement has mobilized young Islanders through regional networks such as Pacific Climate Warriors, Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN), and Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC). This mobilization has led a new generation to look back to past examples of pan-Pacific activism and protest: in this context, the NFIP movement emerges from history as a heroic example of transnational, Indigenous-led, grassroots, and anti-colonial mobilization.

Amongst young scholars, there is a reaction against histories of nuclear protest in the Pacific that have underestimated the agency of Islanders in the campaign. There are also angry responses to examples of corporate interests trying to re-package the history of this protest as an initiative by Western campaigners. As one example, a 2020 NZ advertisement for Steinlager beer presented young Pākehā activists as the heroes of the campaign against French nuclear testing. The ad sparked widespread anger amongst Pacific anti-nuclear campaigners, who condemned the ‘white washing’ and commercialization of history:

By highlighting only the actions of New Zealanders, Steinlager’s ad reinforces colonial ideologies while overlooking the Pacific experience of anti-nuclear activism. The commercial uses the French colonial spelling – Mururoa – rather than the spelling widely used by Pacific peoples – Moruroa. It ignores the work of other Pacific Islanders like the ‘dream team’ from the Cook Islands who sailed from Rarotonga to Moruroa in a huge, Pacific-wide campaign called ‘Vaka ki Moruroa’. The local protest effort was aided by the Cook Islands government, which arranged for the voyaging canoe Te Au o Tonga to join the protest flotilla.³⁸

Investigating the history of the nuclear era in the Pacific involves some tension between Pacific Rim and Pacific Island perspectives. This tension reflects similar debates in other environmental and social movements, including history wars between Western environmentalists and climate justice activists from the Global South, arguments in the Black Lives Matter movement, and in the regional feminist movement.

For 20 years from the mid-1970s, there was a broad social movement for a nuclear free Pacific, as people mobilized against French nuclear testing through churches, trade unions, non-government organizations, and women’s groups. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace were central to this movement, courageously sailing yachts and other vessels into nuclear testing zones (at great cost, with the death of Fernando Pereira in the 1985 terrorist bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior by French agents).³⁹

Within this broad campaign, however, there was also a structured movement for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP), led by Pacific Islanders and Indigenous peoples from Pacific Rim countries. The NFIP movement had its own secretariat, the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC), with a region-wide executive board. In the pre-internet age, common experiences were shared through a monthly newsletter Pacific News Bulletin and triennial conferences that determined policy and joint campaigns. The personal bonds from that time continue today, despite the closure of PCRC more than 20 years ago.⁴⁰

NFIP’s central focus on political independence, cultural self-determination, and Indigenous rights was often confronting for academics and non-Indigenous supporters within the peace movement, who were sometimes reluctant to prioritize issues of racism, colonialism, and decolonization.⁴¹

For these reasons, the articles presented in this special issue reflect the renewed focus on documenting Islander responses to the Cold War testing programmes by the Western powers. Echoing the contemporary call from Pacific climate justice activists (‘we are not drowning, we are fighting!’), they highlight examples of local, regional, and North–South resistance to nuclear weapons by Pacific Islanders. While based on longstanding practices of archival research, they draw on creative and artistic expressions of multidisciplinary approaches and interrogate the historian’s role.

Some significant themes are highlighted by the articles in this issue:

1. Protests by Pacific Islanders against nuclear testing began in the 1950s, pre-dating the rise of the wider NFIP movement in the 1970s;

2. Fiji’s early foreign policy and the formation of the South Pacific Forum in 1971 involved significant advocacy against French nuclear testing;

3. The role of culture and identity was central to Pacific anti-nuclear activism, amplified through song, poetry, graphic design, and community theatre as well as the written word;

4. The NFIP movement played a critical role linking local struggles to the wider regional context, through pan-Pacific, Indigenous-led activism around self-determination and decolonization;

5. The connections between the NFIP movement and solidarity movements in the Global North, at a time of Cold War nuclear build-up, carried Islander perspectives into global debates – echoing contemporary climate justice initiatives.

Early resistance

Throughout the 1950s, customary leaders and intellectuals from Fiji, Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, Samoa, and other colonial dependencies combined to speak out against the US and British nuclear programmes, petitioning the United Nations for an end to nuclear testing. One of the earliest Indigenous anti-nuclear initiatives was in French Polynesia, when the charismatic Tahitian leader Pouvanaa a Oopa collected signatures for the 1950 Stockholm Peace Appeal.⁴²

Although they were mostly ignored by the nuclear powers, these petitions brought Pacific values into the global nuclear disarmament debate, highlighting the importance of land as a source of culture and identity – land that was being vaporized or contaminated by Western nuclear tests.

This special issue includes one striking example of these petitions to the United Nations Trusteeship Council. The petition, inspired by the March 1954 Bravo atmospheric nuclear test on Bikini Atoll, was prepared by customary iroij (chiefs), local businessmen, and schoolteachers in the Marshall Islands. It requested that ‘all experiments with lethal weapons in this area be immediately ceased’ (see below).

Fiji, the Forum, and anti-nuclear advocacy

The creation of the South Pacific Forum in 1971 was in part driven by the debate over nuclear testing. The autobiography of Fiji’s founding prime minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, stresses the ‘ban on political discussion’ at the South Pacific Commission, noting that ‘France was the most insistent on this, probably on account of its own vulnerable position in the Pacific, because of both its overseas territories there and its nuclear-testing programme at Mururoa Atoll. Economic and social issues oui, politics, non’.⁴³

As Fiji moved to independence in 1970, Ratu Mara and ministers in his new government were vocal critics of French nuclear testing. Based on her PhD research, Dimity Hawkins contributes an article to this issue on state and civil society mobilization against nuclear testing in Fiji during the late 1960s and early years of the post-independence Ratu Mara government. She details the initial cooperation between government ministers and civil society groups such as the Fiji YWCA and Against Testing on Moruroa (ATOM), highlighting the valuable contribution of scientific expertise from scholars at the newly created University of the South Pacific (USP).

While many studies on anti-nuclear activism highlight the first Nuclear Free Pacific conference in 1975, held at USP in Suva, Hawkins looks back to the roots of this movement, documenting government and community anti-nuclear initiatives in the years before and immediately after Fiji’s independence in 1970. She highlights Fiji’s diplomatic statements at the United Nations, and intervention in the 1973 regional initiative against French nuclear testing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Cultural roots

In 1959, at the height of the US–Soviet Cold War, Māori poet Hone Tuwhare wrote the anti-nuclear poem ‘No Ordinary Sun’.⁴⁴ Over the next few decades, a widespread sense of nuclear angst was captured in poetry, short stories, and novels by Islanders such as Chantal Spitz (Mā‘ohi Nui/French Polynesia), Déwé Gorodé (Kanaky/New Caledonia), Cita Morei (Belau), and Grace Mera Molisa (Vanuatu).⁴⁵ Today, this tradition continues in the poetry of the Climate Envoy for the Republic of Marshall Islands, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, and the ‘radiation songs’ of Marshallese women.⁴⁶ Ongoing anti-nuclear cultural activism has recently been anthologized as ‘Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-literatures’.⁴⁷

Anti-nuclear activism across the Pacific is not just based on the written word, but through song, chants, dance, posters, graffiti, voyaging, and vaka – and today, through YouTube and social media memes. But do our histories of the nuclear era capture these diverse, emotional media and the role of protest songs – a global phenomenon of resistance? In her essay in this issue, Fijian–Italian scholar Talei Luscia Mangioni argues that ‘the transgressive spirit, critical flair and cultural power of Pacific grassroots movements are too often ignored or relegated to the footnotes within the discipline of Pacific history’.

Mangioni was the inaugural winner of the Pacific History Association’s Teresia Teaiwa prize in 2021, and her essay presents case studies of anti-nuclear activism in the 1970s and 1980s, introducing Against Testing on Moruroa (ATOM) in Fiji and the wider Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement.

Looking beyond their political role, however, she discusses these networks as an expression of cultural movements for self-determination in the late 20th century. Inspired by Fijian–Tongan poet Tagi Qolouvaki’s invocation of ‘activist art-story’, Mangioni draws on her PhD thesis to call for historians ‘to engage with the creative chronicle of our social movements to make creative Pacific histories’.

South–South solidarity between Indigenous movements

Marco de Jong is another early career scholar documenting the roots of the NFIP movement amongst Māori activists in Aotearoa–New Zealand. His essay in this issue details the work of the Auckland-based Pacific Peoples Anti-Nuclear Action Committee (PPANAC) and activists such as Hone Harawira and Hilda Halkyard-Harawira.

De Jong’s article presents ‘a view upon a native sea turned Indigenized Ocean flowing outwards, and seen from, Aotearoa’, highlighting the importance of the Te Hui Oranga o Te Moananui a Kiwa gatherings in Auckland between 1982–6. He argues that Māori interactions with other Indigenous Pacific peoples were rooted in local struggles for land rights and identity, but developed a unique version of Pacific regionalism, promoting anti-nuclearism and self-determination by and for Pacific peoples. De Jong argues that there were often different priorities between Pākehā and Māori members of the NFIP network: ‘To Māori, the struggle was not “out there” but all around them’.

By focusing on ‘our Pacific through native eyes’, De Jong highlights a fundamental difference between campaigns for a nuclear-free Pacific and the NFIP/PCRC movement. This difference was evident in the second regional Nuclear-Free Pacific and Independence Movements Conference in Ponape, Federated States of Micronesia in October–November 1978. The meeting was held in two parts – a ‘conference for independence movements’ and a ‘conference on nuclear issues for educators and communicators’ – and produced two separate statements: ‘The People’s Treaty for a Nuclear Free Pacific’ and the ‘Charter to establish Rights of Indigenous Peoples’.⁴⁸

The significance of this regional gathering, at a time when pan-Oceania travel and communications were costly and time-consuming, is measured in the participation of an historic group of Pacific leaders. Amongst many others: Nelson Anjain (RMI), Oscar Manutahi Temaru and Téa Hirshon (Mā‘ohi Nui), Déwé Gorodé and Yann Céléné Uregei (Kanaky), Bernard Narokobi (PNG), Walter Lini, Fred Timikata, and John Naupa (New Hebrides), Moses Uludong (Belau), Lorine Tevi and Rev. Akuila Yabaki (Fiji), and Aboriginal activists Gary Foley, Clarrie Grogan, and Brue Walker.

After the next conference, held in Hawai‘i in 1980, NFP became NFIP. As The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders notes: ‘The movement for a nuclear-free Pacific recast itself in terms of Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific, recognising that national sovereignty is a pre-condition of asserting control over the environment’.⁴⁹

North–South solidarity and transnational activism

The 30 years of French nuclear testing mobilized and inspired this regional social movement. There are many studies about the vibrant and diverse anti-nuclear movement within Mā‘ohi Nui/French Polynesia – from Oscar Temaru’s independence party, Tavini Huira‘atira no Te Ao Mā‘ohi, to Moruroa e Tatou (the association of former test site workers), alongside the Ètārētia Porotetani Mā‘ohi (EPM) and church-based youth and community networks, such as Association 193.

In this issue, Clémence Maillochon illustrates the transnational dimension of the Mā‘ohi anti-nuclear movement, rooted in a history of rural resistance and North–South co-operation. Her essay describes a ‘Papeete–Nouméa–Larzac’ axis, linking Mā‘ohi activists with Kanak insurgents and anti-militarist movements in France. She shows the personal and political threads that linked radical lawyers, church networks, and activists from lo Larzac in southern France (the Larzac agricultural plateau that became an international networking space for activists and pacifists from France and its Pacific colonies – ‘a symbol of rural resistance, of an alter-globalism that did not yet speak its name’).

In these essays, the 21st-century authors have foregrounded the agency of Indigenous activists rather than the Western allies – such as Greenpeace – who campaigned alongside the NFIP movement. Their contributions add to a growing body of personal testimony by Indigenous nuclear survivors and resisters from around Oceania: women from Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara communities on Anangu land in South Australia;⁵⁰ Marshall Islanders who lived through 67 atmospheric nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak atolls;⁵¹ Fijian soldiers and i-Kiribati plantation workers who witnessed the British hydrogen bomb tests on Malden and Christmas Islands;⁵² or the Mā‘ohi workers who laboured at the nuclear test sites of French Polynesia for 30 years, witnessing 193 nuclear tests.⁵³

The renewed interest in nuclear history also comes as Pacific Island governments and communities grapple with the radioactive legacies of 50 years of nuclear testing. Despite the decades since atmospheric and underground nuclear testing ended in 1996, Pacific Islands Forum leaders are again speaking out about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the hazard of nuclear contaminants in the Pacific.

Throughout 2021–4, Pacific Islands Forum leaders have raised concern about Japanese proposals to dump contaminated wastewater from the stricken nuclear reactors at Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean. Island governments and civil society groups have expressed concern over Australian plans to purchase nuclear submarines from the United Kingdom and United States under the September 2021 AUKUS agreement.

There is increasing focus on assistance to nuclear survivors and ten Forum member countries have signed and ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This new global disarmament agreement includes a comprehensive set of prohibitions on participating in any nuclear weapon activities, guarantees assistance to nuclear survivors, and calls for environmental remediation of nuclear sites. On 28 September 2023, the Assembly of French Polynesia unanimously adopted a resolution endorsing TPNW and calling on France to recognize the treaty as a new norm in international law.

The nuclear era in the Pacific is not over, but the articles in this issue highlight the deep traditions of resistance and survival, traditions that continue into the 21st century.

Acknowledgements

This special issue of the Journal of Pacific History was inspired by a series of panels at the 2021 Pacific History Association (PHA) conference in Fiji, with thanks to USP historian Nicholas Halter. Thanks also to Adrian Muckle and JPH editors Frances Steel and Ryan Tucker Jones, who welcomed this special edition, and anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback. The introduction draws on my reporting as a correspondent for Islands Business magazine (Fiji), with thanks to editors past and present. As a former staff member of the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre – the secretariat of the NFIP movement – I acknowledge my debt to colleagues too numerous to mention, but give special thanks to former PCRC directors Lopeti Senituli, Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, and Tupou Vere.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nic Maclellan

Nic Maclellan – Journalist and researcher in the Pacific Islands, correspondent for Islands Business magazine (Fiji). [email protected]

Notes

¹ Don A. Farrell, Tinian and the Bomb – Project Alberta and Operation Centreboard (Tinian: Micronesian Productions, 2018).

² Jean-Marc Regnault, La Bombe française dans le Pacifique – L’implantation 1957–1964 (Papeete: Scoop, 1993). See also Renaud Meltz, Alexis Vrignon, and Sylvain Mary, ‘Imperial Resurgence: How French Polynesia was Chosen as the Site for the French Centre for Pacific Tests (CEP)’, Journal of Pacific History (hereinafter JPH) 58, no. 3 (2023); Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon, ‘Polynesian Agency and the Establishment of the French Centre for Pacific Tests’, JPH 58, no. 4 (2023).

³ Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

⁴ Sue Rabbitt Roff, ‘Hiding Britain’s H-bomb Secrets’, letter to The Guardian, 28 Dec. 2018; Sue Rabbitt Roff, ‘Why are Files on British Nuclear Weapons Development in Australia being Removed from Public Access at the UK National Archives?’, Pearls and Irritations, 23 Jan. 2020.

⁵ Présidence de la Polynésie française, ‘Essais nucléaires – la majorité des archives désormais ouverte à la consultation’, Media Release, 23 Nov. 2022 ; Nicolas Barotte, ‘Essais nucléaires en Polynésie: l’armée ouvre ses archives’, Le Figaro, 18 Nov. 2022. For case studies on the ongoing challenges of accessing French government archives, see Marco de Jong, Nic Maclellan, and Carla Cantagallo, Challenging Nuclear Secrecy: A Discussion of Hierarchies, Ethics and Barriers to Access in Nuclear Archives (Oklahoma: Nuclear Truth Project, 2023), 13–14, 23–6.

⁶ J.L. Symonds, A History of British Atomic Tests in Australia (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985); Lorna Arnold, A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapons Trials in Australia (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1987); Lorna Arnold, Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); Lorna Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

⁷ Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb, xi.

⁸ Some key works include Marie-Thérèse and Bengt Danielsson, Moruroa mon amour (Paris: Stock, 1974), republished in English as Poisoned Reign (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986); Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Glenn Alcalay, ‘The Ethnography of Destabilization: Pacific Islanders in the Nuclear Age’, Dialectical Anthropology 13 (1988): 243–51; Jonathan Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994); Bruno Barrillot, Les essais nucléaires français 1960–1996 (Lyon: CDRPC, 1996).

⁹ Holly Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2004); Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report (Santa Monica: Left Coast Press, 2008); Martha Smith-Norris, Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands During the Cold War (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016).

¹⁰ Elizabeth Tynan, Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story (Sydney: NewSouth, 2016); Frank Walker, Maralinga: The Chilling Expose of Our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of Our Troops and Country (Sydney: Hachette, 2016); Nic Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017); Sue Rabbitt Roff, Making the British H-Bomb in Australia – From the Monte Bellos to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics (self-published, 2021); Elizabeth Tynan, The Secret of Emu Field (Sydney: NewSouth, 2022); Paul Grace, Operation Hurricane (Sydney: Hachette, 2023).

¹¹ Bruno Barrillot, L’héritage de la bombe: Polynésie-Sahara 1960–2002 (Lyon: CDRPC, 2002) ; Jean-Marc Regnault, Le nucléaire en Océanie, tu connais? – Les essais atmosphériques (Papeete: Api Tahiti, 2021); Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, Toxique – Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Paris: PUF/Disclose, 2021); Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon, Des Bombes en Polynésie – les essais nucléaires français dans le Pacifique (Paris: Vendémaire, 2022).

¹² For discussion, see Nic Maclellan, ‘Nuclear Testing and Racism in the Pacific Islands’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, ed. Steven Ratuva (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 885–904.

¹³ For analysis of the threat of radioactive contamination to ecological frameworks, see Elizabeth de Loughrey, ‘The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific’, Cultural Geographies 20 (2013): 167–84; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations’, in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235–53.

¹⁴ See, e.g., Ian Campbell, A History of the Pacific Islands (St Luscia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 217–18; Deryck Scarr, The History of the Pacific Islands (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990), 298, 355–6; Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein-Smith, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 343–45; Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211.

¹⁵ Yoko Ogashiwa, Microstates and Nuclear Issues: Regional Cooperation in the Pacific (Suva: USP Institute of Pacific Studies, 1991).

¹⁶ Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Stewart Firth, ‘Strategic and Nuclear issues’, in Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the 20th Century, ed. K.R. Howe, Robert Kiste, and Brij Lal (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994); Stewart Firth and Karin von Strokirch, ‘A Nuclear Pacific’, in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 324–57; Stewart Firth, ‘Nuclear Testing’ and ‘Nuclear Free Pacific’ in The Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia, ed. Brij Lal and Kate Fortune (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 256–68.

¹⁷ Roy H. Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Moruroa (London: IB Tauris, 1997).

¹⁸ For example, Vijay Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement: Problems and Prospects’, in The Pacific: Peace, Security and the Nuclear Issue, ed. Ranginui Walker and William Sutherland (London: United Nations University and Zed Books, 1988), 185–95; Kevin Clements: Back from the Brink: The Creation of a Nuclear-Free New Zealand (Sydney: Allen & Unwin New Zealand, 1988); Ogashiwa, Microstates and Nuclear Issues.

¹⁹ Zohl de Ishtar, Daughters of the Pacific (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1994); Cita Morei, ‘In Defence of our Nuclear-free Constitution’, in Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women, ed. ‘Atu Emberson-Bain (Suva: Marama Publications, 1994), 219–22.

²⁰ David Stone, ‘The Awesome Glow in the Sky: The Cook Islands and the French Nuclear Tests’, JPH 2, no. 1 (1967); J.W. Davidson, ‘French Polynesia and the French Nuclear Tests: The Submission of John Teariki’, JPH 2, no. 1 (1967); Walter Johnson and Sione Tupouniua, ‘Against French Nuclear Testing: The A.T.O.M. Committee’, JPH 11, no. 4 (1976); Stewart Firth, ‘The Nuclear Issue in the Pacific Islands’, JPH 21, no. 4 (1986); Karin Von Strokirch, ‘The Impact of Nuclear Testing on Politics in French Polynesia’, JPH 26, no. 2 (1991).

²¹ There are no papers in edited JPH or PHA collections, such as Brij Lal, ed., Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1992); Brij Lal and Peter Hempenstall, eds, Pacific Lives, Pacific Places: Bursting Boundaries in Pacific History (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 2001); Brij Lal, ed., The Defining Years: Pacific Islands, 1945–1965 (Canberra: Division of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, 2005).

²² Robert Aldrich, ‘Writing the History of the French Pacific’, in Lal, ed., Pacific Islands History, 79–91. The history of the CEP, however, is addressed throughout Aldrich’s France and the South Pacific Since 1940 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993).

²³ For the UK tests, e.g., Losena Salabula, Josua Namoce, and Nic Maclellan, Kirisimasi – Na Sotia kei na Lewe ni Mataivalu e Wai ni Viti e na vakatovotovo iyaragi nei Peritania mai Kirisimasi (Suva: Pacific Concerns Resource Centre, 1999); Gerry Wright, We Were There (New Plymouth: Zenith Print, n.d.); Roger Cross and Avon Hudson, Beyond Belief: The British Bomb Tests: Australia's Veterans Speak Out (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2005); Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb.

²⁴ Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese; Johnston and Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War; Giff Johnson, Nuclear Past, Unclear Future (Majuro: Micronitor, 2009).

²⁵ Giff Johnson, Don’t Ever Whisper – Darlene Keju: Pacific Health Pioneer, Champion for Nuclear Survivors (Majuro: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013); Sylvia Frain, Fanohge Famalåo’an and Fan’tachu Fama’lauan – Women Rising: Indigenous Resistance to Militarization in the Marianas Archipelago (e-publication, Guampedia.com, 2017).

²⁶ John Taroanui Doom, A he’e noa i te tau: Mémoires d’une vie partagée (Papeete: Editions Haere Pō, 2016); Christine Weir, ‘The Opening of the Coconut Curtain: Pacific Influence on the World Council of Churches through the Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Pacific, 1961 to 2000’, JPH 54, no. 1 (2019).

²⁷ Michael Hamel-Green, The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty: A Critical Assessment (Canberra: ANU Peace Research Centre, 1990); Michael Hamel-Green, ‘The Implications of the 2017 UN Nuclear Prohibition Treaty for Existing and Proposed Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones’, Global Change, Peace & Security 30, no. 2 (2018): 209–32; Michael Hamel-Green, ‘Anti-Nuclear Campaigning and the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone (Rarotonga) Treaty, 1960–85’, in Proceedings of the 14th Biennial Labour History Conference, ed. Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber (Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2015), 51–62.

²⁸ Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal, eds, Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015).

²⁹ ‘The Chief Petty Officer – Ratu Inoke Bainimarama’ in Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb, 125–34.

³⁰ Nic Maclellan, ‘Bainimarama Condemns Nuclear Testing “Atrocities”’, Islands Business, 27 Aug. 2021.

³¹ ‘The High Chief – Ratu Penaia Ganilau’, in Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb, 147–56.

³² Jean-Marc Regnault, Oscar Temaru - L’océanie au cœur (Papeete: Api Tahiti, 2020).

³³ Teburoro Tito and Christian Ciobanu, ‘“Tavita i vs. Koriate iaon te Boom Ae Mwakaroiroi” means “David vs. Goliath on the Nuclear Bomb”’, Outrider, 16 Feb. 2022.

³⁴ Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

³⁵ Teresia Teaiwa, ‘bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans’, in Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Sweat and Salt Water – Selected Works [compiled and edited by Katerina Teaiwa, April Henderson, and Terence Wesley-Smith] (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021), 110–26.

³⁶ Epeli Hau‘ofa, ed., We Are the Ocean – Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

³⁷ Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, in Hau‘ofa, ed., We Are the Ocean, 49.

³⁸ Sylvia Frain and Rebecca H. Hogue, ‘This Steinlager Ad Distorts the Truth about Anti-Nuclear Protest in the Pacific’, Stuff, 16 Dec. 2020. For another example within the global Black Lives Matter movement, see Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Pepsi Pulls Kendall Jenner Ad Ridiculed for Co-opting Protest Movements’, The Guardian, 6 Apr. 2017.

³⁹ Over nearly 40 years, France’s attack against the Rainbow Warrior has generated journalistic accounts, histories of the last voyage, and websites featuring interviews with crew members. Richard Shears and Isabelle Gidley, The Rainbow Warrior Affair (North Sydney: Unwin, 1985); Michael King, Death of the Rainbow Warrior (Auckland: Penguin, 1986); David Robie, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior (Auckland: Little Island Books, 2015); Eyes of Fire – Thirty Years On, https://eyes-of-fire.littleisland.co.nz/ (accessed 17 Oct. 2023).

⁴⁰ Disclosure – in a past life, the author was active in the NFIP movement and worked in the NFIP Secretariat in Fiji, the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC).

⁴¹ One example can be found in a debate published in The Contemporary Pacific, where a history of the nuclear era by French academics Paul de Dekker and Jean-Marc Regnault was met with fierce rebuttal from Mā‘ohi activists Gabriel Tetiarahi and John Taroanui Doom, along with critiques by the author, researcher Bruno Barrillot, and historian Stewart Firth. See ‘In Quest of Dialogue on a “Hot” Subject’, The Contemporary Pacific 17, no. 2 (2005): 336–83.

⁴² Interview with Marie-Thérèse Danielsson, Papeete, Tahiti, Sept. 1999. For Danielsson’s memories of Pouvanaa, see Nic Maclellan, ed., No Te Parau Tia, No Te Parau Mau, No Te Tiamaraa – For Justice, Truth and Independence (Suva: Pacific Concerns Research Centre, 1999), 18–19. See also Marie-Thérèse and Bengt Danielsson, Moruroa mon amour (Paris: Stock, 1974).

⁴³ Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, The Pacific Way: A Memoir (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Center for Pacific Islands Studies, East–West Center Pacific Islands Development Program, and University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 170.

⁴⁴ Hone Tuwhare, No Ordinary Sun (Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1964); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Solar Metaphors: “No Ordinary Sun”’, Ka mate ka ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics 6 (Sept. 2008): 52.

⁴⁵ Rebecca H. Hogue and Anais Maurer, ‘Pacific Women’s Anti-Nuclear Poetry: Centring Indigenous Knowledges’, International Affairs 98, no. 4 (July 2022): 1267–88.

⁴⁶ Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, ‘History Project’, in Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 20–3; Jessica Schwartz, ‘Radiation Songs and Transpacific Resonances of US Imperial Transits’, Journal of Transnational American Studies 11, no. 2 (2020): 153–71.

⁴⁷ Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Leora Kava, and Craig Santos Perez, Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022).

⁴⁸ Both statements are included in Appendix 3 of the Nuclear-Free Pacific and Independence Movements Conference Report, published jointly by the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) and Pacific People’s Action Front (PPAF), August 1979.

⁴⁹ Karen Nero, ‘The Material World Remade’, in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 359.

⁵⁰ For the effects of British nuclear testing on Indigenous people in South Australia, see Yami: The Autobiography of Yami Lester (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1993); Yalata and Oak Valley communities with Christobel Mattingley, Maralinga: The Anangu Story (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009); Christobel Mattingley, Maralinga’s Long Shadow: Yvonne’s Story (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016); and Heather Goodall, ‘Damage and Dispossession: Indigenous People and Nuclear Weapons on Bikini Atoll and the Pitjantjatjara Lands, 1946 to 1988’, in The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History, ed. Ann McGrath and Lynette Russell (London: Routledge, 2021), 419–42.

⁵¹ For many years, Giff Johnson of the Marshall Islands Journal, and Jack Niedenthal of the Bikini Atoll Council, have recorded Marshallese memories of the US tests. Giff presents a moving portrait of his late wife Darlene in Don’t Ever Whisper. Jack Niedenthal records many Bikinian memories in For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and their Islands (Majuro: Micronitor, 2001).

⁵² Losena Salabula, Josua Namoce, and Nic Maclellan, Kirisimasi – Na Sotia kei na Lewe ni Mataivalu e Wai ni Viti e na vakatovotovo iyaragi nei Peritania mai Kirisimasi (Suva: Pacific Concerns Resource Centre, 1999).

⁵³ Pieter Van der Vlies and Han Seur collate Polynesians’ testimony during 30 years of nuclear testing in the French Pacific in Moruroa and Us (Lyon: CDRPC, 1997), a collection also available in French, German, and Tahitian.