Nuclear Settler Colonialism at Sea, or How to Civilize an Ocean

Abstract:This essay asks us to reconceptualize nuclear colonialism in the Pacific as a form of settler colonialism, arguing that through nuclear testing the US applied older settler colonial principles of property and appropriation to previously unclaimed ocean spaces. Through an analysis of the Applied Fisheries Laboratory archives, I show how colonial legal doctrines provided a framework within which the American nuclear complex could conceptualize itself as properly owning the ocean that it had put to "productive use" through nuclear testing, with radiation serving as a settler colonial prosthesis that continues to impose colonial land relations even in the absence of settlers themselves. At the same time, I show how the Pacific itself shaped the emergence of US nuclearism, as its surprisingly resilient ecologies allowed the nuclear complex to continue to think of its destructive activities as compatible with the ongoing survival of life. The essay closes with an analysis of the Marshall Islands Student Association's 2019 campaign "My Fish Is Your Fish," which considers what decolonization looks like in an oceanscape that is permanently occupied by American radiation. For MISA, decolonial nuclear justice involves recomposing Marshallese land relations with the irradiated ocean as a critical form of nuclear decolonization.