Paradise and Apocalypse: Critiques of Nuclear Imperialism in Kathy Jetnˉil-Kijiner’s Iep Jāltok

Abstract

Though US weapons testing ended in 1980, Bikini Atoll remains uninhabitable, and the lasting impacts of displacement and irradiation of land, water, and peoples are yet to be remediated by the US government ("Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test").1 Interrogating the spatial mythologies that have made the Pacific Islands an important site for US weapons testing and launching of foreign wars, this article investigates a spectrum of enduring violence impacting Indigenous people and their environments.2 Borrowing Santos Perez's phrase, I consider the gendered views that contribute to the "strategic invisibility" of militarization in the Pacific Islands in both American and transpacific consciousness. "Most Marshallese / can say they've mastered the language of cancer": Slow Violence in Bikini Atoll (40) Over the course of the Cold War, the US launched over 65 atomic tests, but as scientific studies show, the 1954 detonation of the Bravo hydrogen bomb is responsible for the bulk of enduring radiation in the region and, consequently, lasting public health risks. [...]the single event marks the highest dose of nuclear fallout in the history of worldwide nuclear testing: over fifty years after Bravo's explosion, scientists project lasting health implications, with "increased cancer risk as the primary late health effect of exposure" (Simon et al. 48). Because of irradiation, traditional practices of fishing are no longer viable, which has forced dependency on imported industrialized foods (Niedenthal).