Racial Justice in the Nuclear Age

Catalog description

In the 79 years since the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, nuclear technologies have relied on and exacerbated conditions of insecurity and inequality. Dismissing health and environmental harms as "externalities," security experts have ignored this paradox and instead focused on the future of nuclear warfare. Yet for frontline communities --often Black or Indigenous in the US, and in formerly colonized territories elsewhere --nuclear activities pose a real, ongoing existential threat, not a hypothetical one. From nuclear testing in the Pacific and the deserts of Algeria, Kazakhstan, and the US, to uranium mines in Africa, Aboriginal Australia, and the Navajo Nation, the "security" promised by nuclear weapons involves sacrificing the lives and territories of (some) citizens, reinforcing racial, imperial, and colonial logics of disposability. This course will examine those patterns historically and ethnographically. It will explore how the pursuit of nuclear weapons joined people in otherwise disconnected parts of the world into a common history. For example, uranium extracted in apartheid South Africa was used in weapons tested in the Marshall Islands, dispossessing islanders from their homes; the ships used in these tests were later "decontaminated" in Bay Area naval shipyards, with deadly consequences for neighboring communities of color. It will also explore the differences in nuclear experience that resulted from pre-existing vulnerabilities distinct to each location. Finally, the course will explore how these different communities have sought remediation, compensation, and other forms of reparative justice.