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.

In this article, I look at the history of US military waste production and its movements, focusing on Johnston Atoll, a small island in the Pacific Ocean, as it was constructed into a disposal site. To do this, I consider three prolonged and overlapping eras of the atoll under US empire: the turn of the twentieth century, the apex of the American war in Vietnam, and the late and post-Cold War. Twentieth century war technologies and their concomitant military wastes have played instrumental, yet often obscured, roles in driving global ecological change. This modest island bore witness to, among other things, the nuclear arms race, chemical and biological weapons testing, stockpiling and storage, offshore weapons destruction, and the US military's first land-based chemical weapons incineration facility. ¹ In this article, I consider why this atoll was slated for such technological hubris in the mid to late twentieth century, with a focus on its role as a holding and demolition site for chemical munitions waste, and I evaluate the militarized technoscientific logics that were employed to negotiate this. In doing so, I consider what interrogating this site through the politics of land, knowledge production, and waste offer to understandings of US imperialism, military expansion, and liveable ecologies.

As the US vied for technological supremacy during the Cold War arms race, their scientists and military developed and deployed a range of technologies built for bodily and ecological terror, including nuclear, radiological, biological, and chemical weapons. ² The military's activities on and around the Johnston Atoll reflected some of the accumulating uncertainties and failures tied to managing the rapidly escalating quantities of such destructive weapons when they were not in use, obsolete, or otherwise in holding. Heightening anti-war and environmental civilian consciousness in the 1970s, as well as new US environmental laws, also complicated the terms of weapons management. Hardly a moment of technological triumph, the military's attempts to manage and dispose of weapons waste gestured to its complexity, which superseded straightforward rationalistic management and technoscientific solutions. At the forefront of a growing problem across nations pursuing industrialized warfare in the twentieth century, the US military produced enormous stockpiles of munitions, which, when no longer considered useable, transformed spaces from seabeds to land masses into military waste disposal sites. Johnston Atoll's history and formation into a military waste disposal site exhibited the circulations of the US military's amassed arsenal, and the material demands imposed into regions in the south Pacific and global South in sustaining, and expanding, the contemporary world's largest armed forces.

Throughout the twentieth century, the US instrumentalized the atoll as both a lasting military site, and as a dedicated site for scientific research on environmental phenomena. These exploits have resulted in a trail of records in the forms of scientific studies and military documentation. The material traces of these ventures have also been stored in the land, waters, winds, bodies, and technological infrastructures that have been part of, or encountered by the atoll. ³ Though these are less static and legible than government records, these markings are intermittently captured within specific political-scientific nexuses, whether through peoples’ resistance efforts to a military stockpiling operation, findings in contamination clean-up mandates, public rejections of proposed waste disposals, memories spoken in veterans’ lawsuit hearings, or contemporary studies of local bird and fish species. The intermittence matters and serves to build a fuller memory of military waste in the Pacific, beyond the constraints of the printed words legitimated and sealed by the US government.

Robust scholarship on industrial waste has addressed how toxicity and pollution map onto social and geographic formations, often those demarcated by lines of race and class. For instance, environmental justice activism and scholarship about the continental United States has foregrounded how Indigenous, Black, and low-income communities are more likely to be exposed to toxic sites of industrial contamination, whether through highly contaminating industries locating their sites in these lands, or identifying waste sites for dumping, burial, and disposal in these areas. ⁴ This pattern does not depict an inevitability, but rather the results of the organization and use of land, and its ecological degradation and disposability, as historically situated within racial capitalist and settler colonial relations. ⁵ Related scholarship divulges the stark ecological inequalities across imperial lines on a global scale. ⁶

Linking these insights with science and technology studies in contexts of empire, and into conversation with the production of toxic landscapes, several histories of what Ann Laura Stoler calls ‘imperial ruinations’, the ‘active, ongoing processes that allocates imperial debris differentially’, come to light. ⁷ Astonishing developments in warfare technologies, including new chemical munitions like napalm and incendiary bombs, to aerial mobile equipment, and the introduction of nuclear weapons, extended the scale, scope, and nature of mass production and waste. Twentieth century wartime production and stockpiling, conflict ruins and aftermaths, and the legacies of weapons left in landscapes across production sites, transit spaces, and the sites of war, brought new gravity to the stakes and distributions of toxic geographies. Taking militarism as an inherent part of capitalism and imperialism, toxic geographies readily map onto military and imperial formations like the Johnston Atoll.

I use this footing to carry this article out in three parts. First, I address the US’ historical territorial designations of the island, under both legal and scientific descriptors that coalesced by the early twentieth century and enabled its occupation as a military base during both world wars. Second, I contextualize the island within the American war in Vietnam, mostly in relation to the enormous surplus of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons central the US’ Operation Ranch Hand, a major organized US effort using chemical warfare in southeast Asia. I focus here on the island's place in relation to the military's drawn-out problems of disposing of chemical weapons in technologically feasible and environmentally acceptable ways. The military pulled several lands and people into its path during these attempts, dispersing injury in its wake. Third, I carry the synthesis from the first two sections to consider the US military's construction of its first large-scale chemical weapons incineration facility, built on Johnston Atoll in the 1980s. Here, I consider how people in the Pacific came to the defense of the atoll, and furthermore, study how the material idiosyncrasies of chemical waste contradicted military ‘discourses of safety’, insisting on enduring scales and temporalities of the harms of military waste. ⁸ These episodes must be understood within the broader militarized Pacific in relation to US imperialism. Drawing from primary sources including military scientific studies and correspondence, and oriented by thinking in environmental justice and postcolonial and feminist science studies, I offer a reading of the atoll as a place that was used to obscure, yet laid bare and resurfaced, several unattended histories and contemporalities of US empire.

On 6 January 2009, in a Presidential Proclamation, George W. Bush declared the Johnston Atoll and a cluster of nearby islands the ‘Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument’. ⁹ This Marine National Monument, far from the continental US, was established to ‘preserve the marine environment around the islands of Wake, Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, and Palmyra Atoll for the care and management of the historic and scientific objects therein’. ¹⁰ Celebrating the variegation of marine, fish, and bird life and waxing ecopoetic about the genetic density and diversity of the coral reefs and the islands’ volcanic origins, Bush's declaration was a hopeful one for biodiversity protection and optimism under the increasing threats of climate change. The Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Commerce would be responsible for managing the monument, though the declaration stipulates at the end that the islands are ultimately first subject to the US Armed Forces’ use of the islands:

‘Nothing in this proclamation or any regulation implementing it shall limit or otherwise affect the Armed Forces’ discretion to use, maintain, improve, manage, or control any property under the administrative control of a Military Department or otherwise limit the availability of such property for military mission purposes, including, but not limited to, defensive areas and airspace reservations’. ¹¹

Stylizing the atoll as both an ecological site that required urgent protection and as an ever-ready strategic geopolitical military site, presented a key contradiction present in this place. This contradiction, in a time of increasingly urgent global attention to climate change and environmental harm, reflected a pattern that was already over a century old.

Situated between the Hawai’ian Islands and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, Johnston Atoll, known to Indigenous people as Kalama Island, is presently legally designated as an unincorporated US territory. ¹² Johnston Atoll was first catapulted into imperial circuits during the height of the global guano fertilizer trade. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, European and US demand for guano escalated as industrialization in the imperial centres shifted to forms of industrial agriculture. The guano trade exploded, creating competition to mine islands with copious bird populations in the Pacific and around the world. ¹³ ‘Guano islands’ were named after the birds’ excrements that were plentiful on these islands. Used as a precious fertilizer, but also as a key material in munitions production, the demand for guano spurred numerous expeditions and extractive pursuits. So valuable were these deposits that in 1856, US Congress passed an act called the Guano Islands Act, granting US citizens exclusive rights to ‘unclaimed’ and newly ‘discovered’ guano deposits. ¹⁴ In an era of US imperial expansion, land was viewed as commodifiable into private property, sites of wealth extraction and production, and the territorial absorption into the making of US empire.

The US took control of several ‘guano islands’ during this period, claiming them under the legal stipulation that they were unclaimed and newly discovered – implying also that they were unoccupied or uninhabited. ¹⁵ The Guano Islands Act stated that when a ‘citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States’. ¹⁶ A familiar and repetitive claim deployed by settler states, the US activated the colonial politic of terra nullius to occupy and annex lands where local people and governance were not considered legitimate, and therefore justifiably incorporated into US territory.

The discourse of unoccupied or ‘empty’ land was deployed across places that had been inhabited, governed, and cared for by Indigenous peoples. US imperial expansion westwards across Indigenous lands extended beyond continental boundaries and into islands seized in the Caribbean and Pacific under the Guano Islands Act. ¹⁷ It was under this act, and the verification of guano deposits on the atoll, that the US officially absorbed Johnston Atoll into its non-contiguous territory in 1858. This claim did not go undisputed, and King Kamehameha IV attempted to maintain the island under the Kingdom of Hawai’i. ¹⁸ Despite this, and other, evident shows of prior jurisdiction by Hawai’ians and other Indigenous peoples of the Pacific, US actors maintained claim to and use of the atoll, under the assertion that it was uninhabited and empty. They mined it for guano deposits so rabidly that it came to the point of depletion within three decades. Under the last section of the Guano Islands Act, the law codified the right to abandon depleted islands. ¹⁹ But despite its rapacious use of the atoll for guano coming to an end, the US didn’t let go of it quite yet. ²⁰

Britain and the United States recognized the strategic military value of islands, and increasingly positioned them into geopolitical roles by the First World War. ²¹ Already occupied by the US since the guano trade annexations, the US Navy took over administrative control of Johnston Atoll in 1934. By 1942 during the Second World War, the military used a technique called coral dredging to artificially expand the edges of the island to facilitate its use as a military base. ²² Overlapping with the US’ initial orientation of extraction and technocratic militarization towards the island, natural scientists also increasingly recognized the atoll as an appealing site for research in the early twentieth century. It was first designated as a bird refuge under the US Department of Agriculture in 1926. The US National Research Council's Pacific Science Board absorbed Johnston into the orbit of its Coral Atoll Research Program in the 1950s, as one of its ‘natural laboratories for research in tropical ecology’. ²³ Thus, in the first half of the twentieth century, different US actors and institutions had already represented and materialized the atoll through multiple and contradictory designations. ²⁴

During and after the Second World War, in conditions of near permanence of continual or impending war, the atoll was often eclipsed by the spectre of US military demands. In a region where the US would be involved in several hot conflicts of the Cold War, the island's location in the Pacific would maintain geopolitical significance in this period. For instance, in the 1950s, the US used the island as a refueling station during the Korean War. ²⁵ Furthermore, US experts extended scientific research beyond ecology into the technoscientific experimentation of nuclear weapons and atmospheric testing on the atoll, a terrifying reality that would become a milieu across island territories by colonial powers during the Cold War. ²⁶ Converging on erratic uses of the atoll between knowledge production and war, imperial powers exploited this particular island and surrounding ones for experimentation, testing, disposal and deterioration, at the expense and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the harsh uses of the lands and waters. ²⁷ The boundary between its ecological significance as a coral atoll, versus its construction as an artificial island military base, was therefore compromised early on. As the hot wars after 1945 continued with widespread violence taking place in southeast Asia, Johnston Atoll was already strategically viewed by the US as ‘empty space’ to use towards their ends, where the military began to amass waste from shipping fuels to plutonium. Representing it in isolation of an entire region inhabited by Indigenous Hawaiians, Indigenous Polynesians, Asians, and non-Indigenous settlers across these lands, as well as non-human inhabitants from coral, fish, and insects to seals and sharks, ‘nobody’ lived there, and ‘nobody’ was there to defend it. Though continually reconfigured, the imperial politics of emptiness and extraction were culturally and materially embedded into the island, and held fast in the twentieth century.

In this section, I consider how several overlapping US military operations, meetings, and studies during the 1960s and 1970s elucidated the growing problems of chemical weapons waste in the Cold War, and how Johnston Atoll was situated in this flux. I also discuss how the military began to construct this within the purview of simultaneously achieving demilitarization and environmental safety. Viewing multiple operations together illuminates how the US positioned the Johnston Atoll, even after the Second World War, as an ideal ‘remote’ or empty space. The politics of emptiness facilitated military waste disposal while navigating civilian protests, public scrutiny of chemical weapons, and the uncertainties, failures, and dangers of their destruction. All the while, toxic chemicals sat, leaked, spilled, and moved in storage sites and transit spaces, waiting in containment for years at a time before any decisive demilitarization plan emerged.

For the duration of Operation Ranch Hand, Agent Orange constituted over sixty percent of the more than twenty million gallons of herbicides used in the war. ²⁸ Ranch Hand was a vicious US-led counterinsurgent operation during the American War in Vietnam that entailed a decade-long program of spraying and devastating landscapes in this region with toxic chemicals referred to as Rainbow Herbicides. ²⁹ Scientists were increasingly studying the toxicological effects of Agent Orange and other chemical munitions in the 1960s, and had identified dioxins, particularly one known as 2,3,7,8-TCDD (TCDD) in Agent Orange, as acutely harmful. ³⁰ By 1967, many of these scientists galvanized and petitioned the US President to stop the use of Agent Orange and other herbicides in the war, due to its high potential for teratogenicity – causing physiological, developmental, and generational harms – and lethality. ³¹ Part of the urgency of this moment therefore lay in the increasing public and scientific recognition of the severe toxicity of Agent Orange in particular, and the need to dispose of this chemical surplus. Demilitarizing Agent Orange posed a plethora of challenges, not least of which was locating suitable waste storage sites. In broader context, however, these events fell into a larger complex of US chemical weapons stockpiling in the Cold War period, expanded environmental consciousness and law, and anti-war and anti-imperial protest.

By 1970, US President Nixon ordered the military to suspend all herbicide operations in Vietnam. ³² In the face of vehement anti-war protests and opinion polls indicating the US public disapproval of the war, Nixon had already commenced a strategy of removing US troops, though maintaining air strikes on the North Vietnamese, and placing increasing responsibilities for conflict on the South Vietnamese government. ³³ The herbicide suspension order brought about the formal end of Operation Ranch Hand. The prior importance and rapid escalation of Ranch Hand before 1970 had produced significant stocks of chemical products, and much of this surplus remained in storage at US military bases around southeast Asia. Pacific bases like Da Nang and Bien Hoa in Vietnam, and Okinawa, all held huge quantities of the herbicides. ³⁴

A few months after the Agent Orange suspension, officials at the US Air Force Armament Laboratory compiled a report called ‘Recommendations for Handling and Disposal of Military Herbicides’. The suspension pre-empted a series of similar reports, considerations, suggestions, and calculations by the military to determine what to do with the millions of gallons of surplus herbicides. The USAF's report revealed many limitations and gaps in both technological feasibility and scientific information. For example, the notes stated for Agent White: ‘We do not recommend soil incorporation for white because of the persistence in the soil that could result’. ³⁵ For picloram, the report stated, ‘We do not recommend incineration because to the best of our knowledge 1. No incinerator is available, 2. [At] 1000˚C only 91.2 per cent was destroyed, 3. Cost, 4. Lack of data on biological degradation of picloram’. ³⁶

In a similar vein regarding Agent Blue, the notes warned, ‘Incineration of blue is not recommended. Since blue contains organic forms of arsenic, the end result of incineration would be the accumulation of an arsenic residue (inorganic arsenic) that would be 40 to 100 times more toxic than the original herbicide’. ³⁷ The report also noted that ‘chemical neutralizing techniques for disposal and spills of herbicides are not available’, which precluded this demilitarization option. ³⁸ The compendium of chemical weapons, their differing compositions and reactivities, and their responses to varying disposal methods, meant that solutions would require separate and highly specific processes for each chemical product, or a complete set of information for every variable and scenario to foresee combined outcomes. Since both would be costly and time-consuming, neither of these options were readily forthcoming.

Prior to the Ranch Hand weapons disposal predicament, the US armed forces had already been contending with questions around the disposal of chemical weapons in the Cold War period. ³⁹ In the 1960s however, this problem took on new scales, complexity, and secrecy in the Cold War milieu. US authorities continually asserted, for example, that Agent Orange was only a ‘tactical’ weapon, not a chemical weapon as categorized by earlier international protocols. Governments attempted to brush over the seriousness of the potential harms wrought by their munitions, and this confusion informed or justified callous ways that military waste was often dealt with. Overlapping events in this era, such as Operation CHASE, would inform the terms of chemical munitions disposal in the wake of the Ranch Hand suspension.

Since 1964, members of the US Navy had mass dumped chemical weapons into the Atlantic Ocean under the ominous name, Operation ‘Cut Holes and Sink ‘Em’. ⁴⁰ This reckless strategy entailed sinking massive military ships with obsolete weapons on board, many of which were obviously still potent and toxic like nerve gas, sarin, and VX. ⁴¹ Initially evading public awareness and scrutiny, activists and Democratic politicians brought CHASE to light by 1969, and the controversy over chemical dumping off the coast of Florida soon escalated. ⁴² Public outcry and attention to the harms from toxic chemical weapons dumping played an important role in the introduction of a new environmental law in 1972 called the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act. From this point forward, permits would be required for ocean dumping in US ‘territorial sea’ which would be regulated by the newly formed US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ⁴³ Despite the public reactions to Operation CHASE, the military maintained a stance that downplayed the lasting potential harms wrought by chemical munitions, and this position would stretch into the processes and rhetoric of demilitarization and environmental clean-up.

The tension between growing public anxieties of toxic chemical exposures, and the discourses of safety advanced by the US military, unfolded in several ways and places in the militarized Pacific. ⁴⁴ As in Da Nang and other US bases in Vietnam, chemical weapons stored at US military bases in Okinawa, in the East China Sea, also came under new attention at this moment in the context of the military's Operation Red Hat. ⁴⁵ Under US control, Okinawa became an integral site for military bases during the wars in Korea and Vietnam. In the 1960s, several alarming events on the island indicated the accumulating effects of this militarization, many in relation to holding toxic weapons at the bases. One incident found students experiencing dermatitis after swimming along the coast, while another group of students experienced sore eyes attributed to tear gas in the vicinity. ⁴⁶ Ecological changes emerged, such as the discovery of frogs with physiological mutations, and the sudden withering of papaya and sugar canes near an American base. ⁴⁷ As one journalist described the situation, ‘I wonder if any consideration was given to the life environment of the Okinawans when the decision was made to transfer [the poisonous war gases to Okinawa]. I suspect that, since the Americans held full administrative rights over the Ryukyus, they saw no need to seek the views of residents before bringing chemicals into the island’. ⁴⁸

US military presence had sowed deep mistrust among Okinawans, and these tensions were coming to a head in 1970, coinciding with the period that Operation Ranch Hand was suspended. The ongoing American war in Vietnam, and the US military bases in Okinawa, meant that inadvertent weapons detonations and hazardous weapons storage placed local people in persistent danger in their own lands. At this moment, as locals were made privy to the scale and type of chemical weapons stored in Okinawa, as many as 10,000 people called for the removal of chemicals in a rally at a junior high school near the weapons storage area. ⁴⁹ The same year, the military proposed the transfer of these weapons to Johnston Atoll – under Operation Red Hat – a move made to fulfil part of its mandate to ‘return’ Okinawa to Japanese administrative control. ⁵⁰ While US military officials expected relief from locals to this bid, many Okinawans responded in defiance and protest. Cognizant of the fact that chemical weapons storage sites and transport routes would continue to envelop the land and drive people into exposure pathways, Okinawans objected to the movement of the waste through their towns in the process of moving it to the Johnston Atoll.

The rally calling for the removal of chemical weapons coincided with a number of inflamed protests in Okinawa. A pivotal revolt called the Koza Uprising erupted in 1970 in response to the death of a woman caused by a US soldier. ⁵¹ The soldier was not held to account, and furious resistance grew across sites of militarized sexual violence, toxic military exposures, and labour exploitation, demonstrating the robust political consciousness that Okinawans had built in opposition to US imperial forces. Members of the Ryukyu legislature also rejected American calls for neutralizing the chemical weapons in Okinawa, arguing that this would require further delay and the concomitant risks of leaks, accidents, spills, or other exposures, during the wait for suitable infrastructure to carry this out. ⁵² In 1971, the military proceeded with Operation Red Hat despite the resistance from Okinawans. On the day that the military transported the chemicals through the route from the ammunition depot to the port for shipment to Johnston Atoll, villages were found abandoned in Okinawan's continued protest. ⁵³ Refusing to be physically present and proximate to the weapons, villagers demonstrated another form of resistance by retracting their presence during the weapons transfer, rejecting both immediate bodily exposures as well as the discourses of safety advanced by the military.

Although the US military continually asserted that the chemical weapons were safe both in storage and in transit, US Congress passed Public Law 91-672 in 1971, prohibiting the transfer of chemical weapons waste from Okinawa to the continental US. The law stated in Section 13:

No funds authorized or appropriated pursuant to this or any other law may be used to transport chemical munitions from the Island of Okinawa to the United States. Such funds as are necessary for the detoxification or destruction of the above described chemical munitions are hereby authorized and shall be used for the detoxification or destruction of chemical munitions only outside the United States. For purposes of this section, the term ‘United States’ means the several States and the District of Columbia. ⁵⁴

It was not lost on Okinawans that if the weapons should be prevented from entering the US mainland, then serious hazards were evidently likely, and that the US government had decided that these would be better borne by Asian and Pacific peoples and lands. The chairman of the Okinawa Council of Labour Unions, and executive director of the Okinawa Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, articulated the issue plainly: ‘While it is understandable that there should be opposition to the transfer of the gases to America, it is outrageous to suggest that the chemicals should be kept in Okinawa … I wonder if American principles about respect for human rights and for democracy are only valid for American citizens’. ⁵⁵ Despite the immense outcry and pushback by Okinawans, the US military and government enforced its own protocols for weapons management, and carried out Operation Red Hat. Weapons including sarin gas, nerve gas, and mustard gas were moved to Johnston Atoll in 1971.

In September 1971, under growing public attention and pressure against the war in Vietnam and its use of chemical munitions, the Department of Defense directed that the Agent Orange in Vietnam be returned to the United States, and that the entire 2.3 million gallon stockpile be disposed of in an ‘ecologically safe and efficient manner’. ⁵⁶ However, Congress had now set a precedent in its treatment of US chemical weapon stockpiles in Okinawa: US military waste that was already held away from the continental US, should be kept away. Ocean dumping was more publicly recognized and protested, as well as regulated under the Marine Protection Act, which rendered it a less ideal disposal method. The EPA weighed in that a ‘remote region’ would provide the ideal site for this chemical waste. ⁵⁷ At this moment, in response to this directive to return all Agent Orange stock to the continental United States for disposal, yet presented with the limitations imposed by Congress, and civilian pressures from communities from North America to Okinawa, military officials moved the herbicides to Johnston Atoll for storage. Under US law, this land came under US governance as an unincorporated territory, and yet fell safely outside of the ‘several States and the District of Columbia’ of the specific ‘United States’ referred to in Public Law 91-672. Local people raised objections, including Hawaiian calls to conduct hearings with Pacific Island nations. In turn, the military responded, ‘that those islands were beyond the scope of the law and not part of the environmental consideration’. ⁵⁸

Operation Pacer IVY ensued in 1972, which entailed this transfer of the remaining Agent Orange from South Vietnam to Johnston Atoll. Despite their public stance, the military's ambivalent recognition of the potential harms of Agent Orange was belied in telling instances like Pacer IVY. During this process of Agent Orange removal, the first steps involved re-drumming vast quantities of herbicides from disintegrating, leaking, or otherwise damaged drums. ⁵⁹ This labour was relegated primarily to men from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces, and Vietnamese women who worked on US bases. ⁶⁰ In this operation, while the consequences of exposure remained uncertain, and despite the US military's continued assurances of safety, its own personnel were more apprehensive, and protected from immediate contact with the chemicals. It appears that the South Vietnamese soldiers who were allied with the US, and Vietnamese working women, were deemed hierarchically lesser, and therefore subjugated first to harms.

As huge bulks of chemical waste now sat on Johnston Atoll by 1972, the US armed forces considered demilitarization plans for their final disposal or destruction. As early as 1970, however, the US Air Force's Environmental Health Lab (EHL) promoted incineration as an optimal choice, and this increasingly appealed to the military for its relative political and technological feasibility. ⁶¹ This extensive set of reports by the EHL also reviewed several disposal options. The report counted out biodegradation, reasoning that the ‘causative agent … of the widely reported teratogenic effects of 2,4,5-T are unidentified’, and that ‘the toxicity of these materials to biological systems is still incompletely understood’, further cautioning that women of child-bearing age would be endangered by the presence of this chemical. Incineration, however, was considered feasible and cheap.

Furthermore, for US interests, the prospect of a newly designed incineration facility dedicated to destroying some of the worst toxic military chemicals could provide a technological solution, and even prototype, to dispose of future military munitions, as well as commercial toxic chemicals that were also increasingly recognized as unsafe. ⁶² Though the USAF found incineration technology attractive, it would require a favourable site. The EHL initially proposed and considered incineration sites in Texas and Illinois, but were quickly rejected largely because of the communities’ refusal to have such potentially devastating burns carried out near them. For example, in 1972 the Executive Secretary of the Texas Air Control Board responded that the USAF's Draft Environmental Impact Statement lacked sufficient information and technical data to determine the feasibility of destroying such great quantities of Agent Orange, and that the responsibility for technical errors and accidents were not clear. ⁶³ Clearly dissatisfied with the technical viability of the incineration to contain all harmful effects, he instead suggested, ‘It might be desirable to explore the possibility of incinerating the Orange in a federally-owned facility located in a relatively unpopulated area’ instead. ⁶⁴

The USAF's next moves aligned with this thinking, as they again considered sites deemed unpopulous, and that fell under US territorial control. In 1974, the Final Environmental Impact Statement on the Disposition of Orange Herbicide by Incineration, prepared by the Department of the Air Force, mirrored this orientation: ‘[the] Air Force plans to incinerate Orange herbicide in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean … on a specially designed vessel in the open tropical sea near Johnston Island’. ⁶⁵ A separate EPA report in 1975 reflected the narrowed focus on incineration: ‘As we become increasingly aware of the problems and potential problems created by ocean dumping, well disposal, indiscriminate land filling, and other relatively cheap disposal options for hazardous wastes, and as air and water pollution controls are applied, incineration is being looked to as the overall best means of destroying the increasing quantities of many hazardous wastes’. ⁶⁶ The report also noted downfalls of incineration, including ‘ash remains which may or may not be toxic’, and ‘products of combustion that can be hazardous to health or damaging to property’. ⁶⁷ The report, however, included a discussion on the preference for at-sea incineration on Dutch or German tankers due to lesser costs than comparable land-based incineration. The report attributed this to the ‘absence of any pollution control equipment on the incinerator vessel’, and that ‘the overall environmental impact of incinerating hazardous wastes on this vessel is not known’. ⁶⁸ With the bulk of the Agent Orange stock already stored at Johnston Atoll, as well as an assortment of other chemical weapons, and the ever-present uncertainty of the technology and the aftermath, the coral reef atoll was slated as the optimal base for at-sea chemical munitions incineration.

The military's processes of choosing Johnston Atoll as the chemical weapons holding and at-sea incineration site were filled with their own apprehensions, anxieties, and a lack of clear information and consensus. Furthermore, navigating and evading civic resistance in the continental US, as well as in the Pacific from Okinawa to Hawai’i, was more readily achieved at Johnston Atoll, since the military had a legacy of control here. Safely managing, neutralizing, and disposing of the enormous surplus of Agent Orange and other stockpiled chemical weapons exceeded the technical knowledge and capabilities of the US military, scientists, and government. Now, this presented an accumulating challenge on the atoll alongside, and compounded with, nuclear and other military waste. While the bulk of chemical wastes from Okinawa and Vietnam waited in storage on Johnston Atoll, the military navigated avenues to ‘destroy’ the military discards, including the technological and bureaucratic infrastructures that would enable this objective.

In 1975, the US Air Force applied to the EPA for an incineration permit for its two major stockpiles of Agent Orange stored at Gulfport, Mississippi, and Johnston Atoll. The second largest stockpile was shipped from Gulfport to Johnston Atoll, in light of the previous events that now resolved that this toxic military waste be destroyed on the Pacific atoll. In 1977, seven years after the herbicides used in Operation Ranch Hand had been suspended, the US Army initiated the incineration of Agent Orange stocks on the Dutch ship called the M/T Vulcanus under Operation HO (Herbicide Orange). According to the final reports, the military burned over 10,400 metric tons of Agent Orange, with an EPA representative present for only the first of three burn operations. ⁶⁹ For contrast, the quantity of incinerated Agent Orange was the approximate equivalent mass of one hundred adult blue whales.

The final post-operation report anticipated effluent gases to be released from the incineration, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons – anthropogenic sources of both contamination and atmospheric warming. ⁷⁰ Nonetheless, the report documented that the incinerations achieved efficiencies of over 99 per cent for total hydrocarbons, Herbicide Orange, TCDD, and chlorinated hydrocarbons, which portrayed an impressive eradication of these chemicals. ⁷¹ This accounting negated, downplayed, and did not measure by-products of incineration, such as particulate matter, toxic ashes, and gaseous emissions. For instance, the report briefly noted that aromatic hydrocarbons were generated during the combustion process, and it logged emission amounts ranging from 30 to 460 parts per billion. ⁷² Aromatic hydrocarbons are carcinogenic, are not highly soluble in water, and are now known to be persistent organic pollutants. Though the waste was incinerated, and the technical records told a cosmetic story of technological success, the unknown impacts, and implications in the forms of material traces of this mass incineration would continue to assume their own circulations in the Pacific and beyond.

In the shadow of heightened scrutiny on environmental practices, and sights towards longer-term waste destruction infrastructure, the military pivoted towards land-based incineration as the preferred method of chemical weapons destruction after the Vulcanus incineration. Having gained traction as a weapons waste holding site, and at-sea incineration base, Johnston Atoll was selected yet again as a suitable option. ⁷³ Now, the military advanced an image of technological aptitude combined with scientific environmental knowledge and monitoring to curtail criticisms of these processes, and to navigate the uncertainties of chemical weapons waste. That is, rather than being restricted by environmental laws, the US government, EPA, and military constructed a technoscientific nexus where military waste and ecosystem health were rendered compatible and not in contradiction. ⁷⁴ In this nexus, a private engineering group called Washington International was contracted to build the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System, or JACADS, facility.

In 1985, US Congress mandated the destruction of outdated chemical weapons, and the same year, the construction of JACADS commenced. ⁷⁵ An apposite signal of the scale of US chemical war technologies and their use across the globe, the JACADS facility located in the Pacific Ocean was to be the US military's first dedicated chemical munitions incineration facility. Over the course of the decade, the Johnston Atoll was slowly transformed into the site of JACADS, under permit of the EPA, to fulfil the destruction mandate. It is important to note, however, that this was not a mandate for complete demilitarization and disarmament. A report from the US General Accounting Office in 1985 entitled, ‘Chemical Munitions: Cost Estimates for Demilitarization and Production’, illustrated the context. The report estimated costs for methods and sites to destroy unitary chemical weapons, as well as costs for producing new binary chemical weapons. ⁷⁶ While the demilitarization arm was estimated to cost between $1.2 and 2.2 billion USD (1985), the production program for new binary chemical weapons was estimated upwards of $2.7 billion USD (1985). ⁷⁷ The destruction of outdated chemical weapons in particular had as much to do with ridding the military of obsolete munitions, as making room for new ones. Harnessing public attention on JACADS towards buttressing an image of military responsibility and environmental safety, while simultaneously calculating and preparing for a modern generation of chemical weapons production, demilitarization was a contingent, and tainted, proposition. Placing a chemical weapons incineration facility on the atoll would therefore also serve as a prototype for future weapons destruction infrastructures, pointing to the scale of the military's intentions to develop solutions that ensured its continued expansion and power. ⁷⁸

As the site prepared for its first operations in 1990, protests escalated. Until this point, the public from the south Pacific to the continental US had been kept largely unaware of the existence of JACADS or its planned destruction of enormous volumes of chemical munitions and waste. As in Okinawa in the early 1970s, people in the south Pacific were not convinced by the US military's declarations of safety and secure procedures that no hazardous spills, exposures, and remnants would occur. People in the Pacific viewed the destruction and devastation on the atoll as interconnected, in movement, and dangerous to the land, ocean, animal life, and humans. They opposed the JACADS operations as part of a broader resistance to imperial technocultures and militarization of the Pacific, like nuclear weapons experimentation and waste, through avenues like protests, political forums, literature and cultural production, and circulating knowledge. ⁷⁹ In a notable coordinated move, assembling through the South Pacific Forum, fifteen nations including Fiji, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea, firmly declared their opposition to JACADS, with the organization stating that it ‘censured the US for making the Pacific Ocean the “permanent toxic waste disposal center of the world”’. ⁸⁰ The Prime Minister of Australia was the only exception.

International alliances with environmental groups also mobilized. For example, a quarterly newsletter called Tok Bong, South Pacific [FF], circulated to report on issues relevant to diasporic peoples of the South Pacific, dedicated over a third of its October 1990 issue to detailing JACADS and the Johnston Atoll. With the large header Nerve Gas Atoll scripted across the first page, the publication issue detailed anxieties about the Johnston Atoll incinerations, such as toxic dioxin emissions and its potential to ‘[subject] the region to the risk of “another Bhopal or Chernobyl”’. ⁸¹ The issue set the JACADS alongside several related instances of the imperial intoxication of the region. Garbage and hazardous waste transfers from wealthy nations to islands in the Pacific, discussions of ‘ghost shrimp’ emitting radionuclides in the Marshall Islands, and France's continued nuclear ‘testing’ detonations, materialized and continued imperial violence in the Pacific, as it reverberated through, and by, intoxicating the composition of its land and waterscapes. ⁸²

Despite the attempted construction of this space as empty, uninhabited, and expendable, the island was continually protected by Indigenous people across the region, and people in solidarity who recognized the imperial constructions of waste in the Pacific. The Pacific territories were deemed acceptable to bear the hazards, exposures, and risks of storing and destroying such toxic substances, not only by the US military, but also by other US actors including Congress, environmental lawmakers, and even segments of environmental activists. ⁸³ Despite the vehement rejections, the JACADS incinerations proceeded, with the waste burning continuing throughout the 1990s. This mass incineration operation contained such a wide array of chemical weapons, and at such a vast scale, that it was quite literally impossible to be able to foresee all the effects, regardless of the individual studies available, and despite the perfunctory environmental records being produced by the military claiming negligible effects. Here, surrounded by the currents and winds of the Pacific Ocean, the migrations and movements of monk seals and red-tailed tropic birds, sarin gas, mustard gas, nerve agents, most of the Agent Orange stock, and other chemical agents were burned.

Though the US military carried out many EPA environmental mandates, and proclaimed the JACADS operation an overall technoscientific success – implying the effective eradication of a near-century's stockpile of chemical weapons – material waste from these processes emerged in different ways. In turn, these resurfaced traces of war, secrecy, and the scale of destruction across generational lines. Traces emerged in chemical holding places, as increasing scientific, ethnographic, and other studies were conducted in relation to the war. They also appeared sometimes in the military's own scientific studies. In other ways, traces manifested in collective bodies such as veterans’ shared knowledge and lawsuits. And sometimes they surfaced in data produced by other federal scientists tending to the atoll as a site for ecological study. Still a designated Nature Wildlife Refuge, the Johnston Atoll had been imprinted with toxic military waste in landfills, burial sites, lagoons, burn pits, storage infrastructure, and offshore incineration burns. While all these remnants are there, they are often unseen, ephemeral, embedded in different forms – in sediments, water or its dissolved forms, humans, fish – not readily witnessed, or might circulate and take effect in unanticipated ways.

Between 1996 and 1999, a joint Canadian and Vietnamese team of scientists conducted a notable environmental study across areas exposed to Agent Orange. The team collected samples of ‘soil, fish fat, duck fat, pooled human blood and breast milk samples … from A So village’, the site of a military base occupied by US forces between 1963 and 1966. ⁸⁴ Levels of TCDD were elevated here, more-so than other sites where Agent Orange was stored for shorter periods, and more-so than areas where Agent Orange was sprayed from low-flying aircraft. ⁸⁵ The study was pivotal in demonstrating, from its central findings, that while sprayed areas were important impact zones, storage areas of Agent Orange – namely, primarily military bases – were often more intensely affected, with TCDD mobilizing into human food chains over the course of decades. Such a formulation of dioxin ‘hot spots’ sheds light on many overlooked sites of serious Agent Orange exposure, both during and after the war, which would mean storage sites like the Da Nang, Bien Hoa, and Johnston Atoll military bases, which had all held the munition for long periods, could be dioxin hot spots.

Other forms of military environmental monitoring continued in the 1990s. In 1999, a team of US environmental scientists, from a private corporation and from the military's Aberdeen Proving Ground, used various analytical methods to examine the decontamination products of chemical weapons from containers on Johnston Atoll. ⁸⁶ The team aimed to sample and analyse the various decontamination remnants left in disposal containers. Due to the complexity of the range of chemical products, the team employed a wide array of technologies including gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), gas chromatography/atomic emission detection (GC/AED), liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS), capillary electrophoresis (CE), and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR). ⁸⁷ Even so, the scientists encountered a number of challenges including instrument limitations of detecting the presence of agents below certain concentrations, limited analysis of agents due to the ‘presence of chemically similar interferences in the decontamination solution samples’, and challenges determining the sources of unlisted and unrecorded contaminants. ⁸⁸

According to the study, over a quarter of the containers of decontamination waste were inaccurately labeled – that is, ‘the content was not in agreement with the labels’. ⁸⁹ Indeed, the analyses found that several of the tested substances were not recorded as ever being on the atoll at all. One such potent substance was lewisite, which is an extremely toxic blister agent that has respiratory and whole-body effects. ⁹⁰ The range and specificity of measurement technologies for analysis reveals how many resources are required for careful detection, identification, and assessment of materials in chemical or other weapons stockpile clean-ups. Unrecorded agents such as lewisite are a potent reminder of the kinds of acute substances left over in the Pacific, that can quietly go unrecorded even in bureaucratic environmental records.

Imperial traces of toxicity on Johnston Atoll continued to emerge at the turn of the twenty-first century through combined legal-corporeal registers. In 2002, US veterans brought forward a case to Congress, of their exposure to biological and chemicals weapons testing conducted by the US Department of Defense in the Pacific in the 1960s and 1970s. ⁹¹ A hearing took place on 10 October 2002, and the speaker recounted these events in Hawai’i, Johnston Atoll, and other sites as part of a secret mission called Project SHAD, as well as a number of illnesses that veterans had experienced likely in relation to these exposures. ⁹² While this case showed that the ubiquity of chemical weapons exposures did not preclude members of the US military itself, the calculation of harm still depended on liability through specific, US-centred legal avenues. Events like the SHAD exposures were only divulged after four decades, and the subsequent demands for compensation and care were largely rebuffed by the government. ⁹³ Many people in the Pacific, and the waters and lands where they occurred, were also tied into these processes, yet continue to go unrecognized by US state-based registers of toxic military harms.

Throughout these events, Johnston Atoll retained its designation as a ‘Nature Refuge’, and federal scientists produced numerous studies about the island in the three decades following the JACADS closure. Scientific studies produced by biologists, toxicologists, and others that form the ecological research arm of the atoll's technoscientific nexus have also excavated revealing material traces of the place's history. PCBs, radionuclides, plutonium, and dioxins blend into and mutate the materiality of fish and sediments. ⁹⁴ Coral reef areas around the atoll are contaminated with Agent Orange and the incendiary remnants of burn pit trash. ⁹⁵ Coral bleaching, the process of coral reefs losing pigmentation and health due to thermal, chemical, and other stressors, swept across islands in the Caribbean and Pacific regions in 1996, amidst the coral already contending with the weight of dumped munitions. ⁹⁶ Reading this history of the Johnston Atoll through US imperialism brings into relief the intentional degrading of Pacific lands and waters with military waste as a reinforcement of US military power and its continued expansion.

US demilitarization projects cannot consign entire places to total abandon in order to maintain its continual expansion. ⁹⁷ Modes of accumulation, militarization, expansion, and disposal exemplified by US empire continue, as Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser put it, ‘the practice of terra nullius: it actively creates space for the tangible expansion of the “one world” by rendering empty the places it occupies and making absent the worlds that make those places’. ⁹⁸ Sites like Johnston Atoll cannot be historically consumed by US representations into empty, natural spaces, dissociated entirely from war, imperial expansion, and colonial violence, or the people, life-worlds, and cultures that they have suppressed and sought to destroy. Military technoscientific solutions to military waste carry and reproduce racial and imperial lines, and with these, the intensified material burdens of exposure to some of the most brutal synthetic materials designed for death and debilitation. In the face of the harsh and unsteady contemporalities of military waste, the imperial conceit on this atoll serves as a signal to the dangers, and impossibility of resolving the consequences, of wilfully unending weapons production.