The Nuclear Pacific, Independence, and Rise of Pacific Powers in World Affairs

The rise of the United States as the world’s most powerful economic and military power prompted other powers to acquire nuclear weapons, ushering in a period of nuclear standoffs between the great powers and wars by proxy in developing nations as each side sought client states. The Pacific Ocean’s vast expanse and colonial status led to decades of nuclear testing and a toxic legacy that endured beyond independence from colonial rule. Although independence was deferred for most Pacific Island nations until the 1970s, the Pacific Rim nations of the North Pacific boomed economically on the back of rapid industrialization and mass transit of raw materials, fuel, and manufactured products made possible by a technical revolution in large-capacity container shipping.

The Pacific continued to be a focus for nuclear weapons after the war. A number of relatively remote atolls in the American, British, and French colonial territories in Oceania were used for nuclear testing by these three colonial authorities. Although they were remote in global terms, most were either home to or regularly visited by indigenous peoples. The bombs exploded during this period were increasingly more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and resulted in an alarming rise in cancers and birth defects among local peoples exposed to nuclear contamination and colonial service personnel brought in to work on or witness the detonations. A number of industrializing nations on the Pacific Rim also developed nuclear power in this era to meet their increasing energy needs.

The Pacific has not only been the global frontier of nuclear abuse but also been an epicenter of mounting popular opposition to nuclear weapons and environmental degradation. The environmental action group Greenpeace was formed in Vancouver in 1971 in response to continued nuclear testing and nuclear dumping. Greenpeace soon gathered global support through its campaigns of exposing and challenging French nuclear testing in the Tuamotu Archipelago, American nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands, and Soviet whaling off the coast of California. When the Greenpeace attempt to sail into the French nuclear test exclusion zone at Mururoa was met with force, New Zealand sent a naval vessel to accompany the next protest voyage, and New Zealand and Australia challenged the legality of French atmospheric testing in international courts. Atmospheric testing of nuclear warheads eventually gave way to underground testing and then computer simulations and delivery system testing as protests mounted within the region. The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (SPNFZ) was declared in 1985 with only Australia qualifying its support out of concern for its military alliance with the United States and its nuclear- powered and nuclear-armed vessels. SPNFZ bordered the South American nuclear-free zone, making it the largest contiguous nuclear-free zone in the world, covering well over half of the Southern Hemisphere.

In May 2012, a World Health Organization study concluded that Fukushima radiation emissions posed minimal health risk and that leaks into the sea were also not a cause for concern because ocean currents had dispersed the substances and diluted them to nonharmful levels. However, the US National Academy of Sciences demonstrated that by late 2011, cesium-134 and cesium-137 from Fukushima were present in Pacific bluefin tuna taken off San Diego. Surveys of marine ecosystems exposed to nuclear testing consistently reveal massive amounts of iodine, cesium, strontium, and other radioactive isotopes move through the marine and terrestrial food chain, and the human body, in well-documented ways, with degenerative and at times deadly outcomes. Public health risks to humans have been largely suppressed, classified, or persistently denied.

The environmental consequences for the Pacific Ocean of East Asia’s postwar modernization and economic rise alongside the rise of California as a major player in the global economy have been profound in terms of atmospheric emissions and waste dumped into the Pacific. However, these have been cumulative rather than immediately apparent. American largesse and military protection in the wake of a postwar demilitarization of Japan freed Japanese industry to modernize, innovate, and experiment in a nurturing domestic setting before becoming globally competitive exporters. Similar processes occurred in other East Asian client states of the United States, South Korea, and the Republic of China, which took over Taiwan after losing the civil war against the communists on the mainland.

Building momentum in the 1950s, their surging economies took off in the 1960s and 1970s as so-called Asian Tiger economies. A second group of Asia-Pacific economies followed, boosted by the freeing up of global capital from the 1970s to relocate industry in their more competitive labor markets as wages grew in response to the economic success of the original Asian Tiger economies. The second wave of Asian take-off economies were all in Southeast Asia, in places like Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia. They continue to grow today as international regulations and conditions promote private-sector mobility in pursuit of cost savings on labor, taxation, infrastructure, and resource access. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been the exception, recently rising to become the second- largest economy in the world after the United States through strong state control of its economic modernization under the skilled, guiding hand of Deng Xiaoping from the late 1970s.

The East Asian economic miracle gave rise to increased purchasing power and demand that spread Asian fleets across the Pacific and worldwide. East Asian nations are therefore vital to any agreement seeking sustainable fisheries in the Pacific. The other reason for the rise of Asian Distant Water Fishing Nation fleets around the Pacific has been the exhaustion of their own fisheries and massive industrial pollution of coastal waters in East Asia and Southeast Asia. East Asian seas now have the highest concentrations of micro- and meso-plastics in the world. These eroding plastics are the easiest digested into marine food chains. Measurements taken in 2014 in the seas around Japan found plastic levels to be sixteen times greater than the North Pacific average and twenty-seven times greater than the world average. Passing northeast-flowing currents carry these small and eroding plastics out into the North Pacific. Southeast Asian seas are also badly polluted from a combination of shallow seas with limited open-ocean-flushing currents, agricultural and chemical-soaked runoff, deforested land turned into palm oil plantations, plastic waste from megacities, and oil and detritus from ships passing the busiest sea lanes in the world from the Straits of Malacca to East China.

In the Pacific, jet travel first opened up the Hawaiian archipelago as a mass tourist destination for mainland Americans in the early 1960s, with high-rise beachside hotels for this flow of tourists first flourishing in Waikiki. As clean white beaches and surfing were tourist attractions, care was taken to discharge sewage beyond the reef. Finer-grain white sand was also regularly barged in from neighboring Moloka'i to top up the beach, as the local sands were coarser than preferred because the wave action of the relatively sheltered leeward coast was not as erosive as those of the windward side. Container shipping revolutionized trans-Pacific exports in the 1970s by increasing the amount able to be transported through compact storage, which lowered the risk of damage and reduced costs. By 1979, most goods transported by sea across the Pacific were in containers.

Many of the negative side effects on the Pacific of mass industrialization along multiple Pacific shores have only recently become prominent in public discourse. The last generation has seen Pacific Island nations finally gain independence as the global economy expanded and recently developed Pacific Rim economies moved farther out into the Pacific in search of resources to feed their burgeoning populations and raw materials for processing and building. The post-independence era in the Pacific Islands has been dominated by resource depletion, environmental degradation, and questions about sustainable futures for island states. Offshore fishing fleets from Pacific Rim nations regularly violate Pacific Island Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) in the absence of local monitoring capacity.

The same lack of resources to monitor offshore waters also meant that Pacific Island nations could not develop effective fishing fleets and were forced into fishing access agreements that returned a mere fraction of the value of the catch at the market. The potential maritime benefits of political independence with large EEZs have been eroded by the economic realities of limited resources to develop domestic fleets or monitor foreign fleets within EEZs. The rise of California as a global economic powerhouse and the economic rise of East Asian nations over the last generation, and the booming and heavily polluting economy of the PRC in particular mean that the economic and environmental future of the Pacific Ocean increasingly lies in the hands of Pacific Rim nations.