Resistance and Survival - The Nuclear Era in the Pacific
For many decades, historians, researchers, and participants have documented the history of the nuclear era in the Pacific Islands. They have highlighted the legacy of health and environmental impacts of 50 years of nuclear testing by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France between 1946 and 1996. Most official histories of Pacific nuclear testing present extensive technical detail of the development of nuclear weapons, evidence of inter-departmental rivalries, and vivid portraits of the scientists who built the Bomb. This state-sponsored literature, however, makes limited reference to the lived experience of the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites, or the Indigenous peoples whose land and waters were used for the testing programmes in Oceania. Despite a growing international literature on the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, the history of Pacific Islander resistance to the nuclear testing programmes is more fragmentary. In response, the authors in this special issue have foregrounded the agency of Indigenous activists, rather than the Western allies who campaigned alongside the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. Their contributions add to a growing body of personal testimony by Indigenous nuclear survivors and resisters from around Oceania. This special issue includes a 1954 petition from Marshall Islanders to the UN Trusteeship Council, an example of the protests by Islanders that began in the 1950s, pre-dating the rise of the wider NFIP movement in the 1970s. Other articles highlight Fiji’s early foreign policy and the importance of the debate over nuclear testing in the formation of the South Pacific Forum; the importance of culture in Pacific anti-nuclear activism, through song, poetry, graphic design, and community theatre; the role of the regional NFIP movement in linking local struggles to the wider regional context, through pan-Pacific, Indigenous-led activism around self-determination; and connections between the NFIP movement and solidarity movements in the Global North.
Reflection
15 February 2026
Emma-leigh Theobald
“It is a history not of victimhood, but of resistance and survival.”
“This state-sponsored literature, however, often makes limited reference to the lived experience of the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites, or the Indigenous peoples whose land and waters were used for the testing programmes.”
Nic Maclellan’s introduction reframes the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific away from state-centred narratives of technological achievement and toward the lived realities of Pacific peoples. While official histories often focus on scientists, strategy, and Cold War rivalries, this collection foregrounds resistance, survival, and Indigenous agency.
From the 1950s onward, Pacific Islanders were not passive victims of nuclear colonialism — they petitioned the United Nations, mobilised through churches and universities, built transnational alliances, and formed the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. Cultural activism — through poetry, song, and art — became as central as diplomacy and legal action. The nuclear era, the author argues, is not simply a history of sacrifice zones, but of enduring regional solidarity rooted in land, ocean, identity, and self-determination.
Importantly, the article situates this history within contemporary debates — from AUKUS to Fukushima to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — reminding us that the nuclear era in the Pacific is not over. What continues, however, is a long tradition of Pacific resistance and survival.