Somewhere near the middle of the list of things that I want to write in future newsletters is a line that simply says “demilitarize my vocabulary”. I jotted that down in early January when I was on a work trip in Saint Paul, MN. At some point during a meeting, I asked a librarian who they were targeting with a particular program, and then immediately thought that there must be a better word than “target”. It’s a lazy word that, in my field of work (which is not being a professional archer), serves little functional purpose. It’s certainly no replacement for movement building, co-constructing, sharing, or listening. Targeting. Blech!
This idea bubbled to the surface recently when I watched a livestream of Arundhati Roy talking about her latest essay “The Pandemic Is a Portal”. At 23:33 she says,
“Everybody is so freely using the vocabulary of war to speak about this virus, and I keep thinking ‘oh but war is about killing people and presumably what you're doing is supposedly about saving people.’”
She goes on to discuss the ways that annihilation is central to our collective understanding of what it means to be civilized and to enact progress. Nuclear weapons programs, biological weapons programs, and the vast deforestation of the rainforest all reinforce the principle that the annihilation of entire populations, landscapes, and ecological systems is an acceptable price to pay if the market demands it.
I recall a Guardian article written by Sarika Bansal about 17 global development cliches to avoid in 2017, so here are 20 military terms that I’m going to avoid in 2020 (with apologies to Palantir, those wannabe mercenaries).
Oh, the places I won’t go! Work can be tedious at times, but I’m never anything remotely close to being in the trenches. My colleagues will never be deployed and our partners are not boots on the ground. Without frontlines, there isn’t any no mans’ land, and please somebody explain to me why people refer to anything that is not the physical location of a literal catastrophe as Ground Zero.
If I’m trying to make my point in a conversation, I won’t draw on ammo, which is good news because that means that I no longer need an arsenal.
A great thing about the term “due date” is that, unlike deadline, it wasn’t invented to describe a literal line that literal prisoners were literally shot for crossing.
Work can be both important and urgent, but never mission critical. Guidelines and policies do not constitute rules of engagement, and unintended consequences do not constitute collateral damage. Nothing, anywhere, at any time should constitute a nuclear option.
One does not simply get bombarded by email.
If somebody is unpredictable they aren’t a loose cannon, and if they don’t show up to a meeting they are not MIA. I can do my job without task forces or tours of duty, and I can keep up my responsibilities without needing anything to be on my radar.
Is this all a little overkill?
Well, the word “overkill” was first used during the Cold War to describe a destructive nuclear capacity greater than what was required to destroy the enemy (in this case the third and fourth most populous countries on Earth), so you tell me.
Blockbusters and Bikinis
I was really planning for this edition of But It Is Known to be more on the upbeat and fun side, but unfortunately that’s not going to happen. Because when I reading about military language that has entered everyday speech, I came across two other words whose history I feel compelled to share.
The first word is blockbuster. Now used primarily to describe successful movies or that one final franchise in Bend, Oregon that just won’t quit, the word didn’t exist until the 1940s. It originally came into use in Britain when the Royal Air Force began using thinner casings on their high capacity bombs, thus increasing the explosive percentage of a bomb’s weight from 50% to 75%. Through an iterative design process that would make IDEO proud, the British and Americans figured out that the best way to utilize these bombs was to drop them on Germany alongside a few dozen small incendiaries packed with napalm (or some other jellied-petroleum). The high capacity bomb would immediately blow out windows and roofs, exposing often-wooden building interiors to fires that would be fanned by the incendiaries. Often, this combination would quickly subsume an entire German street, in essence “busting a block”.
Source: Wikipedia
The earliest blockbuster bombs weren’t aerodynamic; they were little more than elongated oil drums packed with explosives. In a way, I appreciate the straightforwardness of this original design, as it’s easier to allow oneself to misinterpret the intent (maximum death and destruction) when a bomb is given personality or gets dressed up any other way.
A 4,000-pound blockbuster loaded into de Havilland Mosquito at RAF Graveley, 1944. (Source: Wikipedia)
The Americans were particularly good at masking intent. Take for instance the pair of nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These bombs had fun names (Fat Man, Little Boy), they were graced by well-publicized signatures of U.S. soldiers, and Fat Man was damn near-anthropomorphic (round and chubby, painted yellow with black liquid asphalt sealant sprayed over casing seams, it looked like a giant bumble bee).
Fat Man (painted mustard yellow) lowered onto a transport dolly to be transported to the airfield on Tinian Island. (Source: Atomic Heritage Foundation)
You can still see it up close and in color, actually. A replica of Fat Man currently sits at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, tucked under the wing of Bockscar, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the bomb. A highlight of the exhibit is the nose art that was added to the side of the plane after the mission, a whimsical cartoon of a boxcar with wings flying along a train track from Salt Lake City to Nagasaki. There are a few notable buildings from the Salt Lake City skyline, including the Utah State Capitol and what appears to be the Walker Center. On the Nagasaki side of the tracks there is a single torii (the iconic Shinto gate) and a mushroom cloud.
The other plane that dropped an atomic bomb, the Enola Gay, is on display as well. It sits pride of place, alongside the space shuttle Discovery and an SR-71 (or SR-17 according to postnatal Grimes) at the Udvar-Hazy Center, a satellite campus of the National Air and Space Museum which abuts Dulles Airport outside of Washington, DC. The last time I was further from my house that Russo’s was in early March when I visited friends in Washington and we spent an afternoon at the Udvar-Hazy Center. There was a large crowd gathered in front of the Enola Gay, listening to a tour guide recount the well-worn tale that the nuclear bomb was a necessary step towards peace. I squeezed by the crowd, nearly running into the nose of a Boeing 707, and walked over towards the Enola Gay’s informational plaque. No mention of the quarter million dead.
I didn’t need to travel to Washington to encounter the Enola Gay, however. As an avid (and increasingly disenchanted) solver of the New York Times crossword puzzle, I encounter this plane all the damn time, as it’s name has a particularly low Scrabble value and an uncommon-yet-useful string of letters (N-O-L). Of the top 100 crossword clues for the word “Enola”, 96 of them reference the plane, with some clues ( e.g. “Gay opening?” “Gay partner?” “Gay over Hiroshima”) trying out some cute wordplay to boot.
There is a striking photo of the Enola Gay returning from its famous mission. The plane lands from the right, frozen in time just feet over the runway. The tail marking, a black “R” in a circle, immediately catches your eye, though they are quickly drawn upwards towards a mountain of clouds that takes up the upper two thirds of the frame. Everything seems hot, muggy, and suspended, a feeling that was reinforced when I learned that the Guinness Book of World Records has awarded a neighboring island as having the most equable climate on Earth: the temperature is almost always between 75 and 83 degrees, year round, day and night. Looking at the photo, I think about how light the plane must have felt to the pilots as it bounced down the runway, mission completed, free of fuel and ordnance. But it’s the caption, written by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, that sticks with me the most: “The Enola Gay lands safely on the airstrip at Tinian after completing the mission to drop Little Boy on Hiroshima.” Of all the descriptive words that could have described that photo and that day, “safely” is revealing choice.
The second story I want to tell you picks up right where we have left off. Following World War II, the United States controlled a number of Pacific islands, reef, and atolls (they still do). One of these, Bikini, was chosen as the site of further nuclear testing. (The name Bikini comes from “pikinni”, the Ebon/Marshallese word for “coconut place”). Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests on, above, and beneath Bikini Atoll. The first test was conducted on June 30, 1946, less than a year after the two bombs were dropped over Japan. Four days later, in Paris, fashion designer Louis Réard introduced the two-piece bathing suit to the world. Hoping to create an "explosive commercial and cultural reaction", he borrowed the name bikini. The media gobbled it up, with Harper’s fashion writer Diana Vreeland describing the bikini as the "atom bomb of fashion". 53 years later SpongeBob moved into Bikini Bottom and the rest is history.
Well, except for the people of Bikini. Before the nuclear tests got underway, the U.S. government “asked” the 161 inhabitants to temporarily leave their homeland for "the good of mankind and to end all world wars." On March 7, 1946, the entire population boarded a ship and sailed 125 miles eastward to Rongerik Atoll. The U.S. dropped them off with a few weeks of rations, not unlike Episode 1 of every season of Survivor.
The people of Bikini boarding LST 1108 on March 7, 1946. Source: Wikipedia.
An extremely abridged account of what happened next:
March 1946: It becomes immediately clear why nobody had settled on Rongerik Atoll previously: there is inadequate water and food supply. People soon begin to starve.
March 1948: The population is relocated to Kwajalein Atoll, where they live in tents beside an active U.S. military runway.
June 1948: The population is relocated to Kili, a 0.36 square mile island with no sheltered lagoon, which severely limits the ability to fish and move between islands. Waves are so large for half the year that the U.S. abandons its plan to deliver food by ship and begins airdropping canned goods and USDA rice.
1956: Part of the population relocates to Jaluit, a nearby atoll with better food supply.
1957-58: Successive typhoons strike Kili and Jaluit, damaging crops on both islands.
June 1968: Lyndon Johnson promises the population (now 540 people) that they can return home.
1972: Coconut trees are replanted on Bikini; some of the population returns despite early evidence of lingering radiation.
1975: Scientific tests demonstrate that the well water, flora, and fauna are unsuitable for human consumption. Residents sue the United States. Among other things, the lawsuit states that the U.S. did not use the sophisticated radiation detection methods that they employed for scientific purposes in determining whether Bikini was safe for the residents.
1977: Tests on residents reveal high levels of cesium-137, corroborating a noted increase in miscarriages, stillbirths, and genetic abnormalities among children.
1978: Residents still living on Bikini are forced to leave. Many move back to Kili, though some move to Majuro (the largest city in the Marshall Islands) and the United States.
1980s: The U.S. sets up trust funds for the people of Bikini and for radioactive cleanup; both are quickly deemed insufficient.
1986: The Compact of Free Association grants independence to Marshall Islands and establishes the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal, an international arbitral tribunal charged with the "jurisdiction to render final determination upon all claims past, present and future, of the Government, citizens and nationals of the Marshall Islands which are based on, arise out of, or are in any way related to the [American] Nuclear Testing Program.”
March, 2001: The Nuclear Claims Tribunal awards $563,315,500 to the people of Bikini, comprising funds for loss of land, restoration costs, and suffering and hardship. Far beyond the funds originally endowed to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, the people of Bikini must seek this compensation directly from the U.S. Government.
April, 2006: The people of Bikini file a lawsuit against the U.S. Government for the failure and refusal to adequately fund the March 2001 order of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal.
April, 2010: The case is refused by the U.S. Supreme Court
August, 2010: The UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribes the Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site to the World Heritage List, writing that it “symbolises the dawn of the nuclear age, despite its paradoxical image of peace and of earthly paradise.”
2011: Rising tides begin flooding portions of Kili. The island’s well water supply was contaminated at least five times between 2011 to 2015.
2020: There are more than 5,000 Bikini people, spread out across the Marshall Islands and United States. Bikini serves as a temporary home only for scientists, caretakers, and diver tourists. While radiation levels are decreasing, there is no set date for when the people can return.
A map depicting the exodus of the People of Bikini. Papau New Guinea is in the southwest of the map, Hawaii in the northeast. The people of Bikini moved chronologically from west to east: Bikini, Rongerik, Kwajalein, Kili, Jaluit, and Majuro. (Source: Google Map)
By far the most helpful resource in writing this newsletter was the very well cared for website ”A Short History of the People of Bikini Atoll”, compiled by Jack Niedenthal. One of the major teachings of the “fake news” movement of 2016-17 was that we should never trust websites that look like his. (Where are the Pulitzer winning journos!? The website isn’t even HTTPS!) Yet Jack’s webpage served as a revelatory table of contents of sorts, guiding me around the web this weekend to facts like these that would otherwise remain devoid of context. This isn't to say that nobody else has written about the Bikini exodus, but the lack of highly visible public account is notable. It is no accident, of course. Certain stories are violently torn apart into a fragmentation of facts, tacitly agreed to be left unassembled by the powers that be, lest they coalesce into ideas.