Nuclear testing in the Pacific, 1946–1996: Western colonial networks and legacies

Of all the nuclear bombs tested throughout history, the most powerful and destructive devices have been detonated within the Pacific, from the first sequence of atomic bombs tested at Bikini atoll in 1946, to the final French nuclear test on Fangataufa atoll in Mā’ohi Nui (or French Polynesia, to use colonial terminology) in 1996 (Maurer 2024, 13; Maclellan 2019, 885). The 106 US bombs detonated in the Pacific generated 73.5 percent of the yield from all 1,054 US tests undertaken globally, and were conducted primarily in the Marshall Islands, which, after the US defeated occupying Japanese forces in 1944, were incorporated into the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) (Maurer 2024, 13). Sanctioned by the UN, the Trust provisions enabled US exploitation of the Marshall Islands as a military colony, and 67 nuclear bombs were tested on the northern atolls of Bikini and Enewetak between 1946 and 1958, with a combined yield equating to 8,580 Hiroshima-sized bombs (Maurer 2024, 13). In 1962, the US undertook a further 24 atmospheric nuclear bomb tests at Kiritimati (Christmas) atoll, located in what was then the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony (today the Republic of Kiribati), and also conducted five atmospheric airbursts and nine high-altitude nuclear tests at Johnston (Kalama) Atoll, which remains an unincorporated territory of the United States (Maclellan 2019, 887–88).

Between 1952 and 1958, the UK also exploited its colonial and semicolonial influence in the Pacific in order to conduct nuclear testing. Benefiting from its close political ties with Australia (a former British settler colony which, though self-governing by the early 1940s, still retained the British monarch as the head of state), the UK undertook 12 atmospheric atomic bomb tests within the Montebello islands (in 1952) and at Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia (between 1953 and 1957). A final set of UK tests (nine hydrogen and atomic bombs) were undertaken at Malden Island and Kiritimati (Christmas) atoll, areas where UK and US nuclear imperialism intersected. Kiritimati and Malden were first annexed by the US under the Guano Act of 1856, but Kiritimati (used for both UK and US nuclear testing) was incorporated into Britain’s Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony in 1919, while Malden Island was incorporated in 1972 (see Maclellan 2019, 887–88). The US and the UK also collaborated on “Project Sunshine,” a research project measuring the accumulation of radioactive isotope strontium-90 in the human body as a result of atmospheric nuclear testing (RAND 1953; Maclellan 2019, 894). Initiated by the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1953, the project involved analysis of cadavers from over 19 countries – many of them babies or children, whose bodies are more susceptible to radiation damage – often without the knowledge or consent of their families. The US took advantage of its jurisdiction over the Marshall Islands under the Trusteeship (which allowed the US to strictly limit the access of other nations to the area, and to undertake its nuclear testing programme free of international scrutiny) to run various experiments for Project Sunshine, including the extraction and analysis of both decayed and healthy teeth from ri-Majel children (Johnston and Barker 2008, 158; see also Maclellan 2019, 894).

These experiments were part of a wider classified US biomedical research initiative, codenamed Project 4.1, which exploited ri-Majel as test subjects in order to investigate a range of longer-term human health impacts of radiation exposure. The project was established following the 1954 BRAVO thermonuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll, which exposed several ri-Majel communities living downwind of the site to near-fatal levels of radiation. The largest and “dirtiest” bomb in the US Cold War arsenal, BRAVO was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, spreading radioactive fallout across a 50,000 square mile area, including the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Utrik and Ailinginae, located east of the testing site (Johnston 2015, 144–5). The people of Bikini had been displaced in 1946 to make way for the 23 bomb tests subsequently undertaken on their atoll, but although the communities downwind from Bikini had been temporarily evacuated prior to previous tests on Bikini, at the time of the BRAVO test they were neither evacuated nor informed of the forthcoming detonation. By the time ri-Majel exposed to fallout were transported to Kwajalein atoll (site of a US military base) for treatment, they were suffering various symptoms of severe radiation poisoning, including vomiting, skin lesions and hair loss (Johnston 2015). Following medical treatment for their acute symptoms, these communities were returned to their irradiated atoll environments, and the US military and medical staff from Brookhaven National Laboratory seized the opportunity to investigate the human health impacts of living in a radioactive environment (Johnston 2015, 45). Various experiments, enacted under the guise of medical aid, were undertaken on at least 539 ri-Majel men, women and children, often without their knowledge or informed consent. These included experimental surgery as well as injections of chromium-51, radioactive iodine, zinc, and carbon-14 (Macllellan 2019: 893; Cronkite et al. 1997).

The classified status of Project 4.1 ensured that its operations were kept secret from the Marshall Islands government, and the wider world, for decades. Eventually the Clinton Administration declassified a range of AEC documents in 1994, during a wide-ranging review of US human radiation studies conducted between 1944 and 1974. Among the declassified documents was a 1956 statement from Merril Eisenbud, a member of the AEC’s Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine, revealing the biological racism underpinning project 4.1:

[Utrik] is safe to live on but is by far the most contaminated place in the world and it will be very interesting to go back and get good environmental data […] to get a measure of the human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment. Now, data of this type has never been available. While it is true that these people do not live […] the way Westerners do, civilized people […] these people are more like us than mice. (Eisenbud qted in Johnston 2015, 145)

Even before gaining access to AEC documentation on the longer-term health impacts of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, ri-Rongelap had become acutely aware that the intentions of US scientists visiting their atoll were not benign. After their return to their contaminated atoll, the Rongelap community experienced almost three decades of deteriorating health, and their concerns that their illnesses were radiogenic were consistently dismissed by the AEC medical team (Dibblin 1988). The impact of this dehumanizing treatment is poignantly expressed in a 1975 letter sent by Nelson Anjain (a member of the ri-Rongelap community) to Dr. Robert Conard, the Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist leading project 4.1:

I realise now that your entire career is based on our illness. We are far more valuable to you, than you are to us. You have never really cared about us as people – only as a group of guinea pigs for your government’s bomb research effort…[We] do not want to see you again. We want medical care from doctors who care about us, not about collecting information for the US government’s war makers. (Anjain qted in Johnston 2007, 45–46)

In 1982 ri-Rongelap were eventually given access to a 1978 AEC radiation survey revealing that significant swathes of their atoll – including the northern areas where they gathered much of their food – were as contaminated as Bikini. This data supported ri-Rongelap claims that rising levels of thyroid tumours, leukemia, cancers, miscarriage and congenital defects – including “jellyfish” babies, tiny beings born without bones, or resembling bunches of grapes – were radiogenic (Dibblin 1988, 34–7; Johnston 2015, 145). The US administration failed to act on ri-Rongelap pleas for evacuation, and it was the Greenpeace flagship The Rainbow Warrior that eventually transported the community to Mejato, a hitherto uninhabited island in the northwest part of Kwajalein atoll, in 1985 (Dibblin 1988, 68; see also Keown 2026, forthcoming).

The Rainbow Warrior became a lightning rod for shifting alliances and tensions between the three nuclear powers in the Pacific, as well as regional hegemons such as Australia and New Zealand (both of which are former British settler colonies). In the interests of maintaining security in their respective spheres of influence in Oceania during the Cold War, Australia, New Zealand and the US formed the ANZUS security pact in 1951. However, shortly after The Rainbow Warrior rescued ri-Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, it was bombed and sunk in Auckland harbor by French intelligence agents immediately prior to a planned voyage to Moruroa Atoll to disrupt the French nuclear testing programme (Robie 1989). That same year (1985), as part of a burgeoning Pacific antinuclear movement, various Pacific Island nations (as well as New Zealand and Australia) signed the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (Keown 2018b: 587). In 1987, the New Zealand government instituted a strict ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships visiting New Zealand ports, leading to New Zealand’s partial exclusion from the ANZUS pact, and marking a divergence between New Zealand and US nuclear policy that continues to this day. Meanwhile, the UK and the US monitored and shared intelligence on the French nuclear testing programme in the Pacific during and beyond the Cold War (Richelson 2006).

Of the three nuclear powers, France tested for the longest period in Oceania, conducting 193 atmospheric and underground tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa Atolls in the Tuamotu archipelago between 1966 and 1996 (Maclellan 2019, 888). In Mā’ohi Nui (as with other nuclear testing zones in the Pacific), Pacific Islanders have suffered ill health not only through being directly exposed to nuclear fallout, but also through their involvement in handling radioactive materials during testing operations and clean-ups, and in collecting irradiated environmental samples for scientific analysis by the nuclear powers (Maclellan 2019, 898–9).

Indigenous Pacific antinuclear protest movements and literature

Indigenous Pacific mobilization against nuclear testing emerged from the earliest stages of the Pacific testing programs. As Anaïs Maurer notes, oral histories and songs from ‘Uvea, the largest island of the French colony of ‘Uvea mo Futuna (also known as Wallis and Futuna), record opposition to nuclear testing as early as 1945, the year in which the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Maurer 2024, 17). In 1950, Tahitian independence activist Pouvanaa a Oopa began collecting signatures from islanders in the Tuamotu archipelago (where the French nuclear tests were later conducted) in support of the Stockholm Peace Appeal, and following the 1954 BRAVO test, ri-Majel irooj (chiefs) petitioned the UN to put a stop to US testing in the Marshall Islands (Maclellan 2019, 888). By the 1970s, an Indigenous-led Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement was gathering momentum, building on the antinuclear efforts of regional organizations such as the Pacific Conference of Churches (established in 1966); the University of the South Pacific (founded in 1968); and the South Pacific Forum (inaugurated in 1971, and now known as the Pacific Islands Forum) (Maclellan 2019, 889; Keown and Murray 2013).² The NFIP has been involved in various environmental campaigns, not just against nuclear testing, but also targeting other military and extractive activity undertaken by regional hegemons; these include (inter alia) US testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles at Kaho‘olawe Island in Hawai‘i; the mining of uranium in Australia; and the dumping of radioactive waste in the Pacific by Japan (see Keown 2020b, 667; Firth and Strokirch 1997, 356).

Regional organisations such as the NFIP have served to reinvigorate transpacific networks that connected Pacific Islanders long before colonizing nations such as Spain, the UK, the US, France, Germany and the Netherlands divided Oceania into discrete colonial zones. As the late Tongan author Epeli Hau‘ofa notes, prior to western colonial incursions into Oceania, Indigenous Pacific communities were interlinked by far-reaching travel and trading networks, sharing a vast “sea of islands” later divided by Europeans into the geocultural categories of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia (Hau‘ofa 2008, 27–40). Hau‘ofa notes a “world of difference” between Indigenous cosmological understandings of Oceania – wherein islands are perceived as part of a “universe” comprising not just land surfaces but “the surrounding ocean […,] the underworld with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens, and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations” – versus colonial representations of the Pacific as small, isolated, sparsely populated “islands in a far sea” (2008, 31). Western colonial conceptions of Oceania as tabula rasa; “isolated islets, outside of modern history” (Maurer 2024, 28) or more recently as the “hole in the doughnut” of the Pacific Rim (Hau‘ofa 2008, 37) have underpinned what Maurer terms an “annihilation racism” enabling catastrophic damage to Pacific communities and environments (2024, 28).

In his influential 1997 essay “The Ocean in Us,” Hau‘ofa argues that cultivating transpacific solidarity, particularly with regard to protecting the marine environment that sustains all Pacific communities, is vital not just to the antinuclear movement, but also to other forms of resistance to environmental racism in Oceania:

The sense of a regional identity, being Pacific islanders, is felt most acutely in the movement towards a nuclear free and independent Pacific, the protests against the wall of death drift netting, 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. (Hau‘ofa 2008, 49)

Hau‘ofa’s advocacy for a regional response to environmental challenges has continued to inspire new generations of Oceanian scholars and creative practitioners, particularly as the climate crisis has become more acute. For example, in the introduction to their 2022 anthology, Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures, Kathy Jetñil Kijiner, Leora Kava and Craig Santos Perez similarly situate nuclear imperialism within a longue-durée of environmental racism and extractive colonialism enacted by multiple colonial forces in Oceania. As they point out, while the Pacific is now hyper-visible within climate crisis discourse, posited as being “on the ‘front line’ of climate change” impacts, these accumulating environmental disasters follow on from centuries of “ecological imperialism”:

Across the centuries, there have been so many instances of environmental devastation. Whaling and overfishing in the Pacific. Phosphate strip-mining in Banaba and Nauru. Gold and copper mining in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. Clear-cutting and logging in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Sugar plantations in Fiji. Copra plantations in Micronesia. Palm oil plantations in West Papua. GMO plantations in Hawai‘i. The militarization of Guåhan. The bombing of Kaho‘olawe and Poohakuloa. The dredging of Apra Harbor, Pearl Harbor, and Pago Pago Harbor. The horror of nuclear testing in Bikini, Enewetak, Fangataufa, Mururoa, Malden, and Kiritimati. (2022, iv-v)

Like Hau‘ofa, Jetñil-Kijiner, Kava and Perez here eschew colonial geocultural and linguistic divisions by linking multiple sites of ecological violence across Oceania, including the zones exploited by the three nuclear powers. Their anthology, which includes a range of antinuclear literature alongside material focused on other environmental contexts, supplements several decades of previous antinuclear interventions by Pacific authors and artists. Although (as noted above) Anaïs Maurer has identified examples of antinuclear protest in ‘Uvean songs as early as 1945, Māori poet Hone Tuwhare’s poem “No Ordinary Sun” (1959), the title and content of which is suggestive of the 1954 BRAVO bomb detonation, is often identified as inaugurating antinuclear art and literature in the Pacific (Maurer 2024, 17). The BRAVO bomb was described by ri-Majel nuclear survivors as generating a flash of light comparable to a second sunrise, and what became known as “the day of two suns,” represented in one of Solomon Enos’s panels for our 2019 graphic novel Jerakiaarlap, endures as a major event in ri-Majel cultural memory (Dibblin 1988).

Opening panel from Solomon Enos’s graphic adaptation of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Monster,” published in Jerakiaarlap: A Marshall Islands Epic (2019).

Jetñil-Kijiner’s antinuclear work, which I discuss in more detail below, extends a substantial corpus of previous creative work by Pacific women involved in antinuclear activism. Notable predecessors, who were also members of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement, include ni-Vanuatu poet Grace Mera Molisa, Kanaky author Déwé Gorodé, and Teresia Teaiwa, of i-Kiribati and African American descent.

Teaiwa’s spoken word composition “Bad Coconuts” is a notable example of antinuclear literature linking multiple sites of colonial violence across Oceania. Beginning with the nursery-rhyme dictum “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” Teaiwa goes on to remark that in the irradiated islands of Bikini, Enewetak, Moruroa and Fangataufa, “a coconut a day will kill you” (2010a; see also Keown 2018a). This line has particular resonance in the context of the US nuclear testing at Bikini atoll: even though US scientists had established in the 1950s that local food sources on irradiated atolls in the northern Marshall Islands contained dangerous levels of strontium and cesium, ri-Bikini who responded to a US invitation to resettle their atoll in the early 1970s were not told until 1977 to restrict their coconut consumption to one per day (Firth 1987, 40; see also Keown 2018a, 34). By the time these families were evacuated in 1978, they had absorbed dangerously high levels of radioactive isotopes from the local environment. Bikini is now estimated to be uninhabitable for at least 24,000 years, the half-life of the plutonium that contaminates its environment (Johnston 2015, 148). Today, ri-Bikini are living in indefinite exile, mainly on Kili (a previously uninhabited island lacking a lagoon), Majuro atoll (a crowded urban center where the capital of the Marshall Islands is located), and in the US (Niedenthal 2001, 141; see also Keown 2026, forthcoming). The AEC documentation declassified in the 1990s further revealed that even those ri-Bikini who had not temporarily resettled their atoll had been exposed to hazardous levels of radiation during the Cold War, as the entire archipelago had received measurable fallout from 20 of the nuclear tests undertaken in the Marshall Islands (Johnston 2015, 147).³ This exposure has burdened communities across the whole archipelago with intergenerational radiogenic illnesses, including inter alia multiple cancers, thyroid tumours, immune system vulnerabilities, congenital defects and reproductive health problems (Johnston 2015, 146).

Artistic responses to the legacies of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, in her capacity both as environmental activist and creative practitioner, has played a central role in raising global awareness of the far-reaching legacies of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. For the remainder of this essay, I will discuss her involvement in two creative projects exploring these modalities. The first is a UK-funded arts education project I led (along with a team of artists, authors and researchers) focused around the social, human health and environmental impacts of the forced displacement of Marshall Islanders during the Cold War.⁴ Between 2016 and 2019, our team undertook a range of research and participatory arts activities with ri-Majel schoolchildren and adults in the Marshall Islands and Honolulu (home to a substantial ri-Majel diasporic community). Our project authors and artists conducted a series of creative writing, art-making, and photographic workshops with ri-Majel participants, as well as producing new creative work of their own for the project. Workshop locations included schools in Majuro; Ejit, a small island within Majuro atoll populated by displaced ri-Bikini; Ebeye, a small island within Kwajalein atoll populated by ri-Majel displaced from areas of the atoll under US military control; Enewetak, to which the exiled local community returned in 1980 following partial environmental remediation of their irradiated atoll; and downtown Honolulu. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner led many of the creative writing workshops on our project, and her poetry was adapted into multiple graphic formats by project artists Munro Te Whata (of Māori-Niuean descent) and Solomon Enos (of Native Hawaiian descent). Creative outputs from our project include (inter alia) two volumes of children’s creative writing and art exploring the nuclear legacy, ri-Majel legends and cultural practices, and significant personal experiences; a graphic adaptation and animation of Jetñil-Kijiner’s antinuclear poem “History Project”; a graphic novel entitled Jerakiaarlap situating the nuclear testing era within a centuries-old history of ri-Majel voyaging, navigation and adaptation; a videopoem, “Anointed,” exploring Enewetak’s Runit Island (site of a massive concrete dome encasing an assemblage of nuclear waste buried within a nuclear bomb crater); a series of murals; photographic work; and a short live-action film, “The Batkid of Monkubok” made with children on Ebeye.

These creative outputs were aligned with a range of interdisciplinary strands within our project, including exploring the possibilities of making the “slow violence” of nuclear colonialism visible (here drawing on the work of Rob Nixon [2011] to foreground the fact that radioactive contamination of the environment is invisible to the human eye, as well as the fact that the full impacts of US nuclear testing were concealed until the declassified AEC documents were released in the 1990s). We also drew inspiration from Jetñil-Kijiner’s political motivations as an artist-activist, recognizing her commitment (and that of her compatriots) to raising international awareness of the wide-ranging and devastating impacts of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands in order to galvanize the campaign for nuclear justice. The Marshall Islands gained independence in 1979, following international pressure on the US to dissolve its Trust Territory, but in 1986 the Marshall Islands government signed a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the US that included a grossly inadequate $150 million nuclear compensation settlement, and foreclosed any future claims for nuclear compensation and environmental remediation.⁵ At the same time, the Compact agreement allowed the US to continue using Kwajalein atoll, the largest in the archipelago, for the testing of ballistic missiles launched from Vandenburg Air Base in California, thereby compounding environmental damage to the atoll that has accumulated since the missile testing programme began in the 1960s (Davis 2015, 35; Keown 2026, forthcoming). At the time of writing this article, the US military lease on Kwajalein, which necessitates the ongoing forced displacement of local communities, is secured until at least 2066 (Norris-Smith 2016, 153).

Our creative endeavors have also been inspired by Jetñil-Kijiner’s belief that poetry and other forms of expressive art can “touch” or move people, creating an affective response that can be more effective in building solidarity than assemblages of statistics or “factual” details alone (Jetñil-Kijiner 2014, 2015; Keown 2018a: 40). The creative works we have produced are therefore designed to support the ri-Majel campaign for nuclear justice, and to address the need (communicated to us by our ri-Majel stakeholders) for culturally relevant creative resources that can be used for ri-Majel youth education, in a context in which US textbooks and curricula significantly outweigh locally-focused education resources. The potential of graphic narratives to enhance multimodal, critical and disciplinary literacy is well-documented (Burger 2017; Sabeti 2012; Seelow 2010), and our participatory arts workshops were designed to give ri-Majel youth experience of working alongside Indigenous Pacific creative role models, who fostered an inclusive space in which participants could experiment with producing creative work attuned to their own cultural milieu. Our project’s creative outputs are also inflected by what Teresia Teaiwa has termed the “visual roots” of Pacific literary culture. In critiquing a scholarly tendency to trace Oceanic literature back to exclusively oral origins, with the advent of literacy attributed to European missionaries and linguists who developed orthographies in the wake of Western colonial incursions into the Pacific, Teaiwa points out that “complex visual symbol systems” have permeated Pacific culture across millennia. These range from the Lapita pottery designs (dating back some 3,500 years) to motifs used in barkcloth, tattooing, woodcarving, weaving and rock painting across Oceania (2010b, 731, 734). In keeping with these traditions, our youth participants responded enthusiastically to the invitation to illustrate their creative writing, and to produce graphic adaptations of ri-Majel legends.

I have discussed several of our creative works in detail elsewhere (see, inter alia, Keown 2017; 2018a; 2018b; 2019; 2020a; 2026, forthcoming), but in this article I bring some of these works into relation with those new works created during the Cape Farewell “Kõmij Mour Ijin/Our Life is Here” expedition of 2023. A key objective of the expedition, which departed from Ebeye in August 2023, and included a visit to Wotho atoll en route to Bikini, was to create new art, film, literature and music exploring the legacies of US nuclear testing; the vulnerability of the archipelago’s 29 low-lying atolls and five islands, which average just two metres above sea level, to inundation and other impacts of the climate crisis; and the resilience of ri-Majel communities in spite of these ruptures and ongoing challenges. A public exhibition of creative work resulting from the expedition took place in Majuro in March 2024 (coinciding with the 1^st March Nuclear Remembrance Day, anniversary of the BRAVO bomb), and a further exhibition opened at the National Maritime Museum in London in 2025. Ahead of future exhibitions, publications and events connected with the project, I was invited by members of the expedition’s leadership team to write about creative material from the project in this article. As noted above, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner was a member of the core planning team for the expedition (along with Cape Farewell Director David Buckland and American photographer Michael Light), and a key priority was to include young ri-Majel on the project, thus building on Jetñil-Kijiner’s commitment to youth as Director of the ri-Majel non-profit environmental youth organisation Jo-Jikum (Letman 2023, n.p.). Eight youth members of Jo-Jikum joined the expedition, and I discuss some of their work here, alongside pieces by Jetñil-Kijiner and Enos. I am grateful to David Buckland, his wider team, and the artists and poets who have given permission for their work to be included here.

The title of the “Kõmij Mour Ijin/Our Life is Here” expedition poses a challenge to long-established western tropes effacing Indigenous presence and claim within Pacific islands considered ripe for exploitation by colonizers (see Keown 2018a). Ongoing US military exploitation of the Marshall Islands is informed by what Traci Brynne Voyles terms “wastelanding”: the practice of representing Indigenous territory as “always already pollutable” within western military-industrial discursive frameworks (2015, 154). As Métis/Michif scholar Max Liboiron notes, settler-colonial attitudes towards Indigenous land as “a sink, a place to store waste” is “made easier when the Land has already been cleared of Indigenous peoples” (2021, 8). A key reason for the exploitation of Pacific Islands for nuclear testing was their isolation from the colonial metropoles, meaning that the safety of these northern hemisphere populations could be maximized while Indigenous Pacific communities were viewed as expendable. In recognition of these dynamics, Jetñil-Kijiner asserts that for the US military, “The Marshall Islands was seen as this vast, empty space in the middle of nowhere,” deemed “less important than other places and accepted as a ‘sacrificial zone”’ (Letman 2023, n.p.). The expedition, Jetñil-Kijiner points out, challenges this epistemic violence, asserting that “we’re not a sacrificial zone. There are people here […] We live here. Our life is here” (Letman 2023, n.p.). She also notes an “ugly” predilection, within western discourse, towards “exotification” of the nuclear violence in the Marshall Islands in ways which trivialize the deep intergenerational trauma experienced by ri-Majel communities (Letman 2023, n.p.). Teresia Teaiwa coined the term “militourism” to encompass the ways in which heavily militarised Pacific environments have become imbricated in exoticizing discourses positing Pacific Islands as paradises welcoming the incursions of western tourists (1999). She analyses the commercial sleight of hand through which Bikini atoll became most readily associated with the two-piece bathing suit, invented by French designer Louis Reard in 1946, in celebration of the first set of atomic bombs tested in the Marshall Islands (Teaiwa 1994; Keown 2018a, 36).

A further set of tropes, which resonate with Lawrence Buell’s notion of the “toxic gothic” (Buell 2001), have become attached to irradiated spaces such as Enewetak Atoll, site of 43 of the 67 US nuclear tests detonated in the Marshall Islands. J.G. Ballard’s 1964 short story “The Terminal Beach,” for example, posits an irradiated island in Enewetak as a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which a marooned American ex-military pilot experiences a physical and psychological breakdown. Ri-Enewetak are entirely effaced from the narrative, as though the atoll’s teleology began with the Second World War, when Enewetak became the site of intense combat between US and Japanese military forces. The 1944 Battle of Enewetak resulted in the deaths of ten percent of the ri-Enewetak population, and the destruction of virtually all the food crops, vegetation, and dwellings on Enewetak and Engebi Islands during heavy bombardment (Maragos 2011, 383). After ten years of subsequent nuclear testing (1948–58), eight per cent of Enewetak’s land areas had been destroyed, and even following partial environmental remediation in 1977–1980, more than half of the atoll, and the entire lagoon, remain heavily contaminated. Those southern areas of the atoll that were considered by the US to be safe for habitation were so severely damaged that to this day, ri-Enewetak are heavily reliant on imported food for survival (Johnston and Takala 2016; see also Keown 2020a).

The bomb-ravaged island in Ballard’s “Terminal Beach,” I would argue, is evocative of Runit Island, one of the most irradiated sites in Enewetak atoll. Littered with nuclear detritus and rendered almost barren as a result of the 17 nuclear bombs detonated in its environs, Runit now houses an enormous concrete-capped dome, filled with radioactive debris, constructed just a few years after Ballard’s narrative was published.

Aerial view of the Runit Dome in Enewetak Atoll, where nuclear tests were conducted by the United States between 1948 and 1958.

Image still from Anointed (2018). Photo credit: Dan Lin.

The Dome was built during a belated, partial nuclear cleanup of Enewetak atoll undertaken by the US in the late 1970s, under threat of legal action by ri-Enewetak, who had been displaced to the resource-poor atoll of Ujelang (where they endured periods of near-starvation) for over three decades (Maragos 2011, 383). The partial environmental remediation of Enewetak involved thousands of US servicemen depositing over 100,000 cubic yards of irradiated soil, plutonium, scrap metal and other debris into a large crater – created by the 1958 “Cactus” bomb test – at the northern end of Runit Island (see Keown 2020a).

The Runit Dome (filling the crater of the 1958 “Cactus” bomb), flanked by the crater from the 1956 Lacrosse nuclear test.Image still from Anointed (2018). Photo Credit: Dan Lin.

The waste was mixed into a concrete slurry and poured directly onto the permeable soil of the cavity, and then capped with an 18-inch-thick concrete dome. The dome was only intended as a temporary structure, and has never been repaired, even though cracks in the concrete structure are allowing radioactive isotopes to leak into the lagoon, particularly as the sea level rises. The US claims it is no longer responsible for managing the site, and after undertaking a risk assessment of the dome in 2020, the Department of Energy reported that the dome was still structurally sound and that radioactive leakage was not significant enough to warrant intervention (US Department of Energy, 2020; see also Keown 2020a).

In 2018, as part of our nuclear legacy project, a group of us travelled up to Enewetak to film Jetñil-Kijiner’s videopoem “Anointed,” shot mainly on Runit Island but also incorporating footage of sites on Enewetak’s largest island (where the local community now dwells) and Bikini Atoll, which we visited after Enewetak. I am grateful to Daniel Lin, who filmed “Anointed,” for permission to include various film stills with this essay. In contrast to Ballard’s story, Jetñil-Kijiner’s videopoem reinstates the history and presence of ri-Majel on Runit, once known as a “pantry for the chiefs” due to its rich marine and land-based food sources (Jetñil-Kijiner and Heine 2018, 00:12:51; see also Jetñil-Kijiner 2018a). Where Ballard’s narrative implies Enewetak’s history began at the moment of US military incursion, Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem explores a rich seam of oral history and legend attached to Runit, and footage of her standing on the Dome is a significant act of reclamation, and reassertion of Indigenous presence within this space, which has has become the focus of Western “dark tourism” and travel writing focused around what Anthony Carrigan terms “compound sites of social and environmental catastrophe” (Carrigan 2014, 245; Keown 2026, forthcoming).

Poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner stands alone at the centre of the Runit Dome.

Image still from Anointed (2018). Photo credit: Dan Lin.

Poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner standing on top of the Runit Dome.

Image still from Anointed (2018). Photo credit: Dan Lin.

During the 2023 “Our Life is Here” expedition, Jetñil-Kijiner created a comparable piece of performance art reasserting Indigenous presence on Bikini Atoll. Although the ri-Bikini community remains in indefinite exile, individual members of the community take turns spending a few weeks at a time on the atoll (thereby limiting each individual’s exposure to radiation) in order to take care of their ancestral homeland. These caretaking duties include tending burial sites and the boundaries between weto, parcels of land passed down through generations of families now living in exile. When we visited Bikini in 2018, we were struck by the jarring disjunction between the decaying AEC buildings still standing on the atoll, and the vibrant plant and animal life that endures on Bikini, in spite of what ri-Majel call the “poison” that remains from the nuclear testing era. Jetñil-Kijiner’s 2023 performance piece speaks both to the devastation wreaked by nuclear testing on the atoll, but also to the resilience of ri-Majel culture, as she created the basis of an installation in which she appears in the guise of a mejenkwaad (female demon) “haunting” sites of nuclear violence.

Jetñil-Kijiner has explored the figure of the mejenkwaad in previous creative work, including her antinuclear poem “Monster,” for which Solomon Enos created a wordless visual adaptation in the third section of our graphic novel Jerakiaarlap (2019). In this earlier work, she expands beyond customary ri-Majel understandings of the mejenkwaad as a malevolent, destructive figure who wantonly devours “babies and pregnant women,” built structures, and even whole islands (Jetñil-Kijiner 2018b, n.p.). During the process of researching and writing the poem, Jetñil-Kijiner spoke to ri-Majel women who postulated that the mejenkwaad may have evolved as a metaphor for post-natal depression, which can result in a “deep sadness” and “madness” that inhibits bonding between mother and baby (Jetñil-Kijiner 2018b, n.p.). Jetñil-Kijiner speculates that within a context of radiogenic birth abnormalities, “what if the mejenkwaad was not eating her child as a brutal act – but was instead attempting to return the child to her body […] to her first home?” (Jetñil-Kijiner 2018b, n.p.). In keeping with this interpretation, the final lines of the poem depict the mejenkwaad swallowing her suffering baby to “bring the child peace” (Jetñil-Kijiner 2019, 63). Solomon Enos’s graphic adaptation of “Monster” touches upon these more benign traits Jetñil-Kijiner ascribes to the mejenkwaad, but also confronts the destructive, violent attributes that Jetñil-Kijiner locates in ri-Majel legend: these female demons commonly appear as “monsters” with “unhinged jaws” and “shark teeth in the backs of their head[s],” “bloodthirsty” to the point of devouring “their own babies” (Buckland and Jetñil-Kijiner 2024, n.p.).

The final panel of Enos’s adaptation aptly captures the ambivalent status of the mejenkwaad in the poem, depicting the demon atop a rounded coral head birthing and swallowing spherical progeny suggestive both of the “jellyfish” babies born to irradiated ri-Majel women, and of the mushroom clouds generated by nuclear detonations.

Final panel from Solomon Enos’s graphic adaptation of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Monster,” published in Jerakiaarlap: A Marshall Islands Epic (2019).

The mejenkwaad’s mouth is wide open in eager anticipation as she prepares to devour another ovoid offspring, while multiple other “jellyfish babies” drift in the water around her, symbolizing the hundreds of “tiny beings” born to grieving mothers across generations (Jetñil-Kijiner 2017, 10; see also Keown 2019).

Jetñil-Kijiner’s forthcoming performance art installation takes inspiration from a further dimension of the mejenkwaad – her all-consuming “rage” – and channels it in the form of embodied resistance against “the nuclear legacy, the climate crisis, the disempowerment of women” (Buckland and Jetñil-Kijiner 2024, n.p.). Footage of Kathy-as-mejenkwaad filmed on Bikini posits her as “tied to the land … a site she haunts while consumed with loneliness and rage at the destruction of the environment, as well as the loss of a community she can no longer consume” (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.).

From Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s performance of “The Mejenkwaad,” filmed on Bikini. Photograph by Brock Scott/ David Buckland for Cape Farewell (2024).

Jetñil-Kijiner reveals that she has “a lot of love” for the mejenkwaad, and that channeling the mejenkwaad’s rage becomes empowering in a context in which “women are silenced [and] told not to be angry” (Buckland and Jetñil-Kijiner 2024, n.p.). Although the mejenkwaad performance piece emphasizes the horrific consequences of nuclear violence in the Marshall Islands, it contrasts with objectifying “toxic gothic” discourse (such as Ballard’s “Terminal Beach”) by situating this within a context of ri-Majel cultural resistance and continuity rather than annihilation. Jetñil-Kijiner’s planned installation includes footage of the mejenkwaad moving from Bikini to other islands and atolls impacted by climate change, a trajectory that draws attention to the continuing and multiple impacts of Western ecological violence. While the lack of transformative international climate change action is currently “contributing to a slow death of her islands,” the mejenkwaad’s witnessing carries the potential for a more optimistic environmental future (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.). Jetñil-Kijiner’s embodiment of the mejenkwaad to enact a process of “haunting” transcends conventional Euro-American gothic tropes such as the uncanny or the return of the repressed, pointing towards the fact that, as Sāmoan author Dan Taulapapa McMullin notes, Indigenous legends are “a kind of magical communication with the physical world, through our bodies, through our ghosts,” transcending linear teleologies and instead existing “outside time, in an Indigenous futurism, which can be the same as an indigenous past, a sutured cleft, an eternal return” (2024, 247; 253).

Jetñil-Kijiner’s mejenkwaad performance piece resonates with another creative work from the expedition: a painting by Victoria (Vicky) Jamore, a young woman of ri-Bikini heritage who visited her ancestral homeland for the first time as a member of the expedition’s youth delegation. “Dreka In Nin” depicts an elderly woman in a traditional jaki-ed (woven clothing mat) who represents “an ancient sensation” Jamore experienced when encountering her homeland (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.).

Victoria Jamore, “Dreka in Nin” (2024).

The destruction wreaked by the nuclear tests is evoked in imagery of fish skeletons and dead, bleached coral woven into the woman’s hair, but she holds a pandanus leaf pounder (referenced in the Marshallese title of the work), symbolizing the “resilience” and “passing down” of “culture and our legacy” to future generations (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.). Ri-Majel culture is predominantly matrilineal (Jetñil-Kijiner 2017), and Jamore’s choice of a female subject, like Jetñil-Kijiner’s mejenkwaad performance piece, emphasizes the strength and endurance of powerful women as cultural and environmental custodians across centuries of ri-Majel history. Jamore’s site-responsive painting is, therefore, attentive both to materiality and affect, expressing the imbrication of the human and more-than-human central to ri-Majel and other Indigenous Pacific ontologies and spiritualities.

Vicky Jamore’s younger brother Caesar Jewan Jamore, who also joined the expedition, wrote a sequence of poems exploring the nexus between the nuclear legacy and the “impending danger” of climate change impacts in the Marshall Islands (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.). His poem “Lamoran,” quoted in full here with his permission, was inspired by a dream about the inundation of his home town, Loij. Located in the south-eastern part of Kwajalein atoll, Loij is particularly vulnerable to wave inundation as a result of sea level rise, typhoons, and other climate change impacts (Barnett et al 2023), and “Lamoran” (which translates as “homeland”) expresses fears rooted deep within the poet’s subconscious:

Silence breaks as the disturbed wind thunders

The scorching sun overthrown by darkness

Lost currents crash in

As the coastline slowly cracks

I feel the world breaking apart

I stood weak and desperate

Watching the trees crumble into the sea

Homes getting sucked in by the current

Gravestones floating before my eyes

As ancestors roam the island one last time

I find myself next to my late grandmother

Staring into what was once home-

An island of lamoran and life

Now a debris of ocean waste.

The catastrophic scenario Jamore expresses here resonates with the lived experience of many Marshall Islanders who have witnessed the graves of their ancestors and loved ones washing into the rising seas as a result of increasingly frequent extreme weather events caused by anthropogenic climate change. The poem’s irregular meter, abrupt changes of tense, and asyndetic lines evoke the ruptures of landscapes and lifeways “breaking apart” and emphasize the accumulating horror of these catastrophic events as they layer within the poet’s episodic dream-vision. While the poem conveys a sense of desperation and inexorability, Jamore’s own commentary on his composition reveals that it is intended as a spur for ri-Majel youth to “take action” in order to “prevent” this apocalyptic vision from becoming a future reality (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.).

Patsy “Peji” Glad, another young artist on the expedition, created a series of paintings, linked to an inoñ (folktale) of her own composition, themed around military violence and the US nuclear legacy. Titled “Buroro in Botoktok” (“Blood Red”), the work comprises four paintings, each featuring a red motif (redolent of ri-Majel tattoo designs) that symbolises the “horror” of violent colonial incursions into the Marshall Islands, ranging from the beheading block installed on Maloelap Atoll by occupying Japanese forces during the Second World War, to the destruction wreaked by the BRAVO bomb (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.). At the Majuro and National Maritime Museum exhibitions, the tetraptych was displayed alongside both Kajin Majōl (Marshallese) and English-language versions of the inoñ, accompanied by a key to the meanings of each motif. With the permission of the artist, the English language version of the inoñ is quoted in full below, while the Marshallese version, hand-lettered in red paint, is included here as an image alongside the four paintings and the key to the motifs used therein.

Marshallese-language version of poem from Peji Glad’s “Buroro in Botoktok” (“Blood Red”) (2024).

Image from Peji Glad’s “Buroro in Botoktok” (“Blood Red”) (2024).

Image from Peji Glad’s “Buroro in Botoktok” (“Blood Red”) (2024).

Image from Peji Glad’s “Buroro in Botoktok” (“Blood Red”) (2024).

Image from Peji Glad’s “Buroro in Botoktok” (“Blood Red”) (2024).

Peji Glad, ‘Motifs’ key from “Buroro in Botoktok” (“Blood Red”) (2024).

“Blood Red”

I had a dream – a dream soaked in blood red.

I was standing on a hill in Maloelap,

where history carved its silence into stone.

Before me, the beheading block from war days past,

and my head –

it rolled gently down the slope,

toward a lake the colour of sorrow.

In its crimson waters swam red snappers

large as the sharks that haunt Bikini’s wrecks,

lurking in corals like promises

never meant to be kept.

I remembered fishing with the old man,

his quiet wisdom cast into the sea,

and I began to cry.

‘Please don’t cry. Wake up.’

A voice echoed from the block’s hollow.

Inside, two gnomes sat -

one beckoned, ‘Don’t cry. Wake up.’

The other whispered, ‘Come cry beside me, forever.’

My body burned with heat,

and I awoke to a sky bleeding light,

the heavens above me

turning red –

blood red.

Glad’s installation, like Jetñil-Kijiner’s mejenkwaad performance piece, emphasises the horror of military violence in the Marshall Islands; her “blood red” imagery and iconography evokes and restages that pivotal historical moment when the detonating BRAVO bomb appeared to ri-Majel witnesses as a fiery second sunrise inexplicably manifesting on the western horizon (“Kõmij Mour Ijin” 2024, n.p.). US Nuclear imperialism is here situated alongside the punitive violence ri-Majel experienced under the occupying Japanese forces during the Second World War, and Glad’s dreaming subject (re)experiences the trauma of those compatriots who were executed on beheading blocks like the one that remains in Maloelap. Like Jetñil-Kijiner, Glad also defamiliarizes Euro-American gothic tropes by adapting motifs from ri-Majel legend: the “gnomes” referenced here are redolent of magical creatures such as noniep or dwarf-like beings that feature prominently in traditional stories from the Marshall Islands. In this sense, the poem is in keeping with a range of contemporary Pacific eco-literature that “narrate[s] and visualize[s] the world” with specific reference to Indigenous understandings of the relationship between the human and more-than-human (ho‘omanawanui et al. 2024, 9). As with Caesar Jamore’s poem, the fragmented syntax, irregular line-lengths, asyndeton and anachrony in this inoñ emphasise both the rapid visual transitions in the dream-sequence, and the accumulating horror of the sites and modalities of violence that Glad explores as an irruption of intergenerational trauma.

Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos, who (like Jetñil-Kijiner) participated both in our nuclear legacy project and in the 2023 expedition, has also drawn upon Indigenous Pacific legend as a means by which to represent colonial ecological violence. In addition to giving vivid visual expression to the trauma of nuclear violence (in his adaptation of Jetñil-Kijiner’s “Monster”), as an avowed “possibilist” who has produced a wide spectrum of Indigenous Futurist, Science Fiction and Fantastical visual art, Enos has also explored speculative solutions to the environmental challenges ri-Majel communities are facing. In the fourth and final section of our graphic novel Jerakiaarlap, for example, he produced his own futuristic “cli-fi” narrative positing biotechnological solutions to the problem of rising sea levels and the contamination of the ocean by toxic waste. Enos creates a “Neo-Majuro” in which the atoll has developed its own internal “biowalls” deploying thermal waste conversion to transform anthropogenic refuse into healthy soil, thereby raising the atoll well above sea level (Enos 2019, 89). This Indigenous “vitalist” terraforming (Ghosh 2021, 110) takes place with the assistance of a “small team of Marshallese descendants” and “biobots” that have emerged from coconut trees (Enos 2019, 72), referencing Hawaiian and other Indigenous Pacific beliefs in the “interconnection of species” through “kinship” (ho‘omanawanui et al. 2024, 7). Enos’s narrative bears witness to his recognition of the shared environmental values among Oceanic peoples, manifesting his “empathy” for ri-Majel as Pacific Islanders who, like Hawaiians, have experienced US military violence (Enos qted in Sabeti 2019, 76).

During the 2023 Cape Farewell expedition, Enos produced a new collection of speculative paintings motivated by his belief that “if we can harness great power to facilitate destruction, so too can we move in the polar opposite direction, and turn our hands to profound systems of peace” (Enos 2024, n.p.). With Enos’s permission, included here is a selection of paintings from a sequence exploring what the artist describes as “cryptic future technologies to heal and channel new growth into islands and lands affected by climate change and pollution” (Enos 2024, n.p.). Some of the paintings feature humanoid figures that are melded with the landscape, indexing Pacific legends in which shapeshifters change their form at will, for example from human to animal, or tree, or some other element of the ecosystem (see Enos et al. 2019, 21). The titles of these paintings refer to the figures as “sentinels,” emphasising their protective or custodial roles within these landscapes.

Solomon Enos, “Sentinel of the Cloudeaters.” Acrylic on wood (2024).

Solomon Enos, “Sentinel of the Nodes.” Acrylic on wood (2024).

Other paintings, labelled as “cryptic structures,” center on “strange dancing forms made of noble plastics and other benign materials,” resonating with the bioadaptive processes explored in the final section of Jerakiaarlap, and with earlier work such as Enos’s “Polyfantastica” series, a science fiction epic imagining a future in which native Hawaiian culture thrives by building a new society founded on ancient environmental holism (Enos 2024, n.p.).

Solomon Enos, “Cryptic Structures 7.” Acrylic on wood (2024).

Solomon Enos, “Cryptic Structures 8.” Acrylic on wood (2024).

Such representations express Enos’s belief that just as technologies shift and change in his visual works, so should human societies “learn” from the mistakes that have instigated war and climate change and transform from “one kind of species to another” (Enos et al. 2019, 21).

In their essay “Histories of Wonder, Futures of Wonder,” Michael Lujan Bevacqua and Elizabeth Ua Ceallaigh Bowman explore the ways in which contemporary environmental activists in Guåhan (a US unincorporated territory in which the military occupies one third of the island) have drawn inspiration from traditional legends, such as the well-known tale in which the women of Guåhan work together to defeat a giant fish that is devouring their island. As Bevacqua and Bowman note, young Chamoru activists have invoked this narrative as an allegory for US military occupation, and have created new narratives of “demilitarization and ecosovereignty” informed by the values of community cohesion and cooperation that underpin the traditional story (2024, 57). The various creative works I have discussed in this chapter similarly draw on traditional legends, knowledge and values, and oral histories in order to analyze and explore potential solutions to ecological challenges resulting from nuclear imperialism and anthropogenic climate change. These works comprise what ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Joyce Pualani Warren and Christina Bacchilega describe as “present-day Indigenous Pacific world-building that looks to the past in creating alternative futures, and in doing so reimagines relationships between peoples, environments, deities, nonhuman relatives, history, dreams, and storytelling” (2024, 1). To echo Jetñil-Kijiner’s own creative credo, articulated in her poem “Two Degrees,” these works seek to turn “the tide towards / an equilibrium / willing the world / to find its balance” (2017: 78). Such a process, her wording suggests, can only take place if multispecies kinship and care, fundamental to Indigenous Pacific value systems, are recognised and fostered not just at a local or regional level, but on a planetary scale.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.