Domestic Containment in the Marshall Islands: Making a Home for Cold War Workers in the U.S. Imperial Pacific

During the Cold War, the U.S. military transformed the Marshallese Island, Kwajalein, into a missile range to test intercontinental ballistic missiles. To help recruit American knowledge workers to move their families to the central Pacific to participate in this Cold War mission, the military erected a suburban landscape on Kwajalein. This landscape harnessed an array of residential, recreational and consumer amenities, reminding arriving families they would not have to sacrifice the American dream; they could find that dream restaged in the Marshall Islands. The promise to American knowledge workers that they and their families could find home on Kwajalein not only entailed erecting a refuge mirroring the comforts of American suburbia, but also reassurance that the security of American family life would not be threatened by the presence of other workers on island.

This paper examines the history of military surveillance and segregation policies on Kwajalein aimed at such domestic containment in the Pacific: a Cold War security mission to protect the national home thousands of miles away, and the local effort to secure a replica of that home on Kwajalein. I consider how categories of race and colonial subjectivity merged with class to inform policies aimed at policing boundaries of gender and sexuality on the island during the Cold War. Such regulations helped mark Kwajalein as an American family space—a space of middle class domesticity—where Marshallese remained foreign and American bachelors constituted a perpetual threat.