I found this book to be really intense. Although it didn’t have too strong of an agenda, it was slight yet uneasy. I found this reading to be overall a lot about the uncanny and defining its true role in lives at that time. As I read I began to think of the strange contradiction of nuclear weapons being created by humans yet completely unbeatable by humans. Using the weapons was described, in this book, as “technologically mediated violence” (Masco 9). This violence created a constant increase of anxiety, I cannot imagine living in an environment similar to that. Cities as they are, are anxiety filled. This seemed a situation where both the mind and the body had to catch up to one another. The existence of humans was on the run, but to nowhere. People were too numbed to really understand what was happening internally or externally. “The system reverses its role. Its goal is to numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become, rather, one of anesthetics” (Masco 9). Humans became robots. Throughout this reading I was constantly asking myself were people ever feeling safer because of nuclear weapons? The question was posed if nuclear weapons were a commodity or a national fetish. It is sad that something that mutates the bodies of humans could have possibly been a commodity OR a national fetish. Fearing death, mutation and disease every day of your life could cause you to question the trade offs involved in having nuclear weapons. At one point Masco speaks about how Freud described the “uncanny.” He said it created what was a “secret desire to return home” (Masco 28). This to me seemed so interesting because it almost makes everyone a helpless child again. Everyone is demoralized through fear and is at once children again.
I agree with Melina's insight into how Masco refers to the "uncanny" nature of atomic weapons. It seems to me though, that they are uncanny on even more levels. While they are created by humans, and certainly have a great degree of life force in them (or rather death force) they don't seem to follow the seemingly universal laws of living things. At the same time, they do not mimic nature or take on the tacit qualities of a commodity. For example, radiation could easily be given the qualities of an infection...some sort of contagion...but at the same time it cannot be killed like an infection can. Radiation strangely straddles a line between living and non-living.
Like a commodity, an atomic bomb does not have it's own morality...it is (hopefully, yet usually not) equipped with the morality of it's creator or the one who chooses or chooses not to use it. Fortunately, such a person must be a catalyst for setting it off...it cannot detonate itself. The person who would use the bomb in certain circumstances, yet decides against using the bomb does so out of a faith in the morality of his or her enemy.
All this creates a very strange, uncanny, war-like peace. (or peace-like war for that matter) I question whether there really is such a thing. As of right now there was NO SUCH THING as pax romana, there is no such thing as pax americana and there never was. If one uses militarism to avoid military conflict one is not in a state of peace. If the atomic bomb is the extension of the self, and peace is enforced through weapons of war, those creating such "peace" are in war.
Gertrude Stein's statement on the atomic bomb makes the bomb banal in an entirely new way - rather than fascination or terror, Stein reacts to the a-bomb with dismissal and fearlessness, saying "If you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting." I agree with her sentiment that "it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them" but it seems that with her dismissal of the bomb as somehow insignificant to human life, Stein is neglecting a critical cultural milieu of possible observation. Nuclear fetishism, while it may be wasteful to the human condition in general, has not only threatened modern society, but in some ways, has also inaugurated its creation. Masco argues that this fascination with the violence of nuclear power has completely reconfigured our place in time and space. The nuclear uncanny, as he puts it, has recreated our tactile experiences with the world, based on the threat of obliteration, that our very orientations are altered "not only in our technological infrastructure and our social institutions - they are in our bodies" (26). This is completely observable in the Nuevomexicano peoples on whom Masco focuses; the presence of nuclear power has entirely redefined the way they live in the world. I doubt that Stein would turn up her nose at the plight of these peoples, and their colonization by the laboratories of nuclear science. It seems to me that Stein's statement that "it's the living that are interesting" should be exactly why she ought to be interested in the atomic bomb, which, by her short quote on p14, she does not seem to demonstrate. It seems that Masco is addressing what Stein fails to acknowledge - the idea of atomic bombs affect human behavior and mentality without even necessarily affecting mortality in a concrete way. It is only the notion, only the idea of the a-bomb, that is necessary for influencing (and potentially controlling) the behavior of living human beings.
The beginning sections of The Nuclear Borderlands address the very fundamental and important transition into an age where almost instantaneous human extinction is not only possible but systematically manufactured and supported. Masco first discusses how mere knowledge of the bomb affects the human psyche, more specifically how we think of both our collective lives and deaths. Then emerges an interesting paradox. On the one hand, Masco argues (with philosophical help from Walter Benjamin), that the increased speed at which technology develops leads to a deadening of the senses. On the other hand, however, people are also terrified, even paranoid, of the nuclear threat. The invisibility of radiation enables the fear of annihilation to deeply proliferate into cognitive and constructed spaces of the imagination. Masco asserts that though the bomb was presented as a temporary (and, equally important, ONLY) solution to the Cold War, it has increasingly become a project of aesthetic-intellectualism and continues to affect all social institutions, both private and public.
Masco continues by focusing more specifically on those who worked at Los Alamos post-Cold War and begins to think about how such people came to engage with the bomb and experience its sociopolitical implications. He argues that "the shifting experimental regimes open to Los Alamos weapons scientists have, over time, worked to position the U.S. nuclear arsenal within the laboratory as [a project] that is both normalized and depoliticized" (p.45). The atomic bomb was discarded as a "nation-building"project and reinvented as the foundation of national security and (comparatively) innocent scientific exploration and discovery. Once above ground testing was no longer permitted, scientists were forced to interact not with the actual explosion itself but rather pre- and post-production of the bomb. In this regard, not even the scientists experience the bomb as a duality of terror and pleasure as they did during the testings of the 1940's and 50s; rather, they can only engage with the nuclear complex through academic and intellectual pretexts. The technological mediation of the actual explosion allows scientists and laymen alike to think of nuclear development as part of unavoidable scientific progress rather than unnecessary, aggressive militarism.
The book made me feel that we led our way into a dark future, whether we knew it or not. We are so determined to technologically progress that we don't take into consideration the possible consequences. Yes, it is amazing to see that atomic bombs are no longer imagination, yet it is also very scary. Because we were so hooked on seeing what we can do, we introduced terror into the world. Soon, Russia began to make their own weapons to match or overpower ours. There was fear of living your ordinary life one day and the next you were just ash. We try so hard to "enlighten" ourselves, but really we are only destroying ourselves.
I am also sorry because I finally got around to asking my Classical Greek 1 professor about the "xi" and he explained that the reason why it is theta-xi-omicron-nu as opposed to theta-epsilon-omicron-nu is because IN GERMANY the symbol for the Classical Greek "epsilon" is the American-British symbol for "xi" and I have only until now got about to clarifying revelation that lead from my admission of confusion on this blog.
Also because since I have posed so late about this, no one will probably listen to Charles Bernstein's contribution to this broadcast of poems for Obama:
But since it will probably also relate to next week's reading, i will post it there to.
You don't have to listen to the other two poems though.
What seems to me notable about Masco's indeed multifacetedly fragmentary observations on the bomb, bomb culture and also about the bomb itself, which I can see some of my peers are already gathering together, is this idea that the bomb is pretty much the ultimate, perhaps even inevitable expression of the phallocentric nation state.
You talk about Freud, what does the bomb look like?
As Masco has noted, the bomb has a deep connection to Freudian concepts of Thanatos (from the Greek word, which is male gendered), that is, as Masco puts it, echoing Zizek, immortality. The idea of the nation-state as immortal, and nothing could be father from the truth. That death threats to it threaten to obliterate "the whole world." It creates its permanency with constant threat.
Always nice to read something from Stein. I daresay Masco is irony-deaf in his reading however.
at first i was really confused at the turn to this book and its relation to your course. But of course, i realised how awkward an atomic bomb is in relation to what is ::natural:. The bomb itself is hard to cope with, to comprehend *(perhaps why Masco lumps it into the massive category: the unthinkable:) but the human intelligence behind the bomb is not all that surprising. That we should be capable of destroying humanity completely after so much *needless? construction doesnt seem too far out. Its the most out of control possibility, but it relies on a necessary use of control in order to work: RESTRAINT becomes a key actor in our world of massive possibilities of destruction. Masco's argument about the global and the local is a new way of looking at the bomb and i think he makes a good point, the bomb zips up the world compressing time and space and making urgency and possibility of mass death ever looming realities, but realities that should remain unspoken and stuck up in the imagination, the )unreal place, the )unthinkable place.
Joseph Masco explores the harm nuclear developments in America have had on the nation itself. Due to the government’s eager desire for national security during a race between Russia for technological supremacy, the nuclear projects developed in areas of New Mexico have left its communities displaced and stripped from their cultural identity. What the author identifies as the “nuclear uncanny” has led the indigenous peoples of Pueblo to question the actions taken place at the community of Los Alamos and the consequences it has had on their health and place in the U.S. How expendable were their lives during those two decades (1940’s-1960s) of unknown nuclear testing. It seems that the goal of national security of these determining years of the Cold War era prioritized becoming a world leader in exchange of sacrificing the countries politics and structure.
Joseph Masco gives strong multidimensional insight into the consequences of LANL. At first, I was skeptical of his description of Pueblo culture because it was unclear if the traditions he was describing were old ideals or still active and alive in daily life. But his description of cultural landmarks and practices, and his choice of personal testimonies clarified how Pueblo people actually recognize, revive, and territorialize their culture. The statistics and maps also helped realize the impact LANL had on the cultural and economic life of its surrounding communities. In addition to cultural desecration, the project introduced a 'plutonium economy' that agitated local economic and environmental systems in irreversably destructive ways.
His theories of the nuclear uncanny and phantasmagoria are really intriguing and I think acutely identify some of the ways in which nuclear technology has caused a notable shift in contemporary American culture. I don't know if I would go as far as saying it is a 'national fetish' but I do think the constant 'national security' anxieties and public awareness of nuclear science/radiation, its invisible incorporation and temporally delayed health effects have transformed contemporary modes of consumption and response.
I dont know why this is so long... Masco’s examination of America’s explosive entry into the Nuclear age investigates the many social, environmental, economic repercussions associated with the atomic bomb. For a brief period of time, he explains, many people believed the achievement of the atom bomb made war obsolete, and represented a radical break from the past. In this way technology was seen as a form of social revolution. However, as nuclear weapons rapidly became a fetishized “a historical norm,” and represented the ultimate sign of national security/domination, the public’s reaction splintered. While nuclear strategists viewed weapons as specific tools of international relation, anti-nuclear activists felt that they were the ultimate representation of a chain of dangerous social processes. Many feared the weapons encouraged war, paranoia, and a feeling of powerlessness. Masco later discusses the rift between the northeastern pueblo inhabitants of the Parajito Plateau, and the newer residents/scientists that chose the site to perform nuclear testing. The secrecy surrounding the explosions caused concern, and LANL attempted to pacify complaints by insuring that the explosions would not rupture the nearby homes/religious sites. The government’s inability to understand the pueblo’s differentiation between natural seismic events and artificially created ones seemed especially relevant to this class. The original inhabitants of the test site were most disturbed by the unnatural corruption of their land: “Eastern pueblo cultures recognize and venerate the evolution in natural forms over time through erosion and decay” (134). This idea reminded me a bit of the concept/reaction to natural disasters.
According to Masco, the introduction of a weapon of this scale transformed the view of the world and confounded previous ideas of present and future, as well as the “permeability and relevance of national borders” (12). Interesting to me was the way in which the “nuclear possibility” still works its way into our collective consciousness in various ways. After the cold war, nuclear projects, such as uranium mining and plutonium production, involved (and endangered) the public, forming an interrelationship between the human body and nuclear technology. Even now, the secrecy surrounding nuclear testing causes a feeling of distrust rather than safety—an idea that the national system—economic, political, legal—is not working. Nuclear weapons do not have to be detonated into order to have profound cultural effects.
The notion of creation and destruction creates a border of natural duality; that is, these two intertwined concepts appeal to our sense of a larger universal law above us. The term is obviously infused with biblical connotations but the concept itself transcends such a mold. In fact the two truths of the world coincide in our collective nonconscious so that only the absolute reality that one nuclear act of detonation will result in a chain reaction of systematic total destruction – stops us. It is only the fact that we are no longer the sole bearers of the omega truth, the fact that the end of the world is no longer a mere tool possessed by one entity changes our ethical pre-tensions and applications [of nukes]. This certainly coincides with our perpetual fear of nukes (from 50’s Soviet to turn-of-the-century N. Korea, and now to contemporary Iran – to name but a few) “falling into the wrong hands” etc. but is contradictory to our statistical possession, not to mention the only to ever use in a nationalistic act of definitive and calculated destruction. So how does a natural law become part of the collective nonconscious? via the “objective of the experiment” (58). The objective being the sight, sound, shockwave, and heat of the nuclear detonation, confirmed by the overwhelming attention to the objective – unintentionally mind you – of the various overseers of the first explosion. It was the sensory overload of a creation invoking – literally, at the time – unimaginable destruction, the destroyer of worlds. Yet, I argue it is not so much the objective of the weapon, rather, the scale.
The Nuclear Borderlands got far more interesting than the first section we were to read. Joe Masco began relating the issues to things I could hold onto like the movie Them!, which was based on the giant ants that were created by man destroyed the. Nature plays a very interesting role in all this. On Page 298 he says, the “nature” of nature in interrogated in these discourses, as power of atomic energy, the “purity”, of ecosystems, and the adaptability of certain organisms to a radioactive environment are positioned against human “nature.” So here he talks about nature not as the physical environment but as in human condition or the nature of our actions which has evolved to go against the nature of other living things on this earth. But what does he mean by the “purity” of other ecosystems? Not all ecosystems are always in perfect balance and sometimes it does not have to do with human intervention, so why is it still considered “pure.” If one creature’s “nature” goes against another creature’s “nature,” is that not natural?
13 comments:
I found this book to be really intense. Although it didn’t have too strong of an agenda, it was slight yet uneasy. I found this reading to be overall a lot about the uncanny and defining its true role in lives at that time. As I read I began to think of the strange contradiction of nuclear weapons being created by humans yet completely unbeatable by humans. Using the weapons was described, in this book, as “technologically mediated violence” (Masco 9). This violence created a constant increase of anxiety, I cannot imagine living in an environment similar to that. Cities as they are, are anxiety filled. This seemed a situation where both the mind and the body had to catch up to one another. The existence of humans was on the run, but to nowhere. People were too numbed to really understand what was happening internally or externally. “The system reverses its role. Its goal is to numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become, rather, one of anesthetics” (Masco 9). Humans became robots. Throughout this reading I was constantly asking myself were people ever feeling safer because of nuclear weapons? The question was posed if nuclear weapons were a commodity or a national fetish. It is sad that something that mutates the bodies of humans could have possibly been a commodity OR a national fetish. Fearing death, mutation and disease every day of your life could cause you to question the trade offs involved in having nuclear weapons. At one point Masco speaks about how Freud described the “uncanny.” He said it created what was a “secret desire to return home” (Masco 28). This to me seemed so interesting because it almost makes everyone a helpless child again. Everyone is demoralized through fear and is at once children again.
I agree with Melina's insight into how Masco refers to the "uncanny" nature of atomic weapons. It seems to me though, that they are uncanny on even more levels. While they are created by humans, and certainly have a great degree of life force in them (or rather death force) they don't seem to follow the seemingly universal laws of living things. At the same time, they do not mimic nature or take on the tacit qualities of a commodity. For example, radiation could easily be given the qualities of an infection...some sort of contagion...but at the same time it cannot be killed like an infection can. Radiation strangely straddles a line between living and non-living.
Like a commodity, an atomic bomb does not have it's own morality...it is (hopefully, yet usually not) equipped with the morality of it's creator or the one who chooses or chooses not to use it. Fortunately, such a person must be a catalyst for setting it off...it cannot detonate itself. The person who would use the bomb in certain circumstances, yet decides against using the bomb does so out of a faith in the morality of his or her enemy.
All this creates a very strange, uncanny, war-like peace. (or peace-like war for that matter) I question whether there really is such a thing. As of right now there was NO SUCH THING as pax romana, there is no such thing as pax americana and there never was. If one uses militarism to avoid military conflict one is not in a state of peace. If the atomic bomb is the extension of the self, and peace is enforced through weapons of war, those creating such "peace" are in war.
Gertrude Stein's statement on the atomic bomb makes the bomb banal in an entirely new way - rather than fascination or terror, Stein reacts to the a-bomb with dismissal and fearlessness, saying "If you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting." I agree with her sentiment that "it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them" but it seems that with her dismissal of the bomb as somehow insignificant to human life, Stein is neglecting a critical cultural milieu of possible observation. Nuclear fetishism, while it may be wasteful to the human condition in general, has not only threatened modern society, but in some ways, has also inaugurated its creation. Masco argues that this fascination with the violence of nuclear power has completely reconfigured our place in time and space. The nuclear uncanny, as he puts it, has recreated our tactile experiences with the world, based on the threat of obliteration, that our very orientations are altered "not only in our technological infrastructure and our social institutions - they are in our bodies" (26). This is completely observable in the Nuevomexicano peoples on whom Masco focuses; the presence of nuclear power has entirely redefined the way they live in the world. I doubt that Stein would turn up her nose at the plight of these peoples, and their colonization by the laboratories of nuclear science. It seems to me that Stein's statement that "it's the living that are interesting" should be exactly why she ought to be interested in the atomic bomb, which, by her short quote on p14, she does not seem to demonstrate. It seems that Masco is addressing what Stein fails to acknowledge - the idea of atomic bombs affect human behavior and mentality without even necessarily affecting mortality in a concrete way. It is only the notion, only the idea of the a-bomb, that is necessary for influencing (and potentially controlling) the behavior of living human beings.
The beginning sections of The Nuclear Borderlands address the very fundamental and important transition into an age where almost instantaneous human extinction is not only possible but systematically manufactured and supported. Masco first discusses how mere knowledge of the bomb affects the human psyche, more specifically how we think of both our collective lives and deaths. Then emerges an interesting paradox. On the one hand, Masco argues (with philosophical help from Walter Benjamin), that the increased speed at which technology develops leads to a deadening of the senses. On the other hand, however, people are also terrified, even paranoid, of the nuclear threat. The invisibility of radiation enables the fear of annihilation to deeply proliferate into cognitive and constructed spaces of the imagination. Masco asserts that though the bomb was presented as a temporary (and, equally important, ONLY) solution to the Cold War, it has increasingly become a project of aesthetic-intellectualism and continues to affect all social institutions, both private and public.
Masco continues by focusing more specifically on those who worked at Los Alamos post-Cold War and begins to think about how such people came to engage with the bomb and experience its sociopolitical implications. He argues that "the shifting experimental regimes open to Los Alamos weapons scientists have, over time, worked to position the U.S. nuclear arsenal within the laboratory as [a project] that is both normalized and depoliticized" (p.45). The atomic bomb was discarded as a "nation-building"project and reinvented as the foundation of national security and (comparatively) innocent scientific exploration and discovery. Once above ground testing was no longer permitted, scientists were forced to interact not with the actual explosion itself but rather pre- and post-production of the bomb. In this regard, not even the scientists experience the bomb as a duality of terror and pleasure as they did during the testings of the 1940's and 50s; rather, they can only engage with the nuclear complex through academic and intellectual pretexts. The technological mediation of the actual explosion allows scientists and laymen alike to think of nuclear development as part of unavoidable scientific progress rather than unnecessary, aggressive militarism.
The book made me feel that we led our way into a dark future, whether we knew it or not. We are so determined to technologically progress that we don't take into consideration the possible consequences. Yes, it is amazing to see that atomic bombs are no longer imagination, yet it is also very scary. Because we were so hooked on seeing what we can do, we introduced terror into the world. Soon, Russia began to make their own weapons to match or overpower ours. There was fear of living your ordinary life one day and the next you were just ash. We try so hard to "enlighten" ourselves, but really we are only destroying ourselves.
-Jackie
So sorry to post so late.
I am also sorry because I finally got around to asking my Classical Greek 1 professor about the "xi" and he explained that the reason why it is theta-xi-omicron-nu as opposed to theta-epsilon-omicron-nu is because IN GERMANY the symbol for the Classical Greek "epsilon" is the American-British symbol for "xi" and I have only until now got about to clarifying revelation that lead from my admission of confusion on this blog.
Also because since I have posed so late about this, no one will probably listen to Charles Bernstein's contribution to this broadcast of poems for Obama:
http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=625
But since it will probably also relate to next week's reading, i will post it there to.
You don't have to listen to the other two poems though.
What seems to me notable about Masco's indeed multifacetedly fragmentary observations on the bomb, bomb culture and also about the bomb itself, which I can see some of my peers are already gathering together, is this idea that the bomb is pretty much the ultimate, perhaps even inevitable expression of the phallocentric nation state.
You talk about Freud, what does the bomb look like?
As Masco has noted, the bomb has a deep connection to Freudian concepts of Thanatos (from the Greek word, which is male gendered), that is, as Masco puts it, echoing Zizek, immortality. The idea of the nation-state as immortal, and nothing could be father from the truth. That death threats to it threaten to obliterate "the whole world." It creates its permanency with constant threat.
Always nice to read something from Stein. I daresay Masco is irony-deaf in his reading however.
at first i was really confused at the turn to this book and its relation to your course. But of course, i realised how awkward an atomic bomb is in relation to what is ::natural:.
The bomb itself is hard to cope with, to comprehend *(perhaps why Masco lumps it into the massive category: the unthinkable:) but the human intelligence behind the bomb is not all that surprising. That we should be capable of destroying humanity completely after so much *needless? construction doesnt seem too far out. Its the most out of control possibility, but it relies on a necessary use of control in order to work: RESTRAINT becomes a key actor in our world of massive possibilities of destruction. Masco's argument about the global and the local is a new way of looking at the bomb and i think he makes a good point, the bomb zips up the world compressing time and space and making urgency and possibility of mass death ever looming realities, but realities that should remain unspoken and stuck up in the imagination, the )unreal place, the )unthinkable place.
Joseph Masco explores the harm nuclear developments in America have had on the nation itself. Due to the government’s eager desire for national security during a race between Russia for technological supremacy, the nuclear projects developed in areas of New Mexico have left its communities displaced and stripped from their cultural identity. What the author identifies as the “nuclear uncanny” has led the indigenous peoples of Pueblo to question the actions taken place at the community of Los Alamos and the consequences it has had on their health and place in the U.S. How expendable were their lives during those two decades (1940’s-1960s) of unknown nuclear testing. It seems that the goal of national security of these determining years of the Cold War era prioritized becoming a world leader in exchange of sacrificing the countries politics and structure.
Joseph Masco gives strong multidimensional insight into the consequences of LANL. At first, I was skeptical of his description of Pueblo culture because it was unclear if the traditions he was describing were old ideals or still active and alive in daily life. But his description of cultural landmarks and practices, and his choice of personal testimonies clarified how Pueblo people actually recognize, revive, and territorialize their culture. The statistics and maps also helped realize the impact LANL had on the cultural and economic life of its surrounding communities. In addition to cultural desecration, the project introduced a 'plutonium economy' that agitated local economic and environmental systems in irreversably destructive ways.
His theories of the nuclear uncanny and phantasmagoria are really intriguing and I think acutely identify some of the ways in which nuclear technology has caused a notable shift in contemporary American culture. I don't know if I would go as far as saying it is a 'national fetish' but I do think the constant 'national security' anxieties and public awareness of nuclear science/radiation, its invisible incorporation and temporally delayed health effects have transformed contemporary modes of consumption and response.
I dont know why this is so long...
Masco’s examination of America’s explosive entry into the Nuclear age investigates the many social, environmental, economic repercussions associated with the atomic bomb. For a brief period of time, he explains, many people believed the achievement of the atom bomb made war obsolete, and represented a radical break from the past. In this way technology was seen as a form of social revolution. However, as nuclear weapons rapidly became a fetishized “a historical norm,” and represented the ultimate sign of national security/domination, the public’s reaction splintered. While nuclear strategists viewed weapons as specific tools of international relation, anti-nuclear activists felt that they were the ultimate representation of a chain of dangerous social processes. Many feared the weapons encouraged war, paranoia, and a feeling of powerlessness. Masco later discusses the rift between the northeastern pueblo inhabitants of the Parajito Plateau, and the newer residents/scientists that chose the site to perform nuclear testing. The secrecy surrounding the explosions caused concern, and LANL attempted to pacify complaints by insuring that the explosions would not rupture the nearby homes/religious sites. The government’s inability to understand the pueblo’s differentiation between natural seismic events and artificially created ones seemed especially relevant to this class. The original inhabitants of the test site were most disturbed by the unnatural corruption of their land: “Eastern pueblo cultures recognize and venerate the evolution in natural forms over time through erosion and decay” (134). This idea reminded me a bit of the concept/reaction to natural disasters.
According to Masco, the introduction of a weapon of this scale transformed the view of the world and confounded previous ideas of present and future, as well as the “permeability and relevance of national borders” (12). Interesting to me was the way in which the “nuclear possibility” still works its way into our collective consciousness in various ways. After the cold war, nuclear projects, such as uranium mining and plutonium production, involved (and endangered) the public, forming an interrelationship between the human body and nuclear technology. Even now, the secrecy surrounding nuclear testing causes a feeling of distrust rather than safety—an idea that the national system—economic, political, legal—is not working. Nuclear weapons do not have to be detonated into order to have profound cultural effects.
The notion of creation and destruction creates a border of natural duality; that is, these two intertwined concepts appeal to our sense of a larger universal law above us. The term is obviously infused with biblical connotations but the concept itself transcends such a mold. In fact the two truths of the world coincide in our collective nonconscious so that only the absolute reality that one nuclear act of detonation will result in a chain reaction of systematic total destruction – stops us. It is only the fact that we are no longer the sole bearers of the omega truth, the fact that the end of the world is no longer a mere tool possessed by one entity changes our ethical pre-tensions and applications [of nukes]. This certainly coincides with our perpetual fear of nukes (from 50’s Soviet to turn-of-the-century N. Korea, and now to contemporary Iran – to name but a few) “falling into the wrong hands” etc. but is contradictory to our statistical possession, not to mention the only to ever use in a nationalistic act of definitive and calculated destruction. So how does a natural law become part of the collective nonconscious? via the “objective of the experiment” (58). The objective being the sight, sound, shockwave, and heat of the nuclear detonation, confirmed by the overwhelming attention to the objective – unintentionally mind you – of the various overseers of the first explosion. It was the sensory overload of a creation invoking – literally, at the time – unimaginable destruction, the destroyer of worlds. Yet, I argue it is not so much the objective of the weapon, rather, the scale.
The Nuclear Borderlands got far more interesting than the first section we were to read. Joe Masco began relating the issues to things I could hold onto like the movie Them!, which was based on the giant ants that were created by man destroyed the. Nature plays a very interesting role in all this. On Page 298 he says, the “nature” of nature in interrogated in these discourses, as power of atomic energy, the “purity”, of ecosystems, and the adaptability of certain organisms to a radioactive environment are positioned against human “nature.” So here he talks about nature not as the physical environment but as in human condition or the nature of our actions which has evolved to go against the nature of other living things on this earth. But what does he mean by the “purity” of other ecosystems? Not all ecosystems are always in perfect balance and sometimes it does not have to do with human intervention, so why is it still considered “pure.” If one creature’s “nature” goes against another creature’s “nature,” is that not natural?
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