Between 1966 and 1996, France conducted 193 nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia, including 41 detonations at or above ground level. This chapter explores the history of legal and diplomatic contestations of the French right to conduct nuclear tests in the South Pacific through the lens of environmental violence. Polynesians and other Pacific stakeholders saw France’s use of the South Pacific as a nuclear proving ground as an act of colonial violence and sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the imposition of any additional radiological risk in Polynesia. Data gaps, information asymmetries, and the inherent causal uncertainty surrounding harms from exposure to ionizing radiation frustrated both prospective and retrospective legal recourse, as Pacific Islanders struggled to prove that they would be – or, in ensuing decades, that they had in fact been – harmed by French nuclear tests. The complex dynamics around radiological risk provoked anguish not only during the period of nuclear testing, but also afterwards, as individuals who developed potentially radiogenic conditions continued to navigate challenging victim compensation landscapes. This chapter illustrates the particular difficulties of coming to terms with causally complex, underdetermined harms in modern contexts of environmental violence.

France and its empire have continued to shape each other’s trajectories, longer after formal “decolonization.” Millions of people from the colonies migrated to France during the postwar economic boom. They and their descendants have helped turn France into a multicultural society. Some domains never decolonized at all and remain French national territory as Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer (DOM-TOM). The republic has proved surprisingly tolerant of local political cultures, though most DOM-TOM remain far more economically dependent on the French state as national territories than they ever were as colonies. Yet none of the DOM-TOM appear to want full independence. In postcolonial Africa, policies known collectively as Françafrique have involved interference at the highest levels of postcolonial governance, substantial development aid, and an array of dubious business dealings. Françafrique made France a partner in genocide in Rwanda, and later required it to deal with some brutal postcolonial regimes fighting militant Islam in the Sahel. Independent Algeria essentially inherited and refined the colonial state, most violently in the civil war of the 1990s. The history of the French empire, to date, does not really have an end, as former colonizer and formerly colonized continue to contest its memory.

This chapter traces India’s status concerns from independence in 1947 leading up to the advent of the NPT in the late 1960s. It examines India’s approach to nuclear weapons during this period and derives expectations for how India would react to an international treaty such as the NPT from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account, based on primary sources, of India’s approach to nuclear proliferation and positions taken in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) negotiations of 1954–1956 and in the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament from1962 to 1969. It finds that although India faced a major nuclear threat from China, India supported nonproliferation and universal nuclear disarmament, so long as the international nuclear negotiations allowed symbolic equality with the great powers and the door to joining the nuclear club remained open. When the superpowers drafted an NPT that effectively froze the number of recognized nuclear powers for the next 25 years, Indian perceptions of the openness and fairness of the international order changed, leading India to reject the NPT and undertake the very costly and risky step of testing a nuclear weapon.

Climate change history often (and rightly) highlights the plight of the Global South and poorer countries, but zeroing in on the nuclear Anthropocene shows how ubiquitous were radioactive toxins especially in the northern hemisphere. This story has been largely missed because, as military leaders detonated 520 nuclear bombs into the atmosphere from 1945-1963, the fallout that settled down became part of “background” or “natural” radiation. In the same decades that manmade radioactive isotopes began to circle the globe, so too did new classes of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical pollutants from new industries producing plastics, aluminum and a host of goods that contaminated landscapes. The blanketing of the earth with anthropogenic toxins was so encompassing, the scale so grand, that this major change to the planetary eco-system has been hard to discern. A focus on the nuclear Anthropocene reconfigures our sense of scale, and with it, time and human agency.

This chapter undertakes to explore a particular seismic shift in the fields of both thought and perception unfolding during the early part of the Cold War, as governments and publics grappled uneasily with the threat of nuclear war. I focus on the exploration of a particular cinematic event: the global release in late 1959 of the anti-nuclear war dystopian film On the Beach. Directed by the American Stanley Kramer and based on a 1957 novel by the British-Australian Nevil Shute, the film offers an opportunity to revisit and reflect on the tangled intersections between the cultural, legal and geopolitical orientations of this ‘hot’ Cold War moment from a new angle. While in 1959 an international legal architecture governing nuclear testing and nuclear non-proliferation had yet to emerge, the approach taken in this chapter suggests that a re-examination of this kind – that is attentive to the modes of perception (as well as discourse) that are emergent in this moment may be of interest to contemporary legal scholars seeking to make sense of a world in which nuclear threats have not abated, and international law’s role in managing that threat remains in question.