Good people in California protested on election night — not the election but the practicing of nuclear war in the form of launching a missile loaded with dud nukes from the California coast. The few people who even knew such madness was happening were likely to have heard about it from reports that explained very little about where such ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) land when they come back down from outerspace. They do land somewhere, and it’s always the same somewhere.
The book Suburban Empire by Lauren Hirshberg tells the story of the Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands, taken during World War II by the United States from Japan, to whom they did not belong. The United States not only took over these islands, and built military bases on them, but also tested nuclear weapons there between 1946 and 1958, above ground, in much greater quantity than in the continental United States, where the people could vote. The people of the Marshall Islands were and remain colonial subjects — easier to test horrible things on.
On the island of Kwajalein at the southern end of the Kwajalein Atoll, the U.S. evicted the residents and created — or recreated — a U.S. suburb with U.S. shopping venues, golf courses, baseball fields, etc., plus free housing so that occupiers could save most of their salaries for the future benefit of their nuclear families.
The people who had lived in and owned Kwajalein and other islands from which they were removed were permitted to live on the impoverished disease-ridden slum island of Ebeye, from which (if they had a pass from the U.S. military) they could commute by boat under armed guard each day to work on Kwajalein, cleaning homes, landscaping yards, etc. Kwajalein was made into essentially a sundown town, from which the non-residents had to depart each evening, and from which they were not permitted to bring anything of value even if it were given to them.
The U.S. eventually stopped nuclear testing, which Trumpies say they want to resume. But it took up long-distance missile testing, targeting the same corner of the world from farther away. And when Ronny Raygun insisted on a “Star Wars” missile defense scheme, the same corner of the world became the testing area. (Trump says he wants to turn “missile defense” over to an illiterate former football player.)
So, Apartheid Nuclear Island remained “critical” to “national security” long after the Civil Rights movement, and even after the demise of South African Apartheid. This little Palestine in the Pacific is, in fact, not entirely unlike many of over 900 U.S. military bases currently active outside the United States. I don’t know that any thorough study has been done of attitudes toward class segregation that U.S. military personnel bring home with them from periods abroad.
In 1982 a thousand Marshallese men, women, and children sailed through the Kwajalein Atoll and occupied land in protest of the theft of their land. “Operation Homecoming” won some partial demands:
“After a 4-month occupation, the United States and Marshall Islands governments agreed to talks with the Kwajalein Atoll Corporation (KAC), a group that represented the interests of Kwajalein landowners. The occupation temporarily ended and the natives went back to Ebeye while the negotiations occurred. The talks resulted in a reduction of the lease from 50 to 30 years, 10 million dollars earmarked for capital improvements for Ebeye, the return of six islands to natives, and access to the Mid-Corridor islands for 3 six week periods a year. In June 1983, the governments signed a revised lease agreement called the Compact of Free Association and held a general plebiscite in September. Kwajalein Atoll natives continued to reject the new lease agreement because they did not agree with the 30-year lease and the intervention of the Marshall Islands government in the use and distribution of lease compensation for the Kwajalein natives.”
According to Hirshberg, victory is far from complete, and today, “Kwajalein and Ebeye continue to resemble the apartheid condition decried during the 1970s and 1980s.” On top of which the people of the Marshall Islands face rising sea levels, droughts, a new private space industry port, and the ticking time bomb of the Runit Dome, a cracking concrete container of nuclear waste that also contains contaminated soil from nuclear tests done in the United States.
Many Marshallese have left the Marshall Islands. The single largest group now lives in Arkansas, where they “opted to cut chicken” at the Tyson chicken factory “for $7 an hour” rather than “clean toilets on Kwajalein for $2 an hour.”
Not that anyone is safe from U.S. nuclear weapons in Arkansas, which the U.S. military has almost nuked a couple of times.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. This originally appeared at WorldBeyondWar.org.