The -ism Series (33): Nuclear Colonialism

"Nuclear colonialism is a system of domination through which governments and corporations disproportionately target and devastate indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process."
Danielle Endres



Nuclear colonialism refers to a system that targets indigenous peoples in order to maintain the nuclear production process. Rhetorically, it "excludes American Indians and their opposition to it". A large part of the world's nuclear industry is sited on Native lands or their surroundings, i.e., reservation and sacred lands threatening the people's health and cultural survival, poisoning their environment. In the U.S., about 70% of uranium mining takes place on Native lands. Between 1951 and 1992 alone, "over 900 nuclear weapons tests were conducted on the Nevada Test Site (NTS) land claimed by the Western Shoshone under the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley" exposing Indigenous people to radiation again and again. From the exploration to the dumping of radioactive waste, each step contributes to the genocide and ethnocide of Indigenous peoples (via).

American Indian resistance is an important part of the story of nuclear colonialism. Despite the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act's limitations, American Indian activists were instrumental in getting it passed.
Danielle Endres

Black US-Americans are also excluded in the rhetoric:

Well before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against nuclear weapons, African Americans were protesting the Bomb. Historians have generally ignored African Americans when studying the anti-nuclear movement, yet they were some of the first citizens to protest Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
(...) from early on, blacks in America saw the use of atomic bombs as a racial issue, asking why such enormous resources were being spent building nuclear arms instead of being used to improve impoverished communities. Black activists' fears that race played a role in the decision to deploy atomic bombs only increased when the U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam a decade later. (...) the nuclear issue was connected to colonialism: the U.S. obtained uranium from the Belgian controlled Congo and the French tested their nuclear weapons in the Sahara. (via)

"Atomic ballet" with a (stemless) mushroom cloud at Upshot-Knothole Dixie of Operation Upshot-Knothole. The photographs of ballet dancer Sally McCloskey were taken by photographer Donald English on 6 April 1953

Sometimes we would cover it from Angel’s Peak, take pictures of the mushroom cloud. Sometimes we’’d take dancers up to the top of the peak. I’’d have one girl, Sally McCloskey, we did a little series that was called Angel’’s Dance. And she was a ballet dancer, not a showgirl, and she did an interpretive dance to the mushroom cloud as it came up and we shot a series of pictures and sent it out on the wire and they called it Angel’’s Dance. We just did anything we could to make the picture a little bit different because the newspapers would run the mushroom cloud pictures, but they were always hungry for anything that had any kind of a different approach.
Donald English

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- Endres, D. (2016). The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6(1), 39-60, LINK
- Schwartz, J. A. (2016). Matters of Empathy and Nuclear Colonialism: Marshallese Voices Marked in Story, Song, and Illustration. Music & Politics, X(2), LINK
- photographs of nuclear dancer via and via and via