In “By the Bomb’s Early Light,” Paul Boyer writes about the ebbs and flows of nuclear criticism as atomic dreams and radioactive nightmares danced across this nation’s psyche throughout the Cold War. He wrote his book during such a peak and prefaced his second edition with a question about the next peak to come, as the Cold War had been called off by then.
In the intervening years, there have been blips of renewed interest, especially around the time of the radioactive catastrophe at Fukushima, but with rising geopolitical tensions and increased climate emergency, it seems like we’re re-entering another full-blown cycle of intense interest in the nuclear, one that refreshes and expands on its classical forms as “waste, weapon, and energy.”
I see this in projects like @artistsagainstthebomb, which is turning fresh eyes towards the living legacies of the “nuclear sublime.” And I’m also seeing it in the emergence of new perspectives that connect nuclearism to the uneven politics of infrastructure more broadly – the so-called “nuclear mundane.” This is vitally important, because new voices are also rising to call nuclear critique an anachronism, going as far as smearing anti-nuclearism as a form of climate injustice.
The stakes couldn’t be higher; the connections between energy, weapons, and waste must be remade.
Nuclear culture means more than atomic symbology and nuke-themed fads; it concerns the ways our very norms and ways of inhabiting the world have been reshaped to make room for the atom over the past seventy or so years. This refers to both the subtle ways that nuclearism has changed our understanding of safety and risk and to the dramatic ways it has become our multimillennial anthropogenic legacy.
In “Unmaking the Bomb,” Shannon Cram writes about how our very definitions of “clean” and “healthy” were blown apart by the emerging cost-benefit calculus of living with nuclear risk; in the harsh light of the atom, life becomes a spectrum of death.
In a recent article for the @unionofconcernedscientists, Dylan Spaulding calls the plutonium isotopes distributed globally by nuclear explosions “one of the clearest, most temporally-distinct features amongst the many signatures of human existence.”
He writes: “Much like the widespread iridium anomaly associated with the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, radioisotopes from nuclear weapons development spread widely and define a narrow window in time from 1945-1963, when the Partial Test Ban Treaty ended above-ground testing. Because plutonium is a man-made element, it is incontestably distinguishable from natural phenomena and its long half-life (24,100 years for 239Pu) means it will be measurable far into the future.”
That’s nuclear culture. A scar on the very surface of this planet that will outlive our whole species. And that’s not even counting the nuclear waste we’re still trying to figure out where and how to bury.
We say we, but the uneven politics of infrastructure demands that this “we” is interrogated; the Anthropocene is largely the Capitalocene, after all.
No, “we” didn’t start this fire, but here it is still burning, and our children and their children will continue to foot the heating bill.
That’s why this new criticism is so necessary; it’s an anti-nuclearism that is not anti-science, but is informed by feminist, indigenous, and anti-racist critique. The new nuclear criticism recognizes the unique threats of waste, weapons, and energy, while still combatting toxicity in all its forms.