Kwajalein Island is an odd mix of military base and American suburbia. Streets lined with houses and recreation centers give way to alien-looking radar installations. In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez explores how tourism and militarism advance this peculiar form of American imperialism in the Pacific. Using Hawai’i and the Philippines as examples, she argues that these two forces work in tandem, with the United States military paving the way for tourism, and tourism laying the ideological, political, and cultural groundwork that facilitates continued military presence.[1] In some ways, life on Kwajalein can be explained through this framework of militourism. Greg Dvorak—“Kwaj kid” turned critical academic—recounts that during his childhood growing up on Kwajalein the American civilian contractors and their families considered their time on the island a mere “tour of duty.” He reflects that here “‘touring’ was a pun that was more suggestive of our leisurely lifestyle than it was an active defense assignment.”[2] Yet it is a different pun—the double entendre of nuclear—that most accurately explains the specific form of settler colonialism on Kwajalein Atoll.

It was a tour, but we weren’t exactly tourists. – Greg Dvorak

The onset of the Cold War was sudden and unrelenting. Americans’ elation at victory in World War II quickly turned to fears and anxieties about the spread of communism. At any moment, nuclear war threatened to destroy the way of life Americans had fought so hard to protect. In the late 1940s and 1950s, American policymakers thus developed the foreign policy of containment. By halting the menacing march of communism, they hoped to preserve the United States “sphere of influence.” In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, groundbreaking historian Elaine Tyler May argues that Americans applied the same logic at home. [3] In this theory of domestic containment, the home was the “sphere of influence.” Within its walls Americans could be in control and create a refuge in a dangerous and uncertain environment. The nuclear family was thus a source of security in a world plagued by the insecurity of nuclear war.

Historian Lauren Hirshberg uses the example of Kwajalein to expand upon this argument. During the early 1960s the US Army turned the island into an intercontinental ballistic missile testing site. Missiles launched from California landed in the Kwajalein lagoon as over a thousand American scientists and contractors studied the results. To house this team and their families, the Army built Kwajalein into a suburban paradise, mirroring the rise of large suburban developments in the continental United States. To the new residents it was “hyper America…more American than America.”[4] This domestic dream masked the grave purpose of their time on Kwajalein. The comforts of suburban life created a false sense of security that concealed the imminent nuclear threat the American workers confronted everyday at their job.

[1] Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

[2] Greg Dvorak, “Detouring Kwajalein: At Home Between Coral and Concrete in the Marshall Islands,” in Touring Pacific Cultures, ed. Kalissa Alexeyeff and John Taylor (Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2016), 105.

[3] Elaine Taylor May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1988), 14.

[4] Lauren Hirsberg, “Nuclear Families: (Re)producing 1950s Suburban American in the Marshall Islands,” OAH Magazine of History 26, no. 4 (2012): 1.