Imperial Ruin and Military Waste on Johnston Atoll

Abstract

In 1970, the United States military was ordered to halt the use of herbicides in the Vietnam War. The suspension pre-empted a series of considerations by the military to determine what to do with the millions of gallons of surplus herbicides, such as Agent Orange, White, and Blue. In 1972, in response to a directive to return all Agent Orange stock to the continental United States for disposal, officials moved the herbicides to Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. In the 1980s, Johnston Atoll was slowly transformed into the site of the US military's first chemical munitions incineration facility. The military's use of the Atoll as a munitions waste site offers material and historical traces of the vast and continued global circulation of US military waste, how the military conceptualized the ‘destruction’ of such waste, and where it was deemed acceptable to house and carry out these attempts of waste removal. Drawing from primary sources including military scientific studies and correspondence, and situated within environmental justice and postcolonial science studies scholarship, I offer a reading of the Atoll as a place that was used to obscure, yet laid bare, several unattended histories and contemporalities of US empire.