Throughout the Cold War, colonies became preferred sites of nuclear weapons experimentation. The United States initiated this trend when it began testing weapons offshore in the Marshall Islands where, between 1946 and 1958, it detonated 67 of its largest nuclear bombs. As historians of science and technology have begun to explore, American researchers engaged not only in weapons research, but also in biomedical, environmental, and anthropological inquiry facilitated by these destructive tests. Equally as important to nuclear testing, however, were US legal experiments with new territorial forms in Oceania.
This paper traces how nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands entangled with the United States’ creation and maintenance of a sui generis territorial entity—a United Nations strategic trusteeship over which the US exercised near-exclusive control. Drawing on archival research in US military, Atomic Energy Commission, Department of State, and Department of Interior records, the paper demonstrates how the creation and maintenance of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands both grew out of and justified the experiments with, and related to nuclear armaments. Simultaneously, it explores how this novel, international territorial status strictly limited Islanders’ and their allies’ legal rights to object to the appropriation and use of Indigenous lands, waters, communities, and bodies for scientific experimentation. As fallout from nuclear tests ranged worldwide, the United States’ territorial experiment contained Indigenous discontent offshore.
