Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and the Conventional Forces Europe (CFE), required disarmament of nuclear, chemical, and conventional weapons stockpiles, respectively. The end of the Cold War left behind excess military buildup that had to be sold, abandoned, or disposed of in some way.13 Much of the research on the impact of war preparation has focused on nuclear weapons research, testing, and economies, and for good reason. Nuclear weapons development represents an extreme case of environmental destruction caused by preparation for an all-out war that never happened and hopefully never will.14 According to Joseph Masco:
How individuals engage the nuclear complex puts them in a tactile experience not only with the technology of the bomb but also with the nation-state that controls it, making the interrelationship between the human body and nuclear technologies a powerful site of intersection in which to explore questions of national belonging, justice, and everyday life. (2006, 12)
This is also true of conventional weapons and warcraft, albeit to a different extent. Most obviously, military waste might be evaluated in terms of utility or economic salability. The end of the Cold War also meant that the official arms market was gradually replaced with illegal and quasi-legal trades of excess weapons, which dominate the contemporary global arms trade. The global arms trade reached its height beginning with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, as Western powers indirectly paid for oil with weapons (Becker 1982; see also chapter 1, this volume). According to official data, the arms trade reached its peak toward the end of the Cold War. However, it is likely that illegal arms trades increased at the end of the Cold War (Wezeman 2014).15
Yet selling old weapons is not always so simple. On the one hand, the more powerful and destructive some military objects are (with nuclear weapons the most extreme case), the less easily they can be sold as commodities with ordinary exchange value.16 Masco (2006) regards military weapons as an unusual commodity for this reason. Marx famously credited the moment of exchange with concealing the conditions of the commodity’s production and replacing it with a fetishized image, which is all the buyer and seller usually encounter. Military objects can act as fetishes because they circulate globally as images of power and destruction, whether or not they are exchanged on a market. Understanding military weaponry and warcraft as fetishes highlights the fact that military buildup serves functions beyond their possible “consumption” in warfare. Following Mills (1956), this results in a militarized metaphysics—instead of military equipment being seen as a means to an end (namely peace), “military strength,” equated with the cost and size of military budgets and products, becomes fetishized as a valued end in itself.
If military weapons serve as fetishes of national power and security, they are also just objects. They age, wear, and fall into disuse; they also shape and are shaped by places they occupy. As Masco (2006) also documents, the mitigation of aging, disused weapons is a growing concern for the American military. Tracing military waste in this way can highlight the instability of national fetishes. According to Peter Custers, the unproductive inputs and by-products of military production, and the final disposal of obsolescent military products themselves, represent a form of negative exchange value. Insofar as these military wastes need to be managed and mitigated, they require the investment of further money and labor, which may overshadow the (also negative) use value of military products as instruments of physical force and national power. Negative exchange value is no mere abstraction. Sailors of the American and Soviet navies were dumping radioactive waste from nuclear projects into the ocean for over a decade after the conclusion of World War II. American sailors were told that this was harmless and given no special training to eliminate unfamiliar by-products of the nuclear age then emerging. The VA and the Navy did not follow up on the health impacts of this harmful exposure, despite unusual health problems reported by some of the service members.17
In Peter Sloterdijk’s words, “The twentieth century will be remembered as the period whose decisive idea consisted in targeting not the body of the enemy, but his environment” (2009, 43). If what he says was true of the preceding century, ours might one day be known as a time when proliferating military wastes no longer respect divisions between weapon and target, ally and enemy, when circulating materials, of uncertain value and toxicity, manifest in open-ended ways. Warfare always implicates environments to a certain degree. What makes the era of industrial warfare distinct is the severity and unpredictability of the hazards that litter and contaminate postconflict zones. In chapters 3 and 6 I use the concept of the Polemocene (from the Greek word polemos, meaning war) to think through the relationship between war preparation and environmental transformation.
Contamination can occur even where no battles transpired, as happened after decades of military exercises on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Though never an official US battleground, Vieques was a strategic base due to its proximity to the Panama Canal and its ability to simulate amphibious warfare in the tropics. Antibase activism ended the US occupation in 2003, but the area ceded by the US military was badly polluted.18 In addition to heavy metal contamination, devastation from repeated bombing, and the storage and dumping of many other toxicants, one of the most alarming legacies for the people of Vieques is the radiation left over from the use of depleted uranium munitions. The impact of leftover radioactive uranium in bases like Vieques, as well as war zones like Iraq, led the US military to switch to tungsten munitions for a time. This lasted several years before new health studies suggested that this “green alternative” might act as a carcinogen as well. More broadly, the ecotoxicology of explosives has been a concern of NATO and the DoD for decades. Mass-produced materials like TNT are not only hazardous ordnance, but threaten human and nonhuman health as they decay over time. The DoD has identified some ten thousand formerly used defense sites (FUDS) in the United States and its territories, whose assessment and remediation had been conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers as of 1986 as part of the FUDS program (Copp 2018). In many cases, toxic substances were not treated with sufficient care, and billions have been spent on their cleanup.
In other cases, there have been efforts to convert closed defense sites into wilderness areas, also known as M2W conversion. This does not put an end to the problems posed by such sites. As geographer David Havlick puts it, “What M2W conversions may put at risk, then, is not simply the character and budget of national wildlife refuges in the United States, but the broader understanding of what it means to militarize certain places” (2007, 162). As I discuss in chapter 6, military sites can also be transformed into wilderness in order to maintain power and erase historical connections between the United States and certain places it has militarized. That chapter begins by associating contemporary American marine conservation efforts with American settler colonialism and the creation and repurposing of wastes and wastelands. This had its foundation in the systematic dispossession of native lands that were represented as “going to waste,” but by the mid-nineteenth century this same logic was necessary as a means of acquiring guano to cure widespread global soil exhaustion. The chapter ultimately traces a parallel between the shift from a dependence on natural to artificial fertilizer and the transition from guano to oil imperialism, identifying the distinct ecological rifts and challenges that arose as a consequence. These metabolic disruptions on land and sea have not only made possible American empire, it is argued, but been exacerbated by it and potentially placed it at risk.
These examples illustrate two key arguments of this book. First, not only war but also war preparation can transform and contaminate spaces and lives. Second, these impacts are not straightforward but manifest slowly, in open-ended and often unpredictable ways.19 The disuse of military objects can introduce even more open-ended possibilities. This is where, in Michael Thompson’s terms, military waste transitions from transient to durable value, as when vessels become sites of creative remembering. For instance, an old military wreck may be reassessed later as a transcendent symbol of the nation-state, like the USS Arizona, sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But this kind of shift in rubbish value is not guaranteed.
Much of this book considers the productive afterlife of military waste, not only economic but artistic, ecological, scientific, and discursive.20 As already mentioned, waste need not be taken as a lost expenditure or the opposite of productivity, economic or otherwise, but can instead be regarded as a source of creativity (see Navaro-Yashin 2012, 150–1).