Reinventing Pacific Islands

The Pacific was ‘reinvented’ after 1945 as colonial powers acted primarily for themselves and only secondarily for Islanders. The historically most challenging symbol of this posture: the two atomic bombs that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year, which may have ended the Second World War but which also began an arms race that turned the region into a nuclear arena. Though the Russians tested their nuclear weapons within the Soviet Union (but not in Russia itself), the United States, Britain and France tested in the Pacific because of sparse and ethnically different populations. Over exactly half a century — between 1946 and 1996 — more than 250 uranium and/or hydrogen explosives were detonated at Bikini, Enewetak, Johnston Atoll, Christmas Island, Malden, Moruroa and Fangataufa (see Map 11). Once the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union compelled the United States and Britain to conclude their testing in the Pacific in 1963 (the last test had taken place there in 1962), three years later France commenced its testing of nuclear weapons in the Tuamotus and, ignoring wave after wave of international protest, continued detonations there until 1996.