Nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands delivered slow-exposure harms out of sight

Evidence

Attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space are marked above all by displacements—temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and environmental costs. Such displacements smooth the way for amnesia, as places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them, places that ordinarily pass unmourned in the corporate media. Places like the Marshall Islands, subjected between 1948 and 1958 to sixty-seven American atmospheric nuclear “tests,” the largest of them equal in force to 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 30

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The Marshall Islands ‘jellyfish babies’ — headless, eyeless infants born from irradiated parents — is a concrete case of slow violence’s somatic toll.
• SHARE: The image of headless ‘jellyfish babies’ born in the nuclear-colonial Marshall Islands is devastating and worth sharing with someone working on nuclear environmental history.
• XREF: connects to: Nuclear tests displaced people from seven Marshall Islands and contaminated thousands of square miles; Nuclear testing displaced six Marshall Islands groups beyond just Bikini — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 194; US missile testing displaced Marshallese to extreme overcrowding on Ebeye — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 205 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Nuclear tests displaced people from seven Marshall Islands and contaminated thousands of square miles #expands (0.85)
• Nuclear testing displaced six Marshall Islands groups beyond just Bikini #expands (0.78) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 194
• US missile testing displaced Marshallese to extreme overcrowding on Ebeye #expands (0.75) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 205
• Depleted uranium combusts into odorless radioactive glass particles that are inhaled unknowingly #expands (0.72) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 634