Nuclear test sites worldwide are sited on lands of marginalized nomadic micro-minorities

Evidence

Across the world, the people who are reconstituted as uninhabitants seldom belong to large or powerful ethnic groups. This is true of all the desert nuclear test sites internationally: in the Nevada Test Site; in the deserts of Kazhakstan, Pakistan, and India; in the Central Desert in Australia; the French test sites in preindependence Algeria; in western China; and in Southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert. In all these areas, the people who are strategically recast as virtual uninhabitants are micro-minorities from marginalized ethnic groups. They are also very often nomads, people who traditionally have had to learn to live, through movement, within the limits of the land. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1172

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s extraction/globalization and land/place strands across the polyad; also supplements Base Nation’s chapter on Kwajalein displacement and nuclear-testing harms to Afro-Pacific islanders as part of the same micro-minority siting pattern across a global test-site network. — connects to: The Nevada desert and Kazakh nuclear sites share environ-cultural memory and imaginative links — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1171; Nuclear testing displaced six Marshall Islands groups beyond just Bikini — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 194; Nuclear tests displaced people from seven Marshall Islands and contaminated thousands of square miles
• SHARE: This systemic pattern — nuclear test sites repeatedly placed on nomadic micro-minority lands from Nevada to Algeria to Australia — would interest a geopolitics-of-science colleague working on infrastructure siting.

Broader Connections

• Nuclear testing displaced six Marshall Islands groups beyond just Bikini #exemplifies (0.85) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 194
• The Nevada desert and Kazakh nuclear sites share environ-cultural memory and imaginative links #expands (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1171
• Nuclear tests displaced people from seven Marshall Islands and contaminated thousands of square miles #exemplifies (0.80)