Searching for Culpability in the Archives: Commonwealth Nuclear Test Veterans’ Claims for Compensation

Abstract

In the late 1950s, Commonwealth servicemen participated in a series of British nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific. Today these veterans claim to suffer multiple health problems from radiation exposure, and seek compensation from the British and New Zealand governments. In resisting the State's control of evidential archival documents, the veterans devalue State documents and contest the truth of military records, instead elevating personal and collective memories based on notions of witnessing. Yet veterans do accept certain documents as legitimate bearers of historical truth if they emerge from the archives without the influence of powerful State agencies. From these “unfiltered” documents, test veterans create their own private archives which function as sites of memorialization, social legitimation and legal proof. Engaging with the work of Ann Stoler (Stoler, A. L. (2002), “Colonial archives and the arts of governance”, Archival Science, vol. 2, pp. 87–109; Stoler, A. L. (2009), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford), I argue that revealing State power requires understanding how groups outside the archives both subvert and mimic its documentary logic.