Before the term ‘Bikini’ evoked memories of a sultry summer, it referred solely to Bikini Atoll: a coral reef in the Marshall Islands. Between 1946 and 1958, Bikini Atoll became the testing site for at least 23 nuclear bombs, detonated by the United States. To cover up these ecocidal crimes, the term Bikini was weaponised and subverted, and the female body became centred as a hyper-sexualised object. Nuclear imperialism has been violent across the Pacific, and the threat of devastation continues through risks associated with climate change and fossil fuel capitalism.
Throughout its history, the Marshall Islands have been a colony of Germany, Japan and the United States. The United States gained control of the area as a result of the Japanese defeat in WWII — becoming the occupiers of an Indigenous population who had never ceded sovereignty. Nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll was accompanied by the evacuation of 167 Bikini Islanders, who were told they would be able to return to their lands after the tests had been completed. To this day, the Indigenous people of Bikini Atoll have been unable to return to their lands due to the threat of radiation poisoning. These communities continue to face ongoing health issues, such as greater risk of cervical, lung and oral cancer.
We cannot extricate colonial violence from ecocide. In fact, it is a core tenet of imperialism. To Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmegs Curse, colonial violence marked a new form of warfare where “Indigenous peoples faced a state of permanent war that involved many kinds of other-than-human beings and entities: pathogens, rivers, forests, plants, and animals all play[ing] a part in the struggle.” The ability to dictate which environments and peoples live, and which environments and peoples die, is the ultimate form of biopower bestowed upon the colonial state; a power most ‘legitimately’ exercised in warfare, but also through soft power and total inaction. Any measures towards decolonisation cannot be considered meaningful without consideration of environmental and multi-species justice.
Teresia Teaiwa, in bikinis and other s/pacific and n/oceans, links together the erasure of Bikini Atoll from Western consciousness, and the weaponisation of both the female body and the semantics of the term Bikini. She argues that “the bikini bathing suit is testament to the recurring tourist trivialisation of Pacific Islanders’ experience and existence.” The bikini performs a sexist dynamic where “objectification through excessive visibility” is inverted to the effect of “objectification through rendering invisible.” The female body operates as a hyper-sexualised guise for an imperial legacy: a perverse reminder of shared struggles and the need for solidarity across gendered and racialised lines. This is an instalment within the historic campaign of sexualised language, with phallic language and references to ‘virginity’ common in nuclear discourse. The disposability of the environment that occurs within the “loss” of nuclear virginity is akin to the disposability of the female body under the global patriarchy.
Bikini Atoll is not an outlier, but one of many areas in the Pacific affected by nuclear imperialism. The region has historically been used as testing grounds for nuclear weaponry, with tests being conducted by the United States, France, and the United Kingdom across the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Kiribati, and Australia. Nuclear apocalypse is not a distant future, but a lived reality for some communities in the Pacific. With the ongoing threat of climate change, communities across the Pacific find themselves exposed to vulnerabilities unique to their positioning within a matrix of colonial power relations. The risk of rising sea tides, warming temperatures, tropical storms, and ocean acidification all exacerbate the threat to the Pacific. When coupled with continued nuclear contamination, inaction on both nuclear disarmament and climate change sparks risk of environmental disaster across the entire globe.
We must not excuse so-called Australia from the discussion. While we exist in close proximity to our Pacific neighbours, we certainly lack a sense of Pacific identity or any meaningful ethos of regional solidarity. Within Australian consciousness is the prevailing view of the Pacific as a convenient dumping ground. We flaunt our place in the Pacific when it is convenient, during regional conferences and diplomatic meetings, while remaining manifestly a part of the Global Northern elite. Australia has an enhanced capacity to mitigate the impacts of climate change compared to its neighbouring states. A failure to extend this capacity regionally in fact constitutes a form of genocide by negligence. Our climate change policies remain steeped in empty promises to reduce emissions and climate-migration deals that become tokenistic and reactionary when coupled with the former. We are beginning to see the deliberate weaponisation of climate change globally, including in occupied Palestine. Australia’s failure to make strides towards climate justice normalises this weaponisation and diminishes efforts towards decolonisation at both a regional and local level.
Insidiously, we also refuse to acknowledge the cruel nuclear atrocities committed on Indigenous land in so-called Australia, against populations at Maralinga, Emu Field and the Montebello Islands from 1952 to 1963. None of these tests considered the impact on the traditional owners of the land, indeed many people were not properly evacuated or informed at all. At Emu Field, communities were directly exposed to nuclear fallout. Decontamination attempts were consistently negligent. Maralinga was not returned to its traditional owners until 2009. We cannot separate nuclear imperialism from our own history of genocide.
The struggle for disarmament remains inseparable from the struggle for environmental justice. State security is a flimsy, violent, ironic notion at best when the idea remains so entwined with the stockpiling of ready-to-use nuclear weapons. While the history and impact of both colonialism and climate change in the Pacific is specific, this is a pattern replicated across the globe where communities that are not responsible for climate change bear the brunt of the impact. We must turn to the strong Pacific activists who have been mobilising for decades against both nuclear proliferation and climate inaction, and critiquing these ideas of security. It is only through meaningful engagement with their voices that we can strengthen our regional ties and commit to a decolonised and feminist future.
