Mapping American innocence in the Pacific: Cold War empire, militarization and suburbanization at Kwajalein Atoll

ABSTRACT

This article represents a historical and ethnographic reflection on the process of researching an active US military base in the Marshall Islands, while offering analysis of the spatial and cultural forms of suburbanization on the island that emerged during the Cold War. Kwajalein Island served as a support base for the nuclear testing campaign in the Northern Marshall Islands (1946–1958). At that campaign’s conclusion, the island was transformed into a segregated suburban missile installation that remains active today. By tracing my research process on the island, including discoveries of sources that helped me examine the importation of US racial signifiers marking the island’s social order, I offer an analysis on how the physical and cultural construction of this segregated suburban landscape on Kwajalein has helped support an exceptionalist narrative of US imperial innocence in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold war
• US military empire
• Pacific
• suburban
• race

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Ian Zuckerman for his help in writing this article; the piece could not have come together without his tremendous support. The article grew out of a workshop Paul Kramer organized to engage historians working on base studies globally; so a huge thank you to Paul for the invitation to participate. And thank you to all of the workshop participants for giving me feedback on my writing; with special thanks to Mary Mitchell, Andrew Friedman, Jana Lipman, Dario Fazzi, and Dan Margolies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. US colonial rule followed upon two previous colonial regimes: Germany from the 1870s through World War I, and Japan under League of Nations sanction through World War II.

2. For more on the historical impacts of irradiation see Smith-Norris (2016).

3. For more on militarism and masculinity, see Enloe (2000), and for local contexts, Dvorak (2008).

4. Vine explores the historic rise of this ‘base nation’ that comprised 800 US bases outside the 50 states and D.C. by (2015).

5. All visitors not residentially employed on Kwajalein (or their dependents) must secure sponsorship for day/overnight passes.

6. Suburban Empire (Hirshberg 2022) traces the history of the ‘Ri’Katak’ programme and its role in mediating decolonization amid ongoing segregation in the atoll.

7. Barclay grew up on Kwajalein and wrote his first novel, Melal: A Pacific Story (Barclay 2002), about life on Ebeye and Kwajalein. The novel explores Kwajalein’s suburban landscape against the backdrop of Marshallese cosmology by following main character Rujen Keju, a Marshallese sanitation worker, as he navigates the island’s structure of segregation and surveillance.

8. While outside the scope of this article’s focus on race and empire, I have written extensively on gender and Kwajalein in Suburban Empire (Hirshberg 2022), analysing military policing of sexual relations between US bachelors and Marshallese women and girls working on the island. The book also explores the experiences of civilian women living on Kwajalein over time.

9. For more on this history, see Firth (1987).

10. The historic sail-in followed earlier landowner protests during the 1970s that aimed to influence the terms of the Kwajalein lease agreement tied to the signing of a Compact of Free Association between the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. These protests called for higher lease payments to landowners, compensation for past use, and funds for Ebeye.

11. These tests were central to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as ‘Star Wars’.

12. Vila’s work overlaps with Cold War labour history of global ‘police professionalizers’ chronicled by Stuart Schrader (2019).