Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020. xi, 303 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$24.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5381-3033-9.
I learned not long ago that I was exposed to Agent Orange back in 1966 while I was deployed in Vietnam. (Agent Orange refers to a highly toxic dioxin herbicide spray that was widely used by the US military throughout the 1960s to defoliate Vietnam’s countryside; its dangers were well understood by 1966 though its use was not discontinued until 1970.) Although I do have a medical condition that could well be traced to this exposure, I prefer to focus here on how it was possible for me to remain entirely unaware of this exposure for well over 50 years; it was only a shipmate’s tenacious research that brought the truth to light. The US military and the US Defense Department have the maddening habit of reflexively refusing to acknowledge almost anything that could possibly be construed as making them look bad. One of the consequences of this habit of denial is that the military’s right hand rarely knows much about what its left hand is up to. Rather than admit this ignorance, however, military leadership insists that the armed forces are entirely honourable and that they are therefore incapable of doing anything nefarious. It takes books like this to thrust these dirty deeds out into the open.
I suspect that the US military will undertake to discredit Poisoning the Pacific, and it is for this reason that I have opened my book review by explaining why I find Mitchell’s arguments entirely credible. The book’s three main themes are that 1) the US government and its military have been among the worst, if not the worst, purveyors of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons (often referred to as “weapons of mass destruction”) and authors of the human and environmental damages they inflict; 2) the US government and military have worked diligently and consistently to censor any reports exposing these war crimes; and 3) when their censorship efforts fail, these agencies seek to discredit the reports by any means they can.
Speaking as a scholar whose stock in trade is the attempt to determine as much about history as possible—that is, representing the past, as Leopold von Ranke famously put it, “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (as it actually happened)—I am never entirely sure whether I am most troubled by the deeds themselves or by the efforts those who have committed them make to deny that they have committed them. On the one hand, practices that injure, maim, or kill hundreds, thousands, even millions of people are unspeakable (Mitchell reports that as a direct consequence of the spraying, “an estimated 3 million Vietnamese fell ill” [84]). On the other, the willingness of the perpetrators to act as if nothing has happened makes it all the easier for them to keep on committing these atrocities in the future, and, moreover, diminishes our hopes about the prospects for fundamental human decency.
The book’s title might be construed as a bit misleading, given that so much of contemporary work on “the Pacific” is done by Australasian scholars and that they tend to forget that the vast expanses north of the equator are still part of the Pacific. Chapters are devoted to specific issues and events in Japan, Okinawa, the Marshall Islands, Vietnam, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Johnston Atoll, and while the work focuses especially on nuclear testing and waste and Agent Orange and related toxins, other environmental atrocities are covered as well.
All these places, with the exception of Johnston Atoll, are densely inhabited. Johnston was the site of a series of high-altitude nuclear weapons tests and then for many years served as a storage depot for every imaginable sort of toxic weapon and waste. It was also a stepping-stone along the route of the old Air Micronesia flights from Hawaii to the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and I stopped there many times; it’s hard to imagine anything much bleaker than that remote strip of coral. As Mitchell says, Johnston “has suffered the worst; poisoned with plutonium, Agent Orange, and chemical weapons, today it sits as an abandoned sacrifice zone in the North Pacific, a testimony to military hubris” (176). It’s possible to argue that the US military took steps to mitigate the human costs of manufacturing all this poison by shifting much of it to this uninhabited spot, but it is equally possible to argue that by shifting it the military tacitly admitted just how harmful this stuff has been to the inhabitants of all the other islands it has poisoned.
Apologists like to claim that these events are history now and of little relevance to the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. US armed forces, especially the Navy, remain locked in conflict with China and continually contest sovereignty over the South China Sea. Islands like Guam and Okinawa are deemed essential to the forward positioning of forces. Johnston, which is now designated as a wildlife sanctuary, has had its status revised many times and could easily be returned to active duty.
What is more, the Micronesian nation-states and territories at or near the geographical centre of all this are still viewed as essential elements in maintaining this forward positioning and their political status compacts with the US allow American forces to deploy in the islands over their people’s objections and without recourse to any international body.
Strategic and tactical weaponry continues to evolve, and one cannot say with certainty what lies in store for these islands, but given what the author describes as America’s “military hubris,” it hardly takes flights of fantasy to imagine that a host of polluting and poisoning activities will return to haunt these islands.
Glenn Petersen
City University of New York, New York