The Foreign Service Journal, September 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2018 55 Our country has the expertise and resources to lead in environmental diplomacy. We should. Doing Our Part In her poem, “Tell Them,” Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner says: “We’ve never wanted to leave.”That line refers to the evacuation of Bikini. Although King Juda of Bikini told the U.S. Navy, “It is in God’s hands,” the use of the Marshalls as a testing ground was a foregone conclusion. The U.S. government had determined that atomic testing was necessary for our national security during the Cold War, whatever the consequences for the islanders. Six decades later, the Marshall Islands faces a devastating threat to its national security, in fact to its very existence: inexorably rising sea levels. So it’s time for the United States to help address the crisis instead of adding insult to injury. Now, you could say that such a sentiment sounds like it’s com- ing from an ambassador who has gone native. What do we care if sea levels rise a meter or two? But environment, science and technology issues truly are national security matters. After all, the Pentagon continues to keep an eye on climate change as a driver of conflict. Our country has the expertise and resources to lead in environmental diplomacy. We should. Environmental issues may not always get first priority, but they aren’t going away. Still, if you want hard-power reasons for acting to reduce the pace of global climate change, I can name two in the Marshall Islands alone. One is the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Defense facility on Kwajalein, one of the jewels in the U.S. defense architecture. That’s where intercontinental ballistic missiles launched fromVandenberg Air Base in California are tracked and targeted to land in the lagoon in Kwajalein. Those missiles deter North Korea and could be deployed in the case of hostilities. The second incentive for us to act is the fact that the Runit Dome nuclear repository in the Marshall Islands could be swamped by rising seas. Runit is the concrete-capped dome that encapsulates nuclear waste from some of the tests. If seas rise, the dome could be swamped and release those materials. I do not think such an accident would be enough to endanger the world, as some alarmists have claimed, but it would clearly not be good. Such an outcome would represent yet another failure to secure nuclear material, a theme in the global nuclear legacy.