One of our affiliated researchers, Anton Öhman, has recently published Islands of uncertainty: promises, time, and nuclear test sites.

The article examines how French nuclear testing in French Polynesia was repeatedly justified through promises about the future. From Charles de Gaulle to François Mitterrand and Emmanuel Macron, presidential discourse presented nuclear testing, and later its aftermath, as a path towards security, development, technological modernity, strategic autonomy, and eventually recognition and repair.

Öhman shows how these promises did political work: they made particular arrangements appear necessary and legitimate while repeatedly pushing the consequences of nuclear testing into the future. Against this state-centred time of progress and eventual repair stood the slower temporalities experienced by affected communities: exposure, environmental degradation, intergenerational uncertainty, and demands for accountability.

The article brings together history of knowledge, Science and Technology Studies, and the study of political time. Öhman’s research builds on his doctoral dissertation, Knowing Nuclear Weapons Tests: Witness Activism and Oppositional Knowledge in the Cold War Colonial Pacific, completed at Lund University under the supervision of Johan Östling, Director of LUCK.

Abstract:

Between 1966 and 1996, French nuclear testing in French Polynesia was justified through a recurring promise/threat nexus that linked strategic necessity to development while producing enduring social and environmental harms. Presidential speeches delivered in Tahiti by Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and Emmanuel Macron illuminate how the test site and its aftermath have been governed through shifting forms of political promise-making. Nuclear testing was framed as a route to technological modernity, national security, regional development, strategic autonomy, and, more recently, remediation and recognition. These promises transformed past tests and present administrative choices into futures of progress, autonomy, or repair, rendering particular political arrangements both necessary and legitimate. At the same time, promissory narratives privileged metropolitan and state-centered temporalities – national grandeur, staged development, and bureaucratic manageability – over the slower temporalities of exposure, ecological degradation, intergenerational uncertainty, and reparative duration experienced by affected communities. Read through Arendt’s conception of political promise, STS accounts of techno-scientific promissory work, and Hartog’s regimes of historicity, the speeches reveal how rhetoric, expertise, and temporal framing co-produced both the legitimacy of French nuclear governance and the conditions of its contestation. The enduring reliance on promises of future remedy suggests that accountability for past harms is repeatedly displaced into administrable futures rather than resolved in the present.

Image: Archives New Zealand from New Zealand – HMNZS OTAGO at the Mururoa Nuclear Test Zone in 1973., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51248239