Testing as the Blindspot of Nuclear Nonuse

Abstract

Pacific activists’ proclamation that nuclear testing is nuclear use poses a challenge to the notion of nuclear nonuse in the discipline of International Relations (IR). While addressing such a challenge, this article reveals a disciplinary blind spot regarding nuclear testing that disqualifies testing from nuclear use. I argue that IR discussions of nuclear nonuse—exemplified by Scott Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz’s debates on nuclear deterrence and Nina Tannenwald’s nuclear taboo framework—are part of the colonial knowledge production that dismisses the political agency and humanity of colonized people. This article then argues that nuclear testing is a form of nuclear use, specifically, the colonial use of nuclear weapons, by developing a postcolonial reinterpretation of nuclear testing in the case of US nuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands (1946–58).

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, editors of Security Studies, Ole Adolphsen, Udbhav Agarwal, Alexander D. Barder, Tarak Barkawi, Himadeep Muppidi, Maryam Nahhal, J. Luis Rodriguez, Sebastian Schmidt, Robbie Shilliam, Kaiqing Su, and many others for their feedback on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a more comprehensive list of nuclear test sites, see “Pacific Nuclear Test Archive,” International Disarmament Institute, https://disarmament.blogs.pace.edu/nuclear-test-archive/ (accessed April 29, 2023).

2 Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP), Pacific Women Speak: Why Haven’t You Heard? (Oxford: Greenline, 1987), 34. Quoted in Shine Choi and Catherine Eschle, “Rethinking Global Nuclear Politics, Rethinking Feminism,” International Affairs 98, no. 4 (2022): 1133.

3 Bernard Brodie, Frederick Sherwood Dunn, Arnold Wolfers, Percy Ellwood Corbett, and William T. R. Fox, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1946); Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Verna Gehring, “The Nuclear Taboo,” Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy 20, no. 2/3 (Summer 2000): 14–18; Maria Rost Rublee, “Taking Stock of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime: Using Social Psychology to Understand Regime Effectiveness,” International Studies Review 10, no. 3 (2007): 420–50; T. V. Paul, “Taboo or Tradition? The Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons in World Politics,” Review of International Studies 36 (2010): 853–63; Frank Sauer, Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear Weapons (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

4 Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

5 Sauer, Atomic Anxiety.

6 Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo.

7 T. V. Paul, The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2009).

8 Zachary S. Davis, “The Realist Nuclear Regime,” Security Studies 2, no. 3–4 (1993): 79–99.

9 Davis, “Realist Nuclear Regime”; Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

10 Scott Sagan, “The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Why More Nuclear Security Forces May Produce Less Nuclear Security,” Risk Analysis 24, no. 4 (2004): 935–46; Paul, Tradition of Non-Use; Paul, “Taboo or Tradition?”; Reid Pauly, “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button? Wargames and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security 43, no. 2 (2018): 151–92.

11 George Quester, “If the Nuclear Taboo Gets Broken,” Naval War College Review 58, no. 2 (2005): 70–91; Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo.

12 Rublee, “Taking Stock of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime.”

13 Brain Rathbun and Rachel Stein, “Greater Goods: Morality and Attitudes toward the Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 64, no. 5 (2019): 787–816; Michal Smetana and Marek Vranka, “How Moral Foundations Shape Public Approval of Nuclear, Chemical, and Conventional Strikes: New Evidence from Experimental Surveys,” International Interactions 47, no. 2 (2021): 374–90.

14 Michal Smetana and Carmen Wunderlich, “Forum: Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons in World Politics: Toward the Third Generation of ‘Nuclear Taboo’ Research,” International Studies Review 23, no. 3 (September 2021): 1072–99.

15 Carol Atkinson, “Using Nuclear Weapons,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 4 (2010): 839–51; Theo Farrell, “Nuclear Non-Use: Constructing a Cold War History,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 4 (2010): 819–29.

16 Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

17 Shampa Biswas, Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 23. Also see Anne Harrington de Santana, “NWs as the Currency of Power: Deconstructing the Fetishism of Force,” Nonproliferation Review 16, no. 3 (2009): 325–45.

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21 Brodie et al., The Absolute Weapon; Frederick Dunn, “The Common Problem,” in The Absolute Weapon, ed. Brodie et al.; Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Brief Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948); Robert Jervis, “The Nuclear Revolution and the Common Defense,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 5 (1986): 689–703; Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After Hiroshima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

22 Kenneth Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” The American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (1990): 731–45; Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons.

23 Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 64–65.

24 Scott Sagan, “The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Why More Nuclear Security Forces May Produce Less Nuclear Security,” Risk Analysis 24, no. 4 (2004): 935–46.

25 Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 4.

26 Ibid., 46; Scott Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

27 Remus Prăvălie, “Nuclear Weapons Tests and Environmental Consequences: A Global Perspective,” Ambio 43, no. 6 (2014): 729–44; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), “Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Testing,” USEPA, last modified February 13, 2023, https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-fallout-nuclear-weapons-testing (accessed April 29, 2023).

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29 Seiji Yamada, “Cancer, Reproductive Abnormalities, and Diabetes in Micronesia: The Effect of Nuclear Testing,” Pacific Health Dialog 11, no. 2 (2004): 216–21; Wendy N. Nembhard et al., “Nuclear Radiation and Prevalence of Structural Birth Defects Among Infants Born to Women from the Marshall Islands,” Birth Defects Research 111, no. 16 (2019): 1192–204; “The Human Cost of Nuclear Testing,” International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_tests (accessed December 11, 2023).

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31 Toshihiro Higuchi, Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

32 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).

33 Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 4 (emphasis added).

34 Ibid., 11.

35 Sagan, “Problem of Redundancy”; Scott Sagan, “Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 73–95.

36 Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 79.

37 Itty Abraham, “The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories,” Osiris 21, no. 1, Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs (2006), 51.

38 Darlene Keju-Johnson, “For the Good of Mankind,” in Pacific Women Speak out for Independence and Denuclearisation, ed. Zohl dé Ishtar (Christchurch: Raven Press, 1999), 15.

39 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, “The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific,” Cultural Geographies 20, no. 2, Special Issue: Islanding Cultural Geographies (April 2013): 167–84; Aimee Bahng, “The Pacific Proving Grounds and the Proliferation of Settler Environmentalism,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 11, no. 2 (2020): 45–73; Jessica Hurley, “Nuclear Settler Colonialism at Sea, or How to Civilize an Ocean,” American Quarterly 74, no. 4 (December 2022): 969–95.

40 Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo, 60; Nina Tannenwald, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-Use,” International Organization 53, no. 3 (1999): 433.

41 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 4, no. 1 (2001): 391–416.

42 Nina Tannenwald, “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo,” International Security 29, no. 4 (2005): 9.

43 Charlotte Epstein, “Constructivism or the Eternal Return of Universals in IR: Why Returning to Language Is Vital to Prolonging the Owl’s Flight,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 499–519.

44 Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo, 1 (emphasis added).

45 Roxanne Doty, “Aporia: A Critical Exploration of the Agent-Structure Problematique in International Relations Theory,” European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 3 (1997): 365–92; Robbie Shilliam, “‘Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate’: Caribbean Slavery, Constructivism, and Hermeneutic Tensions,” International Theory 6, no. 02 (2014): 349–72.

46 Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo, 2 (emphasis added).

47 Tannenwald, “The Nuclear Taboo,” 434.

48 Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo, 157.

49 Ibid., 169.

50 Biswas, Nuclear Desire, 35.

51 Coleman, “Racism!.”

52 Sanjay Seth, “Postcolonial Theory and the Critique of International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 1: 167–83; Hugh Gusterson, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 1 (1999): 111–43; Mark Laffey and Suthaharan Nadarajah, “Postcolonialism,” in Contemporary Security Studies (Fifth Edition), ed. Allan Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 126–43.

53 Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26, no. 4 (2001): 401.

54 Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Studies Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2008): 559.

55 Ansems de Vries et al., “Fracturing Politics”; Coleman, “Racism!.”

56 Meera Sabaratnam, “IR in Dialogue… But Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3 (February 2011): 781–803.

57 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 72–73.

58 Ibid., 73.

59 Aaron B. Sampson, “Tropical Anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the Way We Imagine International Politics,” Alternatives 27 (2002): 429–57.

60 Barkawi and Laffey, “The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies,” Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 329–52.

61 Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 150.

62 Ibid., 149.

63 Teresia Teaiwa, “On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global Context,” The Contemporary Pacific 18, no. 1 (2006): 72.

64 Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

65 Ralph Wilde, International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ralph Wilde, “The Role of the Hague Regulations in the Evolution of International Trusteeship, and the Framework of Rights and Duties of Occupying Powers,” Loyola Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review 31, no. 85, issue 1 (2009): 85.

66 Kimie Hara, “Micronesia and the Postwar Remaking of the Asia Pacific: ‘An American Lake’,” The Asian-Pacific Journal 5, no. 8 (2007).

67 Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents, xxix.

68 Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization,” European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 4 (1999): 414.

69 Ibid.

70 Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

71 Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

72 Sasha Davis, The Empire’s Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

73 Shampa Biswas, “Masculinist States, Radioactive Contamination, and Transnational Nuclear Justice: A Conversation on Building Bridges Across Borders,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 23, no. 1 (2021): 149–69.

74 Robert Jacobs, “Nuclear Conquistadors: Military Colonialism in Nuclear Test Site Selection during the Cold War,” Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 1, no. 2 (2013): 157–77.

75 I thank the anonymous reviewer for this important point.

76 Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo, 157.

77 Roy Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Mururoa (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997).

78 Holly Barker, “From Analysis to Action: Efforts to Address the Nuclear Legacy in the Marshall Islands,” in Half-Lives and Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War, ed. Barbara Rose Johnston (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007).

79 Laffey and Weldes, “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

80 Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo, 114.

81 Rebecca Hogue and Anaïs Maurer, “Pacific Women’s Anti-Nuclear Poetry: Centring Indigenous Knowledges,” International Affairs 98, no. 4 (2022): 1267–88.

82 Jacob, “Nuclear Conquistadors”; Biswas, “Masculinist States.”

83 Cynthia Werner and Kathleen Purvis-Roberts, “Unravelling the Secrets of the Past: Contested Versions of Nuclear Testing in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan,” in Half Lives and Half Truths, ed. Johnston, 277–98.

84 Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (The Woodlands, TX: Two Sixty Press, 1991); Eric Frohmberg et al., “The Assessment of Radiation Exposures in Native American Communities from Nuclear Weapons Testing in Nevada,” Risk Analysis 20, no. 1 (2000): 101–12; Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 39–60; James Rice, “Downwind of the Atomic State: US Continental Atmospheric Testing, Radioactive Fallout, and Organizational Deviance, 1951–1962,” Social Science History 39, no. 04 (December 2015): 647–76.

85 I thank the editors of Security Studies for raising the discussions.

86 Shah Meer Baloch, “The Fallout From Pakistan’s Nuclear Tests,” The Diplomat, May 29, 2017, https://thediplomat.com/2017/05/the-fallout-from-pakistans-nuclear-tests/ (accessed December 11, 2023).

87 I thank Shahab ud Din Ahmad for this point. See Salman Rafi Sheikh, The Genesis of Baloch Nationalism: Politics and Ethnicity in Pakistan, 1947–1977 (Washington: Routledge, 2018).

88 Biswas, Nuclear Desire, 112.

89 For more detailed data and impacts of US nuclear testing, see Hart Rapaport and Ivana Nikolić Hughes, “The U.S. Must Take Responsibility for Nuclear Fallout in the Marshall Islands,” Scientific America April 4, 2022, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-s-must-take-responsibility-for-nuclear-fallout-in-the-marshall-islands/(accessed April 29, 2023).

90 Jack Niedenthal, “For the Marshall Islands, Nuclear Remembrance Day Is a Painful Reminder,” The United States Institute of Peace, March 1, 2024: https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/03/marshall-islands-nuclear-remembrance-day-painful-reminder (accessed May 5, 2024).

91 Jack Niedenthal, For the Good of Mankind. A History of the People of Bikini and TheirIslands (Majuro: Bravo, 2001); Holly Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2004); Michelle Keown, “Children of Israel: US Military Imperialism and Marshallese Migration in the Poetry of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner,” Interventions 19, no. 7 (2017): 930–47; Anaïs Maurer, “Nukes and Nudes: Counter-Hegemonic Identities in the Nuclearized Pacific,” French Studies 72, no. 3 (2018): 394–411; Becky Alexis-Martin, Disarming Doomsday: The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons Since Hiroshima (London: Pluto Press, 2019); Anaïs Maurer and Rebecca H. Hogue, “Introduction: Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 11, no. 2 (2020): 25–43.

92 Mark M. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton Unviersity Press, 2009).

93 Bahng, “The Pacific Proving Grounds.”

94 Ralph Wilde, “From Trusteeship to Self-Determination and Back Again,” 94. Quoted in Bahng, “Pacific Proving Grounds,” 50.

95 Bahng, “Pacific Proving Grounds,” 50.

96 U.S. Joint Task Force One, Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads, Prepared under the direction of the Commander of Joint Task Force One (New York: W.H. Wise, 1947), 15 (emphasis added).

97 Ibid., 3.

98 Lauren Donaldson, “Biological Cycles of Fission Products in Aquatic Systems as Studied at the Pacific Atolls of Bikini and Eniwetok,” Report AECU–3412, Box 3, Folder 7, Lauren R. Donaldson Papers, University of Washington Special Collections. Quoted in Laura Martin, “Proving Grounds: Ecological Fieldwork in the Pacific and the Materialization of Ecosystems,” Environmental History 23, no. 3 (July 23, 2018): 579.

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102 Jacobs, “Nuclear Conquistadors,” 158.

103 Joint Task Force One, Bombs at Bikini, 16.

104 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

105 Keith Parsons and Robert Zaballa, Bombing the Marshall Islands: A Cold War Tragedy (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 64–65.

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107 Paul Williams, Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 17.

108 Ibid., 87.

109 DeLoughrey, “The Myth of Isolates,” 174.

110 Kerry R. Howe, The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003), 23.

111 Jacobs, “Nuclear Conquistadors,” 159.

112 E. J. Rooney, “The Strange People from Bikini: Primitive They Are, But They Love One Another and the American Visitors Who Took Their Home,” New York Times Magazine, March 31, 1946, 23–25. Quoted in Davis, “Representing Place,” 615.

113 Quoted in Davis, “Representing Place,” 607.

114 Walter J. Hickel, Who Owns America? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971). Quoted in Teaiwa, “Bikinis,” 101.

115 SECY-2686, 6 September 72, Secretariat, Box 7929, Folder 1, MH&S 3, Radiation Vol. 1, RG 326, DOE Archives (accessed April 29, 2023), 5–6.

116 Atomic Energy Commission, Minutes of the Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine, January 13–14 (New York: AEC, 1956). Quoted in Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese, 45.

117 Jacobs, “Nuclear Conquistadors,” 160.

118 Youngsolwara Pacific, “Remembrance Day March,” Youngsolwara, last modified 2021, https://www.youngsolwarapacific.com/we-are-not-alone.html (accessed April 29, 2023).

119 Indigenous Caucus of the Nuclear Connections Across Oceania Conference, “Ōtepoti Declaration,” last modified December 1, 2022, https://www.youngsolwarapacific.com/about.html (accessed April 29, 2023).

120 Lou Cornum, “The Irradiated International,” Data and Society, June 7–8, 2018; Maurer and Hogue, “Introduction.”

121 Maurer and Hogue, “Introduction,” 27.

122 Christen T. Sasaki, Pacific Confluence: Fighting over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022), 11. This postcolonial understanding of island states and their people as significant political actors resonates with the recent contributions that bring indigenous and Oceanic perspectives into IR. See Tiara R. Na’puti and Sylvia C. Frain, “Indigenous Environmental Perspectives: Challenging the Oceanic Security State,” Security Dialogue (2023): 115–36.

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Notes on contributors

Ruoyu Li

Ruoyu Li, Political Science Department, Johns Hopkins University.