Kimberley Peters. Review of Rachael Squire, Undersea Geopolitics: Sealab, Science, and the Cold War

BOOK REVIEW

Undersea Geopolitics: Sealab, Science, and the Cold War. Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds

by Rachael Squire

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
2021. 180 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78660-730-0.

Reviewed by Kimberley Peters

In a recent work-related exchange with a colleague, it was mentioned that many students in the classroom today, in 2024—at least in some areas of human geography and aligned disciplines in which they (and I) teach—have scant introduction to the Cold War and its spatialities. I recalled myself, in all my years of teaching political geographies (and across different country settings, in the United Kingdom and overseas, and at bachelor’s and master’s levels) that I didn’t really touch this area of history. My colleague mentioned this in view of Rachael Squire’s excellent 2021 book Undersea Geopolitics: Sealab, Science, and the Cold War. They’d been using it with their class. The students loved it, with its fascinating foray into the anticipatory politics of possible world-ending times, and explorations to sustain life underwater. This is a book that kept surfacing for me.

Indeed, just the week before the above exchange, in conversation with a doctoral student, we had been discussing Squire’s work for opening up not just the topic of the Cold War—but a very particular voluminous articulation of it: one with depth, one that was watery (where much analysis had, unsurprisingly perhaps, focused on the air and airspace with missile threats). Squire’s text takes human geographers, the primary audience of the book, to an immersive realm that could not be comprehended from the surface—the deep ocean. Together, this student and I mused over the merits of an “undersea” geopolitics (so the title of Squire’s book goes) versus other wording: perhaps a deep geopolitics? A benthic geopolitics?[1] We agreed Squire’s work was central to not just a critical ocean “turn” that is shaping a number of social science and humanities disciplines, but one that pushes limits—notably the surface and the (mostly) surface phenomena (that is, shipping) that seem to dominate a lot of scholarship written under the flag of “human geographies of the ocean.”[2] Although literatures on swimming, diving, yachting, shipping, and fishing allude to depth, and involve (partial) submersion of bodies, technologies, et cetera, the deep has been largely out of bounds. Squire’s book takes us there through a unique case study of the US Navy “experiments”—Project Genesis, Sealab I, II and II, and later Tektite 1—which were efforts to investigate whether “mankind” could live, and thrive, underwater. The book thus offers a window into two marginal spaces in geographical scholarship: the overlooked temporal space of the Cold War era, and the vertical, three-dimensional space of the deep sea.

Yet the book also does this through an important theoretical framing. In a third surfacing of Squire’s text, it so happened, both being geographers of the ocean, that we came to collaborate on a couple of watery projects. Having committed to this review already, I sat on it for a while. And then a bit more (with the editor waiting patiently, and politely, through this and several other crises that I faced at the time, which duly delayed the review further still). In the end, I was committed to writing it. My positionality as Squire’s collaborator didn’t mean I couldn’t reflect on this book—one I thought to be superb (which drove my desire to work more closely with her!) Indeed, as part of our collaboration, we came to write a chapter together on feminist oceans for a new handbook, and it was here Squire’s Undersea Geopolitics text came to the fore again. Rachael sent me a draft of the chapter we were writing—yet she, her own book, was nowhere to be seen in this chapter. But she is, in Undersea Geopolitics, bringing a firmly feminist geopolitical lens to a masculinist history of deep ocean discovery. I duly cited her book (perhaps much to her embarrassment).

For readers of this review, then, Squire’s Undersea Geopolitics brings together three novel strands: the underexamined worlds of Cold War strategy, territorial politics and future making, delivered through an underexplored empirical case of the underwater realm, delivered through a unique feminist lens that upends dominant masculinist narratives of exploration and discovery that come with the searching for new zones for military (and wider nationalistic) purpose. Challenging the status quo from a classical geopolitical analysis (of international relations), or even a critical geopolitical analysis (of political relations wrought through representation, materiality, and practice), Squire’s feminist account shows how geopolitics functions through deep-sea homemaking (chapter 2), the body and motion (chapter 3), and the elemental and more-than-human (chapters 4 and 5). Indeed, this is the fundamental drive of a feminist geopolitical approach: to unlock an analysis that is centered on the everyday and embodied dimensions of politics. Squire’s text offers, then, not just an intriguing insight to a somewhat strange, terrifying (sometimes banal), experimental (sometimes crazy) attempt at deep-sea living, but one that goes beyond the expected narrativization of masculine dominance of frontier terrains (chapter 1) to a more nuanced, intimate, consideration of such lifeworlds that the naval missions produced.

Each chapter builds smoothly and logically from the next, with Squire offering theoretical anchorages in each that help readers navigate what is to come. For example, chapter 2, “Disciplining, Domesticating, and Dishwashing: Making ‘Home’ on the Seafloor,” considers the “taming” of the environment for habitation, not just for the physical terrain where the Sealab projects would take place, but through the “homesteading” that aquanauts practiced inside their underwater homes. Following, in chapter 3, ‘‘‘A Breed Apart’: Taking the Measure of Man,” Squire continues to think with practice and the body, developing the previously introduced idea to consider the very limits on the body of such pressurized (literally) living. Chapter 4, ‘‘‘Think Helium!’: Sub-marine Pressures and Elemental Entanglements,” continues some of these themes, with chapter 5 moving more explicitly to the more-than-human realm of sea life and the role of marine beings (not least Tuffy the Dolphin) in the unfolding geopolitics of the Sealab experiments. Here Squire notes how animals were “at various moments … invaders, companions, noxious pests, infiltrators, zappers, and friends,” but a focus on them helps ask new questions about how nations sought not just to apprehend territory but also life, learning from and using more-than-human bodies in various ways (p. 85).

In sum, even a couple of years post publication, Squire’s book, as a geo-historical piece of scholarship, for readers of human geography, international relations, political science, Cold War history, and beyond, doesn’t age. It taps into cutting-edge theories through often overlooked avenues into the topic at hand. It offers a rare glimpse into a world readers didn’t know they needed to know about, but do: an insight into an immensely challenging time of “fears of nuclear war, overpopulation, and resource scarcity,” imaginations of which “ran wild” in the Cold War years but which feel strangely close in the contemporary era in which we live (p. xiii). Squire’s book charts the efforts to transcend earthly limits, the limits of land, and other ways to live and inhabit the planet.

Across the six chapters (plus introduction and conclusion) that constitute this book, part of the Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds series published by Rowman and Littlefield, Squire takes the readers on a voyage of repeated experiment—of efforts to live underwater—of living underwater, although no large-scale inhabitation has since happened. This is a book charting attempts at future making that might have been—itself a fascinating topic amidst current literatures tackling questions of the “future.”[3] Indeed, for all that this is a richly researched historical foray into the various projects of the US Navy, evidenced with rich archival materials and evocative photographs of missions, Squire weaves a maritime story that remains ever current.

Notes

[1]. Merdeka Agus Saputra and Katherine G. Sammler, “Volumetric, Embodied and Geologic Geopolitics of the Seabed: Offshore Tin Mining in Indonesia,” Territory, Politics, Governance (2024): 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2024.2334821; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes 57, no. 1 (2019): 21-36.

[2]. Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters, eds., Waterworlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).

[3]. John Urry, What Is the Future? (Oxford: Wiley, 2016).

(Reviewer: Kimberley Peters (Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg))

[This work from H-Net is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License]