This paper analyzes promises related to nuclear weapons test sites in the Pacific Ocean and the historical trajectory of activist knowledge production, such as citizen science and humanitarian witnessing. In line with Hanna Arndt, the political promise is understood as a special force of social constraint. Arendt’s view of promises as islands of certainty in an island of uncertainty (1958) can be related to the institution of Nuclear weapons test sites, how they were legitimized, and their subsequent treatment in separate regimes of knowledge. My case expertise, from which I draw analytic examples, is in the French Polynesian Centre d’expérimentation du Pacifique (C.E.P.) test sites at Moruroa, Hao, and Fangataufa atolls. _x000D_
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Here, promises were, around 1958, made on several levels. Progress, flourishing economy, affluence, and safety and security for local inhabitants were associated with the promise of nuclear technology, increased communications, and tourism in a speech by General De Gaulle in Papeete. A promise to leave the atoll test sites as they were when the center for the experiments was established was also made. Such promises came to be thought of and highlighted by people who increasingly questioned the sustainability, safety, and legitimacy of the test sites in the Pacific by articulating them as nuclear colonialism. In this paper, I describe the articulation and problematization of the possibility of betrayal of the historical promises connected to the nuclear weapons test sites.

Anton Öhman
Doctoral candidate, Lund university

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ID Abstract: 73