Knowing Nuclear Weapons Tests : Witness Activism and Oppositional Knowledge in the Cold War Colonial Pacific

How are nuclear weapons tests made knowable – and by whom? Knowing Nuclear Weapons Tests: Witness Activism and Oppositional Knowledge in the Cold War Colonial Pacific examines how knowledge about nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific was produced, contested, and rendered credible from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Centred on French Polynesia, it develops the concept of “witness activism” to analyse how activists transformed testimony, archival labour, and transnational circulation into epistemic interventions against state secrecy, scientific uncertainty, and colonial governance. Drawing on archival ethnography, testimony theory, and the history of knowledge, the study traces how oppositional actors assembled counter-archives, translated lived experience into evidence, and negotiated authority across legal, scientific, and humanitarian domains. The dissertation argues that nuclear testing and colonialism must be understood as a single historical formation – nuclear colonialism – in which the management of the tests’ consequences was inseparable from the management of knowledge. By reconstructing the practices through which this order was challenged, it shows that the politics of nuclear testing was not only a dispute over facts, but a struggle over what could count as evidence, who could speak, and how harm became legible. In doing so, it repositions Pacific anti-nuclear activism as a site of epistemic production and offers a more unsettling history of the nuclear age: one in which truth was neither given nor revealed but laboriously made under conditions structured to prevent its emergence. Anton Öhman, born in 1990, is a historian at Lund University, Sweden. Knowing Nuclear Weapons Tests is his doctoral dissertation.