How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  3 “He is too big,” etc.: Quoted in Ross, Wenner-Gren, 3.

  4 science and rationality: Axel Wenner-Gren, Call to Reason: An Appeal to Common Sense (New York, 1938).

  5 Anglic: “Anglic Urged as World Tongue,” Albuquerque Journal, December 8, 1931.

  6 “I have not a shred”: Sumner Welles, quoted in Luciak, “Vision and Reality,” S314.

  7 “perfect example”: Scott Farris, Inga: Kennedy’s Great Love, Hitler’s Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover’s Prime Suspect (Guilford, CT, 2016), 137.

  8 J. Edgar Hoover: Farris notes that the recordings of Kennedy and Arvad having sex were likely lost by the 1960s but that Hoover nevertheless took pains to assure Kennedy that he was keeping the file on the pair “safe.” See Inga, 240–42.

  9 “When we have won”: Bryce, You Only Live Once, 72.

  10 “blessed corners”: Quoted in Tao Leigh Goffe, “007 Versus the Darker Races: The Black and Yellow Peril in Dr. No,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 12 (2015): 1.

  11 “In the whole”: Quoted in Parker, Goldeneye, 212.

  12 Blackwell’s young son: Mark Binelli, “Chris Blackwell: The Barefoot Mogul,” Men’s Journal, March 2014, www.mensjournal.com/features/chris-blackwell-the-barefoot-mogul-20140319.

  13 “too posh”: Edward Helmore, “Chris Blackwell: The Original Trustafarian,” London Telegraph, May 8, 2012.

  14 “Bond prepared” … “Bitten off”: Ian Fleming, Doctor No (1958; New York, 2002), 53.

  15 “the most valuable” … “I can bend”: Ibid., 175, 178.

  16 “Who in the world”: Ibid., 161–62.

  17 “no sovereign or territorial”: Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York, 1994), 200.

  18 A consultation of the records: Ibid., 216.

  19 “Are we in an acquisitive”: Ernest Gruening, Many Battles: The Autobiography of Ernest Gruening (New York, 1973), 235. On the 1930s recolonization of the equatorial guano islands, see Roy F. Nichols, Advance Agents of American Destiny (Philadelphia, 1956), chap. 9; Lowell T. Young, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and America’s Islets: Acquisition of Territory in the Caribbean and the Pacific,” The Historian 35 (1973): 205–20; Skaggs, Guano Rush, chap. 11; and Under a Jarvis Moon, dir. Noelle Kahanu and Heather Giugni (Bishop Museum, 2011).

  20 “maintain the sovereignty”: Ernest Gruening, “General Information, Equatorial Islands,” c. 1939; “World’s Colonies—General” folder; box 607; 9-0-1, Administrative, World’s Colonies; Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1951; ROT.

  21 “Because of their adaptability”: Ibid.

  22 deposited in small groups: Details in Interior Department press memos, 1938, in “Colonization—Other Islands” folder, box 12, Padover File.

  23 “I am instructed”: Gruening, Many Battles, 236.

  24 Howland Island: William Atherton DuPuy, “Our New Islands,” Current History, February 1937, 62–64.

  25 eight hundred such bases: David Vine offers this reasonable estimate in Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York, 2015), 4.

  26 pointillist’s brush: My notion of a pointillist empire derives from William Rankin’s discussion of “territorial pointillism” in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016) and the insights of Ruth Oldenziel in her chapter “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 13–42. The “bases are the new form of empire” historical literature was sparked by Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York, 1999). See also the ensuing historical scholarship cited in Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” DH 40 (2016): 390n.

  27 “storm of comment”: CDA 359, “American Opinion of ‘Trusteeship’ for Pacific Bases,” November 1945, 5, Notter Records, box 126.

  28 “maintain the military bases”: Truman, Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference, August 9, 1945, APP.

  29 “We seek no territorial”: George Marion, Bases and Empire: A Chart of American Expansion (New York, 1948), 11.

  30 “vivisection”: Quoted in Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics (Gainesville, FL, 2002), 24.

  31 “We are the lamb”: Alba Encarnación, quoted in ibid., 40.

  32 On Guam: Department of Defense, Base Structure Report, Fiscal Year 2015 Baseline, 42.

  33 something similar in Alaska: John S. Whitehead, Completing the Union: Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Battle for Statehood (Albuquerque, NM, 2004), 277–78.

  34 “The military doesn’t have”: Quoted in Vine, Base Nation, 75.

  35 “relatively small”: Quoted in ibid., 65. Stuart Barber and the strategic island concept are also discussed in David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ, 2009), chaps. 2–3.

  36 “The Yankees”: Benjamín Torres, ed., Pedro Albizu Campos: Obras escogidas, 1923–1936 (San Juan, 1975), 271.

  37 cable traffic: Reprinted in Daniel C. Walsh, An Air War with Cuba: The United States Radio Campaign Against Castro (Jefferson, NC, 2012), 17.

  38 “pigs” … “a queer” … “a cage”: “Swans, Spooks, and Boobies,” Time, December 6, 1971.

  39 fifty million regular listeners: James McCartney, “Radio on Swan Island an Outpost of Free Cuba,” Boston Globe, April 23, 1961.

  40 cryptic messages: “Swans, Spooks, and Boobies.”

  41 journalists snickered: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, Our Invisible Government (New York, 1964), 329.

  42 Fleming’s advice: Christopher Moran, “Ian Fleming and CIA Director Allen Dulles: The Very Best of Friends,” in James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films Are Not Enough, 2d ed., ed. Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield, and Jack Becker (Newcastle, UK, 2011), 208–15.

  43 CIA still found uses: Sam Dillon, Comandos: The CIA and Nicaragua’s Contra Rebels (New York, 1991), 177–82.

  44 “powdered white” … “screaming lungs”: Fleming, Doctor No, 214, 211.

  45 “We just took out”: Quoted in Sasha Davis, The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens, GA, 2015), 61.

  46 “We will gladly”: Carey Wilson, dir., Bikini: The Atom Island (MGM, 1946).

  47 “We didn’t know”: Interviewed in Robert Stone, dir., Radio Bikini (IFC Films, 1988).

  48 staged reenactment: Peter Bacon Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now (Chicago, 2014), chap. 1.

  49 “all nations have yielded”: Paul V. McNutt, Address at the Inauguration of the Philippine Republic, July 4, 1946; “McNutt, P. V., Correspondence and Speeches, 1945–46” folder, box 7, HC–DC.

  50 detonated sixty-six more: Dick Thornburgh et al., “The Nuclear Claims Tribunal of the Republic of the Marshall Islands: An Independent Examination and Assessment of Its Decision-Making Processes,” 2003, www.bikiniatoll.com/ThornburgReport.pdf.

  51 90 percent of the populations: Davis, Empires’ Edge, 53.

  52 National Cancer Institute: Simon L. Steven et al., “Radiation Doses and Cancer Risks in the Marshall Islands Associated with Exposure to Radioactive Fallout from Bikini and Enewetak Nuclear Weapons Tests: Summary,” Health Physics 99 (2010): 105–24.

  53 “catastrophic nonsense”: Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–70 (Stanford, CA, 1997), 14.

  54 “We have no prudent”: “12 Scientists Ask Bomb Tests Go On,” NYT, October 21, 1956.

  55 “There are only 90,000”: Davis, Empires’ Edge, 86. Kissinger’s population estimate was considerably inflated.

  56 a nation that very much gave a damn: My account draws on two articles: George O. Totten and Tamio Kawakami, “Gensuikyō and the Peace Mov
ement in Japan,” Asia Survey 4 (1964): 833–41, and Toshihiro Higuchi, “An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954–63: The Government, the Grassroots Movement, and the Politics of Risk,” Peace and Change, 33 (2008): 333–67.

  57 the director Ishirō Honda: The following discussion derives from Yuki Tanaka, “Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Killed and Created the Monster?” in Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb, ed. Robert Jacobs (Lanham, MD, 2010), 159–70.

  58 “emitting high levels” … “If nuclear testing”: Gojira, dir. Ishirō Honda (Toho, 1954).

  59 “The menace was”: Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, dir. Terry Morse (Transworld, 1956).

  60 front lines of nuclear confrontation: Details on nuclear weapon storage from Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons, July 1945 Through September 1977, 1978, www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/NCB/306.pdf. A helpful decoding of this important document is Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin, “Where They Were,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55 (1999): 26–35. Nuclear weapons were also stored in allied countries such as Britain, Canada, and West Germany.

  61 “New Thule”: Deneen L. Brown, “Trail of Frozen Tears: The Cold War Is Over, but to Native Greenlanders Displaced by It, There’s Still No Peace,” Washington Post, October 22, 2002.

  62 “tantamount to suicide”: Nikolai Bulganin to H. C. Hansen, March 28, 1957, quoted in Nikolaj Petersen, “The H. C. Hansen Paper and Nuclear Weapons in Greenland,” Scandinavian Journal of History 23 (1998): 32. See also Danish Institute of International Affairs, Greenland During the Cold War: Danish and American Security Policy, 1945–68, trans. Henry Myers (Copenhagen, 1997).

  63 “no-nuclear” principle: Petersen, “H. C. Hansen Paper,” 33.

  64 “one of the first ones”: Thomas Power, 1950, quoted in Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 170.

  65 a B-52 flying near Thule: History and Research Division, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, Project Crested Ice: The Thule Nuclear Accident, vol. 1, SAC Historical Study 113, 1969; Sagan, Limits of Safety, chap. 4.

  66 “one-point safe”: Excellent discussions of these issues are in Sagan, Limits of Safety, chap. 4, and Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York, 2013).

  67 seventy-five tankers: Calculated from figures for phases 1 and 2 given in Project Crested Ice, 24, 56.

  68 village of Palomares: Details from Tad Szulc, The Bombs of Palomares (New York, 1967).

  69 “all the makings”: “The Missing H-Bomb,” Boston Globe, March 4, 1966.

  70 “just the way”: “¡La Bomba Recuperada!” Time, April 15, 1966, 35.

  21. BASELANDIA

  1 “narrow the range” … “Airstrip One”: George Orwell, 1984 (1949; New York, 1984), 53, 186.

  2 “cold war”: George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” November 19, 1945, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston, 2000), 4:9.

  3 Burtonwood: Details from Aldon P. Ferguson, Eighth Air Force Base Air Depot Burtonwood (Reading, UK, 1986). Burtonwood was briefly closed as a U.S. base in the 1960s.

  4 “occupiers” … “coca-colonization”: Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1993).

  5 postwar Panama: Thomas L. Pearcy, We Answer Only to God: Politics and the Military in Panama, 1903–1947 (Albuquerque, NM, 1998), 175.

  6 “Well, we did not”: Thomas S. Power, Design for Survival (New York, 1965), 132; Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York, 2013), 188.

  7 Within months, more than five thousand: Ken Kolsbun, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol (Washington, DC, 2008), 41, 43.

  8 “I was in despair”: Gerald Holtom, “A Prelude to the Dance of Life,” quoted in Andrew Rigby, “A Peace Symbol’s Origins,” Peace Review 10 (1998): 477. Another story is that Holtom’s design combined the semaphore signs for N and D: nuclear disarmament.

  9 “such a puny”: Ibid.

  10 five hundred bands: Bill Harry, Bigger Than the Beatles (Liverpool, 2009), 9.

  11 “that Liverpool”: George Martin, Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (New York, 1994), 41.

  12 1,636 buildings: Ferguson, Burtonwood, 103, 88, 96.

  13 “shoddy, shameful”: Ibid., 81.

  14 official contracts: Ibid., 97. The case for the Beatles as a base band is ably made in Keith Gildart, Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ’n’ Roll, 1955–1976 (New York, 2013), chap. 3. On Burtonwood and music, see also Harry, Bigger Than the Beatles, 45, and Helen Southall, “‘Total War’: Effects of World War II on the Live Music Industry in Cheshire and North Wales,” in World War II and the Media, ed. Christopher Hart, Guy Hodgson, and Simon Gwyn Roberts (Chester, UK, 2014), 137–53.

  15 “brought their culture” … “an absolute magnet”: Martin, Summer of Love, 42.

  16 Ringo’s stepfather: Brian Roylance, ed., The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco, 2000), 35.

  17 John and Paul … George got his records: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York, 2005), 27, 55, 110, 123.

  18 McCartney appeared on: Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–70 (Stanford, CA, 1997), 196.

  19 “Look what they do”: Quoted in Hunter Davies, “The Beatles,” Life, September 20, 1968, 76.

  20 protest and participation: An excellent discussion of this dynamic in the domestic context is Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA, 2012).

  21 “confused” … “dazed”: Edwin O. Reischauer, The United States and Japan (Cambridge, MA, 1954), 217.

  22 MacArthur ruled: Details, unless otherwise indicated, from John W. Dower’s extraordinary Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999).

  23 two hundred thousand troops remained: Sarah Kovner, “The Soundproofed Superpower: American Bases and Japanese Communities, 1945–1972,” Journal of Asian Studies 75 (2016): 90, 96.

  24 “bound hand and foot”: Suzuki Mosaburo, quoted in George R. Packard, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 19.

  25 18 percent of those polled: Justin Jesty, “Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage and Grief: Hamaya Hiroshi’s Photos of Anti-Security-Treaty Protests,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13 (2015): 6.

  26 “a colony”: Thomas R. H. Havens, Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975 (Princeton, NJ, 1987), 193.

  27 5 percent of its population: Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 137.

  28 “incidents and accidents”: Masumichi S. Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (New York, 2007), 50–51.

  29 more than a hundred Japanese died: Kovner, “Soundproofed Superpower,” 98.

  30 relinquished jurisdiction: Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York, 1997), 316.

  31 $800 million: Richard Stubbs, Rethinking Asia’s Economic Miracle: The Political Economy of War, Prosperity, and Crisis (New York, 2005), 68.

  32 “divine aid”: Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1985), 289.

  33 “gift of the gods”: LaFeber, Clash, 287.

  34 “Toyota’s salvation”: Schaller, American Occupation, 289.

  35 Toyota’s output: Fujita Kuniko, “Corporatism and the Corporate Welfare Program: Impact of the Korean War on the Toyota Motor Corporation,” in The Occupation of Japan: The Impact of the Korean War, ed. William F. Nimmo (Norfolk, VA, 1990), 124.

  36 well-paid internship: On the relationship between military con
tracts, standardization, and Asian growth, I’ve learned much from Jim Glassman and Young-Jin Choi, “The Chaebol and the US Military-Industrial Complex: Cold War Geopolitical Economy and South Korean Industrialization,” Environment and Planning A 46 (2014): 1160–80, and Patrick Chung, “Building Global Capitalism: Militarization, Standardization, and U.S.–South Korea Relations Since the Korean War” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2017).

  37 Deming: My understanding of Deming and his place in Japan is from William M. Tsutsui, “W. Edwards Deming and the Origins of Quality Control in Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 22 (1996): 295–325.

  38 “I never felt”: Andrea Gabor, The Man Who Discovered Quality (New York, 1990), 80.

  39 “patron saint”: Akio Morita, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (New York, 1986), 165.

  40 Vietnam War helped: Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 98.

  41 fifty-five-fold: Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford, CA, 1982), 6.

  42 Japan’s growth: Important perspectives are Johnson, MITI, and essays by Bruce Cumings and Laura Hein in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley, CA, 1993).

  43 sentiment was profoundly complicated: Details on protests and polls from Kovner, “Soundproofed Superpower,” 94–95, 100.

  44 “contradiction”: Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 194.

  45 serious protests: Details from Packard, Protest in Tokyo.

  46 Okinawan city of Koza: Inoue, Okinawa, 53–55; Miyume Tanji, Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa (London, 2006), 103–104; James E. Roberson, “‘Doin’ Our Thing’: Identity and Colonial Modernity in Okinawan Rock Music,” Popular Music and Society 34 (2011): 593–620.

  47 Yukio Kyan: Roberson, “Doin’ Our Thing,” 606; see also Justin Zaun, “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” Okinawa Living, October 2004, 10–17.

  48 “little future” … “cheap imitations”: Michael Schaller, Altered States: The United States and Japanese Since the Occupation (New York, 1997), 3.