The Nuclear Charter: International law, military technology, and the making of strategic trusteeship, 1942-19471

This chapter explores how US colonialism in Oceania became nuclear. It traces the origins of the international status of “strategic trusteeship, " through which US officials synthesised longstanding colonial ideologies of trusteeship over racialised peoples with US military authority to fortify land. It argues that the material and affective affordances of military technology, not least, air atomic power justified new, offshore, international legal formations of US colonialism, while concurrently marking a movement of the United Nations away from disarmament and demilitarisation as foundational principles of interwar internationalism. Nuclear blasting in the Marshall Islands, both before and after the designation of Micronesia as a “strategic trusteeship, " meanwhile, materialised representations of the Pacific as a nuclear network and deepened the dispossession and marginalisation of Marshall Islanders.