“Iraq and Global Toxic War”
Toby C. Jones
Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University
1.26.18
12-2pm
Beginning in the 1970s US war planners and their partners in the "defense industry" began refashioning nuclear waste into weapons. Depleted Uranium, a byproduct of nuclear energy production and nuclear weapons manufacturing, was re-purposed for use on modern battlefields. Put to use extensively between 1991-2011 by the US military in Iraq, this talk explores the global environmental and political economic histories around "toxic" war.
Toby C. Jones is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick where he directs the M.A. program in Global and Comparative History. He teaches courses on global environmental history, energy, and the modern Middle East. Jones is the author of two books. The first, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia was published by Harvard University Press in 2010. The second, Running Dry: Essays on Energy, Water and Environmental Crisis, published by Rutgers University Press, appeared in 2015. He is currently working on a history of energy and violence and an oral history of the Bahrain uprising. He has written for both scholarly and general audiences, including at the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of American History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Middle East Report, Raritan Quarterly Review, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and elsewhere. In 2015 Jones was recognized as a Rutgers Chancellor’s Scholar for distinguished scholarship.
