ABSTRACT
The politics of nuclear testing can be located at the intersection of a number of concepts which have become contested at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the ownership of property, ownership of knowledge, of natural resources, and of reproductive rights. This chapter discusses the politics and the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific as well as South West Australia. It focuses on the ways in which indigenous communities have been exploited, disenfranchised, and killed by (neo)colonial powers in the name of scientific progress and a Cold War politics of 'nuclearization'. In a series of nuclear tests throughout the 1950s, the bodies of Marshall Islanders were ultimately redefined as knowledge resources in the service of medical research in the emerging field of nuclear medicine. The chapter argues that to see the history of nuclear testing only in terms of environmental justice fails to acknowledge the myriad ways in which indigenous communities were disenfranchised and victimized by nuclear testing.
