Biography
Nathan Samayo was born in Guåhan and raised in Tacoma, Washington. He obtained his BA from Seattle Pacific University and Master of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. As a PhD student at Princeton Theological Seminary, Nathan’s research focuses on military technology, political ecology, and Pasifika culture, epistemology and intellectual history.
Paper Abstract
From 1946-1958, Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands was designated as the site for the U.S. Department of Defense nuclear bomb testing—the third largest series of nuclear blasts in global history. This presentation examines how nuclear weapons proliferated in the U.S. Christian imagination in the WWII/early Cold War era using the Marshall Islands nuclear bomb tests as a focal point to examine how Christian theology has shaped and been shaped through advanced military weaponry and technological solutionism. It goes further to showcase the ecological implications of such nuclear weaponry interests including 24,000 years of marine ecology radioactive contamination and dilapidated nuclear fallout containment infrastructures. I argue that nuclear weaponry proliferated WWII/early Cold War U.S. Christian imagination because of Christian enchantment with technology and U.S. military expansion.