Tinkering Care, State Responsibility, and Abandonment: Nuclear Test Veterans and the Mismatched Temporalities of Justice in Claims for Health Care

Abstract

This article critically engages with Mol, Moser, and Pols' notion of "tinkering" care (2010) as "attentive experimentation." I explore the limits of tinkering care for United Kingdom and New Zealand military veterans who participated in British nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific. Although the British state has assured the men that they were exposed to safe levels of radiation, test veterans continue to believe their ill health is service related. Over fifty years of seeking care and recognition, the test veterans have dealt with multiple state actors and medical professionals who have successively taken over responsibility for their care and their claims. Each new agent seeks novel ways to fine tune service provision, biomedical knowledge about the men's illnesses, as well as their experiences of care. All the while, they offer no final endpoint to claim making, knowledge production, care provisions, and compensation. This approach is starkly in contrast to the urgent temporality within which aging veterans seek definitive decisions, care, and recognition that reduces (rather than extends) their engagements with the state. This article thus considers the moments and circumstances when actors actively work against the unsettled, experimental qualities of care in order to feel truly cared for.

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