‘The chemists’ war’ in Sydney’s seas: Water,time,and everyday militarisms

Introduction

In early 2018, two recreational divers found a Second World War bomb partially buried in the silt on the floor of Sydney Harbour (Gorrey, 2018). The front piece had corroded and come off, and a spring stuck out from the top. The divers brought it to shore and waited for the Australian Defense Force to claim it.

This particular bomb posed no danger. The discovery nonetheless seemed spectacular: unexploded ordnance in the places we live, work, and play? Yet Sydney’s nearshore waters are home to many souvenirs of war. These military caches include some 5000 tons of unused chemical weapons, most often containing mustard gas (Plunkett, 2003). Drowned about 28 kilometres south south east of South Sydney heads, at a depth of 275 metres, Sydney’s underwater chemical weapons dumps join similar sea burial grounds all around Australia’s coasts and are part of the hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical ordnance dumped in the planet’s oceans after the Second World War. The late 19th century rise of industrial chemistry had birthed these warfare agents, weaponised via new chemical technologies and first deployed in combat in 1917 near the end of what would come to be known as the ‘chemists’ war’. Although the 1925 Geneva Protocol made their offensive use illegal, chemical weapons were still produced in large quantities when war broke out again in the late 1930s.

Australia, too, fearing chemical attack from Japan, stockpiled these weapons near the end of the Second World War. Despite the bombing of Darwin, it never deployed them. However, like other Allied forces, Australia was faced with the postwar conundrum of disposal. Relying on the sea’s ‘unlimited absorptive capacity’ (in the words of Department of Defence researcher, Geoff Plunkett (2003) who has conducted most of the published research on chemical weapons in Australia), sea drownings provided one way of decommissioning this ordnance once the war was ostensibly over. The eternal sea, fathomless, and mostly beyond sight, experience, and comprehension, was once again called upon to wash away our human folly.

Now, almost a century later and in the context of growing awareness of ocean pollution and climate change, it is clear that water’s reputation as a ‘universal solvent’ with magical powers of erasure has been overestimated. Scientists, social scientists, and cultural thinkers alike now recognise our planetary waters as too often playing the role of planetary garbage disposal. If the sea was once the convenient drain to ferry our refuse to an unknowable ‘away’, it is now more often imagined as beleaguered archive: a record and retainer of our anthropogenic messes, to which there is no outside, since our dumped desires rarely stay put in the past.

How, then, should we be concerned with the ‘chemists’ war’, mostly forgotten but still lingering, at the bottom of Sydney’s seas? Are these chemical weapons safely secured in the past or are they part of the multiplying toxic assaults on the oceans which require urgent address? Better understood as a material archive of memory and forgetting, the sea, like other bodies of water, engages the work of both dissolution and retention (Neimanis, 2018). While the ocean bears the scars of our human violences, it also dilutes and hydrolyses certain substances to mitigate their danger. According to environmental humanities scholar Bron Szerzynski (2019), the planet can be said to remember – but as with any archive of memory, remembering is sutured to the capacity to forget. Arguing that ‘only things which can remember can forget in any interesting sense’, Szerzynski avers that ‘specific kinds of memory can require forgetting, selection, erasure’ (223). To complicate matters further, the materiality of the sea (its salty composition, its fluctuating temperatures, its currents that transport its contents from one place and time to another) as well as the weapons’ materiality (the properties of different chemical agents, the various canisters that house them) preclude the possibility of certainty: these weapons may, or may not, pose a threat. They enact a queer temporality ¹ and resist any linear progress-time that would confidently deliver us from cause to effect.

The aim of this paper, then, cannot be to determine conclusively the extent of damage that these sunken weapons have caused or will cause. If we want to understand the legacy of these sunken chemical weapons, and their effect on the oceans (and us), we instead require conceptual tactics that can accommodate their temporal and epistemological strangeness, and follow where such tactics might lead. After a consideration of what we know and don’t know about these dumps, the sections on ‘slow and spectacular violence’ and ‘concept-work’ examine how, under such conditions of uncertainty, the concepts we use to understand sea dumped chemical weapons reveal issues that should concern us, at the same time as they occlude others. I underscore the value of environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon’s (2011) theoretical contribution on slow and spectacular violence, particularly in drawing our attention to the environmental afterlives of war. However, I describe how sunken chemical weapons dumps also exceed and complicate dualistic understandings of ‘slow’ and ‘spectacular’. I argue that at sea, even if ‘slow’ and ‘spectacular’ violences evoke different affects, their temporalities nonetheless swim in and out of each other, backwards and forwards, and hovering in suspense. Following this, I draw on the work of Ann Stoler to more explicitly argue that how we take up Nixon’s terms, and set them in relation to each other, has significant bearing on how the phenomena they describe come to matter. I elaborate the need to eschew a temporality of slow violence as either dualistically distinct from the spectacular or as progressive and unidirectional, and pay attention instead to the tentacular tangles of time these weapons dumps reveal.

This article thus joins other recent critical uptakes of slow violence that further nuance and expand Nixon’s groundbreaking concept, and continue to probe the complex ways in which time, matter, and violence intersect – particularly in the context of climate change (e.g. Anderson et al., 2020), militarisation and securitisation (e.g. Micieli-Voutsinas and Cavicchi, 2019; Touhouliotis, 2018), and from feminist, queer, and anticolonial perspectives (e.g. Cielemecka and Åsberg, 2019). In the next section on ‘Leveraging the spectacular’ I contend that instead of resisting the affective pull of the spectacular, we might instead leverage it to trace unexpected, complex, and even contradictory relations to other matters of concern. In doing so, Nixon’s framework helps us understand how these (ostensibly benign) sunken chemical dumps index a more ubiquitous and troubling everyday persistence of chemical militarisms in Sydney’s waters, hidden in plain view. Drawing on feminist, anti-racist, and anticolonial rejections of the bounded space–time of war, I develop an understanding of everyday militarisms by tracking the trickles of these sunken chemical bombs as they condition and connect to other instances of militarisms in Sydney’s seas. This leads to my conclusion: if these latent warfare agents compel us to complicate straight and straightforward scales of time and space when it comes to ‘ecologies of the aftermath’ (Nixon, 2011: 199), might they also compel a more complex scale of mattering? Rather than quantitative measures of size or duration, we might rethink the ways in which militarisms and their effects come to matter differently, for different bodies and in different contexts, in both entrenched and surprising ways.

Chemical weapons in Sydney’s seas: Disaster contained?

To be clear, in Australia, as elsewhere, chemical weapons weren’t only dumped at sea. During the Second World War, as the Japanese forces advanced as far as Papua New Guinea, chemical weapons were stockpiled around Australia, under the purview of General MacArthur’s Chemical Warfare plan for the South West Pacific Area. The weapons were never actively used in combat, and when the war drew to a close, these stores – variously supervised by the US Army, the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Army or the Australian Navy – required disposing (Plunkett, 2007).

Some weapons, like those weaponised with phosgene, were ventilated – pierced and allowed to vapourise. Most of the Australian stocks, however, comprised sulphur mustard (also known as mustard gas) for which ventilation was not an option. A large number of these stores were burned in places like Talmoi and Prosperine in Northern Queensland, and also less than 200 kilometres northwest of Sydney in the Newnes State Forest. Incinerating thousands of tons of chemical weapons produced mixed results: among various kinds of environmental contamination, the soil at places like Newnes required massive rehabilitation operations decades later. Incompletely destroyed weapons also continue to be discovered, some resulting in human casualties (Plunkett, 2007).

In light of some of these experienced and anticipated difficulties, ‘sea drowning’ was viewed as the safest, most effective means of disposal for mustard gas. And indeed, it provided a solution for putting the weapons somewhere where they were unlikely to be used again. ² Sydney’s nearshore waters were just one of the dumping sites around Australia (others included the waters of the Northern Territory, two major sites off the coast of Queensland, as well as Victoria’s coastal waters). The dumping primarily took place by loading up old ships with weapons and scuttling them around 30 kilometres out to sea. When no more old ships were available to scuttle, weapons were simply dumped overboard in the general vicinity of a dumpsite. While this mostly happened in the 1940s, a small amount of weapons is known to have been dumped here in 1965 (Plunkett, 2007).

So what do Sydney’s seas remember of this chemists’ war? According to Plunkett’s calculations, drawing on scientific research available on other dumpsites around the world, the Sydney dumps are unlikely to be dangerously toxic. If they ever were, he avers, their effects were extremely localised. ‘The combination of a slow leakage rate [from the canisters], warm sea temperatures, and currents’ Plunkett (2007) surmises, ‘will quickly dissolve and hydrolyse the mustard gas both within its housing and as it diffuses through the holes [that have been caused by corrosion in the canisters]’ (355). As with other chemical ordnance dumps in the planet’s oceans, the vast amounts of seawater that have bathed those old bombs for almost a century have likely mostly neutralised any directly harmful chemicals. With temperatures at the Sydney dumpsites averaging over 10 degrees Celsius, the mustard gas probably did not solidify, as was the case at dumpsites in the colder waters of Europe and the North Atlantic. Solidification means that the gas will not hydrolyse, but rather be preserved in a hard shell of itself. In the Baltic Sea, for example, clumps of mustard gas have been hauled up from the benthos, to become reactivated at warmer surface temperatures (CHEMSEA, 2013). In the Sydney dumps, just like those further north at Cape Moreton in south Queensland, the dumped poisons were probably diluted enough to pose no significant measurable risk, while the regular ocean currents likely aided in this process of dilution. As Plunkett (2007) concludes, ‘the hydrolysis products will be rapidly dispersed to the south by the East Australian Current [EAC]’ (355).

Yet at the same time, Plunkett (2007) also notes that sea dumping was ‘largely the result of a lack of understanding of the possible dangers to human safety and the ecology of the sea as the consequence of such practices’ (331). In other words, while the decommissioning objective might have been successful, this solution did not anticipate the concomitant questions of human and environmental impact. Even though the existing research on these dumps reveals little that should directly worry us, this is not to say that these chemicals neither did nor will cause any damage. First, there is no ‘outside’ to our lands, seas, and skies, where harm could be reduced to zero. In this sense, sea dumping may have been the best solution, but only in a slurry of bad ones (Smith, 2017; Souchen, 2017). Plunkett also points out that knowledge (and avoidance) of the dumpsites are the best guarantee of safety for both humans and non-humans, as disturbing the canisters is what poses the greatest threat. Yet, some cylinders have been found in places where they were not supposed to be (Plunkett, 2003). Second, then, whether carried by the ocean in unanticipated ways, or dumped in places unaccounted for, such discoveries remind us that these weapons will not be contained according to their known locations. Third, we need to consider the matter of the bombs and whims of the sea. Although estimates of the Sydney dumps suggest a likely gradual release and hydrolysis of the chemicals (which presents a best-case scenario), the rate of corrosion of the cylinders is not uniform, due to variations in their thickness and materials, as well as in the watery environments with which they come into contact. If the rate of release of the chemicals is quick, the toxicants will negatively impact their environment in an immediate way; if the cylinders remain strongly intact, however, the risk remains that any future disturbance could have negative consequences, since ‘the more intact the containers, the more likely it is that there will be mustard present’ (Plunkett, 2007: 356). Significant changes to ocean temperatures, which can also affect currents and movement in the ocean, are further unknowns with which to reckon. These dumps are thus carried by a sea that both remembers and forgets; they are held by an eternal ocean that both absorbs and dissolves all matters into her waves, just as often as she spits disaster back out onto the shore. The same sea time that can neutralise this poison can just as well preserve it for explosive futures.

In short, any reassurance against environmental and human harm is at best a good guess. Research done elsewhere in the world reveals that chemical weapons dumping will likely cause some damage to marine environments (e.g. CHEMSEA, 2013; Greenberg et al., 2016), but no comprehensive survey of the environmental impact on marine biota in the Australian dumpsites has been conducted. As Plunkett (2007) also notes, since the Sydney site is a known dumpsite for many other kinds of detritus, any leaking chemicals ‘would only pose a danger to biota surviving in this accumulated debris’ (357). (Similar problems exist even in extensively surveyed places. For example, research in the Baltic Sea (CHEMSEA, 2013) reveals changed biomarkers in marine life around the dumpsites, but also notes that the eutrophication of the water is so extensive that there is no healthy baseline for comparison.) This fourth consideration could be parsed as follows: in waters already so wounded, any additional damage may be difficult to index to a specific cause. The lack of evidence of harm that is supposed to reassure us may be in fact due to the exceptionally slow and compounded nature of the damage. Aswim in moving seawater, these canisters may rupture at an uneven and unpredictable rate; if they are leaking mustard gas, these damages would be so difficult to isolate from the background damage that they are almost impossible to bring into view.

Given the above, our objective cannot be to definitely adjudicate on the extent of damage that these weapons have caused or might still. Moreover, in the depths of the sea, nor can we rely on other kinds of witnessing to testify to harm, as in other zones of slow violence. ³ We can, however, attend to the possibilities that are opened and foreclosed by how we think about these dumps, and the concepts we use to frame them. For example, if we accept Plunkett’s general surmisal that these dumps probably don’t pose much of a risk, I am perplexed by the tenacity of a certain disastrous tone that seems to accompany most reporting on unexploded mustard gas bombs at sea. Much of the historical, social, and policy-oriented commentary on sea-dumped chemical weapons, whether in Sydney’s coastal waters or elsewhere, stresses the need for caution, further research, but also a sort of ineffable doom. Susan L. Smith’s (2017) book length history of chemical weapons, for example, presents evidence from both Hawaii and Europe that reveals (scientifically documented) harm from sea dumps to be negligible. Yet she follows this with pages of warnings about dangers these drowned weapons might harbour, and concludes that they show how ‘the impact of war is ever present and everywhere’ (94).

I agree with Smith’s conclusion: the impact of war is present and everywhere, but it is difficult to trace the thread that would connect those research results (these sea dumps have negligible effects on ocean health) to that conclusion (war is killing the seas). So, while I am a firm advocate of the precautionary principle, I also wonder: why are we so inclined to find disaster below the waves, when evidence suggests a less disastrous picture? ⁴ What does this doomsday imaginary promote (or foreclose)? While the tenor of disaster in part responds to the uncertainty that these dumps manifest, I wager that this tone also stems from the general spectacle attached to war, bombs, and chemical explosions. Sunken bombs in the places we live, work, and play are spectacular. In the following section, following the work of Rob Nixon, I examine how this sense of the spectacular rubs against a competing instinct to understand these bombs as a potential form of ‘slow violence’. I suggest that framing these dumps as either slow or spectacular is each helpful in some ways, but also limits and sediments how these dumps might become meaningful in an ecological context, always conditioned by larger structures of militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and gendered and raced structures of power. If we want to better understand this tangled pervasiveness of militarisms at sea, I argue, we must extend and complicate the spectacular-slow conceptual imaginary.

Slow and spectacular violence, at sea

Slow violence, according to Rob Nixon (2011) in his landmark book on Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor, names ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (2). By piercing the containment of violences in time and space, and paying attention to their cumulative and leaky natures, Nixon invites us to rethink ‘what counts as a casualty’. We need to focus more on the everydayness of environmental violences, he argues, even as they struggle to command our attention. He demands that we find ways to make such ‘incremental and accretive’ violence matter – particularly when ‘spectacular, immediately sensational, and instantly hyper-visible’ (13) violence holds us rapt. Displacements of ‘attritional catastrophes … smooth the way for amnesia’ into the future (7), leading to grossly inaccurate narratives of the effects of our actions. This in turn smooths the way for more of the same violence. Without a doubt, Nixon’s work has provided an important and powerful framework for centering environmental justice concerns within environmental scholarship of all kinds, as well as in the context of war’s environmental harms. ⁵

Importantly, Nixon’s argument here is about temporality, but it is also about affect. It is primarily the affective register that he refers to when he notes that ‘politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft’ (3). On his list of ‘spectacular’ things that get our attention Nixon includes falling bodies, exploding heads, and volcanoes (3). Such violences seize our imaginations in a way similar to their material devastations. On the one hand, then, mustard gas dumps at sea seem to fit with these spectacular violences that (perhaps disproportionately) demand our attention. We see this in the assumption of inevitable disaster I note above, as well as in the dramatic tone of news and policy reports: ‘Today’, notes one description of a research event on these dumps, ‘the pollution of underwater munitions threatens marine life, human security, and off-shore economic developments with toxic chemicals, carcinogens, and spontaneous explosions’ (Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, 2018). Another researcher warns that ‘as time goes on and corrosion continues, these tools of death and destruction will slowly return to endanger another generation’ (Souchen, 2017: 34). Hakai magazine reports that ‘the scientific quest to locate and deal with these chemical weapons has become a race against the clock’ (Curry, 2016). According to The Economist (2013), such dumps are ‘ticking time bombs’, while the International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions (2016) notes that ‘the seas are dying’ at the hands of these dumped weapons. These reports describe similar dumps around the world, but they characterise the affect engendered by news of Sydney’s chemical weapons dumps as well. The imaginary of mustard gas bombs on the seafloor (and not all that far from the shores where we swim, boat, fish, and play) resonates spectacularly. How could we allow this?, we demand. Why aren’t we doing anything about them? Could they still explode?

Following Nixon’s suggestion, we might then purposively resist the spectacular lure these stories dangle before us. Knowing something about what scientific data reveal (and doesn’t) about any threat these dumps might pose, we could instead turn our attentions to the more mundane, less spectacular issues of pollution that accumulate in our coastal waters – dying coral reefs, rising sea levels linked to warming climates, and accumulating microplastics, for example. These are the slow smotherings of the sea that we, in our intoxicated, fossil fuelled, and plastic wrapped Western lifestyles, participate in daily, and which, to use Nixon’s words, ‘possess an unequal heft’. While it would be wrong to say publics are entirely complacent about these more banal forms of contamination, a kinderegg toy at the bottom of the harbour does not seize us in the manner of an unexploded chemical bomb. Nixon’s framework could thus serve as a compass for directing our attention to affectively ‘slower’ but pressing disasters that we might otherwise overlook.

Yet if we set aside the affect of the spectacle to attend to the material temporalities of these dumps, their categorisation as spectacular starts to falter. Generally speaking, while the temporal event of an exploding bomb is spectacular, the aftermath of militarisms is often very slow. This is Nixon’s observation, too, as he considers ‘the mirage of war’s end’ (207) in Slow Violence’s last chapter. Here, war’s ecological aftermath is a quintessential example of slow violence, and any accounting of war’s violences needs ‘to measure a weapon’s “kill range” not just across battlefield space but across ecological and genetic time as well’ (213). Noting, for example, the lingering illnesses and environmental problems that outlast troop withdrawal, Nixon decries what he cleverly calls the ‘temporal camouflage’ of military discourses of ‘smart’ and ‘precision’ wars. Such language covers over the reach of the violences they inflict. Technologies like the clusterbomb, for example, disperse violence across time and space. Their ‘passive-aggressive’ presence continues to thwart recovery in a multitude of ways – lands that cannot be used and adjacent lands that get overexploited, health resources that must be diverted into an extended future, infrastructures that must remain on alert, weapons clearing operations that cost 10 times more than did putting the bombs there in the first place (225–227). This all, argues Nixon, epitomises the slow violence of war.

We already noted above that although the dumps may not pose any significant known danger, there may be all kinds of ways in which they do or could participate in slow harm to the sea: we just don’t know, or can’t see, it. Such resistance to visibility is a key dimension of slow violence, as Nixon describes. This suggests that slow violence is also an important frame for understanding these dumps. Moreover, not only might these bombs be temporally slow and spectacular but they might also hover between these two conditions, undecided. As I have argued elsewhere (Neimanis, 2018, 2019), weapons dumps at sea are perhaps best described as full of suspense: not now, they tell us, but just wait. They enact an anticipatory, but never guaranteed, orientation to the future. They are disaster that will violently arrive, or not. The movements of the ocean can push and pull these bombs from suspension to explosion, but any certainty of this is only retrospective. The undecidable temporality of sea dumped chemical weapons is not a question of insufficient knowledge, as if calculating mustard gas time is just a matter of knowing more information or gathering more facts. As we learn from even the most-studied dumps, such as in the Baltic Sea, rather than moving towards certainty, each new piece of information multiplies possible futures. While chemical agents ‘represent scattered point sources of pollution of unknown magnitude and difficult to control … (t)he amount of available data does not enable predictions on the development of the situation’ (CHEMSEA, 2013: 82). Effects are routinely called ‘complex’ and ‘ambiguous’, while solutions and their potential efficacy remain ‘problematic’ (European Union, 2008: 3, 4, 9). In their very situated materiality, these bombs and any violence they might harbour refuse neat containment. This refusal is not a temporary state awaiting resolution, but their ontological basis.

Moreover, the discussion of risk and harm here is based on epistemologies where damage is measurable according to scientifically verifiable evidence. The comforting ‘lack of evidence’ sidesteps other kinds of damages caused by militarisation of the sea, where for some communities, the oceans are not only a data-set of chemistries and biologies, but a site of kin, story, and survival. As researchers and writers like Elizabeth de Loughrey (2010), Craig Santos Perez (2017), and Alice Te Punga Sommerville (2017) all highlight, the ocean that holds these dumps is known by means other than Western science. Concomitantly, instruments of Western science may not register these damages. A lack of evidence of changed biomarkers in fish species, for example, would tell us nothing of other kinds of violences that have been done to these deep ocean places.

So again: what is the temporality of a ticking time bomb drowned at sea, both gone and still here, both drowned and waiting to resurface? Slow, or spectacular? Neither? Both? I emphasise this epistemology of uncertainty in order to clarify that the oscillation of drowned chemical bombs at sea between the slow and the spectacular is not a dilemma to be solved – where if we had more information, we could confidently place the violence of these bombs on one side or the other. The time of the chemists’ war at the bottom of the sea is neither that straight, nor that straightforward. Like mustard gas itself, which does not kill instantly, but draws out its damage in both slow and spectacular ways, the violences of these sunken weapons do not fall easily into linear time. In their queer cleaving between these temporalities of violence, the weapons dumps suggest that we need to complicate the analytical tools that Nixon offers.

Concept-work as occlusion (slow is not enough)

In her book Duress (2016), Laura Ann Stoler considers how concepts ‘emerge as seductive and powerful agents’ (8) that can reinforce the ‘occlusion and submersion’ of what is already hard to see. While we need concepts to reveal the patterns and articulate the disparate fragments that our research uncovers, Stoler encourages vigilance: beware of the security of stability that successful concepts proffer; notice what seems uneasily, partially, or awkwardly to ‘fit’ a concept’s ‘ready analytical frames’; pay attention to what is ‘not quite covered’ or what cannot be ‘quite encompassed’ by their grammars (9).

For Stoler, one of the ways in which concepts can fail us is through the temporalities they invoke and perpetuate. The case study in her book is imperialism, and the ways in which colonialism as a frame of analysis seems to have been occluded by other contemporary questions – ‘epidemics, disaster management, persistent racial inequities, ecological catastrophes, forced dislocations and refugee populations, humanitarian failures, border regimes, and security protocols that impinge on their everyday and future possibilities’ (3). Our inability to effectively track the continuities between these ‘more pressing’ issues and colonialism may be a function of that framework itself, which, Stoler argues, imports a sense of done-ness. The conceptual temporality cannot accommodate a deeper analysis of the ways in which ‘colonial entailments’ persist in morphed and sometimes difficult-to-recognise forms. Colonial entailments are not simply ‘traces’ that ‘haunt’ us, Stoler insists, but lively recursions; they are torqued reworkings (and even subversions born of endurance) rather than just mimetic continuities.

Let’s pause here to make clear that it doesn’t take a book by Stoler to notice the ongoingness of colonialism. Testimony, scholarly accounts, and cultural works by Indigenous people in Australia, as elsewhere, make this argument in no uncertain terms, and are the authority to consult on how colonialism is perpetuated, reworked, and endured. But Stoler’s argument about ‘concept-work’, as she calls it, is interesting here because she also invokes Nixon’s work as the kind of concept we need; in writing about the ongoing imperial project as threading through material sites of ruin, she refers to ‘what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” and “long dyings” that mark zones of neglect, attenuated possibilities, and abandonment’ (368).

Yet, with respect for both Stoler and Nixon’s projects, I wonder if ‘slow’ is the best way to describe the militarisms and colonialisms both she and Nixon are interested in. Or more precisely, I wonder if these phenomena are only slow. We know that one of the problems with spectacular violence is its short-lived hold on our imaginations – spectacular events may seize us affectively, but their time comes, and then goes, and we relegate them (as Stoler suggests is the case with colonialism) to the category of done-ness. But while spectacular violence occludes analysis of its ongoingness, slow violence harbours its own temporal assumptions. And, the framework of slow and spectacular, when read as conceptual apposition, occludes other things still.

If we turn back to the mustard gas dumps of Sydney’s sea, for example, we find that the slow-spectacular framework occludes the possibility of queerer times – times that do not move predictably or progressively from cause to effect, but which start, stutter, reverse, stall, and fold back. As Stoler notes, the inability to effectively trace the tangles between events ostensibly ‘past’ and their recursion in the present-future ‘may have as much to do with what the connectivities between past and present are expected to look like’ (6). The issue not only concerns ‘where in time’ – past, present, future – a phenomenon is placed but it also concerns assumptions about what must come next in and as time. We might think about these as cause-and-effect chains, whose tethering is guaranteed by a tautological temporal orientation: effect follows cause because effect follows cause, and always along a straight line.

Yet in Sydney’s seas, there is also dissipation of damage. At least to some extent, these toxins are being hydrolysed by the ocean. Time’s arrow is queered, awaiting a future that may or may not arrive. Violence hovers, waits, and, when we are lucky, pulls its head back in. Or (as we shall see shortly) returns, transformed and just barely recognisable. This challenges a slow-spectacular temporal orientation, if we read this as a movement of time only progressively forward (albeit incrementally). Even if slow violence invites us to switch gears, its temporality is still unidirectional; the only path which this violence traces is: onward.

Moreover, within this temporal orientation, violence’s only option is to gather and sediment; the only path which violence traces is forward toward inevitable demise. But if memory, as described by Szerzynski (2019), is always accompanied by forgetting, is it not possible that violence might not only accrue, or that not only violence might accrue? After all, despite our propensity to offload our violences into her benthos, the sea is also resilient (to a point). It is creative, too. On the substratum of old chemical weapons dumps off the coast of Hawaii, for example, new species of starfish are thriving, as the seas transform the dumps into hospitable habitat (Barrat, 2015). The concept of slow violence – naming a violence that in Nixon’s own words is accretive, cumulative, gradual but increasing, proliferating, and even exponential – strains to accommodate the possibility to heal, or to become differently.

Importantly, I am not claiming that Nixon’s examples exclude healing or its possibility. After all, Nixon’s (2011) own descriptions of war’s after-violences are temporally complex, diffracted, and multiscalar; they clearly exceed a unidirectional or binaristic slow-spectacular temporal logic, and are far more queer than that conceptual frame would suggest. I am thus rather interested in cleaving open the potential constraints of the concept itself to allow for more contradiction and queer simultaneity. As Stoler confirms, marks of duress (which could include chemical bombs, suspended between the slow and the spectacular) are ‘deep pressure points of generative possibilities or violent and violating absences’ (5). That is to say: while they might let violences impress themselves further, they might also, surprisingly, change tack, opening to something unimagined. And they might do both at the same time. ⁶

Damage can be reworked, even dissolved, even as its entailments persist, differently. Recognising this is not just about choosing more precise concepts, it is part of keeping alternative futures open. Without the possibility of temporal queerness, slow violence risks becoming a version of neoliberal and capitalist progress-time, where the march onwards and upwards is the only way of moving through time – except, here, the slide is downwards, into inevitable demise. Or, slow violence risks becoming another form of apocalypse imaginary, just at a more languishing pace: doom is coming, whether it will take days and decades to arrive. This then is another occlusion of the slow-spectacular framework: it moves (whatever the speed) towards only one kind of end. When slow violence becomes a synonym for ‘the aftermath of war’, the only antidote to the problematic temporal containment of militaristic violence in the past is its unfolding as a slow motion disaster into the present-future.

Paying attention to such occlusions does not deny the immense usefulness of Nixon’s framework, nor is it an invitation to ignore the wounds, nor sidestep accountability for violences done. Indeed, insisting on this kind of remembrance is also part of the conceptual and practical challenge. As Szerzynski (2019) points out, ‘forgetting is not just privative, the lack of memory […] Forgetting is an active process, a capacity, a skill. And specific kinds of memory can require forgetting, selection, erasure’ (223). In light of this, we need a more complex deployment of Nixon’s temporal concepts, whereby those wounds are commemorated, somewhat paradoxically, by keeping open the possibility of their becoming different. Such a temporal analysis would be able to both remember (hold to account) and forget (heal, survive). This is what the material strangeness of the water, the weapons, and their queer times, demand.

Leveraging the spectacular to notice everyday militarisms

In settler colonial Australia, the spectacle of these mustard gas bombs at sea ironically becomes an alibi for wars presumably in the past, and separate from everyday life. By this I mean that the prospect of bombs on the floor of Sydney’s seas seems so spectacular precisely because, for the white settler imaginary, war is something readily enclosed in a spatiotemporal elsewhere and elsewise. If war is something that happens ‘over there’ and ‘back then’, then no wonder its everyday intrusions affectively seize us.

Yet Black, Indigenous, and feminist analyses have long implored us to rethink war’s containment and its separation from the everyday. Not long after Cynthia Enloe’s (1990) pathbreaking Bananas, Beaches and Bases described the intrusion of war into everyday life in gendered and colonial ways, the title of an article by feminist philosopher Chris Cuomo (1996) asserted that ‘War is not just an event’. Foreshadowing Nixon’s concerns with the lure of the spectacular, Cuomo notes that ‘crisis-based politics and analyses’ can ‘distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people’s lives’ (31). She continues: ‘the dramatic nature of declared, large-scale conflicts should not obfuscate the ways in which military violence pervades most societies […] and the significance of military institutions and everyday practices in shaping reality’ (32). Angela Davis (2008) among many other abolitionists points out that US wars such as the ‘war on terror’ extend war tactics to racialised communities particularly in relation to the prison industrial complex, while in Australia, the ‘frontier wars’ against Indigenous communities are described by Lea et al. (2018) as ongoing, but in new guises such as the violence of unrelenting bureaucracies. Such analyses find further expression in work such as feminist anthropologist Catherine Lutz’s (2002) ‘making war at home’ that defines militarisation as the continuation of war into everyday life. Caren Kaplan’s (2017) recent work on drones reminds us that ‘war registers its effects across varied tempos and spatial scales that cannot be neatly sorted into “before,” “during,” and “after” or even “here” and “there”’ (35).

These and other feminist, anticolonial, and anti-racist arguments implicitly and explicitly posit that by framing war as a containable event, we impoverish both the analysis of our relationship to it and our possibilities for resistance. Rather than only focusing on whether violence or harm persists (or doesn’t), they demonstrate that more agile tactics are needed to account for the conditions of possibility of harm in the first place. Such approaches account for unanticipated outcomes, as well as our own complicity in the good and the bad. They insist on thicker descriptions, and more nuanced takes on how bodies and environments continue to be shaped by sustained infrastructures of militaristic thinking and doing.

This push to ‘uncontain’ our understanding of war, grounded in feminist, anticolonial, and anti-racist perspectives, provides inspiration for how we might rethink the matter of Sydney’s sea-dumped chemical weapons. A proposition, then: Instead of reading slow violence as though it were opposed to the spectacular, or assenting to the unidirectional temporal orientation and cause-and-effect chains that this dualism can imply, what if we used the attention-grabbing power of the spectacular to unpick how war is snarled in more mundane environmental degradations, and how militarisms are tangled in ongoing colonialism, capitalism, and technoscientific industrialisation? In other words, even if temporality of the sea-dumped bombs exceeds the rubric of slow and spectacular, the hook of the spectacular can nonetheless be useful for examining their conditions of possibility. Tacking between the slow and the spectacular, we can trace the way these militarisms (their logics, their matters, their drivers and enablers) still persist, although maybe in different forms. We need not turn away from the spectacular (how could we?), but instead of distracting us with a non-story, it should be an opening for considering other everyday militarisms beneath the sea. As a result, our understanding of everyday militarisms can also be significantly enhanced.

For example, we could follow these weapons back to the rise of industrial chemistry and its suturing of militarisation to everyday marine pollution. While German chemist Fritz Haber was responsible for weaponising sulphur mustard in the First World War, his contribution to the so-called Haber–Bosch process also won him the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918. This process, which synthesised ammonia from its elements, is credited with facilitating cheap fertiliser after the war, and in turn for enabling the Green Revolution. This set the stage for mass-scale industrial agricultural, including industrial animal meat production. While the benefits of this boon to food production are well noted, the concomitant reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers also precipitated other consequences including ‘decreasing ecological diversity, increasing monocultures, increasing use of pesticides, [and] a more toxic environment’ (Schneider, 2016). Moreover, ammonia synthesised through the Haber–Bosch process was also used in the production of plastics, fibres, and explosives.

Paying attention to the origins of chemical weapons in the rise of industrial chemistry helps us map the lineaments of an industrial chemo-militarism that is still very much with us today. While chemical weapons sunk off the coast of Sydney may not be a direct significant concern for Australian waters, nutrient overload from agricultural sources, as well as ‘alarming rates’ of microplastics certainly are (Montoya, 2015: 79). The point is not to bring all marine pollution back to the actions of one man (for Haber is also entangled in other processes before and beyond him), but rather to question whether weaponised chemicals can be so easily cordoned off from those we rely on in our everyday lives.

And, if we extend our view past mustard gas alone, we see how such sutures between military poisons and everyday chemical products repeat themselves elsewhere, too: Sydney’s waters also harbour the toxic run-off from the production of 2,4,5- trichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid herbicides, the two ingredients for Agent Orange, which was manufactured at the Union Carbide plant on the Parramatta River (west of Sydney Harbour and the Central Business District) from the 1950s to the 1970s, and used in the Vietnam War (Montoya, 2015: 41–43). Here again, militarised industrial chemistry meets the mundane: Union Carbide in Sydney was also the global production site of Glad Wrap, a household plastic designed for single use. So as fishers hailing from places like Viet Nam now perch on the banks of the Parramatta with fishing rods, noticing or not noticing the signs warning them not to eat the fish due to dangerously high levels of dioxins, while perhaps pulling a plastic-wrapped sandwich from their lunch box, might we ask: Which is the slow violence, which is the spectacular one? The slow and the spectacular, wartime and the everyday, cleave together and apart. The chemists war and the mustard gas bombs at the bottom of the sea anticipate and even condition future Sydney waterways as hypoxic, plastinated, and poisoned. How might attention to these bombs lead us to more complicated stories about contemporary expressions of the military chemo-industrial complex, aswim all around us?

There are other tangles leading out from these waterlogged weapons caches that we could follow. We might note, quite banally, that ‘militarism is the most oil-exhaustive activity on the planet’, and that the US military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum products and energy (Hynes, 2011). While sunken chemical bombs nearly a century old would seem to have little to do with the contemporary state of Australia’s oceans, rising sea levels and warming waters are clearly linked to the toxic and fossil-fuelled everyday operations of the military even if direct cause and effect is difficult to attribute. And Australia, as Tess Lea and Stuart Rollo (2016) point out, is implicated in this everyday militarism too:

the on-going deployment of thousands of American Marines on Australian soil for at least the next quarter century, the expansion of already extensive US intelligence gathering facilities based in Australia, and the tenuous link between Australia’s regional vulnerabilities and the American-led wars Australia repeatedly commits its resources to (18)

We might also attend to how new extractive prospects at the bottom of the sea continue to propagate an imaginary of the benthos as open for business. Oceans researcher Susan Reid (2019) explains that with the arrival of deep seabed mining into waters proximate to Australia, seabed ecologies – which include manganese nodules that grow only millimetres every million years – will be ripped apart to extract minerals for civilian and military purposes. And following the tangles of our mustard gas caches further, we recall that these bombs were sunk at a time when trawlers did not extend their reach as deeply as they routinely do today. Although Plunkett (2007) remarks that the areas around the mustard gas dumpsites are not currently trawled, ‘the chemical agents may still pose a threat to future trawling or other activities including sea mining’ (356). Focusing on the spectacular (if supposedly ‘harmless’) bomb ecologies reveals how they are connected to and potentially even reactivated by contemporary extractions that help keep the capitalist war machine running.

We could also connect up Sydney’s dumpsites to those elsewhere in the world. Here, we are reminded that the afterlives of war can also be surprising: they transform into unplanned wildlife refugia, medical breakthroughs, and more ways of knowing and learning and seeing and doing. One key reason why Western scientists know anything at all about the deep sea floor is because of military research. And as consumers soaking in the precipitate of military technology, we are complicit in these transformations, for better or worse – sometimes joyfully so (as fingertips tap on keyboards dependent on extracted rare earth metals). Despite discomfort with these revelations, we require conceptual frames whose temporalities do not automatically exclude the paradoxical ways in which the same militarisms that bring us these slow-spectacular violences can also bring us (among other things) ways of recognising them, transforming them, benefiting from them, and resisting them.

In other words, by reading Nixon’s concepts of spectacular and slow violences as queer, non-linear, and tangled, we come to understand these dumps and the militarisms that give rise to them differently. These sea dumps suggest that damage may be difficult to isolate, harm may not be easily attributable to clear chains of cause and effect, and violence may not stay its intended course. To ascertain how these war dumps matter, we need to look instead at what they index, and where they point us. What unexpected relations are uncovered? What gets amplified at the confluences of seemingly disparate phenomena? How are old mustard gas militarisms, their environmental consequences, and the colonial violences and imperial expansions from which they cannot be severed still with us in tangled up ways? These reemergent militarisms are both concealed and revealed by and through the same logics and infrastructures that enabled the old ones – further diffracted through the lineaments of coloniality, capitalism, and technoscience – but perhaps not always or only in the spectacular forms that we have come to expect.

Conclusion: Queer times, queer matterings

Water’s resistance to spatial containment is well documented. Water flows and overflows. It is a shapeshifter, transforming other matters, too, into something – somewhere, sometime – else. ⁷ What once was river will soon become cloud, rain, ocean, plankton, whale, just as weapons casing becomes silt, and toxin becomes distributed, diluted, and potentially forgotten. Water’s strange time-space-matterings remind us that as both memory and forgetting, water is a time-based medium of latency, of return, of dissolution and preservation. As such, water invites us to let go of ‘chrononormativity’ (Freeman, 2010), comfortable scales of mattering, and a secure linearity between cause and effect. Water is where we find old wars that bubble up from the past, while the future remembers what it was supposed to forget. Things come to matter in queer ways.

In refusing to see the slow-spectacular framework as dualistic, or to index it to a forward-moving scale of speed and time, these mustard gas dumps also suggest that we need to rethink our inherited scale of matter – of mattering. After all, how are we to understand ocean mnemonics when what has been forgotten still haunts us, and while what is still here can barely make us care? That is, how can it be that a mustard gas bomb matters both more, and less, than sandwich wrap, or a 5 dollar bag of fertiliser, at the bottom of the sea? How do past wars still excite us, while the everydayness of militarised violences leaves us unmoved (and happily complicit)? The heft of mattering cannot be quantitatively calculated according to received markers of significance. What kinds of times, and matters, are these?

As Stoler reminds us, our analyses of what matters, and how and why, can be obfuscated by our habitual modes of tracing connections. An archive of materiel at the bottom of the sea, when we parse it only according to the distance between the slow and the spectacular, can divert our attention from other ways in which the tangled foreshadowings and aftermaths of this rubble come to matter. An unexploded bomb may seem to be a straightforward index of persistent danger, but the spectacle of the unexploded ordnance may make it difficult to feel the ocean getting warmer, or see the shreds of Glad Wrap floating by. A slow-spectacular framework may also struggle to visibilise the connections between these phenomena. This framework may keep us tethered to a linear temporality that, while telling an important story, may also unwittingly keep other stories unseen. Particularly in undersea conditions where causal connections cannot be easily or definitely traced – neither by instruments of science nor experiential witnessing – we need not, and should not, choose between greater or lesser, closer or further, more mundane or more spectacular threats. Rather, we need additional ways of attuning to and evaluating harm and its sometimes surprising dissolution as simultaneous with its queer persistence. We require modes of analysis that centre relations rather than things and events. How something matters will be read from the intensity of meeting points, convergences, confluences, and stealthy returns. Our work as scholars is to find these relations, and ways to story them, particularly when the connections are occluded.

Stories of mustard gas at sea in Sydney have been both explicitly and incidentally concealed – by military secrecy, by time, and by the sea itself. There is a risk that in revealing them, I draw attention away from what needs to be urgently storied: an ongoing colonial enterprise of dispossession and extraction, mundanely persistent marine pollution, and a military-industrial complex that still Glad Wraps our everyday life. But once we disturb the times that might neatly package the ‘then’ and ‘now’ or the ‘slow’ and the ‘spectacular’, perhaps these dumps can also come to matter differently. Neither more, nor less, but differently. These stories, of water’s mnemonics, militarism’s tangled times, and our own material coimplication, are the ones we need to learn to tell, in all of their strange matterings.

Highlights

Sydney’s coastal waters contain thousands of tons of chemical weapons dumped post-Second World War, but according to scientific epistemologies, harm is likely negligible.