Through Post-Atomic Eyes 9780228013761

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Table of contents :
Cover
THROUGH POST-ATOMIC EYES
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
To See through Post-Atomic Eyes
Blast, Blast, Blast
PART ONE | NUCLEAR AFTERIMAGES
1 Godzilla’s Breath
Uranium Tailings #12
2 Port Hope in the Era of Nuclear Waste
Hot Dam Black Veil
3 Post-Atomic Childhood around 1980
No Immediate Threat
4 Flashblindness
Atomic Tourist / Trinity
PART TWO | BEYOND THE BOMB
5 Below the Bombs
A Very Cold Winter
6 Big Data? No Thanks
Peace Camp, from Proving Ground: Nevada
7 Little Boys and Blue Skies: Drones through Post-Atomic Eyes
The Last Days
PART THREE | HIROSHIMA AFTER FUKUSHIMA
8 Through the Lens of Fukushima
Hibaku Jumoku/The A-Bombed Trees
9 As If Nothing Happened, As If Everything Is the Same: Composure in the Wake of Fukushima
Somebody’s Boots, Namie, Fukushima Exclusion Zone
10 The Blindspot of the Post-Atomic
Trace Evidence
PART FOUR | ATOMIC ANTHROPOCENE
The Distant Early Warning Project
11 The Half-Life of Yasser Arafat
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
12 The Future-Past, the Future-Present, the Future-Possible: The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Photographs of David McMillan
Zero Hour, Nuit Blanche, Toronto
13 Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness
Illustrations
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Recommend Papers

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Through Post-Atomic Eyes

McGill-Queen’s/BeaverBrook canadian Foundation studies in art History Martha Langford and Sandra PaikowSky, SerieS editorS

recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. this series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. we welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including native and inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis andrew horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. Mckay

The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography françois-Marc gagnon translated by Peter feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology edited by Louis Martin

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada edited by Carol Payne and andrea kunard

Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher armstrong

Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 robert Mellin

Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada edited by Lynda Jessup, erin Morton, and kirsty robertson

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales edited and with an introduction by françois-Marc gagnon, translation by nancy Senior, Modernization by réal ouellet

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 karen Stanworth

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums ruth B. Phillips

Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums andrea terry

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra alfoldy

Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett

Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 edited by kristina huneault and Janice anderson

Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena howard Shubert

Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted edited by Bridget elliott

For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in TwentiethCentury Nova Scotia erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 anne whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World edited by Martha Langford Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 edited by dominic hardy, annie gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada kristina huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China anthony w. Lee Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums kirsty robertson What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear Through Post-Atomic Eyes edited by Claudette Lauzon and John o’Brian

THROUGH

POST-ATOMIC EYES Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-2280-0139-3 (cloth) Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from Simon Fraser University’s University Publications Fund.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Through post-atomic eyes / edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian. Names: Lauzon, Claudette, 1969– editor. | O’Brian, John, 1944– editor. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20200193333 | ISBN 9780228001393 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Social aspects. | LCSH: Art and photography. | LCSH: Art and nuclear warfare. | LCSH: Art and society. | LCSH: Nuclear accidents. | LCSH: Radioactive pollution. | LCSH: Nuclear industry. | LCSH: Atomic bomb—Social aspects. Classification: LCC TR183 .T57 2020 | DDC 704.9/49306—dc23

Set in 11/14 Minion Pro with Bison, Calps Sans, and Opinion Pro Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

contents

Acknowledgments

xi

To See through Post-Atomic Eyes 3 Introduction by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian Blast, Blast, Blast 17 Project by Kristan Horton

Part One | nuclear afterimages 1 Godzilla’s Breath 23 Essay by John O’Brian Uranium Tailings #12 43 Project by Edward Burtynsky 2 Port Hope in the Era of Nuclear Waste 46 Photo essay by Robert Del Tredici and Blake Fitzpatrick Hot Dam Black Veil 65 Project by Andrea Pinheiro 3 Post-Atomic Childhood around 1980 Essay by Lindsey A. Freeman

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c On ten ts

No Immediate Threat 83 Project by Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge 4 Flashblindness 86 Essay by Joseph Masco Atomic Tourist / Trinity 107 Project by Mary Kavanagh

Part tWO | BeYOnD tHe BOmB 5 Below the Bombs 113 Essay by Matthew Farish A Very Cold Winter 133 Project by Mark Ruwedel 6 Big Data? No Thanks 136 Essay by James Bridle Peace Camp, from Proving Ground: Nevada Project by Erin Siddall

149

7 Little Boys and Blue Skies: Drones through Post-Atomic Eyes Essay by Derek Gregory

152

The Last Days 193 Project by Blaine Campbell

Part tHree | HirOsHima after fukusHima 8 Through the Lens of Fukushima 199 Transcript of a recorded talk by Julie Salverson and Peter C. Van Wyck Hibaku Jumoku/The A-Bombed Trees Project by Katy McCormick

211

9 As If Nothing Happened, As If Everything Is the Same: Composure in the Wake of Fukushima 214 Essay by Kyo Maclear viii

10 The Blindspot of the Post-Atomic Photo essay by Eric Cazdyn

235

238

c On ten ts

Somebody’s Boots, Namie, Fukushima Exclusion Zone Project by Donald Weber

Trace Evidence 267 Project by Susan Schuppli

Part fOur | atOmic antHrOPOcene The Distant Early Warning Project 273 Project by Charles Stankievech 11 The Half-Life of Yasser Arafat Essay by Eyal Weizman

276

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone 283 Project by David McMillan 12 The Future-Past, the Future-Present, the Future-Possible: The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Photographs of David McMillan 286 Essay by Karla McManus Zero Hour, Nuit Blanche, Toronto Project by Public Studio

304

13 Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness Essay by Karen Barad

306

Illustrations 333 Bibliography 339 Contributors

355

Index 367

ix

acknowledgments

This book is a cooperative endeavour. We would like to thank the many artists, photographers, and writers who have contributed to the volume: Karen Barad, James Bridle, Edward Burtynsky, Blaine Campbell, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Eric Cazdyn, Robert Del Tredici, Matthew Farish, Blake Fitzpatrick, Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatsky (Public Studio), Lindsey A. Freeman, Derek Gregory, Kristan Horton, Mary Kavanagh, Kyo Maclear, Katy McCormick, Karla McManus, David McMillan, Joseph Masco, Andrea Pinheiro, Mark Ruwedel, Julie Salverson and Peter C. Van Wyck, Susan Schuppli, Erin Siddall, Charles Stankievech, Donald Weber, and Eyal Weizman. We would also like to acknowledge those who lent support to the endeavour at various times from its inception to its realization. These include individuals who assisted with the conference Through PostAtomic Eyes held at ocad University and the University of Toronto in 2016. The conference was arranged in conjunction with the exhibition Camera Atomica, organized by John O’Brian for the Art Gallery of Ontario. Special thanks to Sophie Hackett, Kathleen Mclean, Paola Poletto, and Jim Shedden at the ago, as well as Amy Meleca, Jessica Law, and Jeff O’Brien, who helped organize and run the conference, and our videographer Renée Lear. We also wish to thank Yani Kong, Micaela Kwiatkowski and Michael Mao, who assisted with the initial preparations for the book, Dionne Co, who assisted with the final preparations, Garet Markvoort, who designed the book, Allison Mander-Wionzek, who assisted in preparing the index, and the staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press with whom we worked, especially Jonathan Crago, Kathleen Fraser, and James Leahy. We also thank the many artists, organizations, and publications that gave permission to reprint material in this volume.

ack n OW leD g m en ts xii

We are grateful for valuable financial support provided by the following institutions: The Art Gallery of Ontario; Canada Council for the Arts; McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History; ocad University; Simon Fraser University; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and the University of British Columbia. A version of chapter 1 appears in John O’Brian, The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020). An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as Lindsey A. Freeman, “Atomic Childhood around 1980,” Memory Studies 9, no. 1 (January 2016), and is reprinted here by permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd. An earlier version of chapter 11 appears as Eyal Weizman, “Arafat’s Tomb,” London Review of Books 36, no. 1 (January 2014). A version of chapter 13 appears as Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” New Formations 92 (August 2017).

Through Post-Atomic Eyes

introduction: to see through Post-atomic eyes clauDette lauzOn anD JOHn O’Brian The spread or proliferation of repercussions from every kind of disaster hereafter will bear the mark of that paradigm represented by nuclear risk. Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima, 2015 They asked me what I thought about the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it. Gertrude Stein, “Reflection on the Atomic Bomb,” 1946

What does it mean to live in a world transformed by nuclear risk and destruction? How might we understand some of the most pressing issues of our time – from weapons proliferation and aerial surveillance to toxic waste disposal and climate change – as atomic by-products? Can the arts in particular offer a sharpened lens through which to see and comprehend the vexed legacy of the nuclear age in our increasingly unstable time? What might it mean to see the world through post-atomic eyes? These are the questions that anchor this book. To address them, we’ve assembled a group of scholars and artists whose areas of expertise span the sciences and humanities, including military geography, performance studies, anthropology, quantum physics, photography, big data, and forensic architecture. What unites this diverse group of contributors to Through Post-Atomic Eyes is, first and foremost, the conviction that the atomic bomb demands as much attention today as it did in 1946, when Gertrude Stein was unable to muster hers.1 But what also draws our contributors, and this volume, together is the belief that any approach to atomic culture and its aftermaths must be closely attuned to matters of visuality.2 From the iconic black-and-white photograph of a

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mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki in 1945 to the steady stream of real-time video documenting the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, images help to shape both our perceptions and our actions. But as the contributors to this book demonstrate, artists equip us with the capacity to perceive and act otherwise – to better see the hidden structures, networks, and flows that constitute the contemporary nuclear-industrial complex, to demystify and challenge convenient orthodoxies of safety and security, but also to pay attention to what Eric Cazdyn, in this volume, calls the blindspots that complicate our desire for total vision. Stein’s indifference towards the bomb was at odds with majority opinion at the time. Following the end of the Second World War, intellectuals and commentators in the media were anxious to express their views on the bomb. Within days of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American journalist Norman Cousins wrote that “The fear of irrational death … has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions.”3 Albert Einstein is said to have regretted that “The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking … If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”4 Japanese victims reported that the aerial attacks by the Enola Gay and Bockscar seemed more like ruptures in the order of nature than military interventions.5 “People are dying, mysteriously and horribly,” wrote the Australian correspondent Wilfred Burchett for a London newspaper about those initially spared in the bombing of Hiroshima, “from an unknown something I can only describe as atomic plague.”6 First it was vomiting and diarrhea, then bleeding gums and the loss of hair. Still, some Christian fundamentalists welcomed the news of atomic plague, as it accorded with their eschatological beliefs.7 The apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation was at hand. Fast forward from the end of hostilities in 1945 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. Almost overnight, Stein’s lack of interest in the atomic bomb went from being a minority attitude to a dominant one, as the perceived threat of nuclear conflict subsided across Europe and North America.8 The dangers posed by nuclear weapons no longer seemed to present a global threat that required ongoing vigilance. People forgot to be afraid and were unable, in the words of Stein, “to take any interest” in the atomic bomb. In How We Forgot the Cold War, Jon Wiener observes that people stopped paying attention to memorial sites dedicated to the Cold War. The least visited Cold War site in the United States was the pumpkin patch where Whittaker Chambers hid microfilm incriminating Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy.9 During the red-baiting McCarthy era, few news stories had generated more attention. Although

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mistrust of science and nuclear technology persisted, particularly after the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, wariness about the bomb evaporated almost as quickly as the Berlin Wall collapsed. The mushroom cloud became less a sign of menace than of nostalgia, a Cold War icon rubbed smooth by constant reproduction and commercial exploitation.10 In the 1994 film True Lies, Jamie Lee Curtis and Arnold Schwarzenegger kiss as a mushroom rises behind them, as if an unfolding nuclear explosion was a perfect accompaniment to romance.11 Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, famously argued that existential threats to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism disappeared after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The collapse announced “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”12 The book contains no entry in the index for the atomic bomb. We think that the histories and legacies of the modern era require a full index of atomic references. At the same time, fast forwarding now to the early decades of the twenty-first century, it is clear that a host of catastrophic scenarios – from the devastation wrought by human-induced climate change, to the future of autonomous weapons, to the dangers posed by big data mining and global surveillance culture – now compete with the ongoing nuclear threat for our anxious attention. Indeed, in 2007, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, which since 1947 has measured the proximity of nuclear annihilation, introduced global warming to its apocalyptic metrics. At that time, the hands of the clock were moved two minutes closer to midnight (to 11:55 p.m.) to indicate both the ongoing dangers associated with nuclear energy and the increasingly dire threat of climate change.13 The bulletin announced at the time that it would “continue to monitor progress on reducing dangers from nuclear weapons [as well as] efforts to reduce carbon emissions,”14 and they have since added what they call “disruptive technologies” – namely artificial intelligence and biotechnology – to the watchlist. The present volume is likewise concerned with what we are calling a global shift from the atomic age to the post-atomic context of the twenty-first century – insisting, all the while, that the prefix post- delineates neither beyond nor after but rather the troubling of linear narratives of development (think post-modern, post-colonial, post-human, even post-Communism). As Karen Barad puts it in regard to post-humanism, the prefix urges us toward “a critical engagement that asks a prior question of how the divide is constituted and what its material/materialized/ materializing … ongoing (and iteratively reconfigured) effects are.”15 To invoke the post-atomic, then, is to engage critically with both the material and discursive contours of the divide between the modern nuclear

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era and its contemporary reconfigurations – and at present these contours remain ill defined. So on one hand, Rey Chow cautions that the bomb tends to overwhelm our collective imaginary of disaster to the extent that “the world has been … oblivious (until fairly recently) to other forms of damages to the ecosphere that have not attained the same level of visibility.”16 On the other hand, Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that the myriad destructive technologies that have emerged in the last twenty years must be located within a military-industrial trajectory in which nuclear energy plays a crucial role.17 It is not surprising, in this respect, that the Reaper drone – the most recognized uav in international airspace today – is produced by the nuclear industry giant General Atomics, nor that the “smart” missiles deployed by weaponized drones are produced using depleted uranium that, in addition to having a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years, is triggering incalculable toxic consequences.18 One of the chief concerns of Through Post-Atomic Eyes, then, is to comprehend how the dangers posed by atomic energy and nuclear warfare shape our responses to these other imminent threats. While we were preparing this book for publication, the ongoing possibility of nuclear conflict resurfaced in public consciousness with a vengeance. This was provoked by Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, who engaged in nuclear brinkmanship by baiting each other and trading insults. The US president provided the North Korean supreme leader with the nickname of “little rocket man” and the supreme leader characterized the president as a “mentally deranged US dotard.”19 They were also provoked by modernization programs in nuclear arsenals, including the development of low-yield weapons (mini-nukes) for use in place of conventional weapons. The threats posed by such a geopolitically volatile nuclear landscape pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock closer yet to midnight in January 2018. The president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declared that the world was “on the cusp of a new arms race” and there was a growing likelihood of more nuclear accidents.20 Later that year, Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal – a multilateral agreement signed in 2015 to curtail Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the easing of sanctions – thus threatening to further destabilize the region, and the world. In this troubling context, Through Post-Atomic Eyes opens an urgent conversation about the fraught legacy of the atomic age today as told through visual culture. How has representation served and supported the modern nuclear project? And on the other hand, how can images be productively marshalled to produce what Susie Linfield calls “unexpected, unruly responses”21 to the untold dangers of nuclear weapons and the devastating effects of nuclear meltdown? An underlying conviction of this volume is that to attend critically and creatively to these

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questions we must take seriously the tremendous range of strategies and insights that the arts, humanities, and social sciences bring to bear. To that end, we aim to stay true to Linfield’s call to respond to modern and contemporary histories of violence in unruly, unexpected ways. From long-form essays that position nuclear culture within wider historical and conceptual frameworks, to speculative interventions that poke at dominant discursive frameworks, to photo essays that establish provocative counternarratives of resistance and truth telling, to poetic accounts of the personal fallout of the atomic age, the chapters that follow offer multiple lenses through which to better comprehend the post-atomic world that we inhabit today.

Nuclear Afterimages One of our main claims is that nuclear culture has both shaped, and been shaped by, the medium of photography. If, as Blake Fitzpatrick suggests, “the meaning of nuclear war will always exceed the partiality of any representational frame,”22 what role does the photograph play in understanding the post-atomic inheritance of atomic anxieties? In July 2009, shortly after the nru reactor at Chalk River Laboratories in northern Ontario began leaking heavy water and had to be shut down, art historian John O’Brian received an email from its Radiological Protection unit asking if he would be willing to participate in a survey on public attitudes toward radiation. “The public has an irrational attitude to the radiation hazards presented by nuclear, medical and environmental factors,” the email stated, which was “distorted by information filters that change the balance between perceived benefit and detriment.” By “information filters,” the organizers of the survey meant news media, film, photography, video, television, music, books, and the internet. In our opening chapter, “Godzilla’s Breath,” O’Brian investigates one of those filters – photography – and asks: If photographic representations distort public perceptions of radiation risk, as claimed, what are the mechanisms by which this happens? The question of public perception – and photography’s capacity to reshape it – is also the crux of the second chapter, “Port Hope in the Era of Nuclear Waste,” in which photographers Blake Fitzpatrick and Robert Del Tredici put Canada’s conduit to the nuclear world under the lens. Port Hope’s nuclear-age roots predate the first atomic weapons: a radium refinery was built there in the 1930s, and in the 1940s it began refining uranium for the Manhattan Project. Since the 1970s, the town has been at the centre of a massive effort to clean up the invisible but highly radioactive waste that still contaminates its soil and water. In their collaborative photo essay, Fitzpatrick and Del Tredici shed light on 7

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the ongoing fallout of this troubled history, creating an intimate portrait of slow violence in Canada’s atomic town. It is a long day’s drive from Port Hope, Ontario, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where refined uranium was secretly shipped for enrichment during the Manhattan Project. In “Post-Atomic Childhood around 1980,” sociologist Lindsey Freeman revisits the Atomic City (also her place of birth) with a series of semi-autobiographical vignettes on the mnemonics of nuclear culture. What emerges from the collage of recollections, mementos, and photographs that she shares is the strong impression of a town, indeed a nation, unable to reconcile post-atomic anxieties with technofuturistic optimism and nuclear nostalgia. In the process, Freeman captures both the materiality of memory and the viscerality of representation as they coalesce into what she calls the nuclear uncanny. In his own study of matter, memory, and visuality in the nuclear age, anthropologist Joseph Masco considers how the iconography of the mushroom cloud has been produced and managed by the state to instill a kind of collective blindness in the service of nuclear nationalism. In “Flashblindness,” Masco is concerned, like Eric Cazdyn, with the blindspots that photography produces – in this case, how photographs of the bomb create “gaps and silences” in public narratives regarding the dangers of nuclear energy. Observing that the 1945 Trinity detonation saw the deployment of dozens of still- and moving-image cameras to document the test, Masco argues that the images produced would come (perhaps not inadvertently) to overwhelm “the other modes of exposure” that necessarily attend to nuclear science. In the long term, these erasures would come to haunt the nuclear imaginary, generating what Masco calls the “distinct psychosocial domain” of flashblindness – “where not seeing, amnesia, and historical revisionism become ways of stabilizing a society that has lived for generations now with, and through, nuclear ambitions and fears.”

Beyond the Bomb The nuclear fears and ambitions that have come to define the atomic – and now the post-atomic – age are, as Masco underscores, intimately connected to the explosion of image culture in the twentieth century. In the second section of this volume, we consider how this set of connections has helped to structure contemporary intersections of photography, nuclear industries, and military technocultures. In 1989 as the Cold War was warming up (and the planet too), Paul Virilio observed that twentieth-century technologies – computers, nuclear weapons, film, photography – had not only become pervasive but had also developed 8

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a “fatal interdependence,” while the histories of warfare and of visual aesthetic practices within modernity (namely cinema and photography) had dangerously converged to cut off access to the real. The proliferation of screens in modern warfare was especially troubling, for it signified what Virilio saw as the “disintegration of the warrior” into a hall of mirrors populated by digital displays, radar screens, onboard computers, and “self-navigating Sidewinder missiles fitted with a camera or infrared guidance system.”23 In the decades since Virilio sounded this alarm, technology (and military technology especially) has further multiplied its mediating devices; indeed drone warfare has been said to transform the battlefield into a “gamespace”24 in which “joystick soldiers”25 adopt a “Playstation mentality”26 that desensitizes them to the material realities and corporeal consequences of war. With this in mind, the chapters in the second section address the extent to which the scopic regimes operationalized by drone warfare, surveillance culture, big data, and even the landscapes of settler colonialism have their genesis in atomic military culture. The atomic story is also a story of territorial expulsion, occupation, expansion, and contamination. In “Below the Bombs,” geographer Matthew Farish continues the conversation started by Masco, observing that during the early Cold War, the photographing of nuclear weapons testing in Nevada, Alaska, and the South Pacific was of tremendous military interest. Farish’s chapter considers the relationship between these nuclear tests and the landscapes in which they were conducted – the places beneath the bomb – which became palimpsests for practices of human experimentation, the erasure of Indigenous populations, and extraordinary contamination. With close attention to the filmic and photographic records that both depicted and helped to fabricate a narrative rationale for these practices, Farish approaches Cold War weapons testing through the “probing grounds” in which they were situated, offering a more nuanced understanding of the nuclear age and its geographies. In “Big Data? No Thanks,” artist and writer James Bridle teases out a curious set of connections between the bomb and big data. The history of atomic weaponry, Bridle suggests, is the history of computing, and this history – one rife with obfuscation and inscrutability – is deeply complicit in the surveillant present. This historic capacity and inscrutability have their parallel in a contemporary infrastructure, that of surveillance and data gathering, an infrastructure that occupies a similar landscape: from the Los Alamos mesa to the nsa ’s massive Utah Data Center. Today, Bridle argues, the Western world finds itself in a state of dread caused not by the shadow of the bomb, but by the shadow of data. If, Bridle suggests, the twentieth century can be understood in retrospect as a Cold War minefield of existential threat, we are still living in

9

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a minefield now – one where critical public health infrastructure runs on insecure public phone networks, financial markets rely on vulnerable, decades-old computer systems, and everything from mortgage applications to lethal weapons systems are governed by inscrutable and unaccountable softwares. Nuclear history reminds us that this has long been standard practice. Nuclear history and its impact on the standard practices of contemporary drone warfare today is a story that has yet to be written. In “Little Boys and Blue Skies: Drones through Post-Atomic Eyes,” critical geographer Derek Gregory traces a series of entanglements between drones and nuclear war, linking them to a preoccupation with American bodies and American lives. Some of these entanglements are rooted in popular culture: in the wake of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, public commentary in the United States treated American lives as newly vulnerable and repeatedly imagined the consequences of coordinated nuclear strikes on major cities. But part of it was techno-scientific: the US Air Force experimented with the use of remotely controlled aircraft to deliver nuclear bombs and to take samples from atomic clouds in order to minimize risks to its aircrews. These concerns have been radicalized by today’s Predators and Reapers, projecting power without vulnerability, but the two also find common ground in a distinctive geography. The Nevada test site was the major locus for atomic tests in the continental United States and the Air Force portal to this vast laboratory – Indian Springs – is now Creech Air Force Base, the hub for today’s remote operations. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the remoteness that surrounds the vulnerability of lives that are “othered” by American aerial violence.

Hiroshima after Fukushima Of all the lives rendered disposable by American aerial violence, those lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 continue to epitomize the efficient, enormous brutality of the nuclear bomb. Furthermore, as Rosalyn Deutsche reminds us in Hiroshima after Iraq, Hiroshima is “an event that is not over.”27 Like the modern in postmodern, the colonial in post-colonial and the atomic in post-atomic, Hiroshima continues to haunt the global social imaginary, perhaps never more so than on 11 March 2011. On that day, the Tohoku region of Japan experienced a cataclysmic earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. The raging tsunami rushed over embankments, flowing into towns and cities, erasing concrete roads and steel bridges. It plucked buildings from the ground and hurled them across districts. In the town of Otsuchi, a ferry landed on top of someone’s home. In Miyagi prefecture, an entire tree with roots was deposited in a school corridor. Witnesses on rooftops 10

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watched smoke billowing from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, in what would come to be the largest nuclear catastrophe since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. One week later, as the Fukushima disaster continued to unfold in front of the world, environmental journalist Agnès Sinaï predicted in Le Monde that the meltdown marked “the deafening finale of the Anthropocene.” The catastrophe, she continued, “has ordered us to keep a vigil that is independent of the rhythm of thermo-industrial machines.”28 But what appeared at the time to be a finale quickly revealed itself to be a relatively brief pause in what Sinaï describes as an anthropocenic “era of exuberance that abolishes anxiety.”29 While the worldwide development of nuclear energy stalled after 2011, many countries are now “back on the nuclear bandwagon,”30 including Japan.31 Against the backdrop of this continuing march toward an unknowable nuclear future, it has fallen upon artists to keep vigilant record of the continuing legacies of both Hiroshima and Fukushima. In this section, we present case studies in which artists and activists continue to probe the socio-cultural implications and consequences of nuclear disaster. As part of a long-term, ongoing project concerning the material, cultural, and symbolic geographies of the nuclear, cultural studies scholars Julie Salverson and Peter C. Van Wyck have spoken with scholars, artists, activists, and educators in Japan, and documented survivor trees in Hiroshima and tsunami stones on the Sanriku coast, in order to take measure of the long and thick line that joins Hiroshima and Fukushima. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, we cannot “ignore what is suggested by the rhyme of these two names, for rhyme gathers together – reluctantly against all poetry – the ferment of something shared.”32 “Through the Lens of Fukushima” is presented in this volume as a transcript of a paper that Salverson and Van Wyck delivered at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference that we hosted in Toronto in October 2015. Through field notes, analysis, and reflection, the chapter considers the nature – and structure – of the lens that might be appropriate to understand this something shared: the moments of encounter, the gathering together of images of the fixed and the exposed. In the days and months following the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, a narrative emerged in the international media about Japanese stoicism that seemed dramatically at odds with the crisis facing the country. This story, aided by the compositional device of the camera and stereotypes of Japanese fortitude, testified to the triumph of social order in the face of terrifying discomposure. In “As If Nothing Happened, As If Everything Is the Same: Composure in the Wake of Fukushima,” writer Kyo Maclear explores the work of photo artists Norihito Ogata and Munemasa Takahashi, whose images trouble the discourse of composure in post-nuclear Japan. As the Japanese government moves towards rapid reconstruction, these artists have rejected

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the directive to behave “as if nothing has happened, as if everything is the same.” Instead they claim the right to be disturbed – and to be disturbing. Lingering in the places and moments where things break down, where life is at its limits of composure, their art evokes a radical disquiet. As viewers we are invited to shed our own composure, all the while remembering that our fragile world is made more so by efforts to suppress this awareness in the name of technological growth and progress. In May 2015, cultural theorist and filmmaker Eric Cazdyn brought what he calls the Blindspot Machine (a rig consisting of four video cameras positioned along a cardinal axis to create an incomplete 360-degree landscape) to the epicentre of the 2011 disaster. In “The Blindspot of the Post-Atomic,” Cazdyn presents an experimental but also intimate reflection on his ongoing exploration regarding the category of the blindspot. If the blindspot can be understood as a kind of absence that structures the present and is “at the bottom” of things, the provocation of this photo essay is to push beyond such models so that the blindspot is also considered to exist on the surface of our world and, in some sort of time-warped way, coming from the future. What’s happening in those blindspots? What might they teach us about how we look, how we desire, and how change occurs in the world?

Atomic Anthropocene The final section of the book focuses on the complex temporality of nuclear technologies. For Rob Nixon, the “attritional lethality”33 wrought by climate change, toxic drift, and the environmental aftermaths of war is easily ignored, creating a crisis of inattention that exacerbates ongoing crises of poverty, social conflict, and ecosystem degradation. And certainly the distributed nature of radioactive material triggers just such a paradigm. The nuclear, as Schuppli notes, “expands the original contact zone of the event … making it difficult to apprehend the slow leaking of its violence across territories and over epochs.”34 In this section, we ask: Is it possible to trace what Nixon terms the “slow violence” of nuclear energy, and what do lens-based practices contribute to these investigations? With careful attention to what scientists now identify as the atomic beginnings of the Anthropocene epoch, we explore the temporal dimensions that circumscribe the intersections of nuclear and photographic technologies, presenting creative tactics for representing what Cazdyn calls “the impossibility of representing the very time-space of radical transformation” constituted by slow violence.35 The section begins with architect and writer Eyal Weizman’s journalistic account of the 2012 investigation of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Originally written shortly after a Swiss forensic team 12

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determined that Arafat had likely been the victim of polonium poisoning, “The Half Life of Yasser Arafat” astutely compares that forensic investigation to the concurrent building of the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah. Weizman observes that while both aimed to bring material traces of the past into the present, the evidence produced by forensic science is “harder to ignore” than the selective memory produced in curatorial contexts. Underscoring forensic architecture’s contribution to truth-finding in the age of “fake news,” Weizman concludes provocatively that forensics “could become a tool of radical politics.”36 In the following chapter, art historian Karla McManus further establishes the radical potential of forensic evidence in the context of the documentary photography of David McMillan. Since 1994, McMillan has repeatedly photographed the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and its surrounding Exclusion Zone, a region of thirty kilometres maintained by the Ukrainian and Belarusian authorities. McMillan’s photographs of an abandoned and toxic landscape slowly returning to some version of a natural state remind us of the long reach of history. The tension in these images, between future and past, between humanity’s destructive impact on nature and nature’s own capacity to adapt to nuclear crisis, speaks to our current anxiety about climate change, the geological legacy of nuclear waste, and the human struggle to adapt or perish in uncertain times. As McManus suggests, these photographs prick the imagination and present contingency as part of the image, offering a darkly hopeful “what if ” for the future of the planet. The volume closes with philosopher and physicist Karen Barad’s “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness,” which approaches the violent legacy of the atom bomb through the time-hopping narrative of Kyoko Hayashi’s 2010 novella From Trinity to Trinity. Challenging physics’ epistemological imperialism, Barad excavates from the deconstructive impulse of quantum mechanics new radical political imaginaries. She reads quantum mechanics’ interruption of classical notions of universal time and individualist sense of being through its own entanglements in the development of military technologies and the horrific fallout of its theoretical-technological project. Rather than offer an alternative or revisionist history of contemporary quantum physics, Barad investigates the coexistence of multiple material historicities of a geopolitical moment – the splitting of the atom – by tracing the entanglements of techno-scientific projects of colonial conquest. Barad concludes her chapter – and this volume – with the proposal that in these troubling times, we must “begin to come to terms with the infinite depths of our inhumanity, and the infinite possibilities for living and dying otherwise.” Our purpose in this book is to offer a set of insights into the breadth of possibilities that such a proposal indexes,

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as well as art’s unique role in generating them. To further enrich the conversation, we have invited fourteen Canadian photographers to contribute artworks that themselves respond critically to the legacies of the atomic age in the contemporary world. Interwoven through the book, these artist pages are presented, for the most part, without overt editorialization. Instead, the photographic contributions signal our fundamental conviction that while representational practices associated with photography have certainly shaped nuclear culture and its aftermaths, art also has the capacity to produce or compel new ways of seeing and even, as Brian Massumi suggests, to “shock” us into new ways of thinking.37 Taken together, the artists and writers in the pages that follow offer a provocative set of findings in response to the myriad questions, problems, and blindspots that confront humanity at the dawn of the post-atomic age.

noteS 1 Stein, “Reflection on the Atomic Bomb.” Stein wrote the reflection during the first half of 1946, shortly before she died. 2 On nuclear culture as a prominent theme in contemporary art and culture, see Carpenter, The Nuclear Culture Source Book. 3 Cousins, “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” 1. 4 While this quotation is often cited, there is no evidence that Einstein actually said or wrote these exact words. See Keyes, The Quote Verifier, 52. 5 Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear, 58. 6 Burchett, “Atomic Plague.” The London Daily Express mistakenly substituted “Peter” for “Wilfred” as Burchett’s first name in the byline of the original article. 7 See Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light. 8 The subsidence did not take place equally across all parts of the globe. In the Middle East and in India and Pakistan, for example, perceptions of nuclear threat remained high. 9 Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War, 8. 10 See O’Brian, “Nuclear Flowers of Hell,” and Rosenthal, “The Nuclear Mushroom Cloud as Cultural Image.” 11 True Lies was directed by James Cameron and released by 20th Century Fox in 1994. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Visual Effect category. 12 Fukuyama, The End of History, 7. 13 “Doomsday Clock Now Gauges Climate Change.” 14 “It Is 5 Minutes to Midnight,” 66–71. 15 Barad, personal correspondence, 30 July 2018. Barad explains: “What was on my radar screen in using ‘posthumanist’ was the use of the prefix in postcolonial studies, including the fact that colonialism is ongoing and that there is not a sense of ‘beyond’ or ‘after’ implied (not a temporal stage that supersedes some earlier one), but rather a critical engagement with colonialism, and hence, the need to ask a set of prior questions.” See also Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 14

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16 Chow, Age of the World Target, 32–3. See also Masco, “Bad Weather,” which argues that “the Cold War nuclear project enabled a new vision of the planet as an integrated biosphere, but that it is precisely the security state’s reliance on nuclear weapons to constitute US superpower status that blocks action on non-militarized planetary threats, and specifically, on climate change” (9). 17 Nancy, After Fukushima. 18 Nixon, Slow Violence, 200. 19 “Full Text of Kim Jong-un’s Response to President Trump.” 20 Bronson, “Statement from the President and ceo .” 21 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance, 25. 22 Fitzpatrick, “Atomic Photographs in a Fallout Shelter,” 195. On war and its representational regimes in the wider field, see Butler, Frames of War; Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others; and Stallabrass, Memory of Fire. 23 Virilio, War and Cinema, 84. 24 Wark, Gamer Theory. 25 Huntemann and Payne, Joystick Soldiers. 26 Cole, Dobbing, and Hailwood, “Convenient Killing.” 27 Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq, 21. 28 Sinaï, “Fukushima or the End of the Anthropocene.” 29 Ibid. 30 Hamilton, “5 Years after Fukushima, Nuclear Industry Alive and Well.” 31 See Silverstein, “Japan Circling Back to Nuclear Power after Fukushima Disaster.” 32 Nancy, After Fukushima, 13. 33 Nixon, Slow Violence, 200. 34 Schuppli, “Radical Contact Prints,” 289. 35 On the slow violence of nuclear waste, see Bryan-Wilson, “Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning.” 36 On Weizman’s Forensic Architecture Project, see Weizman, Forensic Architecture; and Forensic Architecture, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. 37 Massumi, “Introduction: Like a Thought,” xiii–xxxix.

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kristan Horton, Blast, Blast, Blast, 2009

horton’s Blast, Blast, Blast drawings allude to wyndam Lewis’s short-lived literary magazine, which had a mere two issues published in July 1914 and July 1915, the second being the “war number.” does Blast, Blast, Blast imply an unfulfilled third number? it seemingly accounts for the murky near-century that followed. Cybernetic figures reminiscent of Jacob epstein’s The Rock Drill, 1913, and Torso in Metal from “the Rock Drill,” 1916, graphically hulk and lurch across five pages, emitting beams of energy from their eyes. the lunging, supplicating figures horton depicts in yet another quasi-comic-book – this one without speech – are derived from photos of tennis players in match play. they pose a striking counterpoint to robert Longo’s remarkable Men in the Cities drawings, 1979, the lurching contortions of whose models Longo pummelled into being with tennis balls as they were photographed. Ben Portis, “a haptic Portrait of groping imagination,” 2015.

Part One

nuclear afterimages

godzilla’s Breath JOHn O’Brian

Godzilla’s signature weapon is radioactive “atomic breath.”1 The monster is a product of the atomic age, roused from deep sleep in primordial ooze by nuclear detonations. His skin resembles the keloid scars that developed on the bodies of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since the creature’s invention in 1954, the same year that the US detonated Castle Bravo, a thermonuclear weapon with the force of twelve thousand Hiroshimas, Godzilla has become a metaphor for how nuclear technologies have threatened civilization by outrunning the ability of experts to control them. In the original Japanese version of the film, Godzilla’s breath was generated by an atomic furnace inside the monster’s belly, which erupted through its mouth as deadly rays.2 Physics tells us that radiation is invisible, odourless, and tasteless, but Godzilla shows us that radioactive breath is blue, hot, and smelly.3 There are more than two dozen versions of the film. In many of them, the monster stands in the middle of a burning city, shooting blue rays through long-pointed teeth at a terrified population below. Godzilla functions as a paradigm for the trauma incited by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a response to psychic shattering. Images of nuclear violence have been in wide circulation since 1945 – sometimes as fiction, sometimes as fact – like a palimpsest of unconscious recollection that has shaped public perceptions of nuclear catastrophe and radiological hazard. This essay focuses on the nuclear industrial complex at Chalk River, Ontario, and radiological risk at the site. What role have photography and what I am inclined to call the “Godzilla effect” – a dispersed phenomenon larger than the monster itself – played in shaping perceptions of radiation risk? How, for example, have they altered the way we might read a newspaper photograph

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JOH n O’B rian 1.1 | The Canadian Press/Fred Chartrand. The 53-Year-Old Chalk River Reactor Has Been Out of Operation for Repair of a Radioactive Water Leak, 19 December 2007. Published in the Globe and Mail, 8 July 2010.

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of an aging reactor, the nru (National Research Universal) reactor that has sprung a leak and been shut down for repairs? A sign in the foreground of the photograph, occupying the lower left side of the image and bearing the black-and-yellow trefoil symbol for ionizing radiation, warns against approaching the reactor. How close can we get? Chalk River Laboratories is owned by a private consortium. Until 2014, it functioned under the umbrella of a Crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (aecl Chalk River). The facility began operations during the Second World War as part of the Manhattan Project. The nuclear complex is located on the Ottawa River, 180 kilometres northwest of the Canadian capital, away from major population centres.4 The relocation by the British government of its Cavendish Laboratory from Cambridge to Montreal, to allow for closer collaboration on the Manhattan Project, contributed to the development of the facility.

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Chalk River Laboratories remains a major Canadian nuclear research facility today, specializing in candu reactor technology. Looking to the future, it hopes to participate in the development of a new generation of reactors, Small Modular Reactors (smr s). The government supports the initiative, arguing that it will help to advance resource extraction in the north.5 In an email message sent to me from aecl Chalk River in 2009, researchers seemed to concur with historian and physicist Spencer R. Weart’s observation that public perceptions of nuclear risk are conditioned by the images we carry in our minds and imaginations.6 The message arrived shortly after the nru began leaking heavy water for the second time in eighteen months, requiring it to be shut down for extensive repairs. It also arrived after I had been refused entry, for security reasons, to Chalk River’s unclassified photo archives. Would I be willing to participate in a survey, the message asked, on public attitudes toward radiation? “The public has an irrational attitude to the radiation hazards presented by nuclear, medical and environmental factors,” the email stated, which is “distorted by information filters that change the balance between perceived benefit and detriment.”7 The survey intended to “measure the deviation between public and expert views” in order to better understand the imbalance. When the organizers of the survey stated that public attitudes were skewed negatively by “information filters,” they were referring to broadcast and print media, social media, film, video, television, photography, and other forms of visual and written representation through which the public receives information on nuclear issues.8 They were presumably thinking of an image like Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, by Chris Lund, in which a figure behind glass, dressed in rad-safe gear, seems to be trapped at his work station. In the opinion of the organizers of the survey, public attitudes were skewed by irrational fear. They had been turned upside down, as it were, by the Godzilla effect. Along with observing that the balance between public and expert views on radiation is unstable, the aecl Chalk River survey recognized that in radiological risk-benefit equations, one side of the equation is inseparable from the other. Both observations are correct. Public attitudes toward radiation vary widely according to news of fresh disasters, and positives and negatives are not easily disentangled. This instability can be explained by the notion of the pharmakon, which refers to a remedy that possesses the ability to injure as well as to cure.9 The machine represented in the government-issued photograph Detecting Disease with Atoms, for example, which looks like a cyborg Medusa sprouting wires instead of snakes from its head, is uncannily like the first atomic bomb, a spherical device choked by wires and known as “the gadget,” that was

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JOH n O’B rian 1.2 | Chris Lund. Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Chalk River, May 1955.

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detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The machines dwarf the human figures around them. In the photograph of the disease-detection apparatus the top half of the woman’s head is cut off, and in the photograph of the gadget the man seated on the floor wearing a fedora blends into his surroundings. (The arm and the foot of the figures to his left and right are even less obvious.) The disease-detection machine appears to be more life-threatening than life-enhancing, a visual contradiction that exemplifies the frustration expressed by the survey organizers about filters that distort perception.

1.3 | US Department of Defense. Nuclear Device Detonated at the Trinity Test Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 16 July 1945. 1.4 | United States Information Service. Detecting Disease with Atoms: A Patient Sits Underneath a Complicated Contrivance with Dangling Wires Called a Multidetector, Which Can Pinpoint a Brain Tumor, c. 1950s.

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Another example of the pharmakon is an instrument called the gamma-ray atomic camera, a lightweight, portable device that requires no electric power and reaches into places inaccessible to its predecessor, the industrial X-ray machine. The first atomic cameras were loaded with capsules of radioactive iridium that emitted gamma rays to record on film structural flaws in metal. They produced a specialized form of knowledge that extended beyond previous perceptual limits.10 At aecl Chalk River in 1957, damage to an atomic camera contaminated nearly five hundred workers. The incident was recounted by the Star Weekly magazine, in an article called “Who Will Police Our Peacetime Atoms?” Innocent and harmless though these [iridium] capsules look, they are deadly. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the only supplier in this country, ships them in lead containers weighing up to 500 pounds … The technician [handling the camera] undoubtedly knew this, as he must also have known why he was not permitted to remove the capsule from its shielded compartment in the camera. Unshielded and held one yard from his body, it would give off more radiation in one hour than an atomic worker is permitted in six months. Nevertheless … he removed the capsule and tried to change its shape by cutting the edge with a hacksaw.11 The technician hacked through an iridium capsule and contaminated hundreds of workers. Human error in the nuclear industry is no more frequent than in any other industrial endeavour, but it has less predictable consequences. The sociologist Charles Perrow, who studied the partial meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, reached the conclusion that “as technological systems become more complex, disasters that appear to result from a confluence of bad consequences become, in fact, unavoidable, as a failure in one part causes a failure in another and another in ways that no designer could predict.”12 Extraordinary disasters, he determined, are inevitable. Technoscientific society is unable to control nuclear risk, and this has produced a sequence of accidents leading from Chalk River to Three Mile Island to Chernobyl to Fukushima Daiichi. In Ted Grant’s photograph of a child with cancer caused by Chernobyl, a boy stares down the camera taking his picture. Light strikes his bald head in the same way that it strikes the hood of the automobile represented behind him. The juxtaposition of the boy’s head and the car’s hood is unsettling, as the boy may never have the chance to own or drive a car, never mind the luxury car pictured on the wall. The failed turbine test at Chernobyl in 1986 in Reactor No. 4, which blew a hole in the reactor’s roof and spewed radiation across Europe and

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Children of Chernobyl), 1992.

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1.5 | Ted Grant. Untitled (The

the world, is one of the two worst nuclear peacetime disasters in history. The other is the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. The Chernobyl explosion might have been even worse. It could have led to a second, larger explosion that would have made much of Europe uninhabitable.13 The exclusion zone around Chernobyl, including the adjacent city of Pripyat, continues to remain uninhabitable. Historian Daniel Beer refers to Pripyat as “a latter-day Pompeii,” a description borne out by David 29

1.6 | David McMillan. Negatives and Shoe, Photographer’s Studio, Pripyat, 2016. Inkjet print.

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McMillan’s photographs of the city, which the artist began taking in 1994.14 Negatives and Shoe, Photographer’s Studio, Pripyat is one of thousands of photographs in McMillan’s visual archive of nuclear abandonment. For a photographer, the image of another photographer’s ruined studio functions as a memento mori. It addresses not only the transience of life, but also the transience of images. Compared to the artist’s own visual archive, the abandoned Prypiat negatives are spectral ruins. Until the meltdown at Three Mile Island, hourglass-shaped cooling towers were generally viewed as signs of progress. That changed after 1979. In public consciousness, the nuclear industry became linked with drastic failure, lethal death, and the ubiquity of toxic waste – and so did images associated with it. Why else would a photograph by Robert Del Tredici, Peck’s Road, Londonderry Township (1979), of a woman walking her children and a dog on a suburban road in the direction of two

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cooling towers seem menacing? There is a reason why images of the dead at Chernobyl and Fukushima, buried four metres underground in zinc- or lead-lined coffins, are difficult to find. Authorities have kept them out of the public eye; photography is forbidden at nuclear funerals. The accident with the atomic camera at aecl Chalk River is a “paradox of necessity,” to borrow a phrase from the poet Octavio Paz.15 For nuclear systems to function, radiological cameras were required to search for flaws and leaks in reactors, bomb casings, and other metal components essential to the industry. But if a camera failed, it put nuclear workers at further risk. A camera was also used to illustrate the anti-radiation clothing worn by workers assigned to clean up after the accident. A photograph shows a “jumper,” also known as a “gamma sponge” or a “glow boy,” dressed up like a giant insect with truncated

1.7 | Plastic Suit Protects against Atomic Radiation. From the article “Who Will Police Our Peacetime Atoms?,” Star Weekly Magazine, 19 November 1960. 31

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feet – a bloated antecedent to Darth Vader, sheathed in white instead of black.16 But the worker in rad-safe gear is not a fictional character. If a puncture were to occur in his plastic suit, which is inflated with compressed air funnelled from an unseen generator, he would become radioactively contaminated. Another slang term for nuclear workers sent into toxic areas after accidents is “dose fodder.” In Japan, cleanup workers at Fukushima Daiichi were called “nuclear gypsies.” Since the hacksaw accident occurred at Chalk River, radiation safety gear has become more reliable. Canadian scientists at the Radiological Analysis and Defence group have designed improved equipment for military personnel. Some of the new headgear is represented by Mary Kavanagh, who participated in the Canadian Force Artist Program in 2012–13, in a photograph called The Expulsion (in White). The photograph is a double portrait of a woman and a man looking deadpan at the camera through convex Plexiglass from the interior of their white helmets.17 The bright, shiny regalia promises a brave new world of immunity from chemical and nuclear threat – except that no protection against nuclear threat can ever be foolproof. There is no returning to Eden for the Adam and Eve represented in the picture. The shutdown of the nru reactor at Chalk River began in May 2009 and continued until August 2010. The reactor went “critical” in 1957,

1.8 | Mary Kavanagh. The Expulsion (in White), 2012–13. Inkjet print on archival paper. 32

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which is to say, it started self-sustaining operations, the same year as the atomic camera incident. It needed to be drained of heavy water and then repaired by remote means to avoid endangering workers. At the time of the shutdown, the reactor was responsible for supplying approximately half the world’s medical radioisotopes. Through Nordion, a subsidiary first of Eldorado Mining and Refining and then of aecl Chalk River, Canada had become a pioneer in the development of cancer treatments using cobalt-60 and other radioisotopes.18 The nru reactor’s closure caused a severe shortage in supplies and led to delays in cancer diagnoses, heart monitoring, and other medical procedures. Although safer ways are now being developed to manufacture medical isotopes, those at Chalk River are produced by bombarding highly enriched uranium – the kind of uranium in nuclear weapons – with neutrons. The procedure produces highly toxic waste and the problem of how to dispose of it. In the eyes of the aecl Chalk River survey organizers, the benefits of making radioisotopes for medicine outweighed the risks. The public’s perception of risk was too high, its perception of benefit too low. They may have been correct; I am no expert in nuclear risk analysis as it relates to medical concerns. Max S. Power, in his book America’s Nuclear Wastelands, writes that because “the hazards produced by nuclear contamination are unseen and often latent, people … have no sensory

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clues to help protect themselves,” and this generates anxiety. Polls demonstrate that the greatest concern of the public since the end of the Cold War has been the handling of nuclear waste.19 Power also writes that “people are more likely to dread things nuclear” because of their primary association of the nuclear with war.20 This is the Godzilla effect at work. The dread arises especially at moments of nuclear danger, when imagery from the past is recognized by the present as its own.21 The Beccquerel Reindeer, Harads Same-Produktor, Del Tredici’s 1986 photograph of reindeer carcasses in a meat packing plant in Swedish Lapland that shows meat unfit for consumption due to radioactive caesium-137 fallout from Chernobyl, suddenly acquired new resonance in 2011 following the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. Reindeer occupy a central place in the lives of Laplanders. The contaminated reindeer, filling a room-sized freezer to capacity, their legs pointing toward the ceiling like otherworldly stalagmites inside a primordial futuristic cave, were eventually sent to mink farms as feed. Del Tredici was so stunned by this information that he forgot to ask the plant manager what happened to the meat and excrement of the mink.22 Nuclear images, whether documentary or fictional, instruct us about nuclear realities at the same time as they conjure up hallucinations. The space between reality and hallucination is where the Godzilla effect is most strongly felt. Consider a newspaper photograph of Conservative Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt and her press secretary arriving at a news conference, less than two months after the nru reactor at

1.9 | Chris Wattie/Reuters. Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt (right) Enters Parliament Yesterday with Press Secretary Jasmine MacDonnell, 2009. Published in the Globe and Mail, 4 June 2009.

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Reactor Buildings, Chalk River, 1945.

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1.10 | zeep and nrx Nuclear

aecl Chalk River began leaking heavy water. It was published in the

Globe and Mail on 4 June 2009. The two women look grim, like many officials forced to face the media after a disaster. In this instance the disaster had been compounded by an indiscretion. Raitt, or her secretary, mistakenly left secret documents about the nuclear industry in the offices of ctv following a television interview, and the error became public at an already sensitive moment. Raitt revealed nothing about the contents of the documents, leaving the public to imagine the worst. The first aecl Chalk River reactor, the zeep (Zero Energy Experimental Pile), provided Canada with the ability to build its own atomic bomb. C.D. Howe, who was “Minister of Everything” in the Mackenzie King government during the Second World War, including Canada’s participation in the Manhattan Project, announced the successful construction of the reactor immediately following the bombing of Hiroshima.23 A second reactor, the nrx (National Research Experimental), was finished two years later. A photograph taken from an elevated angle shows a white building housing the zeep on the left and a brick building housing the nru on the right. The Ottawa River, water from which was needed to cool the reactors, flows directly behind the buildings. In December 1947, the Associated Press was given permission to take a series of photographs for distribution as press images. One of the photographs, Checks for Radioactive Contamination, is a representation 35

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1.11 | Associated Press. Checks for Radioactive Contamination, nrx Reactor, Chalk River, Ontario, 29 December 1947.

of how aecl Chalk River protected itself against radiation accidents and spills. A health inspector in a white lab coat is shown squatting next to an array of cleaning equipment in a hallway. A caption accompanying the image, staged for the camera, explains that he is checking for radioactive contamination with a portable Geiger counter. The cleaning equipment in front of him is standard issue, what might be found in any school or business office at the time: brooms, mops, rags, work shoes, dustpan, vacuum cleaner, floor polisher, aluminum bucket, O-Cedar cleaning fluid, and two pairs of gloves. If an item is found to be contaminated, the caption states, it is placed in the garbage can marked “radioactive ” to the inspector’s left (in the photograph the word is half cut and reads “active ”). 36

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Technically, there is nothing wrong with the picture. Take away the human figure, and the photograph looks like a competent advertisement for cleaning products. The problem lies with the content. At a micro level, the health inspector should be wearing a hazmat suit and gloves; and it is also difficult to imagine him fitting the floor polisher into the garbage can should the Geiger counter register that the polisher is hot. At a macro level, the mop-and-pail cleaning equipment in the photograph is incommensurate – absurdly incommensurate – with the technological sophistication of the nuclear generating plant to which it relates. The radiological risks posed by the reactor, should a technical problem occur, will not be solved by O-Cedar cleaning fluid. At the time this photograph was taken, Chalk River scientists and administrators had enough evidence about the dangers of radiation to know that more than mops and pails were required to deal with an accident. Information about the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs on the human body – information about radiation damage and long-term poisoning as well as thermal burns and keloid scars – had been thoroughly studied by those involved in the Manhattan Project. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey had published a report in 1946, titled The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was detailed and graphic.24 Nuclear scientists at aecl Chalk River had also been informed about the circumstances of Louis Slotin’s death from a lethal dose of radiation in New Mexico. The Canadian physicist was employed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to undertake criticality testing, first with uranium, then with plutonium cores. This involved bringing fissile materials to a point of near criticality, a process that insiders call “tickling the tail of the dragon,” which carried the risk of setting off a chain reaction. “I am one of the few people left here who are experienced bomb putter-togetherers,” Slotin boasted.25 On 21 May 1946, a plutonium core on which he was working with a screwdriver slipped, causing a burst of radiation equivalent to that of an atomic bomb detonated 1,500 metres away.26 He died nine days later and was buried by his parents in his hometown of Winnipeg. Since then, Slotin has been the subject of poems, novels, and a play. First and worst among these offerings is a poem published in the Los Alamos Times immediately after his death. “May God receive you, great-souled scientist!” it begins.27 Last and best is a book of poetry called Bloom by Michael Lista, published in 2010.28 The title evokes not only the term given to a sudden release of radioactivity but also the outsider character of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and brings the two together around Slotin and his death. Beginning in the early 1940s, many of the scientists and workers at aecl Chalk River lived a short distance away in Deep River. The town

37

JOH n O’B rian 1.12 | The Chalk River Research Centre of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, on the Ottawa River near Chalk River, Ontario, 1959. Four-colour lithographic postcard.

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was a similar but smaller version of the American atomic cities of Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Richland (Hanford) in Washington, and Los Alamos in New Mexico, which were built to service the Manhattan Project.29 The cities were sometimes referred to as “little Edens” by the media because of their extensive recreational facilities.30 Following the war, as the new atomic age was beginning to develop a visual vocabulary for its activities, views of the towns and the nuclear sites to which they were attached started to show up on postcards. Some of the images were taken from the air, like “Chalk River Research Centre of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, on the Ottawa River,” a card published in “Spectrome Color” in Dryden, Ontario. Although I am wary of atomic postcards, in the same way I am wary of instrumental photography in general, they have something to say about hopes and anxieties at the time of their

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making. As a product of tourism, the modes of address and reception of atomic postcards are peculiar to the medium. Handwritten messages on the backs of cards are almost invariably positive, like the photographic images on the front of them.31 “Hope both of you are keeping well in the heat, its much cooler this way, just fine for the holidays,” correspondent J. Owen Hughes writes in 1959 on the back of the Chalk River card, which pictures trees and water surrounding the nuclear complex. Rectos and versos, fronts and backs, tend to reinforce each other’s reassuring tone of optimism, and even postcards mailed from the edge of danger rarely stray from a lingua franca of cheerfulness. The optimism expressed by the postcards is not shared by the Serpent River First Nation, located in the uranium mining region of Elliot Lake, Ontario. Some of the refined ore used in the reactors at Chalk River came from Elliot Lake. Run-off from uranium tailings ponds in the area contaminated the entire Serpent River system, which flows into the north shore of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, affecting the health of the Serpent River First Nation. In her book This Is My Homeland, Lorraine Rekmans remarks that the lakes in the region “were used as a dumping ground for radioactive waste … The ground-waters under the tailings basins are virtual rivers of poison.”32 In addition, land on the reserve was used to build a sulphuric acid plant to supply the uranium mines. Bonnie Devine, artist and member of the Serpent River First Nation, undertook extensive research on uranium mining to produce her exhibition Stories from the Shield in 2004.33 A mixed media drawing, Set for “Rooster Rock,” the Story of Serpent River, was bound into a large book for the show. The dazzling yellow of the sulphur pile contrasts in the drawing with the greys and blacks of the poisoned land around it. The Serpent River First Nation continues to suffer from the consequences of the mining. In the article “The Radioactive Colonization of Indigenous Bodies,” Robynne Miller comments on the Serpent River First Nation and Indigenous populations elsewhere, including the Sahtu Dene people of Great Bear Lake, who are also affected by uranium mining.34 She observes that white mine workers are epidemiologically at less risk of getting stomach cancer than Indigenous populations living near the mines because the white workers are not living off the contaminated land. The food consumed by white miners is shipped in from the outside, she explains, and when a mine closes the mine workers move on. The local First Nations stay on the land and consume what it offers. Many inhabitants of Deep River brushed aside the risk of living in a nuclear zone. The scientist Ara Mooradian presents his life in the town as if the near meltdown of the nrx reactor on 12 December 1952 and other serious Chalk River accidents in 1957 and 1958 had never occurred.35 In 1952, the nrx was being restarted after routine alterations

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1.13 | Bonnie Devine. Set for “Rooster Rock, the Story of Serpent River,” 2001. Mixed media.

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and maintenance, and through a series of human and design errors, part of the cooling system was brought to a white heat, setting off explosions that destroyed the core of the reactor and released a gaseous bloom of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.36 More than a million gallons of radioactively contaminated water flooded the reactor basement in what was the first major reactor accident in the world. The Canadian military and the United States Navy were brought in to clean up the physical damage and pump the contaminated basement water into shallow trenches near the Ottawa River. One of those enlisted for the job was future president Jimmy Carter, then a nuclear engineer with the US nuclear submarine program. Carter was interviewed shortly after the 2011 meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi and recalled how “the same thing happened in Canada.” As a young naval officer, he reported, he had been dispatched to help dismantle a “very highly radioactive core” of the reactor at Chalk River after its partial meltdown. Wearing protective gear and armed with wrenches and vice grips, he and his team had ninety seconds to dash into the reactor and “take off as many nuts and bolts as we could.” “I had radioactive urine for six months,” Carter recalled, “and I thought I would never have another

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child but Amy came later.”37 President Carter was dose fodder. He was, as the newspaper headline of the interview put it, “Jimmy Neutron.” In response to questions from the news media about the same accident in 1952, C.J. Mackenzie, president of Atomic Energy of Canada, assured reporters that everything was under control. A “pinhole leak,” he declared, had occurred in the reactor.38 His disavowal of what had happened was an attempt to manage public perceptions of radiation risk. He feared that by admitting to the gravity of the accident, the public would respond irrationally. People would begin to feel Godzilla’s breath on their necks.

noteS 1 A version of this essay, entitled “Chalk River,” is published as a chapter in my book The Bomb in the Wilderness. 2 Ryfle, Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star. 3 “Godzilla breath” is a synonym for bad breath. See Urban Dictionary, s.v. “godzilla breath.” 4 Krenz, Deep Waters. Krenz’s narrative is partially indebted to Eggleston, Canada’s Nuclear Story, and to Bothwell, nucleus . 5 Energy and Mines Ministers’ Conference Report. 6 Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear, viii. 7 Group email sent by Larissa Koculym, subject line “Radiation Perception Survey,” 21 July 2009. Koculym’s position was research assistant and tutor (drsa ) at Radiological Protection Research & Instrumentation, aecl Chalk River Laboratories. Maurice Yang and Sophie Chang, summer interns at the Deep River Science Academy, assisted with the survey project. 8 The email message did not specify which media were included in the term “information filters.” 9 Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” 70. 10 McQuire, introduction to Visions of Modernity. 11 Earl, “Who Will Police Our Peacetime Atoms?,” 11. 12 Osnos, “The Fallout,” 52. 13 Plokhy, Chernobyl. 14 Beer, “Revolution from the Brink of Armageddon,” in a review of Plokhy’s Chernobyl. 15 Paz, “Order and Accident,” 112, quoted by van Wyck, Signs of Danger, 13. 16 “They’re Called Jumpers, Glow Boys, and They Go Where No One Else Will.” 17 Conley, “Material, Trace, Trauma,” Article 14; Sharman, “Constituent Parts,” Article 15. 18 In 1991, Nordion was acquired by MDS Health Group. Krenz, Deep Waters, 90. 19 Onstot, “The Atomic Reboot,” 14. In an Angus Reid poll conducted in 2010, 81 per cent of respondents said that waste was their deepest concern. 20 Power, America’s Nuclear Wastelands, 20. 21 The phenomenon is discussed by Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. 22 Robert Del Tredici in correspondence with the author, 15 October 2018. 41

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23 Cragg, “Canada Building Plant Near Petawawa Camp.” 24 United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Useful information is also contained in Cronkite, “Medical Aspects of Atomic Explosives.” This is in my personal collection. 25 Louis Slotin, quoted in Zeilig, “Louis Slotin and ‘The Invisible Killer,’” 24. See also Walsh, “14 Poems from Bloom.” 26 Miller, Under a Cloud, 69, 77. 27 Ashlock, “Slotin – A Tribute.” 28 Lista, Bloom. 29 Brown, Plutopia, and Blackwell, Visit Sunny Chernobyl. 30 Larabee, “Ground Zero,” 270. 31 For an extended discussion of atomic postcards, see O’Brian, “Postcard to Moscow,” 182–93, 222–4. 32 Lorraine Rekmans, quoted in McNamara, “‘Nuclear Genocide.’” See also Rooster Rock: The Story of Serpent River (2002), a film by Bonnie Devine. 33 Phillips, “Between Rocks and Hard Places,” 26. 34 Miller, “Radioactive Colonization of Indigenous Bodies.” 35 Mooradian, “The Most Exciting Thing in the World Was Atomic Energy,” 24–5. 36 Gordon Edwards, “Reactor Accidents at Chalk River.” 37 Jimmy Carter, quoted in Taber, “Jimmy Neutron: Ex-President Carter Recalls Role in Chalk River Meltdown.” 38 Krenz, Deep Waters, 95.

edward Burtynsky, UraniUm tailings #12, elliot lake, ontario, 1995

these images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. we are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. for me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times. Edward Burtynsky, “Exploring the Residual Landscape”

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Port Hope in the era of nuclear Waste rOBert Del treDici anD Blake fitzPatrick

P Ort H OP e in t He era O f n u clear Waste

2.1 (opposite) | Blake Fitzpatrick. View: Cameco Refinery, Alexander Street, Port Hope, 1992. The former Eldorado Refinery was sold to privately owned Cameco Corporation in 1988. 2.2 (above) | Blake Fitzpatrick. Radioactive Poster: Loading the Radium Express, Dorset Street, Port Hope, 1992. Radium and uranium ores refined in Port Hope originally came from Port Radium on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. This poster extolls the virtues of radium and depicts the Sahtu Dene of Great Bear Lake transferring sacks of ore from a dog sled to the Radium Express. Many of these men died because of their exposure to radioactive materials, leaving behind a “Village of Widows” as suggested by Peter Blow’s film on the topic. This poster was photographed on the floor of a Port Hope home and it is radioactively contaminated.

The age of nuclear power is winding down as aging reactors approach the limit of their forty-year lifespans with few new plants to replace them. In the wake of the closing plants, the long-term management of radioactive waste takes on an urgency that has until now been absent. While the age of nuclear power has occupied a relatively brief period, the era of nuclear waste will last forever. The town of Port Hope, Ontario, stands at the front edge of the era of nuclear waste. Referred to as Canada’s first nuclear town, Port Hope (population 18,000) has occasioned the most expensive municipal cleanup in Canadian history – a cleanup currently budgeted at $1.28 billion, and one that will take a decade or more to complete. The task at hand: locating, exhuming, identifying, consolidating, trucking, and reburying the radioactive radium and uranium-processing wastes generated by the oldest uranium refinery in the world. Port Hope’s nuclear roots predate the first atomic bomb. In 1932, Eldorado Gold Mines built a radium refinery on the shore of Lake Ontario close to the town’s homes and shops. In the 1940s the refinery shifted 47

2.3 | Blake Fitzpatrick. Pine Street Extension, Port Hope, 1992. Radioactive soil has been consolidated in the mound behind the fence. In an attempt to monitor and map ambient radon gas arising from the soil, the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office (llrwmo ) in Port Hope has installed radon detectors in simulated birdhouses across the mound. 2.4 (opposite) | Blake Fitzpatrick. Bird House-Radon Detector, cn /cp Viaduct Area, Port Hope, 1992. In the early 1990s, approximately 50 radon detectors, camouflaged as birdhouses, were installed in locations across Port Hope. Hiding the detector in a birdhouse not only is useful as a way to protect the device from vandals it is also a form of terror management for a population at large.

2.5 (below) | Blake Fitzpatrick. muidar : Exterior, Dorset Street, Port Hope, 1992. Marcel Pochon, came to Canada in 1931 to set up the radium processing operation at the Eldorado plant in Port Hope. Pochon had studied with the nuclear pioneer Pierre Curie, husband to Marie Curie in Paris. He lived in a beautiful older home on Dorset Street. The family home was known for a sign that hung over the front step. It read muidar , which spells the word radium backwards. 2.6 (opposite) | Blake Fitzpatrick. muidar : Interior, Dorset Street, Port Hope, 1992. In August 1992 the muidar was being readied for sale. Radioactive contamination had been detected throughout the home. The bathtub and drain system of the home was found to be contaminated and was removed. Bricks on the exterior of the house were also radioactively contaminated and removed. All objects in the home were tested with a Geiger counter and readings were recorded. If radioactivity was discovered on an object, a red sticker was affixed to the point of contamination.

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production from radium to uranium for a top-secret atomic bomb project in the United States. The company was renamed Eldorado Nuclear Ltd and became a Crown corporation that supplied uranium oxide to the Manhattan Project. Port Hope continued to supply refined uranium to the US nuclear weapons program for the next twenty years. In 1988 Eldorado was sold to Cameco Ltd, which processes uranium for commercial nuclear reactor fuel in Canada and worldwide. In 1975, while Eldorado was still refining uranium in Port Hope, St Mary’s School, just off the town’s main street, was found to contain levels of radon gas in excess of uranium mining exposure standards. The Eldorado refinery had donated sandy radioactive uranium wastes to the school for use as fill under the school’s gym, cafeteria, and parking lot. The school was evacuated and stayed closed for nearly two years. St Mary’s was the tip of the iceberg, and as the national media focused in on Port Hope, the vacant school became the first public sign of a radioactively contaminated community. The Atomic Energy Control Board (aecb ) responded with radiological surveys of homes, commercial properties, and landscapes throughout the town, drilling boreholes into yards, gardens, and ravines to measure and map the scope of the contamination. As the inquiry progressed, investigators learned that the refinery had dumped radioactive waste in pockets throughout the town. Further testing revealed that the town’s harbour, adjacent to the 51

rOBert Del tre Dici an D Blak e fitz Patrick 2.7 | Blake Fitzpatrick. “Port Hope” Landfill, Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, 1993. In the fall of 1976, Atomic Energy of Canada directed a program to move radioactive soil from Port Hope to Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. This field is filled with approximately 2,500 truckloads or 104,225 tonnes of radioactive fill from Port Hope.

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Eldorado plant, was compacted with radioactive sediment. The location and composition of these once-invisible wastes had finally come to light through a series of government hearings, technical reports, and citizen consultations. Today, these “historic” wastes (the wastes generated by the plant from its beginnings until 1988 when Cameco Ltd took ownership) are for the most part still in place, but they have been targeted for retrieval and reburial at a site three kilometres from the plant, in a sevenstorey mound with a capacity for one million cubic metres of solid radioactive waste. To be located just south of Highway 401, the mound will one day be visible to all travellers on the country’s main transportation artery – a towering monument to Canada’s participation in the nuclear era. The region around the mound is no stranger to Port Hope’s nuclear wastes. The site used to host the Welcome Dump, one of two locations where Port Hope wastes were dumped for many years, the other being Port Granby. The Welcome Dump was situated in a wetlands on a hill sloping down towards Port Hope and its uranium plant on Lake Ontario. Active for decades, the Welcome Dump, built on geologically unstable terrain and prone to leakage, was declared unsuitable for any form of long-term waste storage. A Siting Task Force (active from 1988 to 1996)

2.8 | Robert Del Tredici. Abandoned Uranium Sacks. Port Radium, Vance Peninsula, Great Bear Lake, nwt , 18 July 1998. Abandoned uranium sacks, once filled with radioactive ore and shouldered by Dene natives, now lie rotting in the sun at Port Radium, the world’s first uranium mine. Dene native Joe Blondin Jr surveys the scene. He was born in Port Radium when the mine was supplying uranium for the first atomic bombs. Many Dene ore carriers sickened and died of cancer. Their town of Deline on Great Bear Lake came to be called “the village of widows.”

2.9 | Robert Del Tredici. Broken Pipe. Lynne Prower at Brand Beach off Lakeshore Road, Port Hope, 2 July 2008. In the spring of 2008 the breakup of winter ice at Brand Beach in Lake Ontario broke an underwater pipe that rose to the lake’s surface spewing water. Locals had not known the pipe existed. It originated in the Welcome Dump site, which had been releasing treated water into the lake since 1956. Sanford Haskill had the pipe’s water analyzed by Caduceon Environmental Laboratories in Peterborough. Tests revealed the water to be contaminated with uranium 50 times higher than Interim Provincial Water Quality Objectives, and arsenic levels nearly 11 times higher than Ontario limits. 2.10 (opposite) | Robert Del Tredici. Soil Remediation in Port Hope. Private Home on Shuter Street, 300 Yards from the Cameco Uranium Conversion Plant, Port Hope, 1 July 2011. Radioactive topsoil is being removed to a depth of several metres, to be replaced by clean soil.

was struck to scour the province of Ontario for a community willing to host the Port Hope wastes. It held out financial incentives; it offered to build recreation complexes and to improve hospitals and schools; it funded communities to bring in experts of their own choosing; it held town meetings. After eight years, the task force came up empty-handed. So it came to pass that by default Port Hope’s wastes had nowhere to go, which opened the door for the unsuitable site around Welcome to become the only available long-term storage solution. The scale of this plan, coordinated by the office of the Port Hope Area Initiative, is vast in scope. Its mission: to move an estimated 75,000 truckloads of radioactive material from the town to the mound – and another 50,000 truckloads from nearby Port Granby to a mound across the road from the old Port Granby dump. Seventy-five thousand truckloads of waste may be hard to imagine. Visualize the project as, roughly, one truckload every ten minutes, forty-eight truckloads a day, six days a week, for five years. To comprehend an endeavour of this magnitude is a challenge, one made all the more difficult by the fact that radioactivity is invisible and its hazards persist over inconceivably long periods of time. Radium 226,

2.11 | Robert Del Tredici. Cruciform. Alexander and Hayward Streets, 250 Meters from the Cameco Uranium Conversion Plant, Port Hope, 22 July 2013. A telephone pole in Port Hope hosts a robust Virginia creeper.

for example, has a half-life of 1,600 years, after which it loses half of its radioactivity. The half-life of uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years. Both of these radionuclides are in the contaminated soils of Port Hope, and these soils will be placed into a mound engineered to last 500 years. The vast time frames involved in nuclear matters prompt us to ask: Then what? This question has gone unanswered, by default pushed onto future generations, who will find themselves living with a nuclear mound that may remain in place, pragmatically, forever. 56

2.12 (right) | Robert Del Tredici. Welcome Dump: Keep Out. Welcome Township, 22 July 2013. A weathered No Trespassing sign warns people against entering the Welcome Waste Management Facility where, for decades, contaminated soils from Port Hope were dumped. The Welcome Dump is located in a wetlands on a hill sloping down to nearby Lake Ontario. 2.13 (below) | Robert Del Tredici. The Cameco Port Hope Uranium Conversion Facility. 1 Eldorado Place, Port Hope, 10 August 2013. Uranium yellowcake is refined in Blind River, Ontario, then shipped to Cameco in Port Hope, which converts it into uranium dioxide for candu reactors, and uranium hexafluoride, whose casks we see in the photo. Uranium hexafluoride is shipped to enrichment plants worldwide to become fuel for light-water reactors.

P Ort H OP e in t He era O f n u clear Waste

In spite of the unsuitability of its site, the Port Hope mound has inspired engineers at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories (cnl ), who are currently building a great mound of their own that is able to contain half a million cubic metres of waste in a five-storey structure engineered to last 500 years. The Chalk River mound will include some wastes from Port Hope (it accepted 2,500 truckloads of contaminated Port Hope soil in 1976), but it will also, importantly, contain materials far more radioactive, toxic, and longer-lasting than Port Hope’s, because the Chalk River mound will also include a variety of nuclear reactor wastes. Both the Port Hope and Chalk River mounds have in common their proximity to large bodies of fresh water. Port Hope’s mound is three kilometres from Lake Ontario; the Chalk River mound is less than one kilometre from the Ottawa River. The plan for the long-term management of the Chalk River wastes, according to cnl ’s Environmental Impact Statement of March 2017, is eventually to abandon them. A third site in the era of nuclear waste, also located near a crucially important body of fresh water, is the proposed Deep Geologic Repository (dgr ) at the Bruce Nuclear Complex in Kincardine, Ontario. This storage facility has been sited less than two kilometres from Lake Huron. It will hold nuclear wastes from the Bruce, Darlington, and Pickering nuclear complexes. The repository will be licensed to hold just

2.14 (opposite, above) | Blake Fitzpatrick. Radioactive Autograph Album: Donna Reed and Greer Garson, Port Hope, 2014. Marcel Pochon was believed to have been an avid collector of movie star portraits and autographs. This autograph album, found in the home muidar , is radioactively contaminated. However, most of the portraits of the movie stars were not contaminated and remain with the family as part of the estate. Name tags identify the movie stars who once graced these pages. The album is included in the inventory of contaminated artifacts housed in the Low Level Radioactive Waste Management Office, Port Hope. A series of nuclear connections exist among the actors identified in the album. Donna Reed wrote a treatment with her high school science teacher, Edward R. Tompkins, for a nuclear film titled The Beginning or the End (mgm 1947). Greer Garson played Madame (Marie) Curie in the studio film Madame Curie (mgm 1943). The album includes the names of Van Johnson and Robert Walker, who also appeared in Madame Curie. 2.15 (opposite, below) | Blake Fitzpatrick. Radioactive Autograph Album: Walter Pidgeon, Port Hope, 2014. Marcel Pochon studied with Pierre Curie. The actor Walter Pidgeon played Pierre Curie in the film Madame Curie. Pochon’s connection to Pierre and Marie Curie is actualized by the radioactivity that binds the representation of these absent nuclear pioneers to this autograph album. The album draws together the names of actors who played a part in the portrayal of atomic histories at a crucial period during and after the Second World War. The album is a tribute to atomic representation and history and is a radioactive object. 59

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2.16 (opposite) | Robert Del Tredici. Dan Rudka. Port Hope, 15 March 2016. Dan Rudka was a nuclear worker at the Zircatec/Cameco Fuel Services Facility in the north end of Port Hope. In 1995 he was fabricating uranium fuel pellets when, under questionable circumstances, he inhaled uranium dust through his face mask. He experienced skin burns, lung failures, and multiple health crises over the next two decades. In 2015 he survived a double-lung transplant. He has not yet received workers’ compensation for the inhalation accident. 2.17 (above) | Robert Del Tredici. Pat Lawson at Her 60th Wedding Anniversary Celebration to Tom Lawson at Trinity Church, Port Hope, 2 April 2016. Long-term resident of Port Hope, mother of four, Pat Lawson was a grassroots community activist and organizer who promoted renewable energy and recycling. She co-founded the Ganaraska hiking trail, and was once a Green Party candidate. She spoke truth to corporate and government power with a laser focus on Port Hope’s nuclear industry, calling it out for its secrecy, cover-ups, radioactive waste mismanagement, routine releases, and health impacts. She drew strength from her faith in Mother Earth and the Great Spirit. 61

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2.18 | Robert Del Tredici. A Thorn in the Side. Port Hope, 20 November 2016. Farmer and horseman, historian and activist, Sanford Haskill lived at Lakeshore and Haskill Road in Port Hope all 73 years of his life. His great-great-great-grandfather Nathaniel Haskill moved to Port Hope from Boston in 1793 as one of Port Hope’s five founding settlers. Sanford has referred to himself as “the biggest thorn in the government’s side” for his multiple efforts to keep Port Hope’s citizens and their environment safe. He died 25 December 2016.

about everything except spent reactor fuel; it will store highly radioactive resins and filters as well as small pipes situated near the reactor core, and steam generators that once flashed primary coolant into steam. Such materials have been contaminated with plutonium and other fission products. In the dgr ’s Environmental Impact Statement, we read that the phases of its project are “site preparation, construction, operations, decommissioning and abandonment.”1 Given the eternal time frames of nuclear materials, abandonment is a precursor to amnesia, and intentionally fostered amnesia is an abdication of responsibility to the future. 62

2.19 | Blake Fitzpatrick. Access Road, Berm and Homes, Port Hope, 2016. This photograph, taken on the top of a berm, shows the newly constructed access road on the left and new residential housing on the right. The access road will be the singular entry point to the radioactive waste storage mound. The purpose of the berm is to protect homeowners from the sight, noise, and dust of an estimated 75,000 truckloads of radioactive waste that will access the mound along this route.

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Port Hope’s history looks back to the world’s first atomic bombs and forward to an unending future of nuclear waste storage. The town’s link to Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been marked by a stand of Japanese cherry trees in Rotary Park on the banks of the Ganaraska River. People for Peace planted the trees there on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan. The town’s marker into the distant future will be its seven-storey mound of radioactive uranium-processing wastes. Historic, picturesque Port Hope is not like any other town in Canada. Uniquely, it has been subject to more than eighty years of exposure to radioactive particles. Long-lived, invisible materials flow through its waters, move through its air, and become embedded in its soils and in the bodies of its people. Port Hope is today on the brink of a historic transformation, one in which the town’s self-image can’t help but be redefined for better or for worse by its deep participation in the era of nuclear waste.

2.20 | Robert Del Tredici. High Density Liner. Longterm Waste Management Facility, Welcome, Hope Township, Municipality of Port Hope, South of Highway 401. 4 May 2017. Rolls of highdensity polyethelyne geomembrane liner wait to be installed at the base of the engineered above-ground long-term waste management mound being built to hold over one million cubic metres of historic radioactive soils from the nearby Port Hope Uranium Processing Plant. Soils without containers will be dumped into the four cells of this mound, which will be seven storeys high with a base covering an area the size of 70 hockey rinks. The mound is designed to last 500 years. The wastes will remain radioactive for multiple millennia.

note 1 Nuclear Waste Management Organization, “Deep Geologic Repository for opg ’s Low and Intermediate Level Waste,” v. 64

andrea PinHeiro, Hot Dam Black Veil, 2016

a uranium tailing dam wall on Stanrock road, near Quirke Lake, like one of many in the elliot Lake area. it is located just south of rooster rock, a sacred site for the anishinaabe of Serpent river, and also the site of the decommissioned Stanrock mine site. the tailing dams are intended to contain the tailing wastes for 10,000–20,000 years. i have visited this particular site often since 2000. i used to imagine it was the same spot where robert del tredici photographed the elliot Lake uranium tailing ponds before they were decommissioned. Andrea Pinheiro

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Post-atomic childhood around 1980 linDseY a. freeman So fully does the nuclear reality pervade my consciousness that it is hard to imagine what existence would have been like without it. It is as though the Bomb has become one of those categories of Being, like Space and Time, that, according to Kant are built into the very structure of our minds, giving shape and meaning to all our perceptions. Am I alone in this feeling? I think not. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light

3.1 | A photograph of Oak Ridge High School, taken by the author

My grandfather was an atomic courier. During the Manhattan Project, he drove secret materials in a white, unmarked truck for the US government. He kept driving through the Cold War for the Atomic Energy Commission. My grandmother performed skits at the local old folks home as “atomic Dolly,” transforming the lyrics to classic country songs by supplying them with nuclear references. My mother and my uncle went to high school in a red brick building adorned with an enormous atom with an acorn as its nucleus. I was also born in atomic Appalachia. I rode my pink and silver Schwinn around a cul-de-sac anchored by a cherry tree until the end of the Cold War. My grandparents moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Second World War, when it was a secret city surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Oak Ridge was one of the three key sites for the Manhattan Project, along with Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington. During the war, nearly 80,000 people lived and laboured in laboratories with code names that resembled instructions to open a safe: X -10, Y -12, K -25. In these enormous buildings tucked in the East Tennessee valley, workers enriched the uranium that powered Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Most of the workers had no clue of what they were actually producing; they knew only that they were working for the war effort and that everything about their jobs

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was considered top secret. Only the highest-level scientists and military brass knew the intended goal of the project. After the war, Oak Ridge was no longer a secret city; it had a national laboratory and a reputation for scientific prowess. Oak Ridgers were filled with pride in their nuclear achievements, as their city’s factories kept turning out fissionable materials for the nation’s nuclear arsenal, but this time for the Cold War. My mother and my uncle came of age during the days when air raid drills were common and bunker planning was regular party conversation. Decades later, I was born into an Oak Ridge still busy churning out viscera for America’s ever-expanding nuclear surplus. Oak Ridge was my first city, but I lived there only for a short while. Before I reached my first birthday my family moved to another town a little over an hour’s drive away. It wasn’t an easy move for my mother, who had grown up in Oak Ridge and was used to a level of cosmopolitanism that the labs helped to generate. I too felt a loss, denied the chance to grow up in the science city for smart people, where the nuclear bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with the future physicists of America. My early immersion into atomic culture came from visiting my grandparents as a kid. I was fascinated by the city’s history and by its national importance. I loved its museum and the stories and myths that circulated about atomic secrets and spies. As I grew up, I slowly began to understand Oak Ridge’s role in Hiroshima’s devastation, nuclear proliferation, and the long-term effects of radioactivity. Today, I write as an atomic exile about the spaces of my childhood. I compose a sociology of what I came to sense and to feel about the place before I was trying to interpret it as a scholar by tracing spaces, objects, affects, and memories of the ordinary, the fantastic, and the atomic uncanny.1 I examine how people, places, things, histories, and memories are entangled and enmeshed with each other, forming mnemonic assemblages that are good to think with.2 Through a series of vignettes exploring myths, memories, mysterious photographs, and childhood toys, I recount what it felt like to grow up in the post-atomic American landscape near a site of nuclear science and national power. My hope is that this project leads to some understanding of post-atomic living through an exploration of my family’s nuclear past, Reagan-era politics, and the culture and cultural objects of the Cold War.

Warning Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road: “Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, 69

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known or not.”3 McCarthy and I went to the same high school, twenty miles away from the Atomic City; I trust him and have attempted to heed his advice.

Atomic Combray A soft poetics of atomic summer rises from the bomb-shaped city. Oak Ridge was my Combray.4 I visited my grandparents in all seasons, but my atomic childhood features summer. This was when I could go and stay for a week because school was out; when I could swim in the gigantic swimming pool built by the Army Corps of Engineers for the atomic workers and their families, at first just for the white ones and then for everyone. For a while, it was the largest pool in the South. Every hot day and early evening it swallowed me, along with scores of other children I did not know, and the occasional lap-swimming adult who sometimes knew my mother. It was in summer that I would run around the track while my grandmother walked, marking each lap with a stone, a remembrance for each ellipse. It was in summer that I would careen down the street on the bright red skate-wheeled wagon that my grandfather made for me. These activities added up to a giddy triathlon that I was unaware I was training for.

Cemesto-B For a long time I went to bed early in a lumpy twin bed in a bedroom of my grandparents’ Cemesto-B house. The little house sat on a street next to other little houses of similar design. They were part of a master plan, housing for the Manhattan Project. The houses were laid out at slightly different angles, as if you were a relatively neat person, but you happened to be playing Monopoly on a bumpy rug or shag carpeting. In this case, the uneven flooring was the contours of the East Tennessee landscape, the ridges and the rolling hills. The point of this Monopoly game was an atomic bomb, rather than a quest for riches and real estate. The B denotes the house’s place in the alphabetized scheme. The letters correspond to the size of the house and the number of bedrooms: A being the smallest and E the largest. The house was built from a material portmanteau – Cemesto – a composite building material made from cement and asbestos with a core of sugar cane fibre insulation, a filling the texture of cotton candy. Cemesto panels were placed horizontally into wooden frames of the house in order to create the walls. Introduced in 1937 by the Celotex Company, a prototype appeared at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. During the Second World War, the

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Mondrian My atomic childhood is a Mondrian painting. On the ordered streets and in the uniform houses of the former secret city, my grandfather’s blue pickup truck fills a square, his blue jeans colour in another, my grandmother’s favourite outfits in red or yellow folded neatly into others. Their yellow house has its own square too.

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architectural firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill used Cemesto design to make my grandparents’ home and nearly three thousand others just like it. After the war and in the spirit of modernism, Cemesto became a favoured material for architects interested in low-cost building materials. Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames were among its newly won fans.

Reagan on TV Inside those squares could be found yet another square – the Magnavox square. Sometimes my grandfather and I would watch tv together while eating Planters dry-roasted peanuts out of their tall jar. He called them goobers. We would consume great big handfuls of them, causing our fingers to become greasy and salty. I thought they were a fancy snack because of Mr Peanut’s attire and monocle, a snack-sized yellow legume cartoon version of Proust’s Charles Swann. Our tv watching was much less aristocratic; Hee-Haw was among our favourite shows. Sometimes before our country variety program we would watch the news. This was a good time, unless Ronald Reagan punctured the small faux-wood-panelled square. If the president showed up, I knew our fun would be interrupted. My grandfather, a yellow dog Democrat, would become disgusted and say: “Hell, I can’t even relax for one evening without seeing that idiot get on or off a plane waving like a monkey in a zoo.” At these moments I felt relieved to have been born under Carter, the peanut farmer president.

Decantation In Samuel Beckett’s essay on Proust he writes, “the individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicolored by the phenomena of its hours.”5 Beckett notes something others deny: the past when viewed through the glass of nostalgia is not always washed

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in dulled, drab tones; it is often chromatically rich. The images of my atomic childhood in Oak Ridge are vividly rendered in primary colours, which are occasionally taken over by the glowing green that seems to always represent radioactivity.

Overdose Once while visiting my grandparents, I became sick with a cold: a betrayal of the body in summertime. In winter this seems a logical physical condition; in summer it feels like a twisted knot in the organization of the universe throwing off the right order of things. Just as Marcel’s grandmother gave him beer, champagne, or brandy for his asthma in A Search for Lost Time, my own grandmother, in an attempt to adjust the equilibrium of my small body, gave me children’s Tylenol and put me to bed. Marcel and I both longed to play; for him it was in the Champs-Élysées and for me it was the Elysian Fields of my grandparents’ honeysuckle-lined backyard. Homer thought Elysium rested on the western edge of the earth by the stream of Okeanos; I knew it was in atomic Appalachia, not too far from the Tennessee River. When my grandmother left the room, she absent-mindedly left the bottle of orange-flavoured, chewable Tylenol on the nightstand. When I woke I felt much better, leading me to the obvious equation: if a little bit of medicine made me feel a little better, surely the entire bottle would cure me immediately, basically lacing up my Nikes for me and sending me out to play. This is not what happened.

Mooning the Russians When I was well, which was almost always, my brother and I would play a Cold War game we called “Mooning the Russians.” It was vaguely related to the space race and the arms race, but mostly had to do with showing the Reds our asses. The Ruskies, most certainly spies, would drive by my grandparents’ house trying to seem nonchalant. Wearing t-shirts and driving American-made cars, just who did they think they were fooling? We would show them we knew what was up by dropping our Jams in their direction. Often, I was more in the direct service of the nation than my older brother. He would order me and I would lower my shorts. Once, a carload of teenage Reds really seemed to enjoy the mooning. They orbited the yellow house in their cherry-red hotrod like a planet orbits a sun, in predictable circles, anticipated trajectories. It took until the third or fourth time for me to realize they were the same spies, only on loop, so crafty were they in their espionage. 72

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Lighting Bugs As twilight hit on warm August evenings, I set to work collecting lightning bugs in a jar. The labs in Oak Ridge would pay you for a Mason full of them – scientific research they said. As my grandparents lounged, I flitted around their yard, chasing the red and black flying beetles with their magical glowing ends. This was my duty as an atomic citizen.

Glowing Rowers On Melton Lake, a couple of miles from my grandparents’ house, rowers kitted out in tight spandex suits of every colour glide past Canadian geese that have never heard of radiation. Melton Lake not only plays host to visiting crews, but also houses its own – the atomic rowing team. Their symbol is the circle with the fan shape inside, the symbol that warns of radiation. I loved seeing the atomic rowers train, bodies and muscles working in unison as they sat in their long, sleek ruby-coloured boat, dipping their lemon-yellow oars in the lake. I stood on the shore rapt, watching as they slid the radioactive symbol in the water, drawing it out, dipping it in, drawing it out, dipping it in, drawing it out.

3.2 | Atomic rowing

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3.3 | Girl Scouts at Oak Ridge, photograph by Ed Westcott, 6 September 1951

Atomic Scouts I joined the Brownies, the precursor to the Girl Scouts, because of a photograph I saw in the Oak Ridge Children’s Museum that irradiated my desire to be a part of a gang of girls – a troop. The black and white snap, taken in 1951 by Oak Ridge’s official Manhattan Project photographer Ed Westcott, showed young atomic citizens decked out in smart uniforms: berets, kerchiefs, buttons, patches, and belts – proud emblems and accessories of the bold, new American generation. Many wore the black and white oxfords that my mother called Mickey Mouse shoes. In 1963, the Boy Scouts of America issued their Atomic Energy merit badge, a patch with a red and blue atom stitched into a background the colour of yellowcake.6 An equivalent badge was never issued for the Girl Scouts. No matter. The scouts of Oak Ridge hardly needed this patch. Their uniforms were already sewn with their town’s very own atom and its accompanying acorn. And, what’s more, they lived and breathed atomic energy. They marched past the atomic factories just like they would walk past the local drugstore or ball field. For them, it was regular, everyday.

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Since my scouting affiliation was based in another town, I was never able to march with my compatriots past factories born for the Manhattan Project. Instead, I was taught how to sew a potholder that looked like an enormous grape. When I learned the new scout leader was the mother of a girl I did not like much – the two wore matching sweater sets in the pale, shimmery colours found inside oysters – I dropped out. Instead, I prowled around alone, a composite of Davy Crockett, Nancy Drew, and Natty Gann sporting a faux raccoon cap, worn brown corduroys, and a small, red backpack where I kept my compass and mystery novels written by Carolyn Keene. Never able to live up to the image that inspired me, I grew despondent about scouting and more intrigued with nuclear spaces and spies.

Dresser Drawers I found treasures among my grandparents’ things, especially in their dresser drawers. Inside the brass-knobbed compartments rested a tangle of bright yellow Juicy Fruit chewing-gum wrappers with their spiked, silver astronaut underlayers reduced to crumples; old buttons that could be repurposed as wheels on a miniature of Thor’s chariot like those Walter Benjamin found in his mother’s sewing box;7 costume jewellery in garish colours utilized in one of my favourite games called jewel thief; and stray documents of the atomic past that I sometimes borrowed, using them as bookmarks, wedging them into the Nancy Drew mysteries I hoped would make me a better atomic detective. It was in those drawers that I found snapshots of my grandfather leaning nonchalantly against the white unmarked gmc truck he would drive in the service of the Atomic Energy Commission, wadded up pale blue pay stubs destined for deposit at the y -12 Credit Union, and other official-looking government missives. These important documents were not neatly organized, but scattered throughout the drawer’s rectangular space, nudging the buttons and wrappers, kissing the old photographs bent at the edges and creased at odd angles, like scars that have healed but remain all the more obvious for having done so. “Memory, as I have tried to prove, is not the faculty for classifying recollections in a drawer, or writing them down in a register. Neither register nor drawer exists,” wrote Henri Bergson.8 The compartments of my grandparents’ dressers opened up a world for me, and I would never talk about drawers “disdainfully” as Bergson does. Still, I know he is right in that drawers or their magical contents are not memory and are not a metaphor for how memory works; rather, they are sites of possibility for the irradiation of memories.9

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Atomique Pneumatique At the y -12 Federal Credit Union, named after the y -12 National Security Complex (the site of the former secret Manhattan Project factory where uranium was enriched for the bomb that was used on Hiroshima), secret messages pass through pneumatic tubes. I ride there with my grandmother in her enormous gold Chevy Nova on secret missions. We pull up to the designated spot. Magical communiqués made up of complicated formulas calculating hours worked, values assessed, pay measured by the clock, by the market, by the Geiger counter are sucked up, zipped over, mulled over, and responded to. Returning messages are equally mysterious – green rectangles baring the faces of presidents, pyramids, and numbers. On a good day a lollipop tags along to sweeten the deal. The tubes of the y -12 Federal Credit Union mirror the old petit bleus pneumatique system in Paris – now defunct, the little blue messages piling up forever in the corner of the dead letter office.

UFOs The Atomic City is full of mysterious accounts of unidentified flying objects. There are stories of glowing saucers hovering low and slow, parallel to the ground, and then abruptly turning pear-shaped as they fly away. Folks trade accounts of ufo s zipping through willow trees, turning sideways alongside telephone poles and hopping cyclone chain link fences, like a neighbourhood kid working her shortcut. I’ve heard of ufos with ribbon tails waving in the breeze, aircrafts engaged in strange smoke writing, thought to be an alien language, and oblong ships glowing yellow, red, and blue. Sometimes they are described as being as large as the moon, other times the size of three basketballs. Although radar pictures have been deciphered as inconclusive, people believe. Like those in the West who experience ufo s, especially close to the Nevada Test Site, people who feel that they have seen evidence of life from outer space in and around Oak Ridge feel that the nuclear reservation is a draw for extraterrestrials. The fbi has systematically denied the presence of ufo s in the area and has suggested other possibilities including: swarms of insects, flocks of birds, leaves swaying in the wind, strange weather, reflections from pools of water, kites, windblown objects, hysteria, insanity, and substance abuse. You can read all about it in the fbi ’s records vault.10 I asked my grandmother once if she believed in ufo s, and if she felt that they were more likely to visit nuclear places like Oak Ridge. She said: “maybe like us, they are drawn to the glowing lights, and the feeling that something important is going on here.” 76

Recurring Dream One summer when I was visiting my grandparents, I had a recurring dream, every night for a solid week. It was a nightmare where radioactive monsters were out to destroy the world. The monsters had once been regular people, but they had undergone a nuclear metamorphosis after eating radioactive fish pulled from Melton Lake. They were transformed into hideous beings, shuffling zombie-like creatures. One by one everyone in town was killed or made monstrous. My brother and I would be the only ones left, our parents the penultimate pair. The monsters would back us up to the black walnut tree at the edge of the yard, and I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding out of my chest like a cartoon. In the repetitive oneiric sequence, the only thing that would change was the colour of the Volkswagen Beetle parked across the street from the final scene. Most often it was painted antique white, like Herbie the Love Bug (but without the racing stripes); other times it was the colour of lemon yogurt; once the car had the hue of a blueberry, like the vw my dad had when he was young and wooing my mother.

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In The Resonance of Unseen Things, Susan Lepselter writes: “Once upon a time, aliens started coming down from space to colonize earth and abduct human beings. They followed the bomb, and the bomb changed what was possible to think.”11 What strikes me about the bomb is that it also changed what was possible to feel. The bomb and the mad times of the Cold War that followed rewired Americans’ nervous systems, creating the possibility for new anxieties and sensations.

The Ghost of Homecoming Although my parents were long divorced, my grandmother found it unseemly to display pictures of my mother – even when she was young, years before she met my father – with other men. So when I would visit, I would see photographs of my mom on the tops of mantles framed in golden rectangles locking arms with dates obscured by Wite-Out. Anyone who visited my grandparents’ home might have thought that my mother had a thing for phantoms. Sometimes no one could remember who the date was under the glob of white. While on one level I found this hilarious, on another it disturbed me, this erasing of my mother’s past with correction fluid. There was something about the whiteness itself I hated. I came to understand why Mondrian’s white squares took more effort than his brightly coloured ones: more brush strokes were applied – he wasn’t laying a background or creating a blank space for future possibilities, the 77

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white marked the end for those spaces, they would be white and nothing else. My grandmother’s efforts with the tiny Wite-Out brush did something similar: my mother would have only my father and no one else. There is something in this insistence that the past is past (or maybe it never happened at all) that causes me consternation, much more so than if it had simply been left alone, as a record. I learned from Toni Morrison that “invisible things are not necessarily not-there.”12 If my mother’s dates had remained in living colour, if they had appeared casually above the fireplace dressed in early sixties fashions, they wouldn’t have troubled me so much as their exaggerated absences did.

The Ghost of Wheat On a crisp autumn day, after much begging and pleading, my grandfather drove me to a place where some folks had seen Oak Ridge’s most famous phantom, the Ghost of Wheat. The ghost is named after one of the farming communities that was confiscated, evacuated, and eviscerated to make room for the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s.13 He is thought to be the spirit of a farmer whose land was forcefully taken by the government, but nobody really knows for sure. Sometimes the ghost has appeared dressed in overalls and a worn plaid shirt, and occasionally he has manifested as a penumbra of light or balls of fire. The road we took to get to the phantom’s supposed stomping grounds was maintained by the Department of Energy; a sign warned: “Only Authorized Vehicles Allowed.” When he felt like we were close enough, my grandfather eased along the shoulder and parked the truck close to the little white George Jones Memorial Baptist Church. The church was the only original Wheat building still standing – a persistent whiteness against the innocence of trees.14 Sitting there by the side of the road, I had the feeling we had not only driven across town, but across time and into the pre-atomic past, and in a way we had. We listened to Barbara Mandrell and George Jones as we waited. “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” filled the sonic space of the cab. It took me years to realize my grandfather was having fun with me when he chose that particular cassette. I remember how he rifled around for it, how the sounds of the tape cases crunching against each other set me on edge. It sounded like stepping on crickets. Later I learned that the church had been named for an entirely different George Jones, a preacher who had donated money and land to the Wheat community. The church was too old to be named for the country music singer George Jones, known for his womanizing and hard drinking. Those two Joneses were simply what the Dutch call naamgenoot, people who share the same name, but no other connections. 78

Space Dogs

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In those days my patience was short, so it wasn’t too long before I saw something. I looked anxiously over at my grandfather, and in his square glasses I saw an oblong white shape: the ghost ! Then I turned to look forward where I hoped to see the Ghost of Wheat, not simply as a reflection in my grandfather’s glasses, but in all his glory. What I saw instead was the headlight of a motorcycle. The Ghost of Wheat is part of my nervous system, and the nervous system of Oak Ridge: unruly, a bit paranoid; sometimes matter, sometimes spirit.15

Sometimes I would bring my dog Pepper, occasionally known as Dr Pepper, with me to Oak Ridge. Pepper was a black and white mutt with a lot of spirit. My grandparents loved him, and he seemed to enjoy his atomic vacations. He lolled in the shade of the carport and chased the fluorescent yellow tennis ball through the tiny tongues of fresh-cut grass, too-big red collar flapping against his chin. My grandfather built him a dog house with real shingles and trim. It looked like a typical American home, but not like an Oak Ridge home; it had no place in the alphabetized arrangement. It was not a Cemesto. On one visit my grandfather told me a troubling story: the Soviets sent a dog to space and she died. Her name was Laika (in Russian the name meant “barker”). She was chosen by Russian scientists to be flung into space on the basis of her calm demeanour: she was able to stay in very small spaces for long stretches of time, able to tolerate extreme vibrations, willing to subsist on a special gel diet, and adept at handling gravitational forces. She was also selected for her good looks and charisma; she famously delighted reporters by barking into a microphone after they asked her questions. Good natured to the end, she barked upon liftoff, but did not survive Sputnik-2’s journey. Still, Laika was considered a national hero and a martyr to communism. There is a memorial to her in Star City, outside of Moscow, postage stamps, and even a brand of cigarettes carry her image. Pepper resembled her.16 My grandfather told me that the worst part was that all along they knew she would not return to Earth. At the time the Soviets knew how to send vessels into the cosmos, but not how to get them back safely. I was repelled and fascinated by this story; I couldn’t help thinking of Pepper in space, wondering about his chances out there. I thought about the time he hurt his hind leg and had to wear a clear plastic cone over his head, how he looked then like a space dog, and how when he slept he sometimes barked as if he were in another atmosphere; I used to think that he was dreaming he was under water, but maybe it was space he was dreaming. 79

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Underground Grandparents There is an Oak Ridge above the surface and its secret twin below. When I was eleven, I wrote a short story about these twinned towns; it was a disaster-tinged utopia called “Oak Ridge under Oak Ridge.” I learned much later that the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote his own story of doubled worlds – stacked one on top of the other, like bunk beds – nearly a century earlier. Tarde’s text of subterranean speculative fiction was called Underground Man. His story was set in a neo-Ice Age, a post-catastrophic time of cold and darkness after the sun was mysteriously choked. My story, so fitting for the American fears of the eighties, was set in the aftermath of a Soviet nuclear attack. Because of nuclear winter everything on the surface of Oak Ridge seeped downwards in what Tarde might call the diffusion of innovations: the laboratories, the Cemestos, the Olympic-sized swimming pool, and even my grandmother’s hammock were relocated below the earth, only without the Japanese maples that held it in suspension – left above they were vaporized. I imagined my grandparents living below the earth, only as slightly paler versions of themselves; Underground Frank and Underground Nan bowling, tinkering, and drinking coffee on the inverted ridge.

Eating the Bomb Sometimes on Saturdays, when my grandmother went yardsaling, my grandfather and I drove to the Jefferson Fountain for breakfast. We had some rituals around this process. Before entering, I had to touch Oak Ridge’s lively atom painted on the window, tracing its energy trajectories. Next we scanned for a booth with a good view and settled ourselves on the cool, red vinyl. Once seated, my grandfather would take off his cap and set it alongside him, as he ran a hand through his thin wisps of hair. We made a pretense of looking over the menu, but we always ordered the same thing: The y -12 Breakfast Bomb. This combo platter came with eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, biscuits, and one pancake. I delighted in the shared abundance, but more than that, I thrilled in eating “the Bomb.”

Adam Bomb I was a miniature collector, a tiny Edward Fuchs. I had an electric-blue Trapper Keeper filled with Garbage Pail Kids.17 The grotesque cards depicted children with rhyming or approximately rhyming names: There was Boney Tony, unzipping his face to reveal a cracked skull underneath; Snowy Joey, being suffocated inside a menacing snow globe; Deaf Geoff, 80

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a cool kid in an inky black motorcycle jacket with a boom box to his ear, the power of the music exploding half of his face, his eyes, mouth, and pink brain flying out with musical notes; and dozens of others like these. Set side by side the cards could function as the school photographs of an elementary school in hell. The Garbage Pail Kids illustrated all the terrible things that could happen to a person, all of our unconscious fears laid out in bright colours.18 They smelled sweetly stale because of the brittle piece of pink bubble gum that came, like a stowaway, in their packaging. They were malleable macabre objects – they could be kept as a card, or peeled off as a sticker and stuck almost anywhere. Like Kudzu, they covered the landscape of my youth. Some teachers and parents felt the situation had gotten out of hand. Garbage Pail Kids were banned from school. After the ban, I had to work in secret sneaking them out during recess. When my mother would pick me up from school and my brother was already sitting in the front seat, I could slide in the back and work out in the open. There, I would reorganize my collection, making sure not to bend the cardboard edges as they slid into their plastic envelopes (I never used them as stickers). I kept my Garbage Pail Kids organized in alphabetical order. The first card, my favourite and the one that scared me most, was Adam Bomb. He was a little kid, but wearing a dark blue suit with a yellow and red striped tie; he looked like the guy from ac / dc. He had his finger on a red button, pressing it, the top of his head exploding into a mushroom cloud, his blue eyes glassy, a lazy smile on his face. My blue eyes would fall on his to find that he was always already pressing the button: the pressing created an explosion, but also a pause. It exploded the continuum of history.19 The pressing was a warning of what could happen and a reminder of what already had. Riding in the backseat of the twentieth century, I was acutely aware of the destructive power of nuclear technologies.

noteS 1 When thinking with affect here, I follow Ahmed’s delightfully gooey, messy framing: “what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and object.” Again, Ahmed: “I do not assume there is something called affect that stands apart or has autonomy … Instead I would begin with the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near.” Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 29–30. 2 For more about mnemonic assemblages, see Freeman, Nienass, and Daniell, “Memory | Materiality | Sensuality,” 3. 81

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3 McCarthy, The Road, 131. 4 Combray refers to an imagined village in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The place plays an important role in the novel, especially in the early chapters, where it is nearly a character in itself. Combray was inspired by Proust’s childhood village of Illiers, which is located in the Normandy region of France. In 1971, to celebrate the centenary of Proust’s birth, the town was renamed IlliersCombray in his honour. 5 Beckett, Proust, 3–4. 6 Yellowcake, also called urania, is a type of uranium concentrate powder that has very low radioactivity. This is uranium in an intermediate stage in processing. Yellowcake is valuable because it can be converted into u -235, a more fissionable type of uranium, to be used in nuclear weapons or as fuel for nuclear reactors. 7 Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, 109. 8 Quoted in Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 75. 9 Bachelard points out Bergson’s “derogatory” use of the word “drawer” in The Poetics of Space, 74. See also Bergson, Matter and Memory. 10 See “ufo Vault.” 11 Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things, 50. See Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands. 12 Morrison, quoted in Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 17. 13 In total there were five communities that were evacuated to create the city of Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project: Elza, New Hope, Robertsville, Scarboro, and Wheat. For more on the Ghost of Wheat see Freeman, Longing for the Bomb, 34–5. 14 This phrase is borrowed from Agnes Martin. Martin said that when she first thought of painting the grids she became famous for, she was thinking of “the innocence of trees.” 15 Taussig, The Nervous System. 16 For more about Laika and other four-legged cosmonauts, see this delightful history: Turkina, Soviet Space Dogs. 17 Eduard Fuchs was a German writer, collector, and historian (1870–1940). My thinking of the grotesque here is influenced by Benjamin’s analysis of Fuchs’s work Tang-Plastik. Benjamin pulls a quote from Fuchs that can be applied to the Garbage Pail Kids: “The grotesque is the intense heightening of what is sensually imaginable. In this sense, grotesque figures are an expression of the robust health of an age … Yet one cannot dispute the fact that the motivating forces of the grotesque have a crass counterpoint. Decadent times and sick brains also incline toward grotesque representations. In such cases the grotesque is a shocking reflection of the fact that for the times and individuals in question, the problems of the world and of existence appear insoluble. One can see at a glance which of these two tendencies is the creative force behind a grotesque fantasy.” The Garbage Pail Kids are either an expression of health or the evidence that the problems of the world and living are unsolvable. See Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 271. 18 During the time Art Spiegelman was turning out Garbage Pail Kids, he was also at work on his Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus a Survivor’s Tale. With these projects we can imagine some of the darkest moments of the twentieth century spread out on his drawing table alongside afflicted, tortured, and mutilated children made cartoonish. 19 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395.

carole condé and karl BeveridGe, no immeDiate tHreat, 1985–86

No Immediate Threat is a 10-part photo series that examines the ideological assumptions behind the development of nuclear power, its history and the problems faced by workers in that industry in 1985. it is based on informal conversations with nuclear power workers and their families in kincardine, ontario, as well as research into the history of the nuclear industry. the series traces the life of a fictional worker who would have been born at the same time as the advent of nuclear power, the bombing of hiroshima in 1945, and grew up to follow in his father’s footsteps to work in the nuclear power plant. Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge

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With the first atomic detonation on 16 July 1945, a new military nuclear age begins, and with it, proliferating new forms of collective blindness. The first forms of blindness are material, embodied, and immediate: observing a nuclear blast, even at a great distance constitutes a direct assault on the eye. The unnatural light of the exploding bomb moves faster than the one hundred milliseconds of the human blink reflex, installing within nuclear modernity a permanent space of injury, an erasure that continues to undercut our collective ability to see the nuclear present. This vulnerability is founded in ocular anatomy, but it has also come to constitute the conceptual space of the nuclear age itself. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is now apparent that the topsecret military experiment run by Los Alamos weapons scientists in the deserts of central New Mexico in 1945 altered the nature of perception itself, creating a form of negative sublimity that has organized collective life with varying intensities ever since but remains only accessible via compensations, displacements, and misrecognitions. Put differently, the first nuclear detonation, code-named “Trinity,” produced the modern concept of “ground zero,” a new settler colonial relation, international site of mass destruction, and form of planetary violence that has haunted national self-fashioning and geopolitics ever since the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The eye – that miraculous combination of lens, muscles, and nerves – orchestrates sight out of a process that is simultaneously physical, chemical, and psychological. Even at a distance, the human eye cannot withstand the unnatural brightness of the exploding bomb, which disables, and can even burn, the retina. Directly witnessing a nuclear flash (which produces a light intensity ten times greater than the brightness

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of the midday sun) creates a range of optical damage in human beings. A core US biomedical project, running parallel to the development of the bomb itself, has consequently been to assess the effects of nuclear detonations on the observing human eye, to map the ocular terms of the atomic revolution. This military research commitment quickly identified a range of visual impairments, from temporary dazzle to stunned afterimages to permanent flashblindness, as foundational effects of the nuclear age.1 Not seeing, in other words, is the first act of a nuclear society, creating a gap in awareness that links the human nervous system to technoscience to global insecurity in a new way. Out of the resulting desire to understand human vision as nuclear vulnerability emerged a serious scientific commitment to 1) building protection for the human eye and 2) creating new kinds of prosthetic vision to open nuclear detonations as spaces for endless inquiry. The Manhattan Project thus not only built the first nuclear weapons, it sought to produce a new kind of human subject capable of withstanding at a distance the destructive ocular effects of the exploding bomb while also establishing a visual terrain for ongoing experimentation and research. Protective lenses in the form of goggles as well as photographic lenses in the form of cameras were used to insulate the eye from damage while producing still images and motion pictures of the exploding bomb for scientific study. The nuclear revolution of 16 July 1945 thus created a dual new form of exposure: it was simultaneously embodied and photochemical, at once a test of the material world and a commitment to documenting nuclear effects on film.

4.1 | Time-lapse sequence of the Trinity Explosion, 1945

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In between armouring the eye against damage from the physical nuclear event and the concurrent effort to photographically document the bomb in all its nuanced forms a psychosocial lacuna is formed, one that nuclear states have exploited relentlessly in different ways. Indeed, the US nuclear state not only recognized the potential for mass blindness in the nuclear age, it responded by proliferating specific photographic images of the bomb – the mushroom cloud in particular – for collective contemplation, creating a vast field of mediation, one with cognitive, political, and psychosocial consequences. A new kind of collective not seeing is linked to a specific photographic profusion, to a proliferation of selected images of a new technology disciplined under a much larger regime of absolute censorship. Indeed, due to the government secrecy informing nuclear weapons research right from the start, selected films and photographs come to stand in for, and even to define, the nuclear event itself in the twentieth century for a mass audience. What is lost in this now iconic tangle of technoaesthetic mobilization – of physical insulation from the danger of the blast and imagistic proliferation of a specific temporal slice of its effects – is the psychosocial power of aestheticization itself.2 Photography turned engineered mass violence on an unprecedented scale into a problem ultimately of awe and distance, of scientific observation and pure spectacle, of photochemistry and perverse reverie. A key part of the American nuclear project has always been to amplify specific technoaesthetic registers of the bomb over its core products: toxicity, rupture, and mass devastation on a scale that links ruined local ecologies to disruptions in the earth system itself.3 Importantly, the atomic bomb becomes an aesthetic object in its first act in New Mexico, a photographic project above all, and – despite future acts of nuclear war and the continuing activities of nuclear “test” regimes around the world – remains so to this day. The photographic record of nuclear effects produced in the era of atmospheric nuclear detonations (1945–63) constitutes nearly the entirety of the visual archive of the bomb, which locks collective understanding of the technology within a specific visual archive that was produced under extreme secrecy and selectively released under highly politicized circumstances. Dazzle may then be the perfect term for the effect of nuclear weapons on human perception and reason. Dazzle is a flooding of the optic nerve with light, leading to blurring, ghosting, and star effects. The exploding bomb can also produce temporally displaced visual forms, “afterimages” that colonize the perceptual field and last long after the reference image is gone. This physiological lag, this false image, this fixation on a hyper bright moment in the nuclear process long after it has passed was officially codified in US nuclear discourse in the image of the mushroom cloud. The mushroom cloud is a specific moment in the sequence of nu-

clear effects that has come to stand in for the entirety of the destructive event. Indeed, the light spectrum of a nuclear explosion involves up to twelve registers of magnitude. The chemical emulsion photography of the mid-twentieth century could capture only up to four registers of the light from the bomb, creating a substantial objective gap in the existing nuclear archive. Photographers sought to capture a slice of the event and to coordinate an assemblage of cameras and different film stocks to capture the detonation as a distributed sequence, always with limited success. When we look at an image of a nuclear detonation it is then always only a partial portrait of a much more extreme event, one that cannot be captured in its totality on film. Moreover, this inability to photographically register the entire spectrum of nuclear effects is connected to other invisible processes – such as radiation exposure – that create a dangerous new planetary condition. What we cannot see of the bomb – from a distance in person or via photographic documentation – is as important as what can be captured by photochemistry. This creates an unprecedented problem for historical memory: a partially documented hyper-violent phenomenon becomes wrapped in existential national politics over the twentieth century and continues to exert power over contemporary consciousness.4 The bomb, as we have all come to know it today, is a fractional image, a highly coded and politicized part of national life, a psychosocial manipulation of the first degree. The crafting of American nuclear subjectivity via proliferating images of mushroom clouds was one of the key projects of the mid-twentiethcentury US nuclear state, a way of establishing a viewer that is distant and maintains a specific line of sight on mass violence, presented directly as external spectacle. Focusing viewers on images of mushroom

4.2a | Nuclear Flashblindness Studies: Schematic Drawing of Eye (from Allen et al., Nuclear Flash Eye Effects Technical Report for Military Planners, 1967) 4.2b | Nuclear Flashblindness Studies: Schematic Drawing of Visual Field Defects Resulting from Injury to Nerve-Fiber Bundles (from Allen et al., Nuclear Flash Eye Effects Technical Report for Military Planners, 1967)

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clouds was also an official way of acknowledging the fact of the bomb while censoring the vast range of other nuclear imagery, deemed too sensitive in terms of weapons design or too violent for public morale. Photographic proliferation of the mushroom cloud combined with a vast censorship of other nuclear effects is a formal US state project that started with Trinity: it was a way of acknowledging and capitalizing on the existence of nuclear weapons but also of crafting a specific vantage point for US viewers as external witnesses to the destruction of the nuclear age. Indeed, film and photography became a central mechanism for mobilizing distinct viewing publics as specific kinds of nuclear subjects (civilian, military, scientific, political) in the United States, and for constituting a specific set of references as “nuclear” in the first place.5 Dazzle, afterimage, and flashblindness are physical conditions but also historical effects of the atomic bomb: since 1945, US politics has been orchestrated by and through nuclear fears, run not only on continually increasing the destructive power of nuclear weapons through scientific research but also on proliferating phantom images, reality effects, and programmatic deceptions.6 Indeed, the bomb is so embedded in American politics that it can be evoked today by small gestures, part dazzle, part afterimage; this happens, for instance, when a national security adviser demands in 2002 an invasion of Iraq to prevent the “smoking gun that might be a mushroom cloud” or when a president in 2017 promises to deliver “fire and fury” to a rival nuclear nation. These calls to nuclear nationalism are legacies of the long Cold War confrontation, a multigenerational project to articulate domestic and international politics through nuclear fear. Today, to be a subject hailed by existential crisis in this way relies on a long-term project of nuclear indoctrination and constitutes a distorted memory of the twentieth century’s nuclear arms race. It involves weaponizing a cultural formation that began in the deserts of New Mexico in 1945, was deployed immediately over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and led ultimately to the global production of over 60,000 city-killing weapons by the late 1980s. This formulation continues in official efforts today to rebuild state-of-the-art nuclear weapons production complexes in the US and Russia.7 To hear this call, to be provoked by such strategically casual references to existential nuclear danger, is to be constituted as a nuclear subject, to be captured by a regime that is as much imaginary and affective as it is technoscientific. In other words, the programmatic use of nuclear threat, the highly coded official warnings of an imminent total loss, is now a well-established form of American politics, one that has been a key suture between post–Second World War US democratic commitments and US imperial ambitions. The nuclear age is a condition of not only not seeing but also of being psychosocially captured by specific imagistic displacements that have a distinct

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history. Flashblindness, in other words, is both a medical condition and a historical formation, a key achievement of late-industrial modernity in the United States. In the remainder of this chapter, I consider the optical politics that begin the nuclear age, tracking the modes of photographic mediation that have made the bomb coherent as a US national project. For, long before nuclear nationalism and technoscience fused in a new configuration of military industrial power in the formal Cold War, the human body was recognized to be incompatible with nuclear weapons, requiring protection and modification, and ultimately psychological manipulation and social indoctrination. New prosthetic senses, remote viewing systems, and imaging technologies were deployed to overcome the fragility of the human eye, to replace the structural blindness of the nuclear age with texts and graphs, photographs and films – to make the nuclear referent not a space of absolute rupture and erasure but rather of aesthetics, power, inquiry, and, for a very few, pleasure. If nuclear modernity is in its first instance blind, then films and photographs do important ideological work in constituting what people have come to accept as a “nuclear” referent. The visual archive also serves as technical documentation for experimental systems, part of a larger apparatus of military scientific objectivity. Images serve as the primary platform for establishing the material form and psychosocial power of the atomic bomb. To make these points, I return to the origin point of the military nuclear age to assess the valences of nuclear flashblindness today. The Trinity site continues to perform the contradictions of nuclear nationalism and articulates the politics of exposure, in both a radioactive and photochemical sense. I then conclude with three afterimages of the Trinity test, contemporary formations that underscore the continuing psychosocial force of ground-zero politics, attending to the dazzle.

Exposing Ground Zero To get to the first ground zero of the nuclear age, one needs good timing and a ride. The Trinity site is open to the public only two days of the year (the first Saturday in April and October) and for major anniversaries of the detonation on 16 July at 5:29:45 a.m. The Trinity site sits several hours’ drive within the White Sands Missile Range, an active military test range in New Mexico, a place where munitions, missiles, anti-missile defences, and rocketry have been developed since the mid-twentieth century. Thus, to be at the Trinity site today is to be within an active military industrial space; it is to engage a specific formulation of American military power based on a commitment to ongoing technological revolution, to unending Manhattan Projects, and increasing force projection 91

JO seP H m asc O 4.3 | Aerial view of Trinity Ground Zero, July 1945

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around the world. From the road, the White Sands Missile Range looks mostly empty, filled with odd bunkers and the occasional building. But looks can be deceiving: campers at the White Sands National Park some sixty miles to the southwest, marvelling at bright white dunes, frequently have to negotiate the sound of missile tests and heed warnings of the ongoing non-nuclear munitions activities on the test range. The region has fomented ufo sightings ever since the Trinity test, as the nighttime sky is filled not only with a vast field of brilliant stars but also with visible satellite systems and the occasional inexplicable moving object. The Trinity site consists of a large parking area, a few buildings that were used to assemble the plutonium device, and a fenced-off area roughly the size of the original blast crater designated as “ground zero.” Within the fenced area one finds a casing similar to the original “fat man” device detonated at Trinity (and then a few weeks later over Nagasaki), a shed covering some remaining shards of “trinitite” (the green glassy substance created when the explosion melted sand at ground zero), a stone obelisk installed in 1965 to officially commemorate the

protection of Ground Zero Monument, Trinity test site, 16 July 1995

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4.4 | Armed guard

detonation, and a row of historical photographs strung along the chain link fence. Signage warns visitors not to eat or drink at ground zero and to limit their visiting time for health reasons. Usually there are a few representatives from New Mexico’s fleet of nuclear facilities providing demonstrations of comparative radiation risk, or offering historical perspectives on the Manhattan Project, the Second World War, or the ongoing US weapons science project to perfect the atomic bomb. Ground zero is a space to wander, to look at the obelisk and photographs, to take in a big-sky desert environment, and to absorb the idea that time itself was altered in this place generations ago. Visitors are a reliable combination of military history buffs, veterans of the nuclear complex and defence programs, tourists, and anti-nuclear activists. In my trips to the site since the mid-1990s, conversations at ground zero have been frequently marked by visitor efforts to capture the grandeur of the original event, to see in the desert landscape and scattered objects a sign of monumental history, the start of a new age of continual technological revolution, weapons of mass destruction, and expansive American power. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the detonation, the site was highly politicized after the shutdown of a proposed Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian earlier in the year by veterans’ groups unwilling to accept the careful work of historians to understand the decisions that led to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.8 At that time, an activist doused the obelisk with a red, blood-like liquid, producing a day-long protective military police counter-formation around the stone structure; it was as if ground zero itself were under attack, instead of the site of originary violence, and needed a military defence (see figure 4.4). In other encounters, I have interviewed visitors 93

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who tried to articulate a “greatest generation” story about the Second World War and the exceptional work of scientific geniuses (focused on the names Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller). Often these efforts were ultimately brought down by the humbleness of the actual site, as visitors were unable to maintain the big man story about nuclear nationalism while staring at a largely empty piece of desert. Many of my interviews have ended with the visitor openly wondering about their own attractions and compulsions to the site, with more than a few suggesting that there is not much of the Manhattan Project to actually see and wondering if they were taken in by a ruse, a con, a nuclear fabulation. For others, the site is more performative than reflexive. I have interviewed anti-nuclear and peace activists who engage ground zero as a site of continuing radiation exposure – showing up in handmade anticontamination gear, wearing face masks, and warning people to not breathe in the dust of the desert. I have also talked to many who endorse the nuclear bombings of Japan as a righteous wartime act, and see the test site itself as linked to the ascendency of American power in the world (in one year, for example, there was a group of American tourists proudly wearing t-shirts grotesquely logoed with “Made in America, Tested in Japan” underneath an image of a mushroom cloud). Still other visitors are employees of the current nuclear complex, wanting to underscore the importance of the bomb in a dangerous world, seeking support for a US military industrial project that they perceive has been under threat since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a moratorium on underground nuclear testing in 1992. I have also encountered academics and journalists, writers and artists, protesters and religious figures all involved in trying to encounter, to find a means of witnessing and engaging, the start of the nuclear age. Thus, the site reflects and refracts the multigenerational complexity of nuclear politics in any given era. But what links all of these diverse engagements is the absent presence of the bomb itself, of the very thing that generates such intense interest and energizes this strange desire among diverse subjects to arrive at the remote desert test site in the first place. In the absence of a monumental “atomic” presence, what people actually do at the site, mostly, is line up to look at the dozens of photographs attached to the chain link fence that surrounds the test area. Ground zero is ultimately a photo gallery, and a strange one at that. The photographs offer portraits of the Manhattan Project scientific team, recording the process of assembling the first atomic bomb, and leisure activities at the site (including, oddly, a polo team). It also offers a long series of time-lapse photographs of the detonation, microsecond images that install a sequence of events focused on the production of the mushroom cloud. The photographs also include a picture of the 6 August 1945 Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper story simultaneously announcing to

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the world the Trinity test and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima. Strangely, there is also a photograph of the obelisk that stands only a few yards behind the viewer. It is, in other words, a decidedly odd mix of portraits, artifacts, and scientific images – all seemingly curated for a

4.5a/b | Photographic display at Trinity Ground Zero 95

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different site. Nonetheless, even though many more images are available today on the internet, alongside highly detailed eyewitness accounts of the detonation, the photographs of the detonation provoke fascination. The combined dilemma of presence (standing at the geographical site of the detonation – at ground zero itself) and absence (as the test is only visible via almost imperceptible trace effects) are heightened at the Trinity site, a problem that the photographs seek to resolve by offering a time-lapse sequence of the event, a microsecond performance of the detonation in laminated photochemistry. At the Trinity site we can begin to see that the American myth of the atomic bomb has been built photographically, installing degrees of dazzle and flashblindness with each image. Built in secret, used without warning, the atomic bomb has captured imaginations via the production and selective promotion of films and photographs. Flashblindness here becomes a multifaceted phenomenon – a combination of physical vulnerability coded into the human eye and nervous system, as well as a distinct psychosocial domain, where not seeing, amnesia, and historical revisionism become ways of stabilizing a society that has lived for generations now with, and through, nuclear ambitions and fears. American society not only built the bomb at mid-century, it also built itself via the bomb, pursuing elaborate commitments to nuclear engineering, militarism, apocalypticism, and emotional management.9 One could say that the nuclear explosion known as “Trinity” not only completed the first phase of the Manhattan Project and brought a new destructive force into warfare, it also inaugurated a new American society increasingly organized around and through nuclear fear. The production of American citizens as nuclear subjects as an ideological project was achieved significantly through photography after the Second World War, raising a vital question: was the Trinity test an atomic bomb attached to a photographic experiment, or was it a photographic project linked to a military atomic experiment? The Trinity event was simultaneously nuclear and photographic, an assemblage organized via a shared fusing and timing system. The trigger that detonated the plutonium implosion device also fired a vast set of motion picture and still cameras, making the Trinity test an extraordinary photographic experiment riding conterminously within a nuclear one.10 Fifty-two cameras (Fastax, Kodak Cine E, and Mitchell motion picture cameras) as well as a host of still cameras (Fairchild J -17b Aero, pinhole, and handheld) were deployed around the test, operating at different speeds and focused on different aspects of the light spectrum. Placed at different distances from ground zero (from yards to miles, while placed on the ground, in partially buried bunkers, as well as on line-of-sight positions on top of local hills), the test was shot in mul-

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tiple formats: 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm motion picture, as well as via pinhole, stereographic, black and white, and colour still images. The photographic group sought to document as much of the blast as possible using the full range of photographic equipment that was available in 1945.11 Some cameras were housed in bunkers built of steel and lead to protect the cameras from the blast effects and the film from radiation effects. Some of the film was ruined by the radiation produced by the blast, leaving only fogged images. It was one of the largest and most comprehensive photographic efforts to date, producing some 100,000 mostly black and white photographic images (from cameras operating at speeds ranging from 1 to 10,000 frames per second). Nonetheless, perhaps the most widely circulated image of the Trinity explosion was not produced by the photographic group and its vast array of cameras: it was by Jack Aeby, a member of Emilio Segre’s technical team, who took a colour snapshot of the blast with his own camera and inadvertently produced a now iconic mushroom cloud image. Julian Mack was head of the Optics group, with Berlyn Brixner serving as principal photographer. Together they designed the imaging approach to the Trinity test and solved the vast set of timing issues, linking dozens of photographic devices to the milliseconds of the implosion event. Mack published a photographic survey of the test in 1946, which used diagrams overlaid on top of images to explain the nature of nuclear effects but also created an enduring metric for publicizing nuclear effects to the American public. In one key image, Mack offers a photograph of the mushroom cloud overlaying the outlines of three structures drawn to scale: the Washington Monument, the Empire State Building, and the Merchandise Mart. This convention of measuring the scale of nuclear effects against US monuments (or later over maps of US cities) continues to this day, here evoking Washington, DC , New York, and Chicago as future nuclear ruins.12 In this way, the atomic bomb has always been imagined as a suicidal project, fomenting nuclear nationalism via images of the total destruction of American cities by US technologies.13 Deeply installed within the Trinity test is a photochemical logic that not only comes to constitute a central means of studying nuclear phenomena, but also establishes an idea of the atomic bomb that can travel outside of the classified worlds of weapons science. Photography is thus a means both of studying military nuclear physics and of creating a collective understanding of “the bomb,” a process that installs gaps and silences even as it documents and exposes. It should not be a surprise that one of Brixner’s first assignments after Trinity was to develop a set of films for Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves, who wanted cinematic documentation of the first atomic detonation to circle the planet in the aftermath of the Second World War as a sign of

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4.6 | Jack Aeby’s photograph of the Trinity detonation 4.7 | Illustration of Trinity mushroom cloud set against building profiles.

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America power and a promissory note to all potential rivals. In an age of continuing technological revolution and international competition, nuclear images both served as technical proof of military capacity and constituted a new psychosocial space in which to negotiate the collective future. The official commitment to recording nuclear effects on film would come to revolutionize imaging in the decades to come, as efforts to develop new photochemical film stocks that could capture more of the extreme visual spectrum of the blast were simultaneously pursued alongside new camera technologies – a commitment to building faster cameras that could turn a nuclear explosion into a temporally expansive contemplative space for scientific investigation.14 Here is how Brixner describes his technical career at Los Alamos in the decade after the Trinity test: It was during those early years that I modified and improved various existing cameras and even, in 1947, invented a new camera. This new camera – a simplified version of the sweeping-slitimage camera – gained for us a resolution of 10–8 second that could be used for a variety of explosion studies – including spectroscopy. Also, I helped develop the first megacycle framing camera at Los Alamos. It all started with A.W. Campbell’s borrowed Bowen 76-lens framing camera that had a maximum speed of 400,000 pictures per second. The idea was to increase the speed of that camera. First we substituted a faster rotating mirror, thus, increasing the speed to 1,500,000 pictures per second. Then, later, we substituted an even faster mirror and increased the speed to 3,000,000. Now, after that experience with an explosionsynchronized framing camera, I began to see a way to engineer a camera design of our own, one that would make larger pictures with better image quality and that would at the same time retain the megacycle picture rate. Within a year the new camera was built and soon became popular for explosion research. The camera was later widely copied and refined by camera manufacturers. For special problems we also made other models of the camera, some with speeds up to 15,000,000 pictures per second, some working at optical apertures up to f/4.0. For nuclear bomb explosion – which could not be synchronized with the rotating mirror – I invented a continuous writing camera that ran as fast as 3,500,000 pictures per second.15 Please note the exponential growth in camera recording speed in Brixner’s account, documenting a period of feverish camera innovation in

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the immediate postwar period. Similar efforts were made to develop new film stocks via a defence contract with Kodak, which could capture even more of the visual spectrum of nuclear effects. This revolution in imaging accompanies the growth of the bomb itself, which by 1952 had jumped from an atomic to thermonuclear level, registering a release of energy hundreds to thousands of times greater than the Trinity test. The year-long US nuclear weapons scientific projects – organized as named “operations” – produced even more expansive photographic survey efforts in the 1950s from the Marshall Islands to the Nevada test site. The politics of exposure informing the Trinity test are, however, more than merely cinematic. The radioactive fallout of the detonation travelled widely, injuring people and livestock, installing alongside a new military technology and photographic challenge, a lasting impact on regional ecology. A post–Cold War nuclear health project concluded that members of the public were exposed to radioactive fallout from the Trinity test, creating the first class of individuals assumed to be injured by radiation from the bomb (as well as the first class lacking the necessary documentation to prove it).16 The Defense Nuclear Agency collected film badge dosimeters from 815 people who visited the Trinity site from July 1945 to January 1947, documenting that at least 45 people received substantive radiation exposure (between 2 and 12 roentgens).17 Made by Kodak (just like much of the photographic film inside the array of cameras), the dosimeter film badge is another key petrochemical domain of the nuclear age: by the end of the Cold War millions of dosimeter badges from nuclear workers would be collected and stored at the Nevada test site, part of long-standing litigation over radiation injury within the US nuclear complex, an archive of Cold War exposure. The exposures recorded by the dosimeter badges are only part of a much larger class of exposed subjects: Today it is acknowledged that there are downwinders all around the world – individuals caught in the radioactive fallout from nuclear detonations – making radiation exposure both a planetary condition and a locally concentrated effect of nuclear nationalism. Downwinders from the Trinity test continue to petition the US government for compensation and health assistance to this day, attributing generations of illness to that July 1945 event.18 Thus, when Los Alamos scientists proved their theory about nuclear fission via a plutonium-based implosion experiment on 16 July 1945, at 5:25 a.m., creating an unprecedented blast that was soon mobilized over Japan with city-killing power, they inadvertently set in motion a wide range of rival exposure processes. From the revolution in photographic technologies to new biomedical accumulations of radionuclides, the nuclear age proliferates modes of exposure, revealing subjects, ecologies, and ideologies via radioactive effects. But we should pause here

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and remember that in July of 1945 the mushroom cloud was not yet an iconic symbol of the nuclear age, not yet an overdetermined symbol for technoscientific power and apocalypticism. Witnesses to the first nuclear detonation were not yet sure that their eye protection, bunkers, and distancing would protect them from the blast. It was an experiment not only with military technology and imaging but also with the collective environment and an unprecedented assault on the human nervous system. It is precisely this fusion of technology, cognition, sensory limits, and visualization that is difficult to appreciate today, almost seventy-five years later, in a hyper-mediated digital age, suffused with nuclear politics, national security affects, and acclimatized to continual technological revolution. We understand the Trinity event today retrospectively, using a set of ideas and conventions that emerge out of Cold War politics. Indeed, one of the key photographs attached to the chainlink fence at ground zero works to transform an experimental event into just such a convention: the caption reads “The classic mushroom cloud about 15 seconds after detonation.” Thus, the mushroom cloud is presented at the Trinity site as “classic” in its very first incarnation. One of the key commitments of US nuclear culture after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to make images of the bomb, and deploy those images with such ferocious energy that they overwhelmed the other modes of exposure – the dosimeter badge readings of nuclear workers, the sacrificed local subjects, and the accelerating registers of a damaged environment – that resist aestheticization. Indeed, in the aftermath of the public announcement of the Trinity test, public fears of the bomb spiked, with fantastic stories proliferating not only about world-ending technologies but also about weather changes, animal mutations, and health effects. The official answer to these fears was to arrange for, and then highly publicize, a photograph of the two directors of the Manhattan Project – J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves – standing at ground zero, nonchalantly witnessing the aftermath and demonstrating by their physical presence that the desert site was survivable. But of course this photograph does not reveal the radiation levels or the damage to the local ecology or begin to imagine the cumulative force of global nuclear testing in the following decades. The above-ground nuclear detonations of the first decades of the nuclear age distributed fallout on a planetary scale, so much so that geologists today are arguing for the creation of a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – founded on the radionuclides from nuclear detonations.19 The plutonium distributed across the planet from Cold War nuclear detonations from Trinity on are now part of the official geological history of the planet, an indelible marker of nuclear nationalism, a register of planetary scale exposure and a new geo-temporal order. The Trinity

4.8 | J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves at Trinity Ground Zero

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4.9 | The Trinity Supercomputer

detonation continues to be world-making as well as world-breaking, installing novel forms of military power via intensifying degrees of dazzle, and, as we shall now see, proliferating forms of flashblindness.

Afterimage I: The Trinity Supercomputer In 2015, Los Alamos National Laboratory revealed its next supercomputer, code-named “Trinity,” a device that would bring exascale computation power – or, a billion billion computations per second – to nuclear weapons science. Announced as part of the seventieth anniversary of the Trinity test, this state-of-the-art supercomputer will be used, in the language of the laboratory, to deliver a “safe, secure, and reliable nuclear stockpile” by rendering “3d simulation of nuclear detonations practical, with increased fidelity and resolution.”20 Seeking a thousand-fold increase in computing power, the new machine is a far cry from the manual calculations made for the first bomb in Los Alamos in 1945, but it continues a foundational commitment to supercomputing at the laboratory. Building 3d simulations of nuclear weapons is also a way of creating a nuclear detonation virtually, generating a nuclear space that does not destroy the human body but is rather tuned to its technoaesthetic pleasures. The formal announcement of the system came with an image of the new machine, complete with a photographic overlay of Oppenheimer and Groves standing in the rubble of the Trinity detonation on its side. This marks a continuity of form, from photograph to immersive virtual simulation, in the making of US weapons of mass destruction, 102

4.10a/b/c | Still images from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Trinity Sequence

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and shows the emergence of ever more sophisticated and seductive modes of nuclear dazzle.

Afterimage II: David Lynch’s Trinity On 25 June 2017, the eighth episode in David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks: The Return aired, taking viewers on an unexpected trip to the deserts of central New Mexico in 1945. The larger storyline of the series – a detective story with supernatural overtones – was suspended, or rather amplified, into a violent portrait of the nuclear revolution. In this surrealist film, embedded within the larger narrative structure of the missing person and murder mystery format, Lynch brings the viewer inside the Trinity detonation, marking it not as a space of scientific achievement and nuclear nationalism but rather as a rip in the fabric of reality, an entry point for malevolent entities from another dimension, an event that fuses the simplicity and surety of small-town American life with demonic forms and unrestrained violence. Set against the atonal musical score of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Lynch explodes the conventions of television narrative, creating a set of images that both mimic and undercut existing forms of nuclear representation. Beginning with a high-definition digital simulation of the Trinity detonation, Lynch offers the viewer at first a conventional viewing angle on the blast and emerging mushroom cloud but then forces the viewer closer, moving inside the event itself. The image shifts from sharp, focused black and white photography of the blast to a swirl of reality-rending shards, streaks, and multi-coloured effects. The material fabric of the universe is ripped apart in this sequence of nuclear effects, creating rifts and tears that allow other forms and logics to emerge through them. These beings include: a demonic supernatural entity that possesses people (and is the violent animus informing the entire Twin Peaks narrative world), three soot-covered men who terrorize or kill all they meet before taking over a radio station and delivering a chant that puts listeners immediately to sleep, and a mutated creature (part insect, part bird, part animal) that climbs outside of a shell at the desert test site and ultimately inside the mouth of a sleeping teenage girl. These forms represent different trajectories of exposure, different kinds of nuclear effects: violent rage, mass-mediated narcolepsy, and internalized mutation. Lynch presents here a highly morbid portrait of the Trinity event: it is the start of a nuclear age not founded in celebratory technoscience and national achievement, but rather in the unlocking of new scales and forms of violence and their installation within the most seemingly normative and peaceful corners of small-town life. Crucially, this violence also operates at the edge of human perception, offering a

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portrait of a seemingly unbroken world that is actually suffused with new malevolent entities and inexplicable violent acts, making everyday life a terrifying form of nuclear dazzle.

4.11 | Cai Guo-Qiang’s pyrotechnic performance piece, commemorating the 75th anniversary of Enrico Fermi’s fission

Afterimage III: Cai Guo-Qiang’s Trinity

experiment at the University of Chicago, 2 December 2017

On 2 December 1942, Enrico Fermi and his team achieved the first nuclear chain reaction in a laboratory at the University of Chicago. It was the official start of the Manhattan Project, a proof-of-concept experiment that ended in fully operational weapons in the summer of 1945, enabling the Trinity test followed by the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the cp -1 experiment, the University of Chicago offered a series of events emphasizing the linkage between science and the state achieved during the Manhattan Project, privileging the creation of “big science” and the subsequent building out of a network of national laboratories, as well as the National Science Foundation. The culmination of this cp -1 commemoration – what one university proponent labelled “the big bang of big science” – was a 105

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performance art piece by the Chinese pyrotechnic artist Cai Guo-Qiang. On 2 December 2017, after a solemn tolling of the campus church bells, Cai ignited a highly crafted explosion over the original site of the cp -1 experiment, raising a rainbow-coloured mushroom cloud directly over the origin point of the military nuclear age on the University of Chicago campus. This technically virtuosic pyrotechnic spectacle presented a mushroom cloud as an inexplicably happy event, offering up fallout (environmental, political, and, now we must say, aesthetic) as no longer a matter of existential collective concern – a matter not only of life and death but also of illness and toxicity – as simply a pleasing spectacle, making perhaps the strongest case yet to date about the continuing force of nuclear flashblindness.

noteS 1 See Glasstone and Dolan, Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 571. 2 See Masco, Nuclear Borderlands, chapter 2. 3 See Masco, “The Age of Fallout,” 137–68, as well as Rosenthal, “Nuclear Mushroom Cloud,” 63–92, and Taylor, “Nuclear Pictures and Metapictures,” 567–97. 4 Masco, Theater of Operations. 5 Masco, “Target Audience,” 22–31. 6 See Masco, Theater of Operations, for a discussion of national security affect and threat perception. 7 See Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review. 8 See Nobile, Judgement at the Smithsonian. 9 See Schwartz, Atomic Audit; see also Masco, Theater of Operations. 10 See Mack, July 16th Nuclear Explosion, and O’Gorman and Hamilton, “eg&g ,” 182–201. 11 Mack, Semi-Popular Motion Picture, as well as Brixner, Photographing the First Nuclear Explosion. 12 Mack, Semi-Popular Motion Picture, 39. 13 See Masco, Theater of Operations, chapter 2, as well as Galison, “War against the Center,” 6–33. 14 Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb. 15 Brixner, “A Scientific Photographer at Project Y,” 107. 16 Widner and Flack, “Characterization of the World’s First,” 480–97. 17 See Defense Nuclear Agency, Fact Sheet: Project Trinity. 18 See Gomez, Unknowing, Unwilling and Uncompensated. 19 See Waters et al., “The Anthropocene,” 2622–5. 20 Los Alamos National Laboratory, From Trinity to Trinity.

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Mary kavanaGH, atomic toUrist / trinity, 2014–

trinity, new Mexico, is an ideologically and historically loaded site that signifies one of the most significant moments of the 20th century – the testing of the world’s first atomic bomb in preparation for its use on the civilian populations of hiroshima and nagasaki, Japan (1945). Considered the birthplace of the atomic age, people flock to the trinity test site during commemorative, bi-annual open houses. a multi-channel video installation lays bare the unique spatial and temporal structure of the trinity open house. filmed in real time, this piece reconstructs a secular pilgrimage to the front line of modern science and the bomb, as thousands of people from across the globe grapple with what Joseph Masco, in Nuclear Borderlands, describes as “a utopian belief in the possibility of an unending technological progress, and an everyday life structured around the technological infrastructures of human extinction.” i have been conducting interviews with atomic tourists on site over a number of years, building an archive of voices and perspectives that reveals a profound collective cultural anxiety filtered through the specificity of the site itself. this serial compilation of interviews, presented as moving image portraits, examines trinity as what timothy Morton calls a “hyper-object” (something massively distributed in time and space) whose fall-out – physical, psychological and sociocultural – continues to impact us today. Mary Kavanagh, Atomic Tourist | Trinity text, 28 August 2019

Nancy Brenner, Macungie, Pennsylvania Atomic Tourist | Trinity, 2014 i saw a documentary on the trinity project many years ago, and it was the first time i realized all the work that went into developing what was really at that time a protective measure, a race against another country that was also developing this technology. then i read a book by richard feynman who worked on the Manhattan

Paul Griego, Albuquerque, New Mexico Atomic Tourist | Trinity, 2019 this is not my first time at ground zero. i was part of the enewetak atoll Clean-up from 1977 to 1979. i collected soil samples on eighteen of the contaminated islands where we had the U.S. Pacific Proving grounds. there were approximately forty-three atmospheric bomb tests conducted at the enewetak atoll, not even

Project and he described how all these people from different disciplines came together to do something that was defensive but that had a lot of potential. the fact that when they set off the first explosion, by their earliest calculations they weren’t even sure if they were going to set the atmosphere on fire, they were really pushing the envelope. the Cold war was crazy. i remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, being told to roll under your desk and in case anything happens to keep a tin can of water, scary for a child. however, when you think about it, the Cold war fed the space race as well; we would never have been as fervent about our space pursuits and achievements had it not been for the Bomb. it’s important that we don’t ever fall into using these weapons of mass destruction again. and it’s extremely important for people to come here and to understand the context, and not just their side of the story, both sides, to remember there are two sides. human nature is very complicated and to create something with such devastating potential means we need to be very responsible with it.

including the Bikini atoll where there were dozens more, and during the clean-up, we built a massive concrete containment dome in a nuclear blast crater on the island of runit. that dome has 110,000 cubic yards of highlevel nuclear materials, soil and debris from the nuclear testing, metals and so forth. i was only twenty years old at that time, yet i was responsible for the lives of the eight men that were part of the operation. we were collecting soil with small hand shovels and wearing nothing but shorts, not even t-shirts. the t-shirt i would use as a mask or towel as everyone else did. the story that the government tells is that we were all wearing protective gear. it’s not true. i have all the photographic evidence. i was there. nobody was wearing hazmat suits. it was over 100 degrees in hot humidity so it wouldn’t have been possible to wear a hazmat suit anyway. i’m the new Mexico State Commander for the national association of atomic Veterans, a group of 385 survivors spread throughout the country. the islands that i worked on are uninhabitable today. twenty-three of the sixty-seven contaminated islands are called wildlife

marine habitats, but that’s just another word for quarantined. when we built that dome in the nuclear blast crater, we never lined it. we weren’t able to line it because it was filled with seawater and open to

Catherine Begaye, Albuquerque, New Mexico Atomic Tourist | Trinity, 2017 Uranium mined on navaho land was used to make some of the first atomic bombs that were tested – not only here at the trinity site, but also in nevada. and the bombs were put together in Los alamos, which is right near a number of native american tribes. Mining companies were able to come out here, mine the land without cleaning it up, poison the water and the earth. all the bad effects and the tailings are still out there – uncovered. and that’s my homeland – and i didn’t realize the connection until recently, the navajo connection, that my people were part of the uranium miners who provided the uranium to be refined and used in bombs dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki, people who would have been my distant relatives … if science is actually true versus native american beliefs about how we came to this world.

the ocean. we built a retaining wall before we started piling up the radioactive debris, segregating what we put in the crater itself and what we just dumped into the sea, right into the ocean.

and then with the navajo code talkers during world war two – it was just such a connection that i thought i can’t be an ignorant person anymore. i can’t pretend i don’t know. i can’t ignore it. and so i’m going to spend this entire year being something of an atomic tourist, going to Los alamos, learning more about it, coming here to trinity, just sort of exploring all the different sites. for me it’s heart-breaking and emotional, but i think it’s important to know, to remember.

Part tWO

Beyond the Bomb

Below the Bombs mattHeW farisH During the frontier era, the “black world” known to some people as Newe Sogobia was “outside” the US state. But as the United States took and transformed this land, it largely preserved the qualities that had made this land an “outside” – laws didn’t apply, things could be done in secret and without consequence, the land could be bombed indiscriminately, and so forth. Trevor Paglen, “Groom Lake and the Imperial Production of Nowhere”

Early in the morning of 1 November 1951, some 3,700 US military personnel gathered in the dusty desert basin of Yucca Flat, in the northeastern corner of an area called the Nevada Proving Ground. They had travelled by truck to an observation point, where they were to witness an airdropped nuclear explosion, code-named “Dog” – the fourth in a series of seven tests labelled Buster-Jangle.1 In the hour before the detonation, a pa device issued a reassuring announcement: the troops, mostly members of the US Army, were in a safe location, some eleven kilometres south, and any danger from radiation would dissipate after ninety seconds. In fact, “with simple protective clothing, they could have been positioned much closer to Ground Zero. Most important, they were told the detonation would not make them sterile.” As dawn broke, the observers could see “a wide valley enclosed by ragged mountains.”2 Eventually, they were ordered to sit down and turn around, and a countdown began. The order was given: “Bomb Away.”3 One witness recalled that those without eyewear “could see the bones in their hands” as they held them over their eyes.4 When the shock wave arrived, another recalled, “The ground was running at you like a roller coaster,” and some men were toppled over.5 Seconds passed, and they were directed to pivot once more and face the cloud and fireball. A paratrooper exclaimed, “It’s extraordinary!”6 Soon, winds were pushing the

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“peak” of the mushroom cloud toward a mountain platform occupied by journalists, who “drove frantically away,” only “slightly contaminated” according to a report in Life.7 The 21-kiloton Dog was the ninth nuclear weapon detonated at the Proving Ground, which was less than a year old (and was given its more familiar name, the Nevada Test Site, in 1955).8 But amid hectic discussions on nuclear testing held between the Atomic Energy Commission (aec ), which controlled the Proving Ground, and the Department of Defense (DoD), the Dog blast was different.9 Half an hour after the explosion, accompanied by an advisory group of three officers from the DoD’s Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (afswp ), 2,800 of the observers moved in vehicles, and then on foot, to fortified “display positions” where they could inspect the post-blast terrain, along with equipment and the unfortunate bodies of captive animals. Set at various distances from ground zero, the closest of these positions was 1,350 metres away, although “records indicate that some observers went closer to the site of detonation” and received “slightly higher” exposure to radiation.10 A separate group of 883 troops from four Army units, combined into a Battalion Combat Team (bct ), witnessed Dog from the same observation point. Two weeks earlier, the bct had established its own “defensive position” a few kilometres southwest of ground zero; a day prior to the exercise, they had left film badges (to record individual radiation exposure) and equipment there. After the explosion, and after receiving a report from radiological monitors, the bct returned to the area and collected these items. Around 11:00 a.m., preceded and accompanied by monitors, they “attacked” in columns “into the bombed area,” until they reached an objective just 460 metres from ground zero. Following this “troop maneuver,” the bct moved back, on foot and in trucks, to positions farther away.11 Finally, they were transported to a “decontamination station at Yucca Pass.”12 According to restricted documentation shared with participants, the premise behind this startling activity (dubbed Operation Thundercloud) was that a “strong Aggressor,” the size of two US field armies, had arrived on the northwest coast of the US and “proceeded to drive to the southeast.” By late October, the US military (specifically, three Corps of the Sixth Army), having withdrawn to a line stretching from San Luis Obispo on the Pacific Coast through southern Nevada, and unsuccessful in its use of “conventional” arms, used “an atomic weapon to effect maximum destruction of the enemy,” followed by an “offensive” pushing this enemy to the north.13 While unnamed, the hypothetical opponent was understood to follow the “typical formations as well as current tactical doctrine of Communist armies.”14

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Under the heading of Exercise Desert Rock, this was the first such exercise on land: “the employment of an atomic weapon tactically on a simulated battlefield.”15 Starting with Dog, from 1951 to 1957, through the sets of rehearsals called Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, UpshotKnothole, Teapot, and Plumbbob, Nevada hosted eight similar Desert Rock programs involving tens of thousands of personnel.16 Participants were housed at Camp Desert Rock, a military facility built at the southern boundary of the aec -run Proving Ground, not far from the scientific and administrative hub of Camp Mercury (today, the still-closed community of Mercury, Nevada). At the camp, soldiers drilled, watched instructional films, and heard “lectures and briefings on the effects of nuclear weapons,” before they were dispatched into the vast space of the Proving Ground.17 Across oral histories, memoirs, journalism, and personal websites, the recollections of Desert Rock attendees amount to a vivid, distressing portrait of life in the maelstrom of Cold War militarism. Since the late 1970s, these and other “GI Guinea Pigs” or “Atomic Veterans” have received significant attention from advocates, scholars, and the media, much of it understandably focused on the long-term health effects of their participation in activities like Desert Rock – participation that was not transparently voluntary.18 This attention has rarely lingered over the filmic and photographic record of Desert Rock, or the specific, lasting landscape that this record depicted and helped to fabricate. Although they were certainly vetted before release, and are thus modest in number relative to the classified archive, these images are nonetheless among the most striking US artifacts of the nuclear age.19 In artistic compendia such as Michael Light’s 100 Suns (2003), photographs that include Desert Rock participants add scale and proximity to the monstrous sublimity of mushroom clouds.20 In the Camera Atomica exhibition (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015), some of these same photographs, drawn from Light’s collection, made for eerie viewing alongside the horrifying pictures of Hiroshima taken by Yoshito Matsushige in the immediate aftermath of that city’s devastation on 6 August 1945. Six years later, not long before Matsushige’s images were first published in the US, the Department of Defense was staging nuclear war on US soil, using US weapons and participants drawn from the US military – who were both protagonists and potential casualties.21 “Sometimes,” Eileen Welsome writes of such scenarios, as troops “marched across saltbrush and sage toward imaginary invaders” they “were lost in the dust and the wind, driven off course, only to find themselves dangerously close to the scorched center of the blast.”22 The photograph of bct members watching the Dog “shot” is the most prominent of a modest number of available images depicting

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5.1 | Troops of the Battalion Combat Team, US Army 11th Airborne Division, watch a plume of radioactive smoke rise after a D-Day blast at Yucca Flats [sic, 1 November 1951], as the much prepared Exercise “Desert Rock” reaches its peak. Photograph by “Cpl. McCaughey.”

Desert Rock I. In 1999, the US National Archives and Records Administration (nara ) included the photo in the exhibit Picturing the Century, and it remains on nara ’s website today. Referring to the “much prepared ‘Desert Rock’ exercise,” the caption reminds us that despite the extremity of the activity and the secrecy enveloping the Proving Ground, Desert Rock events were followed by media and carefully projected to audiences well beyond the military.23 On 2 November, at Las Vegas’s Hotel Last Frontier, eleven Desert Rock participants, “most members of the bct ,” told assembled journalists about their moderate “fear or nervousness, but all were grateful for the experience.”24 Differently cropped versions of the Dog photo were printed in the New York Times, also on 2 November, and in the 12 November issue of the widely read Life maga116

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zine, as part of a two-page spread on the exercise.25 As both  Life and the US public moved, in Peter Hales’s words, from “incomprehension” of nuclear weapons to “something closer to acceptance,” this photograph and a few similar images were crucial to the impression of the Nevada desert as a “theater for atomic performances,” complete with well-trained actors – a nuclear landscape, but more precisely a proper landscape for nuclear war.26 As Scott Kirsch has argued, much of the nuclear-test photography that travelled beyond the Nevada Proving Ground was “designed, quite literally, to take the place out of the landscape,” obscuring the “human and ecological consequences” of these experiments.27 The publication of the Dog photograph was undoubtedly part of an effort to convince a national audience to accept the testing of such devices over and on US soil.28 And yet, especially when situated alongside other Desert Rock sources, there is more at stake in this one image, and perhaps less of a separation of place from landscape. If, since the 1960s, artists and essayists have consistently if variously stressed the “irrevocably social” qualities of the US West, countering the prominent, depopulated vistas of forebears like Ansel Adams, the Dog photo, produced for a different purpose, also captures these qualities, in a discrete, narrower register: the desert is presented “as a technological and apocalyptic space.”29 While it is presumptuous to speculate on the photograph’s immediate cultural influence, its durability as an exhibitionary marker, and the equivalent longevity of claims for redress from Desert Rock and related exercises, invite a discussion that locates the image and its setting at the intersection of two histories.30 These narratives – of militarization and human experimentation – came together forcefully at the Dog test on Yucca Flat, and in subsequent Desert Rock activities, but they also reverberated far beyond Nevada in the fall of 1951.

1. Only one hundred kilometres from Las Vegas, the Nevada Proving Ground was established at the interstices of the Great Basin and Mojave Deserts. In a lively study of the latter, David Darlington notes that during the Second World War, “every branch of the armed forces established a base of at least a million acres in the Mojave.”31 Flying aircraft, driving tanks, and detonating explosives demanded “wide open spaces,” and Western deserts, “already by popular consensus vacant and useless,” were converted into testing ranges and proving grounds, with camps or bases at their edges.32 In Nevada, the preponderance of federal land close to Las Vegas made the “withdrawal” of this land for military use “quick and definitive.”33 By the early 1940s, the Army Air Corps had set 117

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up seven bases around the state. In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt also established the huge Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, encompassing all of what became the Proving Ground. Over 90 per cent of the range was considered public domain, and in 1941, the federal government initiated “condemnation proceedings against the outstanding parcels of land.”34 What later became the Nellis Range, one visitor wrote dismissively, “wasn’t much good for anything but gunnery practice – you could bomb it into oblivion and never notice the difference.”35 The list of military facilities and associated infrastructure built in the western reaches of the US, during just the middle decades of the twentieth century, is staggering: “airfields, army bases, naval yards, marine camps, missile fields, nuclear test sites, proving grounds, bombing ranges, weapons plants, military reservations, training schools, toxic waste dumps, strategic mines, transportation routes, lines of communication, laboratories, command centers, and arsenals.”36 These are merely the material manifestations of militarization; the corresponding social, economic, and cultural consequences have been even more widespread. For example, militarization encouraged the remarkable urban growth in the west during and after the Second World War – the rise of what one study called the “martial metropolis.”37 As a notable historian of the region suggested, in the US west, a “large military establishment became a permanent fixture, a way of life.”38 But the entrenchment of this establishment relied fundamentally on the withdrawal and occupation of land. The Nevada Proving Ground should be treated as part of these broader maps, geographies that stretch to cover the planetary extent of the US military’s activity in those same decades. At the regional scale, the long-standing ties between operations in the Nevada desert and scientific and industrial activities from California to New Mexico are substantial.39 In 1955, the New York Times Magazine described the Proving Ground as the “backyard” of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory “and other Western research centers.”40 Likewise, along with Las Vegas, other communities in the vicinity of the Proving Ground were utterly transformed by the development of a nominally secret site. All of this runs counter to impressions of the place as “isolated” – a troublesome word, of course. And yet, remoteness was frequently invoked by the proponents and protagonists of Western militarization, particularly with reference to the development and testing of hazardous technology. Locations such as the Proving Ground were selected “precisely because of their landscape.”41 Gordon Dean, chairman of the aec from 1950 to 1953, who penned a breathless 1953 article titled “Atomic Miracles We Will See,” also referred to the Proving Ground as “a good place to throw used razor blades.”42

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Even as parts of the region were turned into a “national sacrifice zone,” the “wasteland discourse” that preceded and propelled ruination by military and associated industrial activity also held up certain sites as vital to national security.43 Still, the double claim of isolation and insignificance undoubtedly justified the consolidation of tremendous power in Nevada – what Rob Nixon, in another context, calls the forcible imposition of an “official landscape” over “a vernacular one.” Referring to Rebecca Solnit’s stirring study of the Proving Ground and its “uninhabitants,” Nixon describes “people who have been turned into ghosted casualties of a federal project of imaginative self-enclosure that concealed them from view.”44 But while Solnit and Nixon (and others) have attempted to repopulate such evacuated spaces with lives, narratives, and memories, questions as to the making and use of “official landscapes,” claimed and occupied by soldiers and scientists, remain. For all of the dramatic changes wrought by mid-century militarization in the US west, in one sense they were merely extensions of a longer colonial history, in which the US military has consistently played a central role.45 The creation of the Nevada Proving Ground, on ancestral territories of the Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute, is often described as a notable example of nuclear colonialism.46 These discussions regularly invoke the comment of Raymond Yowell, a former chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, that the Shoshone are “the most bombed nation on Earth.”47 (Moreover, their homeland of Newe Sogobia has been bombed by an institution fond of appropriating Indigenous nomenclature for its deadly technology – including an entire series of Pacific nuclear tests in 1956, Redwing, with bombs named from Apache to Zuni.)48 As scholars have shown in discussions of the US west, but also Alaska, the Marshall Islands, Australia, and elsewhere, nuclear colonialism has relied on the premise of territory as suited to both appropriation and catastrophic damage.49 Whether “nuclear” or not, under colonialism the destructive transformation of Indigenous land is the “territorial corollary” of the “body in pain.” This violence and dispossession is preceded and followed – it is verified – by a bureaucratic record that includes deeds and maps, but also state-sanctioned historical narratives.50 The lineage and persistence of colonialism is absent or marginal in many “authorized” accounts of the Nevada Proving Ground’s establishment. The most prominent of these, the Department of Energy’s history, describes the presence of “scattered” Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone people in the region, suggesting that “by the early twentieth century, most of the free-roaming Native Americans had moved to surrounding towns or relocated to reservations.”51 The cursory treatment and choice of language certifies and normalizes the removal of

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Indigenous people, such that it does not need to be addressed in the context of the early Cold War.52 This aversion is all the more notable, given that the Proving Ground’s most significant precedent – notwithstanding the detonation of the first nuclear weapon in another western US desert – was an expanse of island and water in the southern Pacific Ocean, a region with a lengthy history as a stage for colonial science.53 In 1946, at Operation Crossroads in the Pacific Proving Grounds (ppg ), nuclear testing became a “live” media event, filmed and photographed extensively. Two bombs were detonated in the vicinity of a “target fleet” of ships floating in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. Thousands of military personnel, scientists, and international observers, including over 150 journalists, watched nearby. Beyond the visual spectacle, though, details about the explosions were carefully controlled. Residents of the atoll, instructed to leave for several weeks, have never been able to return.54 After complaints about the challenges and costs of weapons testing in the South Pacific, the afswp initiated Project Nutmeg, a study of potential locations in the continental US and Alaska. The initial survey, completed in 1949, was resisted by the aec , which declared such a site “not desirable.”55 But then the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear weapon, and the Korean War began. The revival of Nutmeg was marked by a momentous meeting at the Los Alamos Laboratory in August 1950, convened to discuss the potential of a continental test site. With Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and other notables in attendance, Alvin Graves, the head of bomb testing for the aec , suggested that the conversation focus on a single space, the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, and that “psychological and political” questions be omitted from a strictly “radiological” discussion. James Cooney, an Army brigadier general and member of the aec ’s Division of Military Application (the commission’s liaison with the DoD), then offered an optimistic opinion on the health risks of radiation. Despite some dissent, the group concluded, in effect, that a 25-kiloton weapon could be safely detonated in the Nevada desert.56 With this judgment in mind, in November 1950 the National Security Council directed the aec and the DoD to formally identify a continental location for the detonation of nuclear weapons. The next month, as Howard Rosenberg writes, the Division of Military Application specified “an area of remote flat land, near Los Alamos, under government control and with enough water and electricity to support needed base camps and scientific instruments.” The 25-kiloton threshold was stretched to 50, which was “probably” safe. After considering five sites, the aec chose what became the Nevada Proving Ground: it was the largest of the options, a military space already “under complete

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control of the government,” with “the lowest population density.” President Harry Truman approved the recommendation in December.57 By late January, the initial set of five explosions, named Ranger, was underway, accompanied by an intensive public relations campaign featuring community visits, presentations, pamphlets, and films.58 Ranger was an aec operation, and the afswp was barely involved, but the bombs were nonetheless “dropped from Air Force planes and the military had a significant presence” at the new Proving Ground.59 On 12 September 1951, a group of vehicles from the III Corps, Sixth Army pulled off Highway 95 near Camp Mercury and started to set up Camp Desert Rock. The Army had just secured about 23,000 acres for the camp from the Department of Interior.60 In the initial weeks, as the cool desert fall set in, soldiers “lined their cots with newspapers and wrapped bath towels around their necks.” But as the Dog test drew closer, shrimp and fish were delivered for visiting vip s; troops watched Hollywood films and some rode trucks into Las Vegas.61 One report notes that the camp was to be dismantled after the Dog exercise, but on 3 November, two days later, a new set of orders arrived from the Commanding General of the Sixth Army.62 Six months after its establishment, Camp Desert Rock was a substantial “semi-permanent tent camp with many modern amenities,” including electricity (from Camp Mercury) and a “training auditorium with seating for 400.” In subsequent years, an airstrip, prefabricated warehouses, better accommodation, and a theatre (hosting performers who travelled from Las Vegas) were all added.63 As soldiers were delivered to the camp, they received a booklet titled Information and Guide. On the first page, Major General W.B. Kean, the head of III Corps and director of Desert Rock I, described the impending event as “a revolutionary stage in the never-ending task of improving and testing new theories and weapons of warfare.” After a stern note about security, the goals and premise of the exercise were set out. The guide concluded with a brief history of the region, which only mentioned Indigenous inhabitants as nineteenth-century actors, targets of conversion efforts who “ravaged” the settlements around a Mormon fort built in 1855 (now a state park, just north of Las Vegas’s Fremont Street).64 By 1951, the area was apparently nothing but an empty wasteland, ready for reinvention. According to a Department of Defense film about Desert Rock I, “In a land where lizards and sand flies are the only living things, a tent city … now stands.”65 In the wake of Desert Rock I, Gordon Dean’s characterization of the Proving Ground greeted readers of an issue of Armed Forces Talk. The profile, “You Go to Desert Rock,” drew on the events around the Dog explosion to prepare future visitors to Nevada. It described several days

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of classroom time in the Camp, a “practice march through the target area,” where equipment and animals had been placed, and then the event itself, a “tense” experience characterized by a “colossal flash,” a “gigantic, sharp bang,” “a glowing ball of fire,” and a “cloud reaching ten miles upward.” The vivid description, directed at soldiers who had yet to travel to Nevada, was part of the larger program of nuclear education in the armed forces, alongside films and photographs. But the nuclear landscape summoned by Armed Forces Talk was also a fundamentally safe (and therefore fictional) one, or at least comparable to other, more familiar fields of war. Meanwhile, the piece made sure to signal that restrictive dosage limits at the Proving Ground had been installed by the aec, and were therefore designed for individuals who were hypothetically exposed to constant radiation, not soldiers.66 For the military, the invisible presence of radiation was far less significant than what could be communicated in, or reinforced by, images such as the iconic Dog photo: a hostile landscape made to appear as a quintessential site for the testing of nuclear weapons, and the equally “natural,” if vulnerable, soldiers who were experimental participants in these tests.67

2. In a November 1950 meeting, as the Nevada Proving Ground was nearing creation, representatives from the Pentagon and the aec had debated “the need for human experimentation.” Citing a history of military medical research on volunteers, James Cooney suggested that if the use of tactical nuclear weapons “has now gone beyond the realm of possibility and into the realm of probability,” experimentation was imperative. Commanders required information: “How much radiation can a man take?”68 As Eileen Welsome explains in The Plutonium Files, Cooney’s career advanced “with the thunderous crack of each atomic detonation.” In a 1948 speech, reflecting on his experiences at Operation Crossroads and Sandstone (also held at Eniwetok Atoll, in 1948), Cooney had described the “fear reaction of the uninitiated” soldier as “appalling.” “We must,” he went on, “acquire a practical attitude” toward “this piece of ordnance.”69 Despite significant opposition within the aec , by the time of the first Nevada nuclear test, just two months after that 1950 meeting, Cooney’s position, or at least his aspiration, had prevailed in two respects. First, the commission had launched a pr campaign designed “to make the atom routine in the continental United States and make the public feel at home with atomic blasts and radiation hazards.”70 Indeed, one historian has suggested that “by 1950 the public had largely accepted the government’s line on radiation.”71 122

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Second, this “line” was accompanied by the Pentagon’s demand that some nuclear tests also be extensive (and reasonably visible) military simulations – exercises that, while not preoccupied directly with the effects of radiation, were nonetheless experimental in design, outlook, and location.72 Again, the precedent of Crossroads was significant. Scores of scientists from universities, private institutes, and government had travelled to the ppg in 1946. One of their principal concerns, in the words of a military report, was life in the wake of nuclear war: “to gain a comprehensive review of the hostile environment created by a nuclear detonation to allow military planners to design survivable military hardware and systems and to train personnel to survive.”73 In this light, the reactions of attending troops, as well as those of animals inside otherwise empty ships, were of great interest to the operation’s planners. These experimental aspects of Crossroads, and their “scientific benefits,” were emphasized by the assembled media, and thus expedient for the military. Meanwhile, the head of the Crossroads task force announced “no casualties from overexposure to radiation.” This conclusion may have brought popular relief in the US, but it was belied by the experiences of participants, including those charged with decontaminating and salvaging vessels, and of course by displaced residents of the Marshall Islands.74 By the middle of the twentieth century, an “ad hoc bureaucracy” had emerged in the US to consider nuclear war as a predicament of medical research.75 This bureaucracy was a manifestation of larger, transnational relationships forged during the twentieth century between “experts” and “the technical production of violent injury to human beings.” For the United States, this relationship was most notably located at the physical and conceptual intersections of battlefields and laboratories, and on the bodies of those positioned at these intersections.76 The extremity of bodies in situations of war was matched by a preoccupation with geographic extremes, and both were treated as scientific problems demanding military solutions. In the year before the creation of the Nevada Proving Ground, the Army had produced Atomic Energy Indoctrination, a sizable pamphlet dismissing the presence of “lasting radiation” and suggested instead that “intense fear” of this phenomenon would be more damaging.77 “Indoctrination” has a sinister ring today, and its Cold War association with “mind control” and “brain-washing,” a discussion that grew feverish during the Korean War, meant that a great deal seemed to depend on who was doing the indoctrinating.78 And yet within the military the word has long been treated as a synonym for education (reflecting its Latin root). But in its delivery military indoctrination is essentially unidirectional: it implies the overhaul of a human subject upon arrival in a

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new environment. Soldiers at or destined for the Proving Ground were understood to require this reconfiguration before the jarring experience of a nuclear test. Having been largely left out of the “hastily assembled,” “Los Alamosrun show” of Ranger, the afswp pressed for additional military involvement in Nevada.79 Borrowing from Atomic Energy Indoctrination, a June 1951 memo from a leading medical adviser to high-ranking DoD officials dismissed the fear of radiation as “groundless,” and suggested that this could be demonstrated if, “immediately following” a test, some sort of “Combat Team” advanced into the “burst area.” But this was not just a question of demonstrating (apparent) safety; education was twinned with experimentation, or what the author called “biomedical participation.”80 In July, the aec ’s Military Liaison Committee wrote to commission chair Gordon Dean: “Indoctrination in essential physical protective measures under simulated combat conditions, and observations of the psychological effects of an atomic explosion are reasons for this desired participation.”81 In subsequent months, correspondence from the afswp to the aec conveyed the desire to “maneuver in the vicinity of ground zero as soon as practicable,” and “to inject the maximum possible realism into the exercise.”82 Although the plan to “advance over the area neutralized by the explosion,” as it was unnervingly described in the July letter, bore little resemblance to the aec ’s own safety guidelines, the request cannot have been entirely surprising, and permission was granted two weeks later, with the double caveats that the aec took no responsibility for the health or the provisioning of visiting troops.83 Similar appeals followed: in August, the afswp advocated for a “systematic research study” of “troop reaction to the bomb experience,” and in September, the Pentagon’s Joint Panel on the Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare sifted through both a draft report on different “problems” that could be explored in “future weapons tests,” and another report on the urgent need for both indoctrination and observation of “a troop unit in normal tactical support” alongside a detonation. As one retrospective concludes, there was widespread support across the DoD, particularly among medical staff, for the simulation of nuclear war as a “training and research” activity.84 If the Nevada Proving Ground was, from its first months, treated as a landscape for the rehearsal of nuclear war, it is not surprising that training was inextricable from research. The “systematic research study” encouraged by the afswp would inform – or justify – future indoctrination. Notably, the agencies charged with pursuing this inquiry were explicitly established to pursue militarized human scientific inquiry. Starting with the Dog detonation, members of an organization called the Human Resources Research Office (Humrro ) led studies of some

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participating troops “to determine their psychological reactions.”85 Humrro was a brand-new contractor, “perched,” as Joy Rohde describes a similar agency, “within an ill-defined gray area between academia and the national security state.”86 It was established by the Army at George Washington University in July 1951, just months before the Dog exercise, to conduct work on performance, motivation, training, and morale, but also “psychological warfare” and “man-machine systems.” Humrro ’s first director was the psychologist Meredith Crawford, poached from his position as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University. By late October, he was at the Proving Ground.87 The research overseen by Humrro during Desert Rock I is summarized in three substantial reports, published by different sources; two of them feature the same Dog photo on the cover and in the early pages, respectively.88 A month before the exercise, at Kentucky’s Fort Campbell, Humrro visitors handed out the first of four Attitude Assessment Questionnaires; the others were distributed following a set of lectures and films, after the “maneuver” on Yucca Flat, and weeks later, back in Kentucky.89 During the Desert Rock simulation, Humrro employees joined “one of the attacking columns to the tactical objective.”90 Had the “indoctrination” prior to the event been effective? In a 1994 interview, Crawford couched the word in the blandly positive language of “attitude, feeling, and motivation,” but Humrro ’s questionnaire design and the “correct” responses to the queries posed to soldiers were both startlingly inaccurate. For example, one question proceeded from the premise that it was safe to move “directly below” the explosion of an airdropped nuclear weapon, immediately, if “regular field clothing” was worn. Notably, only 40 per cent of soldiers provided the answers sought by Humrro researchers.91 One respondent called many of the queries “laughable.”92 Meanwhile, overseen by a Humrro assistant director, other social scientists from the Operations Research Office (oro ) monitored “troops’ levels of fear and anxiety during the actual weapons tests.” The oro ’s private interviews, polygraphs, and physical evaluations “detected much higher levels of anxiety” than the questionnaire-based work of Humrro – what one subsequent report called “underlying tensions.”93 Intriguingly, the Johns Hopkins researchers also suggested that the exercise was thoroughly artificial, and recommended “more realistic conditions.”94 Despite reaching conclusions that were, according to a 1952 Pentagon review, “highly indeterminate and unconvincing,” based on “a gigantic experiment whose results were already known,” Humrro was invited back to Nevada in the spring of that year for additional research at Desert Rock IV, held within the Tumbler-Snapper series of tests (also

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the earliest to receive live television coverage). The oro ’s conclusions after Desert Rock I were echoed by the afswp , whose members clearly believed that better research would result as it campaigned to reduce the distance of those soldiers from ground zero.95 But problems with Desert Rock studies lingered on. They may have been the subtext in Crawford’s comments to a Conference of Army Directors of Research in December 1953. “I feel,” he said, “that if the area is considered very important to the Army, we should try it, even with some misgivings about our methodology.”96 A year and a half after the Dog test – a period averaging roughly a blast per month in Nevada – the Pentagon had convinced the aec to entirely abandon its geographical limits on exposure at the Proving Ground, at least for soldiers. Their distance from ground zero had been drastically reduced, the tolerable amount of radiation increased, and the time before marching toward the mushroom cloud shortened – to nothing. From the outset, the aec , tasked with both the further development of weapons and the safety of participants in its testing program (not to mention nearby residents), “too often” sided with “the military’s requirements.”97 Meanwhile, “for the first time in known history,” the commander of Desert Rock V (1953) wrote to participants, “troops successfully attacked toward ground zero immediately following the explosion.” “You can remember, with a sense of pleasure and accomplishment,” he continued, “that you were … a real pioneer in experimentation of the most vital importance to the security of the United States.”98 Configurations and distances had changed, but the story behind the Dog photo, and the landscape it portrayed, remained consistent. As with the tales told indoctrinees at Camp Desert Rock, the photograph offered a story about the possibility and probability of war, and the purpose of places like the Proving Ground.

Conclusion The United States was not the only practitioner of human experimentation on nuclear proving grounds with colonial genealogies. Also in 1951, as the British government planned its first nuclear detonation, at the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia (in October 1952), organizers were planning to measure the radiation doses received by military participants – and consider compensation if they became sick. A few years later, after the islands became excessively contaminated, the British testing apparatus was relocated to the land of the Maralinga Tjarutja in the South Australian desert.99 While denying that it had ever directly experimented on humans in a testing environment, in 2001 the British Ministry of Defence confessed that “New Zealand, British, and 126

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Australian soldiers were made to run and crawl through a contaminated area after atomic blasts at its Maralinga test site.” The ministry stated that “we were not testing the people, we were testing the clothing.” The atmosphere may not have strictly been “clinical.” But these troops were part of an Indoctrinee Force, trained, like their US counterparts, to become comfortable with nuclear war. At Maralinga, the indoctrinees, described by the force coordinator as “middle-ranking officers … who could and would be expected to return to their units to lecture from first-hand knowledge on the effects of the test,” were also treated to lectures and tours of the devastated land.100 While it has been a location of startling violence, the Nevada Proving Ground – whether during the Desert Rock exercises, or today, in its current identity as the Nevada National Security Site – should not be understood as exceptional. The visual record of the Dog detonation reflects a struggle to manage nuclear fear, but it also opens on to histories of the US west, human experimentation during the early Cold War, and military “grounds” for that experimentation. Even as it captures a shocking moment in a specific site, the Dog photograph guiding this study is ultimately evidence of a broader process: the US militarization of the planet in the middle of the twentieth century, a process accompanied by the creation, in Nevada and elsewhere, of laboratories for the study of soldiers under environmental duress. As Laura Bruno puts it, “The emergence of a nuclear military force was accompanied by massive scientific programs aimed at determining and even controlling environmental conditions.”101 But this concern was widespread, and many of these institutions continue to operate today, sometimes under different names or in different locations. The continued toxicity of the Nevada Proving Ground and other locations in the region, along with the recent struggles of Desert Rock participants (and many other victims of Cold War radiation experiments) for recognition and restitution, point to the duration of the violence initiated under a mushroom cloud. But what permits this slow violence – what makes it possible? In his influential account of the phenomenon, Rob Nixon describes acts of landscape making that are “often pitilessly instrumental.”102 As a “showcase of a dismal science,” the Nevada Proving Ground might have represented the apotheosis of this tendency.103

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noteS 1 Ponton et al., Shots able to easy , 66–70. 2 Welsome, The Plutonium Files, 262. 3 “Bomb Away” is from Rosenberg’s invaluable Atomic Soldiers, 43, which states the time as 7:25 a.m. But 7:30 a.m. is listed in numerous sources, including Ponton et al., Shots able to easy , 68. 4 DeBusk, “My Experience at the Nevada Test Site.” 5 Quoted in Welsome, Plutonium Files, 262. 6 Quoted in Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 44. 7 “New Weapon,” 38–9; see also Hill, “Huge Blast Marks First Atom,” 1, 13; Welsome, Plutonium Files, 262. 8 I will use Nevada Proving Ground in this chapter. It is now called the Nevada National Security Site. Twenty-one kilotons was roughly the same “yield” as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on 9 August 1945, which was several kilotons larger than the weapon detonated over Hiroshima three days earlier. 9 The back and forth between the aec and the DoD during the late 1940s and 1950s is addressed in “Atomic Veterans,” 454–505. 10 Ponton et al., Shots able to easy , 65, 68–9. The afswp was formed in 1947 with the dissolution of the Manhattan Project to “provide military training in nuclear operations.” Defense’s Nuclear Agency, 1947–1997, i. 11 Ponton et al., Shots able to easy , 70–3; Exercise Desert Rock; Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 44. 12 Ponton et al., Operation buster -jangle , 1951, 55. The units were the 1st Battalion, 188th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division; 3rd Battalion Medical Platoon, 188th Air Medical Company; and 1st Platoon, Company “A,” 127th Engineer Battalion, all from Kentucky’s Fort Campbell, and “C” Battery, 546th Field Artillery Battalion, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington. Most of the “support units” were from Fort Lewis and California’s Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base) and Camp Roberts. See ibid., 2; Barrett et al., Analysis of Radiation Exposure, 10–11. In subsequent years, the bct was replaced by (and renamed) Provisional Atomic Exercise Brigades. 13 Exercise Desert Rock, 9–10; and Exercise Desert Rock I, 9. “Operation Thundercloud” is mentioned in Barrett et al., Analysis of Radiation Exposure, 12. The presumed failure of “conventional weapons” is noted in Ponton et al., Operation buster-jangle, 54. 14 Exercise Desert Rock I, 26. A similar scenario was also detailed a few months before the Dog test, in Alsop and Lapp, “Can the New A-Bomb Stop Troops in the Field?,” 20–1, 89–92. 15 Kean, “Introduction,” in Exercise Desert Rock I, n.p. 16 “Rehearsal,” rather than “test,” is Solnit’s preferred word: Savage Dreams, 5. As Peter Bacon Hales put it, “while the poetics of atomic tests may have originated in the desire to confuse, to disguise,” the names “conveyed reassurance as well: these unimaginably destructive, world-threatening weapons hid behind whimsical, humorous, sentimental, even mundane household vernacular forms. Who could fear ‘Teapot-Apple’?” Outside the Gates of Eden, 434n2. 17 Ponton et al., Operation buster -jangle , 1; see also page 51. The camp was effectively closed after Desert Rock VIII, held around the “Galileo” test of Operation Plumbbob on 7 October 1957. Some elements of the Camp were left as rubble and

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18

ruin. Others, such as the airstrip, were repurposed for the aec ’s continued use of the Proving Ground. See Johnson (usa -Ret), “Camp Desert Rock,” 47; Edwards, “Atomic Age Training Camp,” 1. As Hacker tells it, “what began with questions about one man’s disease burgeoned into a national debate.” “Radiation Safety,” 35. Some of the key early sources are Huyghe and Kongsberg, “Grim Legacy of Nuclear Testing”; Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers; Uhl and Ensign, gi Guinea Pigs; Favish, “Radiation Injury and the Atomic Veteran”; Saffer and Kelley, Countdown Zero; Wasserman and Solomon, Killing Our Own. Another set of discussions was sparked by the investigative work of Welsome (culminating in The Plutonium Files) and the release of the achre Final Report. The National Association of Atomic Veterans maintains a website at www.naav.com. Reporting on an equivalent Soviet exercise, near the community of Totskoye, in 1954, remains minimal. See Simons, “Soviet Atom Test Used Thousands as Guinea Pigs.” Footage of the “Totsk” test was used in the documentary series. Doran, The Red Bomb. Both Light and Masco have made this comment about classification. And both have addressed the visual record of Desert Rock, although not in detail. Light, 100 Suns; Masco, “Target Audience,” 23–31, 45. Desert Rock I receives some attention in Kirk’s rich “graphic history,” Doom Towns. On atomic sublimity, see Hales, “The Atomic Sublime,” 5–31; Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics,” 1–25. See O’Brian, ed., Camera Atomica, 52–3, 55; “When Atom Bomb Struck,” 19–25; Masco, “Atomic Soldiers.” On Matsushige, see Katz, “After the A-Bomb.” Welsome, The Plutonium Files, 251. See https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/picturing_the_century/galleries/ postwar.html. For one, the New York Times first referred to Desert Rock in September 1951: “Army to Make Test of Atom Weapons,” 1, 14; “General to Move Unit to Atom-Testing Area,” 20. Edwards, “Atomic Age Training Camp,” 52. Edwards is drawing from a 2 November 1951 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Hill, “Huge Blast Marks First Atom Games,” 13; “New Weapon,” 38. The Times listed the image as an “Associated Press Wirephoto.” Another cropped version is in Light, 100 Suns, 40, who credits it (and a second photo from the Dog test) to Corporal Alexander McCaughey of the Army Signal Corps. A small if full reproduction is in Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden, 35. A different photograph, taken from farther behind the observing troops, is used by Masco in “Atomic Soldiers,” and can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exercise_Desert_ Rock_I_(Buster-Jangle_Dog)_002.jpg, but the source website, associated with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, is no longer active. The photo archive of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada Field Office has also been removed or converted to a less substantial Flickr site. Hales, “Imagining the Atomic Age,” 105. “Theater” is from Scott, “Birth of the Atomic Desert,” 11. See also Goin, Nuclear Landscapes; Pitkanen and Farish, “Nuclear Landscapes”; Zeman, “‘To See … Things Dangerous,” 53–77. Kirsch, “Watching the Bombs Go Off,” 229, original emphasis. For a more substantial engagement with this paper, and with the larger field of atomic photography, see Pitkanen and Farish, “Nuclear Landscapes.” This “public ritual” is taken up in Masco, “‘Survival Is Your Business,” 361–98; Rice, “Downwind of the Atomic State,” 647–76.

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29 The first quote is from Davis, “The Dead West,” 58; the second is from Scott, “Birth of the Atomic Desert,” 1. See also Nardelli, “No End to the End”; Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 311–19. 30 See Wool, “Soldier Exposures,” on the “historical arrangements of life” that produce photographs. 31 Darlington, The Mojave, 152. 32 Limerick, Desert Passages, 174. 33 Hooks and Smith, “The Treadmill of Destruction,” 564. On the broader history of this process in the US, see Davis, “Defending the Nation, Defending the Land,” 19–41. 34 The quote is from Fehner and Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold War, 15. Other details are from Randlett, “Atomic Oasis,” 75, 130n10; Loomis, Combat Zoning, 9–10. 35 Skinner, Red Flag, quoted in Loomis, Combat Zoning, 10. 36 Fernlund, “Introduction,” 1; also quoted in Carr-Childers, “Incident at Galisteo,” 81. Fernlund is referring to the entirety of the Cold War, but the more historically precise claim stands. 37 Lotchin, ed., The Martial Metropolis. See also Dias, “The Great Cantonment,” 71–85. 38 Nash, quoted in Carr-Childers, “Incident at Galisteo,” 81. 39 See Kuletz, The Tainted Desert. 40 Hill, “Desert ‘Capital’ of the A-Bomb,” 22; also quoted in Scott, “Birth of the Atomic Desert,” 13. 41 Montoya, “Landscapes of the Cold War,” 14; see also Carr-Childers, “Incident at Galisteo,” 82–3. 42 Dean is quoted in “You Go to Desert Rock,” 2. Dean’s article was in the 25 August 1953 issue of Look, 27–30. 43 Kuletz, The Tainted Desert, 13–14. See also Voyles, Wastelanding. 44 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism, 17, 153; Solnit, Savage Dreams, 154–5. See also Kuletz, The Tainted Desert, 13, on “one landscape superimposed upon another.” 45 This is the pretext of Solnit, Savage Dreams, among other sources. A superb account of the longer history is Blackhawk, Violence over the Land. See also Loomis, Combat Zoning, 1–4. 46 Nuclear colonialism in the US west is discussed in Kuletz, The Tainted Desert (page 6 and elsewhere). An earlier indictment is Churchill and LaDuke, “Native America,” 51–78. On the Western Shoshone, see Churchill, “The Struggle for Newe Segobia,” 173–89; Solnit, Savage Dreams. For the troubling proximity of toxic military and nuclear activity to Indigenous land, see Hooks and Smith, “Treadmill of Destruction”; LaDuke, “Nuclear Waste,” 97–114. 47 Quoted in Kuletz, The Tainted Desert, 72, and other sources. Yowell also referred to the “Ute, Navajo, Hopi, Paiute, Havasupai, Hualapai and other downwind communities.” 48 Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden, 434n2. 49 See Edwards, “Nuclear Colonialism,” 109–14. 50 Voyles, Wastelanding, 9, 98. Voyles is following Blackhawk, Violence over the Land, 8 (who draws in turn from Elaine Scarry). On the bureaucratic geography of settler colonialism, see Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess?,” 165–82. 51 Fehner and Gosling, Origins of the Nevada Test Site, 6–7. See also Fehner and Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold War, 10. 52 Blackhawk, Violence over the Land, 9.

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53 See, among other sources, DeLoughrey, “The Myth of Isolates,” 175; Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden, 17–22. 54 There is now an extensive literature on Operation Crossroads, the Pacific Proving Ground, nuclear colonialism, and Pacific Islanders. For a start, see Weisgall, Operation Crossroads; Smith-Norris, Domination and Resistance; and the documentary film by Robert Stone, Radio Bikini. 55 Quoted in Hacker, Elements of Controversy, 40. 56 Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 26–9; Welsome, Plutonium Files, 244–5. 57 Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 29–31. 58 Caufield, Multiple Exposures, 104. 59 Defense’s Nuclear Agency, 78. 60 Johnson, “Camp Desert Rock,” 44–5; Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 39. 61 Welsome, Plutonium Files, 261; Exercise Desert Rock I, 18. 62 Barrett et al., Analysis of Radiation Exposure, 5. 63 Johnson, “Camp Desert Rock,” 45. 64 Exercise Desert Rock, n.p. 65 Exercise Desert Rock at https://youtu.be/Y9flO73g0dk. See also Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden, 35–6. 66 “You Go to Desert Rock,” 2–5. Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 16–18, includes a description of a corporal, bound for Nevada in 1957, reading a “frayed copy” of this article. For a critique of the Armed Forces Talk piece and similar military publications, see Favish, “Radiation Injury,” 952–5. 67 See Wool et al., “Soldier Exposures.” 68 Quoted in achre Final Report, 38. 69 Cooney, “Psychological Factors in Atomic Warfare,” 969, 972. The speech, to the Health Officers Section of the American Public Health Association at the Association’s Annual Meeting, is also quoted in Welsome, Plutonium Files, 243. 70 20 December 1950 memo from William R. Sturges to George F. Schlatter, quoted in Hacker, Elements of Controversy, 43; Kirsch, “Watching the Bombs,” 231; and other sources. 71 Caufield, Multiple Exposures, 103. 72 In this I am departing from the achre Final Report, which endeavours to maintain a sharper distinction between human subject research involving radiation and “occupational” exposure to radiation (see achre Final Report, 455–6). I am not convinced that it is sufficient to describe Desert Rock activities as (merely) “occupational,” thereby following the Department of Defense’s language of “duty.” 73 Quoted in Bruno, “The Bequest of the Nuclear Battlefield,” 251. 74 See, among other sources, Caufield, Multiple Exposures, 89–90, and the items listed in note 55. 75 achre Final Report, 35–6. 76 Lindee, “Experimental Wounds,” 8–20; Wool et al., “Soldier Exposures.” 77 Atomic Energy Indoctrination, inside cover, 44. See also achre Final Report, 457–8. 78 See, among other sources, Carruthers, Cold War Captives. 79 The first quote is from Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden, 34; the second is from Welsome, Plutonium Files, 251. On the afswp ’s appeal, see Ponton et al., Operation buster -jangle , 20. 80 Dr Richard Meiling, chair of the Armed Forces Medical Policy Council, quoted in achre Final Report, 457–8.

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81 This is a widely cited memorandum. See Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 38; Favish, “Radiation Injury,” 934n6. 82 7 March and 3 April 1952 letters, quoted in Favish, “Radiation Injury,” 934n6. 83 Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 38–9. 84 achre Final Report, 458–9, my emphasis. 85 Ponton et al., Operation buster -jangle , 3. 86 Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 7. 87 The first quote, and Crawford’s visit to the Proving Ground, are from Ramsberger, “Profiles in Military Psychology”; the second is from Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 23. See also Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 40. After receiving a PhD in psychology from Columbia University in 1935, Crawford worked in the famed Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology. Following a move to Vanderbilt, he left the school during the Second World War to work in the Army Aviation Psychology Program, and then the Continental Air Force’s psychology program. He was recruited to Humrro by another prominent primate researcher, Harry Harlow, who was the Army’s chief psychologist from 1950 to 1952. Ramsberger, “Profiles.” One report from Desert Rock I credited Harlow, along with two others, for the premise of the troop exercise: Hausrath et al., Troop Performance, Acknowledgements. 88 The photo is on the cover of A Study of Soldier Attitudes and Knowledge about Atomic Effects: Exercise Desert Rock (October–November, 1951). It is used in the front material of Hausrath et al., Troop Performance. The third study is Peter A. Bordes et al., Desert Rock I. 89 Bordes et al., Desert Rock I, 4–6; see also Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 41. 90 Ponton et al., Shots able to easy , 73. 91 achre Final Report, 460–1, 490n29. Ramsberger, “Profiles in Military Psychology,” refers to a different Army project, launched later, in 1953, as Humrro ’s “first notable success.” 92 DeBusk, “My Experience at the Nevada Test Site.” 93 Jacobs, “Curing the Atomic Bomb Within,” 453. “Underlying tensions” is from Billingsley et al., Reactions of Troops, 1 (referring to the results of the oro ’s work at Desert Rock I). See also Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 41, 47. 94 Quoted in Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 48. 95 achre Final Report, 461–2. Camerawork at Desert Rock IV led to the short film Operation A-Bomb, released by the Hollywood studio rko in January 1952. Some footage from the film is at https://archive.org/details/a-bomb_blast_effects. See Csida, “Billboard Backstage,” 2; Courtney, Split Screen Nation, 255–67. 96 Quoted in Ramsberger, “Profiles.” See also achre Final Report, 461–4. In one published retrospective, Crawford did not even mention Humrro ’s Desert Rock work: “Highlights in the Development of (Humrro ),” 1267–71. 97 Ball, Justice Downwind, 39. 98 Quoted in Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, 61. See also Matthews, “Nevada Learns to Live,” 839–50. 99 See Roff, “Blood Money,” 311–22; Tynan, Atomic Thunder. 100 Mitchell, “See an Atomic Blast,” 133, 142. 101 Bruno, “The Bequest of the Nuclear Battlefield,” 237. 102 Nixon, Slow Violence, 17. 103 Vanderbilt, Survival City, 84. Vanderbilt is referring specifically to Frenchman’s Flat, or Area 5, within the Proving Ground.

Mark ruwedel, a Very colD Winter, 2000/2004

Canadian forces Station Carp, nicknamed the “diefenbunker” by Prime Minister diefenbaker’s opposition, was built between 1959 and 1961 as a safe haven for government officials in the event of a nuclear war. Built to withstand a 5 megaton blast, the facilities were designed to house 535 people for a period of one month and allow for “continuity in government.” it was decommissioned in 1994. “a Very Cold winter” refers to John kennedy’s remarks to nikita khrushchev on 3 June 1961: “then, Mister Chairman, there will be war. it will be a cold winter.” Mark Ruwedel

overleaf, top left: Cold Winter #2: Main Entrance/Blast deflection tunnel overleaf, top right: Cold Winter #5: Dining room overleaf, bottom left: Cold Winter #7: Men’s toilets overleaf, bottom right: Cold Winter #8: Morgue

6

Big Data? no thanks James BriDle

6.1 | James Bridle, Big Data? No Thanks, 2015

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (cnd ) was formed in the UK in 1957, and led a series of annual Easter Marches in 1959 from Aldermaston, Berkshire, to the centre of London, calling on the British government to unilaterally disarm. The Aldermaston marches took place over several days, and attracted tens of thousands of people, particularly from the Left, trade unions, and various religious groups. In 1960, a number of senior cnd activists decided that more direct methods were necessary to capture the imagination of the press and public policy, and the activists embarked on a campaign of non-violent direct action. This resulted in the creation of the Committee of 100, named for the one hundred signatories on its founding document. One of the committee’s first actions was a sit-down protest by several thousand people at the Ministry of Defence in 1961, which was led by former cnd president Bertrand Russell and his wife Edith. After the

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protest, the Committee of 100 maintained their status as a non-violent, direct-action organization, but over the course of its existence hundreds of members were arrested and many imprisoned. The Committee of 100 had several innovative projects such as a radio broadcast, titled the Voice of Nuclear Disarmament. This was a political pirate radio station, broadcasting anti-nuclear speeches and songs – which included one of my favourites, an album of Scottish anti-nuclear songs comparing the US Polaris missiles in the Holy Loch to the Loch Ness Monster.1 The clever thing about the Voice of Nuclear Disarmament was that it broadcast in the tv audio frequency when the bbc closed down for the night, so you’d get a picture of the queen and the national anthem on the screen, then it would go dark and their radio station would begin. I don’t know of many modern hacks more elegant than that. But there was another splinter group within the Committee of 100, who were not satisfied with non-violent sit-down protests, and in 1963 five of them left London and travelled to the location of rsg -6 in Warren Row, Reading. rsg -6 was part of a confidential nationwide network of bunkers built by the government to run the country in the event of a nuclear outbreak or an exchange of nuclear weapons. The five activists broke into rsg -6, photographed the buildings, and copied several confidential documents. They printed four thousand copies of a pamphlet

6.2 | Anti-nuclear demonstrators including Michael Randle, Michael Scott, Bertrand Russell, and Hugh MacDiarmid, 18 February 1961. Photograph by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, National Portrait Gallery, London,

npg x129580 6.3 | Voice of Nuclear Disarmament poster, c. 1961

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Jam es B ri D le 6.4 | Spies for Peace, Danger! Official Secret rsg -6 , 1963

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containing everything they’d found and mailed it to newspapers, politicians, universities, and activists under the name “Spies for Peace.” The activists then threw the typewriter they’d used to create the pamphlet into a canal and disappeared. Many of their identities remain unknown to this day. The pamphlet was released just before the Easter weekend Aldermaston march of 1963 and it included complete maps of the locations of the rsg s. rsg -6 was a few miles from the route of the Aldermaston march, and on the day of the march hundreds of protesters picketed the site. The revelation of the rsg s damaged the reputation of the government and the credibility of its public statements about nuclear war. Prior to the pamphlet’s release the government had stated publicly that a nuclear war was defendable and winnable, while secretly preparing for its devastating aftermath. This duplicity was unmasked by the Spies for Peace and had an incalculable effect on changing the narrative around nuclear weapons – from a weapon of the state that is controlled in the service of the citizenry, to a weapon that is essentially uncontrollable and could be used by anyone, to destroy everyone. In the context of Spies for Peace, I’ve been thinking a lot about whistleblowing today. Like many, I have been fascinated and appalled by the revelations that followed the release of National Security Administration (nsa ) documents by Edward Snowden in 2013. It’s important to note that the majority of this information was not new. If you had been following the computer security community for the past decade or paid attention to previous leaks from people such as William Binney or Mark Klein, the fact that these documents existed was inevitable, yet it took a release of this size and extent to reach the wider public consciousness. There was a quantity and aesthetic to Snowden’s nsa documents release that was sufficient to bring the attention of the world to bear on it, but I’d also argue that Edward Snowden’s effort largely failed, or at least failed to produce the change in policy and public attitudes that some of us might have expected. Now, several years after the Snowden revelations, most if not all of the confidential information uncovered has been, if not secretly authorized already, signed into law and continued without much controversy. As artist Trevor Paglen has noted, WikiLeaks and the nsa have essentially the same political position: there are dark secrets at the heart of the world, and if we can only bring them to light, everything will magically be made better.2 One legitimizes the other. Transparency is not enough – and certainly not when it only operates in one direction. This process has made me question my own practice and that of many others, because making the invisible visible is not enough either.

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A couple of years ago I was on a wild goose chase trying to find the people who appear in computer-generated (cgi ) architectural renderings, and I found myself at the Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The museum looks admirably science-y and education-y when you drive past it, but it is basically a museum of bombs. And bombers. And missiles. And surface-to-air missiles. And cruise missiles. And hydrogen bombs. And icbm s. And artillery shells. And backpacks. Basically, it displays every single way you could deliver an atomic weapon. After a while you start to feel kind of nauseous, and surprised that we got through the twentieth century without getting blown to pieces. At the museum you can see casings of two of the four bombs that fell on Palomares, Spain, in 1966. When the b -52 carrying them broke up in mid-air during refuelling they didn’t fully explode, although the conventional explosives in two of them did, causing extensive contamination in the local area, akin to a dirty bomb. This contamination is still being cleared today, and will be for some time.3 Nauseous is how I feel today – an existential dread caused not by the shadow of the bomb but by the shadow of data. It’s easy to feel, looking back, that we spent the twentieth century living in a minefield, and I believe we are still living in a minefield, one where critical public health infrastructure runs on insecure public phone networks, financial markets rely on vulnerable and decades-old computer systems, and

6.5 | Outside the National Nuclear Science and History Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013

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6.6 | Fat Man replica. The National Nuclear Science and History Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013 6.7 | “Broken Arrows” (bombs accidentally dropped on Palomares, Spain, 1966). The National Nuclear Science and History Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013

everything from mortgage applications to lethal weapons systems are governed by inscrutable and unaccountable software. This structural and existential threat, to both our individual liberty and our collective society, is largely concealed from the public by commercial and political interests, and nuclear history is a good primer in how that has been standard practice for quite some time. 140

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From Albuquerque I drove a couple of hours to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The laboratory sits across several flat mountaintops in the high desert, and though it appears to be a rural site, it is in fact highly networked due to its demand for computing power. As the headquarters of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos needed access to the most concentrated computing power of the time, much of which was located elsewhere, both during and after the war. The Harvard Mark 1 was one of the most important machines put to use during the project. It was an electro-mechanical machine, built of digital and moving parts. It ran a series of calculations in 1944 that were crucial to developing the concept of an implosive nuclear weapon such as the one used at Nagasaki in 1945. The Harvard Mark 1 has a particularly spectacular appearance because the casing was designed by Norman Bel Geddes – which is why it looks so self-consciously futuristic: Geddes is best known for the General Motors Pavilion, known as Futurama, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (eniac ) was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1941 and 1946 and used extensively for Edward Teller’s early work on hydrogen bombs. The size of a couple of rooms, the eniac had thousands of computer components and millions of hand-soldered connections. The engineer Harry Reed, who worked on it, recalled that the eniac was “strangely, a very personal computer. Now we think of a personal computer as one that you carry around with you. The eniac was actually one that you kind of lived inside. So

6.8 | ibm Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ascc ) – Harvard Mark 1 6.9 | eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, c. 1947–55. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the eniac in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (brl )

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instead of you holding a computer, the computer held you.”4 I’ve always liked that because it seems to describe the world we live in now, living inside a giant computational machine, from the computers in our pockets to data centres and satellites, a planetary-scale network.5 Reed also wrote about how, if you understood the machine, you could follow the execution of a program around the room in blinking lights – but this was a privilege of comprehension only a few enjoyed.6 ibm’s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator reaches a kind of high-water mark of simultaneous technological visibility and inscrutability. The ssec , which became the ibm 701, was completed in 1948 and housed in a former shoe shop next to ibm ’s world headquarters at 57th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City. Unknown to passersby, with their noses pressed up against the glass, the computer was running a

6.10 | Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (ssec )/

ibm 701, c. 1948. Photo credit: Computer History Museum, California. 6.11 | BlueGene/L, Terascale Simulation Facility, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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program called hippo , which calculated hydrogen bomb yields. It was the first full simulation of a hydrogen bomb detonation, and it ran on a computer in a public showroom on 5th Avenue in New York. Visible, but not legible. Unparseable. And this is where we find ourselves  today, at a virtual bombsite.7 ibm’s BlueGene/L supercomputer is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and is used to design and maintain America’s nuclear weapons now that physical test explosions are not permitted. The photographer Simon Norfolk, better known for images of bomb damage and battlefields, turned his camera on these machines when he wanted to explore the invisible and well-distributed territories where violence takes place today. The space within these machines is as much part of the battlefield as a tank or gun; it is a war machine, but it looks identical to a computer stack. This virtual bombsite is everywhere, imprisoning an open architecture inside tiny inscrutable machines we’re not supposed to open. The history of computing is a military history, an atomic history, and a

6.12 | Photograph of the nsa ’s Utah Data Center, taken by an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation during an airship flight, 2014.

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6.13 | The main house at Bletchley Park, 2005. Photograph by Magnus Manske

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history of obfuscation. And this history is complicit in the surveillance of the present. This historic capacity and inscrutability has its parallel in a contemporary infrastructure, that of surveillance and data gathering, which occupies a similar landscape: from the Los Alamos mesa to the Utah Data Center being built by nsa . The inscrutability of the machine co-produces the inscrutability of the secret state, just as critique of the state is shielded by the complexity of the technology it deploys. And it goes far beyond the secret state: this model of technology, of information gathering, of computation, of big data, of ever-increasing ontologies of information, is affecting, destructively, our ways of thinking and reasoning about the world. I travelled to another early computing site recently, Bletchley Park in the UK. This was the home of Britain’s wartime code-breaking efforts, most famously the successful operation to break the German Enigma encryption machine, but it is also the site of other cipher and surveillance breakthroughs. Bletchley Park is currently a visitor attraction, a sort of austerity theme park where they host 1940s fashion theme days and exhibitions based on the British code breaker Alan Turing. While one of the exhibition titles reads “Secrets Revealed,” the attraction is partially funded by Government Communications Headquarters (gchq ), and makes no allusion to the postwar deployments of the cipher and surveillance techniques that were developed there.

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I firmly believe that the other main reason that surveillance is still tolerated – particularly in the UK – is nostalgia for the patriotic efforts of the code breakers. This history is classified as part of the “good war,” with clearly defined enemies, and perpetuates a belief in the moral rectitude of one side over the other, “our side,” which should be the side trusted with these kinds of nuclear weapons. The one concession to the present at Bletchley is a small Intel-sponsored exhibition about cybersecurity, which is largely useless, but also unintentionally revealing. One of the talking heads it calls upon while advising visitors to always use a strong password when browsing online is Michael Hayden, the former director of the nsa and cia , who is famous in part for affirming that “we kill people with metadata,” an affirmation that data is a weapon in itself.8 This thing we call big data is The Bomb – a tool developed for wartime purposes that can destroy indiscriminately. I was struck by this realization at Bletchley, and once seen, it can’t be unseen. I’m not the only one who has seen it either. The phrases “privacy chernobyl” and “meltdown” have been deployed by the media on many occasions, most recently in reference to the data breach at the online dating site Ashley Madison when the personal information of thousands of people was posted online for all to see, with little sympathy for the victims (even when they turned out to be just that, conned twice over – first by Ashley Madison’s marketing department, and second by its security team).9

6.14 | “Secrets Revealed” exhibition at Bletchley Park, 2013. Photo: Kat Last, katlast.com

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Personal website logins are one thing, but when that data includes the names and addresses of all the children in the UK, or an hiv clinic’s medical records, or all of  a cellular provider’s customer data, it’s a bit more concerning.10 This data is toxic on contact, and it sticks around for a long time: it spills, it leaches into everything, it gets into the groundwater of our social relationships and poisons them.11 And it will remain hazardous beyond our lifetimes. And while I can sound alarmist about this, here’s the thing: I actually don’t believe these fears about data, storage, and technology go far enough. I’m unsure about big data’s usefulness in the present and unconvinced by our capacity to deal with it safely in the long term, but even more I think it’s damaging the very way we think about the world. Just as we spent forty-five years locked in a cold war perpetuated by the spectre of mutually assured destruction, we find ourselves in an intellectual, ontological dead end today. The primary method we have for evaluating the world, more data , is faltering. It’s failing to account for complex, human-driven systems, and this failure is becoming obvious – not least because we’ve built a vast planet-spanning, information-sharing system to demonstrate it to us. The nsa /WikiLeaks release is one example of this failure, as is the confusion caused by real-time information overload from surveillance itself. So is the discovery crisis in the pharmacological industry, where billions of dollars in computation are returning exponentially fewer drug breakthroughs.12 But perhaps the most obvious is that despite the sheer volume of information that exists online and the plurality of moderating views and alternative explanations, conspiracy theories and fundamentalism don’t merely survive, they proliferate. As in the nuclear age, we learn the wrong lesson over and over. We stare at the mushroom cloud, see all of this power, and then enter into an arms race all over again. What we should be seeing is the network itself, in all of its complexity. And when I talk about the network, I mean the internet and us and the entire context, because the internet is only the latest but certainly the most advanced civilization-scale tool for introspection our species has built thus far. To deal with the internet is to deal with an infinite library and all the inherent contradictions contained within it. Our categories, summaries, and authorities are no longer merely insufficient; they’re literally incoherent. Our current ways of thinking about the world can no more survive exposure to this totality of raw information than we can survive exposure to the atomic core. And I think this also approaches an answer to a question posed by Susan Schuppli: What constitutes an ethics of seeing in the face of the history of atomic image making? I would suggest that one response is a refusal and an aniconism: a recognition that these

6.15 | Chicago Pile-1, Stagg Field, University of Chicago, 1942 6.16 | Aerial photograph of the National Security Agency on Fort Meade, Maryland, by Trevor Paglen. Commissioned by Creative Time Reports, 2013.

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images and image-making practices are also toxic and radioactive, and need to be buried and surpassed.13 I want to conclude with two images. The first is the black stack of Enrico Fermi’s Chicago Pile Number One in the racquets court at Stagg Field (the site of the first man-made self-sustaining nuclear reaction). The second is the cabinet noir or black chamber, first inaugurated by King Henry IV of France in 1590, revived by Herbert Yardley in 1919, and given material form by nsa and the architects Eggers and Higgins in 1986 at Fort Meade in Maryland. These two chambers represent an encounter with two annihilations – one of the body, and one of the mind, but both of the self. Modern civilization has been built on the dialectic that more information leads to better decisions, but our engineering has caught up with our philosophy. The novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, writing on the occasion of the detonation of India’s first nuclear bomb, called it “The End of Imagination” and again, this revelation is literalized by our information technologies.14 We have to figure out a new way of living with / in the light of the technologies we’ve built for ourselves. But then, we’ve been trying to do that for a while.

noteS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

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Glasgow Song Guild, Ding Dong Dollar. Paglen, “Turnkey Tyranny.” See Moran, The Day We Lost the H-Bomb. Bergin, ed., 50 Years of Army Computing, 153. Bridle, “Living inside the Machine.” Bergin, ed., 50 Years of Army Computing, 153–8. “Next-Gen System,” Advanced Simulation and Computing. Hayden and Cole, “The Price of Privacy.” Newitz, “Almost None of the Women.” Summers, “Personal Details of Every Child”; “London Clinic Leaks hiv Status”; Burgess, “TalkTalk Reveals.” While developing this chapter, I came across Cory Doctorow’s excellent unfolding of the radioactive-data argument in his article “Personal Data Is as Hot as Nuclear Waste” and Cegowski’s “Haunted by Data,” which forced me to up my game somewhat. Scannell et al., “Diagnosing the Decline.” Schuppli, “Radiological Environments as Extreme Images.” The question was in response to an excellent talk from Joseph Masco at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference (Toronto, 2015) about the complicity of photography in atomic history. Chapter 4 of this volume is a revised version of Masco’s talk. Roy, The End of Imagination.

erin siddall, Peace camP (as Part oF ProVing groUnD: neVaDa), 2017

Proving Ground investigates how, in the current era of instability and escalating nuclear risk, histories of the post-nuclear era resist being represented. Uranium glass dishware is placed and photographed on the archaeological remains at the site of the now inactive iconic Cold war–era anti-nuclear protest camp adjacent to the Mercury nuclear test site in nevada. in the pre-nuclear era, uranium oxide was routinely mined in Canada to provide the color for depression-era dishware given for free by food companies, cinemas, and bowling alleys to entice customers. Uranium glass production ended in the early 1940s as uranium was used instead for nuclear testing. the green glow the dishes emit is the result of light shone to detect the normally imperceptible radioactivity: an invisible threat to the body is in contrast to the objects’ benign domesticity. Erin Siddall

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little Boys and Blue skies: Drones through Post-atomic eyes Derek gregOrY Hiroshima, an event that is not over: there is a continuity between the atomic bombing and the current situation of war. Rosalyn Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq

As soon as the dream of human flight was realized, another replaced it: the tantalizing prospect of removing those magnificent men from their flying machines. Most of the early attempts were paper aeroplanes that never flew far from the drawing board; those few that did were largely unsuccessful. But the dream remained alive, and it was given a new lease of life by the deadliest weapon in human history: the atomic bomb. For all the glaring differences between atomic bombs and the Hellfire missiles fired from Predators and Reapers – in scales of investment; in range of delivery systems; in targets and blast radii; and in the time and space horizons of their explosive and toxic effects – nuclear weapons and drones have been entangled in myriad ways. Their development and deployment have involved geopolitical and geo-legal manoeuvres, sparked major oppositional campaigns by activist groups, and had major impacts on popular culture. But, as I seek to show in the pages that follow, the most persistent connection between them has been an unwavering focus on the vulnerability of American lives and the disposability of others’.

Escape from Hiroshima Before flying the Enola Gay across the blue skies above Hiroshima in the early morning of 6 August 1945 Lt Col. Paul Tibbets and his crew had

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repeatedly practised bombing runs from their base at Wendover Army Air Field in Utah. With other selected b -29 crews they had dropped huge, orange-painted dummy bombs (“pumpkins”) modelled on the shape and size of what they would eventually discover to be the plutonium bomb – “Fat Man,” the bomb that would destroy Nagasaki, not the “Little Boy” uranium bomb that devastated Hiroshima1 – on vast target circles outlined on the desert floor of the nearby Bonneville Salt Flats and the Salton Sea 500 miles away in California. Each week since September the crews had made as many as thirty visual drops and three or four radar-guided drops (the initial meeting of the Targeting Committee had considered visual bombing essential), and Tibbets drove his men hard. Although he was a veteran of US bombing missions over Europe and North Africa, his new mission demanded exceptional skills. In the European theatre it was expected that most bombs would land within 1,000 feet of the target (the “Circular Error Probable”), but Tibbets and his men were expected to deliver their top-secret payload from high altitude (30,000 feet) and yet achieve a cep of only 200 feet. Tibbets was in command of a stripped-down b -29 Superfortress, modified to allow for an atomic bomb that weighed 10,000 lbs. In June his 50th Composite (“self-contained”) Group deployed to its operational base on Tinian in the Mariana Islands, and the practices continued. The bombardiers started to drop “pumpkins” (conventionally armed but now replicating the shapes of both Little Boy and Fat Man) from flights of three b -29s outside the potential target cities, so that when the day dawned Special

7.1 | The Enola Gay’s approach to and escape from Hiroshima (drawn by co-pilot Robert Lewis from sketches at briefing made by weaponeer William “Deke” Parsons)

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Bombing Mission 13 – the flight of the Enola Gay and its two accompanying aircraft2 – would be unlikely to be intercepted when its planes appeared overhead.3 The practice runs over the proving grounds in the US and over Japan were about more than accuracy and deception. They were also designed to enable pilots to execute a diving quarter-roll at high speed as soon as the bomb had been released. It was this, as much as the ability to minimize the cep , that was part of the “precision flying” that preoccupied Tibbets and his crews. In September, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, had told Tibbets that the most dangerous part of his mission – for the aircrew, at least – would be escaping the shock wave from the air blast. The only solution – and there were no guarantees – was to reverse the flight path abruptly and to put as much distance as possible between the blast and the aircraft.4 As Tibbets recalled: I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we’d flown straight ahead after dropping them – which is also the trajectory of the bomb. But what should we do this time? He said, “You can’t fly straight ahead because you’d be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there.” He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I said, “Well, I’ve had some trigonometry, some physics. What is tangency in this case?” He said it was [155] degrees in either direction. “Turn [155] degrees as fast as you can and you’ll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded.” I had dropped enough practice bombs to realise that the charges would blow around 1,500 feet in the air, so I would have 40 to 42 seconds [between bomb drop and blast] to turn [155] degrees. I went back to Wendover as quick as I could and took the airplane up. I got myself to 25,000 feet, and I practised turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it where I could pull it round in 40 seconds. The tail was shaking dramatically and I was afraid of it breaking off, but I didn’t quit. That was my goal. And I practised and practised until, without even thinking about it, I could do it in between 40 and 42, all the time.5 At 8:15 the bomb-bay doors of the Enola Gay opened, and 40 seconds later Little Boy exploded 1,900 feet above Shima Hospital in the centre of Hiroshima. By the time the Enola Gay was hit by the first shock wave with a force of 2½ G the aircraft was ten miles away.

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One of the immediate American responses to the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a belief that the atomic bomb heralded the chilly dawn of what journalist Hanson Baldwin called “devastating ‘push-button’ battles.”6 In the dog days of the war General Henry “Hap” Arnold had been convinced that remote-controlled, television-assisted aircraft would soon “fly over enemy territory and look through the leaves of trees and see whether they’re moving their equipment.” “I see a manless air force,” Arnold told his chief scientific adviser, and on the day that Japan surrendered he predicted that “the next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all.”7 At a press conference a few days later he conjured up the prospect of what he called a “Buck Rogers conception of war” that would include “robot, jet-propelled atomic bombs which will be guided by television and find their targets by radar.”8 This was not (quite) a flight of fancy. In July 1944 the Air Force had trialled Project Aphrodite, in which war-weary b -17 Flying Fortresses filled with high explosive were supposed to be crashed onto targets in occupied Europe using television cameras mounted in their nose and remote (“robot”) control from accompanying director aircraft.9 Recalling that (as it happened, unsuccessful) experiment, Arnold repeated his conviction-prediction with renewed confidence: “One year ago we were guiding bombs by television, controlled by a man in a plane fifteen miles away. I think the time is coming when we won’t have any men in a bomber.”10 Baldwin thought the implication was obvious: “Robot planes, rockets, television and radar bombing and atomic bombs will do the work today done by fleets of thousands of piloted bombers.” At first he tried to cut Arnold’s fantasy down to size. In his view, pilots would still be needed for photo reconnaissance and for “pin-point visual bombing”11 One year later found him more optimistic about the prospects for remote operations. “Today,” Baldwin wrote in the New York Times, “planes without crews can be flown almost anywhere, and can even survive … the atomic cloud.”12 It was the need to “survive the atomic cloud” that had persuaded the Air Force to accelerate the series of experiments that had captured Baldwin’s imagination. There were two pressing concerns. First, the Air Force was asked to conduct aerial photography and sampling of the atomic clouds produced in nuclear weapons tests, which raised new fears about the risks of radioactive contamination. Second, the next generation of nuclear weapons was going to be much bigger than Little Boy or even Fat Man, with a corresponding increase in the size of the shock wave, which raised alarms over the escape of the bombers delivering them.

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Atomic Clouds and Drones

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D erek g reg O rY 7.2 | Air Force b -17 Flying Fortress drone landing at Eniwetok Island via ground control station mounted on a jeep

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The solution to both dilemmas, the Air Force believed, was to be found in removing crews from the aircraft. The first postwar series of nuclear tests, Operation Crossroads, took place in July 1946 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The target was a fleet of ninety-five ships ironically readied at Pearl Harbor and now anchored in the lagoon. This was an attempt by the US Navy to move centre stage after Hiroshima and Nagasaki – when the Air Force had played the leading role – and to establish that sea power was still relevant in the atomic age. But critics inside and outside Congress doubted the value of the tests: the bombs would be of the same type as Fat Man, so no development in weapons technology was involved, and in any event surface ships were unlikely to be the targets of such devastating weapons.13 They dismissed Crossroads as an expensive, purely theatrical extravaganza. And despite the remote location, 4,000 miles from San Francisco, every effort was made to attract international attention, both public and professional; the official record trumpeted that “never before had a nation fanfared its most secret weapon so closely before the eyes of the world.”14 As far as the Air Force was concerned, however, Crossroads would be “a laboratory test” and not a “bomb-versus-battleship stunt.”15 It would involve not only bomb delivery by one of its b -29 Superfortresses but also cloud monitoring by drones. Vice-Admiral William Blaney, commander of Crossroads, explained that “robot aircraft will dive into the atomic blast to gather scientific data” and “uncover facts of radioactive phenomena as well as supply data on blast effects on airborne aircraft.”16 His Air Force deputy abandoned sober-sided science for high drama. “Almost as dramatic as the flight of the b -29 bomber,” Major-General William Kepner told reporters, “will be the plunge of the unpiloted but mothered drone planes into the sky-reaching, irradiated cloud.” “Where men cannot go,” he enthused, “the drone will take electronic and other recording instruments.”17 In fact, the drones were supplied by both the Air Force and the Navy. For its part, the Air Force retained its love affair with the heavy bombers that had driven Aphrodite. This time its Drones Unit utilized new b -17 Flying Fortresses: four were converted into drones operated by radio control from four others flying at a safe distance, while one acted as the master control aircraft. The drones were stripped of all their defensive armaments and fitted with radio and television equipment; air filters were fixed to their top turrets to trap particles from the cloud and collection bags installed in their bomb bays. Ground controllers launched the drones from control jeeps and then handed off to the airborne controllers (“beeper pilots”) on board the accompanying b -17s, who directed the aircraft into the cloud before returning them to the ground controllers, who managed the landing. The US Navy used its much smaller

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carrier-based Grumman f 6f Hellcat fighter aircraft as drones and as control aircraft; the guidance system was essentially the same, and each of the drones had an air filter mounted under one of its wings. Altogether the Navy mustered thirty drones and twenty-six control aircraft. The first shot in the series, code named Able, took place on 1 July 1946. At 0900 Dave’s Dream dropped the bomb over the target fleet, but the result was not the thrilling spectacle that had been advertised. Visually it was a damp squib. Judged by its own Broadway razzmatazz,

7.3 | US Navy Grumman

f6f-5k Hellcat drones during the “Operation Crossroads” atomic tests at the Bikini Atoll in July 1946. 7.4 | Ground control officer landing Navy f6f Hellcat drone, Operation Crossroads. Naval Aviation News, July 1951

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one reporter jibed, it was a complete flop: “Operation Chloroform, the logical sequel to Operation Build-Up and Handout.”18 Scientifically it was not much better. Although Vice-Admiral Blaney initially declared that the bomb was dropped “with very good accuracy,” it detonated 2,000 feet off-target – an error investigated by Tibbets himself19 – exploding over one of the instrumentation vessels and compromising the readings from many others. Even most of the high-speed cameras missed the shot. One critic concluded that “from the standpoint of pure science no test was ever more haphazard.”20 Against this catalogue of errors, which was glossed over in the official report, the aerial sampling missions were judged a considerable success. As soon as the bomb was released the first b -17 control aircraft turned its huge drone (Fox) into the cloud at an altitude of 24,000 feet; Fox was then switched to its automatic pilot, entering the cloud eight minutes after the explosion, while the control aircraft raced around the cloud and resumed control when the drone emerged on the other side. Fox was followed by George (at 30,000 feet), How (at 18,000 feet), and Love (at 12,000 feet). All four drones were directed back to Eniwetok atoll where they were handed back to the ground controllers in jeeps at the end of the runway, who taxied them to the radiological safe area where the filters and bags were removed and flown to Los Alamos Laboratory for analysis. The Navy launched four of its Hellcat drones from the carrier Shangri-La, accompanied by eight primary control aircraft and eight secondaries, but only three of the drones – Yellow, White, and Blue – sampled the cloud at 5,000, 10,000, and 15,000 feet before being directed back to Roi Island for ground landing and sample recovery.21 The official report emphasized that the sampling program was a notable first. “At Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few photographs and pressure measurements were made of the explosions, but almost nothing of value to physicists was learned.”22 Crossroads had changed that; “for the first time, samples had been taken from an atomic cloud” during what one military engineer hailed as “the most hugely instrumented experiment in history.”23 To the Air Force its drones had made the crucial contribution not only to the aerial sampling program but also to the development of remote operations more generally: “For the first time, four-motored drone aircraft had been flown without a safety pilot aboard.”24 The author of the official report was equally impressed. “With no one aboard,” he marvelled, “these great planes were radio-guided through their prescribed flights across the target area, a unique and impressive feat.” In a footnote he continued: “A number of Army Air Forces officials believe that the drone-plane program undertaken for Crossroads advanced the science of drone-plane operations by a year or more … Operation

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Crossroads was the first operation in which take-off, flight, and landing were accomplished with no one aboard. The feat was an impressive one; many experts had thought it could never be accomplished with planes of this size.”25 These were the experiments that had captured Baldwin’s imagination. At Bikini the drones were controlled over a distance of eight miles or less, but Baldwin had been told that remote control up to fifty and perhaps even one hundred miles was possible. These were what today would be called line-of-sight operations, so their range was limited and Baldwin stressed that, for the time being at least, “an unmanned drone cannot be sent careening into a target in Europe by an operator standing at his ‘beep box’ on La Guardia field in New York.”26 But he was also adamant that a threshold had been crossed: In the Pacific so much experience in the handling of drones was accumulated during the summer and the operations were so far in advance of drone operations during the war that it is safe to say that a simplified and reliable system of drone control – with all that implies – has been achieved … Drones thus add a new and dangerous instrument to the growing armory of Mars, increase the power of the offensive and further complicate the tasks of the defensive.27 Baldwin turned out to be right, but the remote sampling program was not without its problems. In the Crossroads series of tests some Air Force drones were damaged by the shock wave, and there were difficulties of coordination between drones and their control aircraft. The controllers of the Navy drones described their charges as “cantankerous little children”: apart from the three that returned safely with their samples, another “refused to respond to its ‘mother plane’s orders’ to come home” and “took off in the direction of China” – it was presumed to have crashed – while two others were lost before the blast “when they did not respond to radio control.”28 The second and third series (Operation Sandstone in 1948 and Operation Greenhouse in 1951) were weapons development tests that involved new bombs with a composite core of uranium and plutonium that could be mass-produced for a projected nuclear arsenal. The Atomic Energy Commission requested an increase in the number of remote samplers for both series, but the mishaps continued. Some drones stopped responding to radio signals from their control aircraft altogether, and while most were recovered by the master control aircraft, at least three crashed and exploded. After Sandstone the Air Force recommended the establishment of a permanent drone

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fleet to conduct sampling operations, but Greenhouse turned out to be the last series in which drones were used in the Pacific Proving Grounds. On 15 May 1948, during the final shot (Zebra) of Sandstone, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Fackler, whose b -29 aircraft was charged with collecting samples ten miles from the detonation point, was unable to escape the advancing cloud. “No one keeled over dead, and no one got sick,” he boasted later, and as soon as his radiation safety officer declared the crew had reached its exposure limit Fackler turned the b -29, flew through rain showers to wash off radioactive particles, and landed without incident. Afterwards Fackler pressed the case for crewed aircraft in place of drones, and for the last shots of Greenhouse two manned samplers supplemented the drones. By the time nuclear tests had been relocated from the Pacific to the Nevada Test Site the Air Force had decided that these conventional operations were acceptable and on occasion even superior. No longer a hit-or-miss affair in which the utility of the sample depended on “pot-luck,” an on-board pilot could manoeuvre the aircraft on approach and during cloud penetration to secure “greater precision in sample size and location.”29 The phased transfer to the continental United States was a response to the pressure placed on the US military by its continuing logistical support for tests in the Pacific while the Cold War intensified and the Korean War raged.30 Relocation raised questions other than the strategic and the scientific, of course: American public opinion had to be satisfied that there were no hazards to populations in the vicinity of the tests, and a refusal to allow crewed aircraft into the cloud could only have made that task more difficult.31 Yet this did not mark the end of the use of drones. Between 1951 and 1955 Lockheed f -80 jet aircraft were converted into drones and sent into atomic clouds over the Nevada Test Site to explore the effects of radiation exposure on live animals (monkeys and mice) and to assess the effects of blast on airframes. These were advertised as “nullo ” flights (“no live operator on board”). The drones were directed from control aircraft, but their approach and passage through the cloud was handled by ground control stations at Indian Springs Air Force Base 30 miles away. This was the Air Force portal for the Nevada Test Site, and since 2005 – renamed Creech Air Force Base – it has been the main control centre for the remote operation of Predators and Reapers over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Their predecessors in the 1950s produced mixed results; there were several crashes and repeated failures to penetrate the cloud as planned, and crewed flights eventually replaced them.32 When the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty put an end to atmospheric testing in 1963 the need for aerial sampling over Nevada disappeared with the cloud.33

When Dave’s Dream dropped the bomb for the first shot of Crossroads, its pilot copied the Enola Gay’s manoeuvre over Hiroshima. As soon as the bomb doors were closed he threw the aircraft a tight 150-degree turn, dived, and increased speed to get away from the shock wave.34 But this escape hatch would not be open for much longer. Once the decision had been taken to develop the next generation of thermonuclear weapons it was clear that the Air Force would have to deliver a vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb over a distance of 4,000 miles: “It was expected that the package would produce a lethal area so great that, were it released in a normal manner, the carrier would not survive the explosion.”35 The production program had to proceed with all possible speed since the Soviet Union had conducted its first successful atomic test on 29 August 1949. But the guided missiles the Air Force had in development were at least two years away. Only three aircraft in its current fleet met the operational criteria, and the Air Force decided to convert one of the b -47 Stratojet bombers due to be delivered by Boeing the following year into a drone capable of carrying the bomb. The project was codenamed “Brass Ring.” Its ultimate objective was “to fashion a b -47 carrier with completely automatic operation from take-off to bomb drop,” but this was such a tall order that the immediate plan called for an accompanying b -47 to act as a director aircraft to control take-off, climb, and cruise. The crew on the director aircraft would then set the automatic pilot on the carrier, which would either execute a standard bombing run or dive onto its target.36 By February 1951 progress was still slow but the team was ordered to press on because “it has not been definitively established as yet that manned aircraft can safely deliver the weapon.”37 Brass Ring was a rerun of Aphrodite on an exorbitantly increased scale – and within infinitely higher stakes – and the problems facing the postwar project team were far greater. In October 1951 they discovered that their task had swollen far beyond its original, taxing specifications: the “super-bomb” would weigh not 10,000 but 50,000 lbs. The b -47 would now have to be refuelled twice in mid-air to travel the projected distance. They modified their plans and planes accordingly, and after a series of setbacks the first hour-long test flight of the b -47 carrier on 10 March 1953 was successful: “The automatic take-off, climb and cruise sequence was initiated remotely from a ground control station. The aircraft azimuth, during take-off, was controlled by an auxiliary control station at the end of the runway. Subsequent maneuvers, descent and landing (including remote release of a drag parachute and application of brakes) were accomplished from the ground control station.”38

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Atomic Bombs and Drones

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But there were “several aspects – certain level flight conditions, turn characteristics and the suitability of the aircraft as a ‘bombing platform’ – which required further investigation.” These were hardly minor tweaks. Completion of the project had already been delayed by a year and then extended to the end of December 1953, but Brass Ring was abandoned months before the deadline. Not only was much more work needed, but costs had spiralled, the expansion of US bases overseas had contracted the required delivery range, and the Air Force was finally convinced that a crewed aircraft could execute the bombing run safely (at least, for those on board). Meanwhile, the Navy had not deserted the field. During the war its pilots had taken part in Project Aphrodite – tragically in one case39 – and after Crossroads it reverted to its interest in directing small drones filled with bombs into enemy targets. In 1951 an anonymous officer writing in Naval Aviation News suggested that tomorrow’s drone “may have a television camera in the nose, carry a heavy bomb load and do a Kamikaze dive on a target with great efficiency.”40 The following April a contributor to Popular Mechanics was invited to the Navy’s Pilotless Aircraft Laboratory to observe a flight of four Hellcat drones controlled from a single aircraft. Although he said the Navy was “tight-lipped” about its plans for the Hellcats, Herbert Johansen went beyond the News’s muted speculation to imagine a future in which the drones would “carry atomic warheads and crash-dive as projectiles of destruction.”41 Perhaps this was his own, wild conjecture; perhaps not. The United States had already made it clear that it was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the Korean War, and later that year a naval officer who was overseeing an experiment in remote operations off the coast of North Korea conjured up exactly the same prospect. Between 28 August and 2 September 1952 six Hellcat drones on the uss Boxer were loaded with 2,000 pound bombs and, through television pods slung under their wings, yoked to control aircraft – ad -2q Skyraiders this time – whose pilots used their screens to guide what were now described as “robot missiles” on to their targets. An American agency reporter cabled a vivid description of what he called “one of the most dramatic and historical events of the Korean War”: As the doomed craft streaked towards its target, grim-faced electronic experts, in a secret room on this ship, rode with the missile, mile by mile, through wondrous electronic instruments. On their dials in the secret room, the experts crossed the Sea of Japan and watched the jagged peaks of Eastern Korea loom in the distance and grow larger. Far from the missile, an automatic

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With that blank screen, he continued, those on board the Boxer knew that “here at last in actual combat, was a new era of battle,” when “electronic brains will ride in tough, dangerous places, saving the lives of American pilots.”43 The experiment was not a complete success. Only one of the six drones hit its target and the others all recorded near-misses, but this was enough for Lt Cdr Lawrence Kurtz, the remarkably loose-lipped commander of Guided Missile Unit 90 responsible for the trial, to boast that the United States had enough of them to “launch and sustain a largescale robot campaign.” He then added this sensational rider: some of the “missile planes” were “capable of carrying an atomic bomb from one continent to another.”44 The agency report of his comments was played down in the United States, where they evidently incurred the wrath of his superiors. Rear Admiral John Sides described the use of the Hellcat drones as an “interim measure” before the development of “more effective guided missiles,” conceding that “it wouldn’t take much imagination to realize that there are better ways of doing this job.” He gave no further details: the Navy was “investigating the use of classified information in news dispatches on the employment of pilotless bombers in Korea,” but refused to elaborate.45 Instead, Sides switched the focus from the aircraft to American lives. The object of the experimental program observed by Johansen earlier in the year was “to obtain air kills by individuals operating from beyond the range of the enemy’s armament,” he emphasized, and in Korea “a controller sitting in relative safety” outside the range of anti-aircraft defences “had been able to direct an effective drop on the enemy positions.” A report in the New York Times had already underlined the significance: “The planes were sacrificed but, of course, not a man was lost.”46 And this was the larger and sharper point. The reason drones were originally used to fly through the atomic cloud; the reason the Air Force had sought a remotely operated aircraft to drop the next generation of nuclear weapons; the reason the Navy wanted “offensive drones” and “robot missiles” to attack heavily defended targets was to save the lives

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device transmitted every dying moment of the missile’s last hour to the uss Boxer. The target – an enemy concentration in a valley between two shadowy hills – was indicated on the receiving instrument – a real flak-ridden trap for any hapless Allied pilot. A second to go now – the signal of the instruments grew stronger as the guided missile dived straight at the target at hundreds of miles an hour. Then the instruments went suddenly blank.42

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of American crews. It is the same mission that continues today in the US development of remote operations to prosecute its avowedly asymmetric wars: what the Air Force calls “projecting power without vulnerability.”

American Hiroshimas There was a second, astonishing American response to the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: a preoccupation with the vulnerability of its own cities to nuclear attack. “Physically untouched by the war” – apart from Pearl Harbor – Paul Boyer notes that “the United States at the moment of victory perceived itself as naked and vulnerable. Sole possessors and users of a devastating instrument of mass destruction, Americans envisioned themselves not as a potential threat to other peoples, but as potential victims.”47 And for all the appeals to Buck Rogers in commentaries on future “push-button” wars, most of the scenarios presented to an anxious American public were based on military-scientific data (however imperfect these turned out to be). On 19 November 1945, barely one hundred days after Hiroshima, Life published an illustrated essay entitled “The 36-Hour War,” which was informed by a report from General Arnold as commander of the US Army Air Force to the Secretary of War. Although the opening paragraphs predicted that in the future “hostilities would begin with the explosion of atomic bombs on cities like London, Paris, Moscow or Washington” – Arnold’s report had warned that “the danger zone of modern war is not restricted to battle lines” and that “no one is immune from the ravages of war”48 – the global allusion of the text was dwarfed by Alexander Leydenfrost’s striking illustration of “a shower of white-hot rockets” falling on Washington, DC . In case any reader should doubt the location of what the strapline called “the catastrophe of the next great conflict,” the next image sprawled across two pages and presented a vast panorama looking east across the United States from 3,000 miles above the Pacific: “Within a few seconds atomic bombs have exploded over New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boulder Dam, New Orleans, Denver, Washington, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Kansas and Knoxville [sic]” killing 10,000,000 people. Arnold’s report had suggested that there were “insurmountable difficulties in an active defense against future atomic projectiles.” Now Life warned that “low-flying robot planes” were even more dangerous because they would be more difficult to detect by radar – and “radar would be no proof at all against time bombs of atomic explosive which enemy agents might assemble in the US” – so that defence was more or less impossible. A counterattack could be launched (against an enemy who remained unidentified throughout the essay), but nuclear strikes would surely be followed

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by invasion. By then, the US would have suffered “terrifying damage”: “All cities of more than 50,000 have been levelled” and New York’s Fifth Avenue reduced to a “lane through the debris.”49 That final image was unique; it was the only one to envision a nuclear attack from the ground. Perhaps that was unsurprising; the power of the image – “the nuclear sublime” – was one of the central objectives of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “The weapon’s devastating power had to be seen to be believed,” Kyo Maclear observed, in Moscow as well as in Tokyo. And above all, literally so, it was designed to be seen from the air. During the seven years of the US occupation of Japan the effects on the people who lived and died in the irradiated rubble were subject to strict censorship. Still photographs could not be published – professionals and amateurs were ordered to burn their films and prints (fortunately some refused and hid them instead) – while Japanese media and even US military film crews had their documentary footage embargoed.50 In their place were endless images of the vast cloud towering into the sky. In fact Life had published a series of aerial views of the “obliteration” of Hiroshima and the “disembowelling” of Nagasaki just three months before its speculations on the thirty-six-hour war.51 All those high-altitude views, and the maps that accompanied them, planed away the field of bodies: all that could be seen, deliberately so, were levelled spaces and superimposed concentric circles. In the studied absence

7.5. | “The Atom Bombs Descend on U.S.” In “The 36Hour War: The Arnold Report Hints at the Catastrophe of the Next Great Conflict,” Life 19, no. 21 (19 November 1945).

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7.6 | “By the marble lions of New York’s Public Library U.S. technicians test the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity.” In “The 36Hour War: The Arnold Report Hints at the Catastrophe of the Next Great Conflict,” Life 19, no. 21 (19 November 1945).

of a visual record it was left to the imagination of writers to convey the effect of the bombs on human beings.52 And yet, as often as not, it was the bodies of Americans that filled the frame. Philip Morrison’s remarkable essay for the Federation of American Scientists was at once the best informed and the most exemplary. Morrison was a former student of Oppenheimer who had worked with him on the Manhattan Project, and in July 1945 he was sent to the Mariana Islands as part of the team charged with assembling Little Boy. One month later he was on the ground in Hiroshima with the US Army 166

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mission to investigate the effects of the bomb. Their report was submitted in June 1946, but Morrison’s personal essay had appeared three months earlier and had already acknowledged the impossibility of conveying the enormity of the scene in dry and distanced scientific prose. It also proposed a solution. “Even from pictures of the damage realization is abstract and remote. A clearer and truer understanding can be gained from thinking of the bomb as falling on a city, among buildings and people, which Americans know well. The diversity of awful experience which I saw at Hiroshima … I shall project on to an American target.” Warning that in any future war there would be twenty such targets – and not one bomb but “hundreds, even thousands” – Morrison, as befitted someone who served with the US Army’s Manhattan Engineer District, selected Manhattan. “The device detonated about half a mile in the air, just above the corner of Third Avenue and East 20th Street, near Grammercy Park. Evidently there had been no special target chosen, just Manhattan and its people. The flash startled every New Yorker out of doors from Coney Island to Van Cortland Park, and in the minute it took the sound to travel over the whole great city, millions understood dimly what had happened.” After an endless chamber of horrors – bodies of old men “charred black on the side towards the bomb,” men with clothing in flames, women with “red and blackened burns,” and “dead children caught while hurrying home,” toppled brownstones, roads choked with rubble – he concluded that at least 300,000 people would have died: 200,000 “burned and cremated” by volunteers, and the rest “still in the ruins, or burned to vapour and ash.”53 Hard on the heels of the Army in Hiroshima was the US Strategic Bombing Survey, whose findings were rendered in the same impersonal voice that Morrison found wanting. But in the concluding section of its report, the authors confessed that investigators had been bothered by the same troubling question as Morrison: “What if the target for the bomb had been an American city?”54 They provided rough and ready answers, which they accepted had “a different sort of validity” from the measurable data used in the preceding sections, but they insisted that their speculative calculations were “not the least important part of this report” and that they were offered “with no less conviction.” Acknowledging substantial differences between Japanese and American cities, the report nonetheless concluded that most buildings in American cities would not withstand an atomic bomb bursting a mile or a mile and a half from them, and that the vertical densities of high-rise buildings would produce large numbers of dead, injured, and desperately sick people: “The casualty rates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, applied to the massed inhabitants of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, yield a grim conclusion.”55

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The most vivid, visceral contrast to the dry recitations of the official reports appeared on 31 August 1946, when the New Yorker devoted an entire issue to John Hersey’s epic essay on Hiroshima. It was based on interviews he had conducted with more than forty survivors over three weeks in April. Written when he returned to New York, beyond the scrutiny of military censors, Hersey focused on six people whose stories he told in spare, unadorned prose (he later said he chose to be “deliberately quiet” so that “the horror could be presented as directly as possible”). The essay was cinematic in its execution, cutting from individual to individual across the shattered city, and excruciating in its painstaking detail. Their splintered accounts combined a methodical matter-of-factness – the numbing one-thing-after-another of their acts of survival – with the almost unspeakable horror of what lay beyond: “Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery.” Two of Hersey’s respondents were doctors, which enabled him to pan out across that vast sea of casualties (“Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together”) and then bring the focus back to individuals: “Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.” Hersey’s narrative moved carefully through the weeks after the blast until the results of radiation sickness began to take their toll and even the signs of a precarious normality became sinister: “a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green” as wild flowers bloomed “among the city’s bones.”56 Surely this awful litany would turn the American public’s post-atomic eyes to Japan? In fact the extraordinary success of Hersey’s essay – the print run of 300,000 sold out, “Hiroshima” was reprinted in many newspapers, broadcast on the radio in nightly instalments, and when it appeared in book form it became an immediate bestseller – served not only to dispel the claims of those who had sought to minimize the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it also redoubled the fears of an attack on the continental United States. In consequence, it was not only the New Yorker but also New York that dominated the American atomic imaginary in the late 1940s and ’50s. Even the first mass-market edition of Hiroshima confirmed that the preoccupation with American lives had not sensibly diminished. Hersey later said he had wanted his readers “to identify with the characters in a direct way” – “to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain”57 – but the artist responsible for the cover of the paperback, Geoffrey Biggs, took that literally. His

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image showed what he described as “two perfectly ordinary people” in “a city like yours or mine”: who happened to be Americans in an American city.58 The publication of “Hiroshima” was preceded by the two tests at Bikini, and in 1947 the official report on Crossroads illustrated the vastly more spectacular effects of the second (Baker) shot by superimposing its towering cloud over Manhattan. Perhaps the most iconic series of images of a post-atomic New York was painted by Chesley Bonestell and Birney Lettick. They accompanied John Lear’s contribution to Collier’s in August 1950, whose title seemed to evoke Hersey’s essay only to transpose it: “Hiroshima usa .” A prefatory note from the editor William Davenport insisted that nothing in the report was fantasy. While “the opening account of an A-bombing of Manhattan may seem highly imaginative,” he wrote, “little of it is invention.” It was based on the two US military surveys of Hiroshima, interviews with officials at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon, and advice from physicists, engineers, doctors, and other experts. The description that followed was apocalyptic:

7.7 | Cover illustration for the mass paperback edition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima 7.8 | Atomic cloud (“cauliflower cloud”) from Baker shot of Operation Crossroads superimposed over Manhattan

Aerial reconnaissance was impractical immediately after the blast because of the cloud of black grime that masked the lower city. Even after that cleared, it was only possible for the police helicopter squad to get a numb impression of the devastation. Streets could not be seen plainly. Many were blotted out entirely. In an area roughly 15 blocks long and 20 blocks across – from Canal Street north to Tenth and from Avenue B to Sullivan Street – 169

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7.9a | Chesley Bonestell, Atom Bomb Hits New York City, 1950. Oil on paper laid on board, 54.6 x 45.7 cm. Appeared on cover of “Hiroshima usa ” issue of Collier’s, 5 August 1950. New York Historical Society

there was now an ugly brown-red scar. A monstrous scab defiling the earth … Rising gradually outward from this utter ruin … was all that was left of Manhattan between Thirty-Eighth Street and Battery Park.59 As this passage implies, however, Lear’s vantage point was far from Hersey’s, who had described “four square miles of reddish-brown scar, where everything had been buffeted down and burned” but who was clearly more invested in the suppurating wounds and scarred flesh of the survivors. Consistent with the official sources from which Lear drew, his emphasis was instead on the geometries of destruction: only here and there did the bodies of “the burned, the crushed and the broken” flicker into view. Still, the sting was in the tail. “Fortunately for all of us,” Lear concluded fifty pages after his editor’s admonitory note, “the report you have just read is fiction.” But “if it ever does happen, the frightfulness will almost certainly be more apocalyptic than anything described in these pages.” 170

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For this documentary account is a conservative application to Manhattan Island of the minimum known consequences of explosion of one of the 1945 model A-bombs. And the Russians, if they once decide to attack us, surely will drop two or three or four of the 1950 models, each of which would ruin almost twice the area here circumscribed … In fact, one of the primary assumptions of current military planning for defense of the United States is that an enemy’s first move will be to try to disable not only New York but the entire Atlantic seaboard.60

7.9b | Chesley Bonestell, Atom Bombing of New York City, 1950. Oil on paper laid on Masonite, 44.1 x 83.2 cm. Appeared as an illustration in “Hiroshima usa ” issue of Collier’s, 5 August 1950, 12–13. New York Historical Society

Similar scenarios were regularly offered for other cities, including Chicago in 1950, Washington in 1953, Houston in 1955, and Los Angeles in 1961, and all of them dramatized their accounts through photomontages, maps, and artwork. Significantly, the burden of these accounts was on the effects of blast, burn, and destruction. Hersey’s descriptions of radiation sickness in Hiroshima were not mirrored in the United States, where the government consistently minimized its dangers. For the benefit of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in February 1953 the Atomic Energy 171

7.10 | Fallout plume from Castle Bravo superimposed over eastern US 7.11 | Blast radius from Castle Bravo superimposed over New York (New York Times, 1 April 1954)

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Commission superimposed the blast radius from the first hydrogen bomb detonated in the Marshall Islands the previous November (“Ivy Mike”) over a map of Washington, dc , and the conceit provoked laughter from members of Congress because the “zero point” was centred on the White House not the Capitol. The high-yield thermonuclear blast of Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954 was of a different order, and its fallout contaminated thousands of square miles. To illustrate its extent the AEC superimposed the plume over the eastern seaboard of the United States. Had this bomb been detonated over Washington, then Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York would have become uninhabitable. President Eisenhower insisted on the map remaining classified, and when the New York Times splashed across its front page “The H-Bomb can wipe out any city” its map was centred on New York and emphasized physical damage and destruction.61 I rehearse all this because in her reflections on “the age of the world target” Rey Chow writes of “the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the … target fields.”62 Yet, as I have shown, a common – perhaps even the most common – American response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years immediately after the war was precisely the opposite. To be sure, the preoccupation with American cities as targets was spectacularly self-referential. Peter Galison was not sure whether “the bombsight eye had already begun to look back” before Hiroshima, but he had no doubt that analysts working in the atomic rubble started “to see America through the bombardier’s eye.” In a further twist to the examples I have cited, he shows how this scopic regime was refracted so that US defence planning in the 1950s included a national program of “self-targeting” in which cities were required to transform large-scale maps of their communities into target zones for nuclear bombs: what Galison called a “new, bizarre yet pervasive form of Lacanian mirroring.”63 As it happened, nuclear-capable bombers repeatedly circled above American cities, which were indeed transformed into targets – for the US Air Force. Strategic Air Command staged a series of exercises over major cities to test its targeting capability. The first public demonstration was Operation Pacific on 16 May 1947. The Times cheerfully announced that “for forty seconds today New York City will be under the shadow of the most powerful bombing formation ever assembled in the United States.” Every available b -29 Superfortress was to be involved; following a “split-second schedule,” 130 of the giant aircraft would rendezvous over – where else? Manhattan. But the hundreds of thousands

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of New Yorkers who turned out to watch the show were disappointed. Fewer aircraft arrived than had been expected, a result of poor weather and poor timing, which “destroyed the effect of a mass bombing” that people “had been led to expect.” The Times reckoned that “the crowd felt cheated,” but sac ’s commander insisted that this was always intended to be more than an air show: “Everybody should be tickled that we carried no bombs,” he told reporters, “because New York City in the national picture is the No 1 target.”64 As his warning implied, there was a fine line between instilling confidence in America’s nuclear strike capability and inviting complacency about nuclear attack. To avoid that danger exercises of a different kind were conducted at the Nevada Test Site. Starting in 1953 mannequins were placed inside single-family wooden houses to calculate the survival prospects for what Joseph Masco calls the American “nuclearized” family. The battered mannequins – Hersey’s Hiroshima survivors materialized in plaster and transposed to the United States – were paraded at county fairs with the tag line: “These mannikins could have been real people; in fact, they could have been you.”65

Predator and Prey If these were all so many different versions of a nuclear narcissism, not everyone who contemplated “Hiroshima usa ” was an American. Fifty years later Osama bin Laden repeatedly invoked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in public messages and in clandestine communications. He did so partly as an indictment of what he saw as American hypocrisy over terrorism. Dropping atomic bombs on the two Japanese cities was an act of terrorism, he argued, “whose victims included women, children and the elderly,” and he complained that “when people at the ends of the earth were killed by their hundreds and thousands, young and old, it was not considered a war crime.” But bin Laden also saw in Hiroshima a strategy: since the strikes had forced Japan to surrender, he believed “a ‘Hiroshima’ of at least 10,000 casualties” on American soil would compel the United States to withdraw its troops from the Middle East.66 The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 involved civilian airliners not nuclear weapons, and American news media did not explicitly cite “Hiroshima usa ” – but they came uncomfortably close. Coverage of the aircraft crashed into the Pentagon was rapidly eclipsed by an unwavering focus on the strikes on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan; the scenes of terrified, ash-covered people running from the collapse of the Twin Towers prompted nbc ’s Tom Brokaw to say that it “looks like a nuclear winter in Lower Manhattan”; and, in a rhetorical displacement of the epicentre of Hiroshima, the site of the ruined World Trade Center was dubbed “Ground Zero.”67 174

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Far from compelling a withdrawal of US forces, 9/11 served only to redouble US military intervention in the region. By then the suspension of the Cold War had already transformed aerial violence. If the immediate threat to the United States now came from non-state terrorist organizations, principally but not exclusively al Qaeda and its affiliates, then saturation bombing was largely irrelevant (though it would still have its shocking place in the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq). As part of an evolving US counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategy, a new dimension was added to the arsenal of later modern war, a granular form of killing directed not against cities but against individuals. One of its central vectors was the drone, but in a form – within an apparatus – far removed from its predecessors of the 1940s and ’50s. The new drones were no longer adaptations of crewed aircraft but were specifically designed for remote operation. They required no accompanying director aircraft but were linked by Ku-band satellite and fibre-optic cable to ground control stations thousands of miles away. Their video transmissions were not limited to guidance information for their pilots but provided intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance through full-motion video feeds accessible not only to ground control crews but also to observers distributed across a global network. And even when they were armed they were not disposable but recoverable platforms from which the Air Force claimed it could put “warheads on foreheads.”68 These developments were driven in part by the escalating manhunt for bin Laden, already under way before 9/11, and with them the ligatures between drones and Strategic Air Command – which were still in place during the Vietnam War69 – were finally removed. The parent company whose aeronautics subsidiary supplied the US Air Force with its first purpose-built drone, the rq -1 Predator, was involved in nuclear research, but apart from the name – General Atomics70 – there seems to have been no substantive connection between the two. Although the entanglements between drones and nuclear weapons became largely circumstantial, once the decision was taken to arm the Predator parallels to the previous experiments emerged to bedevil future deployments. Like the drones used to sample the atomic cloud, the Predator was conceived as a monitoring platform; its function was to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for attacks to be executed by other means. Early versions were used in the nato air campaigns over the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, where a number of major operational problems were resolved, but its enlistment in the cia effort to trace and track bin Laden produced new challenges. At first the cia ’s search relied on ground agents, communications intercepts, and satellite imagery. In response to the terrorist attacks on the US embassies in Dar es Salaam

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and Nairobi in August 1998, the Clinton administration launched devastating Tomahawk cruise missile strikes from US submarines off the coast of Pakistan on an al Qaeda camp complex in Afghanistan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The second objective turned out to be spectacularly misjudged and the administration decided to proceed in the future with all possible caution. Alternative plans had also been put in place for bin Laden’s capture by ground assault teams and for another missile strike on his presumed location, but these missions were called off because the cia had chronic difficulty in securing definitive intelligence. The Predator appeared to offer the agency and the administration a way out. Uzbekistan gave permission for a sixtyday trial to be conducted from one of its air bases, but owing to the political sensitivity of Operation Afghan Eyes, President Karimov demanded the lightest possible US footprint. Starting in September 2000 a forward-deployed usaf crew handled the Predator’s launch and recovery from Karshin-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan, while the flights over Afghanistan were directed via a satellite link from a ground control station at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The Predator team was convinced it had captured bin Laden at least once, and perhaps on several other occasions, but these were all visual captures that triggered no military response.71 The cia briefly considered linking the Predator’s video stream to the Navy submarines, but there would still be a six-hour delay between confirmation and execution that would introduce the same uncertainty that had scuttled previous missions. If the Predator could be armed, however, the response time could be reduced to seconds. And so new experiments were authorized, and once again a drone took to the skies over Indian Springs in Nevada. In a repeat of earlier fears about the survivability of the Enola Gay and its successors, there were doubts about the ability of the Predator’s fragile airframe to withstand the shock of a Hellfire missile launched from under its wings. The cia also wanted to calibrate the likely effects of a Hellfire strike on the occupants of a mud-brick compound like those found in rural Afghanistan (plywood cut-outs and watermelons substituted for the mannequins this time around).72 Both tests were successful, but the description of the Korean War drones as “robot missiles” returned to throw a wrench into the works. A debate raged over the scope of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which the United States had ratified in 1988, because it defined missiles as “unmanned, self-propelled weapon-delivery vehicles” – which seemed to catch the armed Predator in its net. During the negotiations some Pentagon officials had wanted to limit the treaty to nuclear-armed systems – precisely in order to create a space for the future development of drones – but they were rebuffed, and when the Predator was deployed

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over the Balkans the Air Force had been warned off converting it to “a weapon-delivery role.” The new situation must have been more compelling because State Department lawyers were now persuaded that the Predator was merely a platform and as such remained outside the scope of the treaty. But they also argued that the Status of Forces Agreement with Germany would require Berlin’s consent for the activation of an armed Predator, and so it was decided to relocate the ground control station to Indian Springs and connect it to the satellite portal at Ramstein through a fibre-optic cable under the Atlantic.73 Bad weather intervened, and in the absence of any agreed policy from the incoming Bush administration, no Predator flights – armed or otherwise – took place over Afghanistan in the winter or spring of 2000–01. The first lethal strike by a Predator did not take place until after 9/11, when in a joint cia -centcom operation Hellfire missiles were launched against the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar, in a house near Kandahar on 7 October 2001.74 Although the strike was unsuccessful, the science-fiction future that had been conjured up only to be dismissed by Hanson Baldwin more than fifty years earlier, of a pilot in the United States controlling a drone thousands of miles away, had finally materialized. In doing so the attraction of “push-button” war was reaffirmed and radicalized; its allure was less in its automated ease – killing as a modern convenience – than in the considerable distance it now opened up between pilot and target.75 After President George W. Bush declared the inauguration of a “global war on terror,” he repeatedly explained to Americans that “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” The rapid generalization of remote operations beyond the manhunt for bin Laden promised the far more attractive prospect of fighting them from here.

Manhattan Projects I and II Generalization took multiple forms in multiple theatres: the Predator and its later variant the Reaper were extensively deployed for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, close air support, and targeted killing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for targeted killing outside these war zones in Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. These counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations all involved highly mobile targets, and in December 2004 the Defense Science Board argued that they would not be successful – that the “war on terror” could not be won – without what it called “a Manhattan Project in scale, intensity and focus” but “more intimate” in temper to develop the capability for “tagging, tracking and locating” these fleeting targets.76 The appeal to the Manhattan Project was hyperbole, but it was also contagious. Next 177

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March a technical adviser in the National Security Agency’s Target Reconnaissance and Survey Division posed the following question and answer: “What resembles little boy (one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II) and as little boy did, represents the dawn of a new era (at least in [signals intelligence] and precision location? If you answered a pod mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (uav ) that is currently flying missions in support of the Global War on Terrorism you would be correct.”77 The language was excessive, even rebarbative, but it was not wholly without foundation. The program devoted to identifying, locating, tracking, and killing – or on occasion capturing individuals of special interest (“High Value Targets”) – has required a tremendous scalar transformation. It depends on the global interception of digital communications and the rapid analysis of big data by algorithms: a process described by some critics as “algorithmic war.”78 This in turn depends on a computational apparatus whose origins can indeed be traced to the back door of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer had always emphasized that the development of nuclear weapons was “singularly proof against any form of experimental approach,” so that in the initial stages it was far safer and cheaper to conduct paper rather than physical experiments. The design and construction of Little Boy and Fat Man had involved complex calculations, but these were done on comparatively simple machines or on electromechanical analog computers that processed decks of punch cards. The development of the thermonuclear or H-bomb, the “Super,” posed a problem of a totally different order of magnitude and required a vastly more powerful computer. To validate the conjectures of the physicists and the designs of the engineers it had to be able to read coded sequences from high-speed memory and run exceptionally large numbers of numerical simulations. The first calculations for the Super were run on the Electronic Numerator, Integrator, Analyser and Computer (eniac ) at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. This was an analog computer but on a grand scale (it covered 18,000 square feet); digital technologies were still considered slow and unreliable and, as George Dyson explains, “analogue ruled the world.” eniac was completed too late to produce the ballistics tables for the US Army Ordnance Corps for which it had been built, and in December 1945 it was turned over to the calculations for Edward Teller’s “Super.” The run took six weeks and consumed one million punch cards, and while at first the results appeared to validate Teller’s model it was subsequently discovered that they had been limited by the eniac ’s memory and were in fact seriously flawed. Progress stalled until Teller (with Stanislaw Ulam) proposed a modified design of the “Super” in February 1951. But how could their design be confirmed? By then John von

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Neumann, a mathematician who had worked on the Manhattan Project and an ardent advocate of the Cold War – he was one of the models for Dr Strangelove – had successfully built an electronic digital computer at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Oppenheimer was now the director of the institute, which had close if not uncontested links with the Atomic Energy Commission, and a team of scientists from Los Alamos collaborated with von Neumann to use his Mathematical Analyser, Numerical Integrator and Computer (maniac ) for the requisite calculations. During the summer of 1951, camouflaged as an experiment in “pure mathematics,” maniac ran the single calculation non-stop for sixty days. The results proved the feasibility of the revised “Super,” and in November 1952 the first full-scale test of a thermonuclear device took place in the Marshall Islands. This was Ivy Mike, whose long-term consequences were immense. The same applied to maniac ; by today’s standards its memory was infinitesimal – just 5Kb – but its long-term effects were virtually incalculable. And the two were intimately related. Not only were “the digital universe [through which the later modern drone would eventually fly] and the hydrogen bomb brought into being at the same time,” as Dyson shows, but also their birth was part of the same military-scientific process.79 It was the analog computer that drove Strategic Air Command’s accelerated targeting cycle immediately after the Second World War. In 1946 sac started to compile a computerized database of potential targets in the Soviet Union, which was soon extended to Soviet satellites and Korea. By 1960 the “Bombing Encyclopedia of the World” contained 80,000 Consolidated Target Intelligence Files, which were harvested to plan nuclear strikes and calibrate damage and contamination models. One of the analysts responsible for nominating targets later described the process – and its dispersion of responsibility – as “the bureaucratisation of homicide.”80 The same might be said of the procedures involved in preparing the “disposition matrix” and the other kill lists that constitute the individualized target arrays for the current counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations conducted by the cia and the US military.81 The computational basis is now completely different: thanks to the maniac . Like targeting cycles within US Strategic Command (the successor to sac ) and other combatant commands, advanced digital systems now drive contemporary decisions about targeted killing. They also guide their execution, which – in keeping with most other modalities of modern war – has also become a bureaucratic process, managed through screen-time rather than face-time.82 The screens through which the strikes are orchestrated are mediations in an extended sequence in which the scattered actions and interactions of individuals are registered by digital intercepts and remote sensors, removed

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from the fleshiness of human bodies and reassembled as what Grégoire Chamayou terms “schematic bodies.” They are given code names and index numbers, plotted on time-space grids and tracked on screens. Drones are closely involved in identification and geo-location – hence that pod underneath the Predator’s wings – and are almost always used in the tracking stage. Although air strikes can then be carried out by conventional aircraft, they are often also executed by drones (especially outside “areas of active hostilities”). As soon as the missiles are released the transformations that have produced the target over the preceding weeks and months cascade back into the human body: in an instant virtuality becomes corporeality and traces turn into remains.83

Visual Economies All of this is mediated by screens, but the audience is screened too: the final awful moment in which the calculative is transformed back into the corporeal is made invisible to public scrutiny. The bodies of the dead and injured were also made to disappear from the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shown to publics in the United States, which were limited to the mushroom cloud and photographs of the devastated cities from the air. Unlike atomic bombs, however, aerial images are not secondary to or parasitic upon a drone strike; instead they are what Harun Farocki calls operative images that are an indispensable part of the operation and focal to its execution.84 The strike videos released by the Pentagon typically show the missile streaking towards the ground. The climax is a displaced repetition of the video stream from the Hellcat drone cannoning towards North Korea: people who moments ago were tracking across the visual field in silent motion suddenly disappear, and the screen goes blank. This is not because the drone has plunged into the target – it hasn’t – but because otherwise the screen would be filled with dead and injured bodies. These “stand-off ” operations, as they are sometimes called, usually require the Predator or Reaper to remain on station to carry out a battle damage assessment that is often an inventory of body parts. But for public viewing these are “stand-off ” operations in quite another sense because the bodies killed and maimed in drone strikes are deliberately withheld from public audiences in the United States.85 This is not out of a sense of decency, of what Farocki describes as a compulsion to spare the dead yet another humiliation, because these redacted videos are also operative images, designed to interpellate the viewer into what they make out to be bodiless wars, simultaneously virtual and virtuous.86 In contrast to all those American Hiroshimas, and other attempts to “bring home” other wars, there have been few attempts to imagine a 180

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domestic drone strike, still less broken bodies on American ground. I can think of only three visual artworks that address military drones over the United States – George Barber’s The Freestone Drone, Omer Fast’s 5,000 Feet Is the Best, and Thomas van Houtryve’s Blue Sky Days – and only Fast’s shows the aftermath of a strike.87 Although drones patrol the southern and northern borders, apparently unarmed, and a number of police forces use them for surveillance, an enemy drone strike within the United States is extremely unlikely (though I realize that is not the point of any of these projects). One reason it is far-fetched is because the production and deployment of the Predator, the Reaper, and similar platforms were at first confined to the United States and a limited number of its allies.88 Another is that they are relatively easy to shoot down, so that they can only be used in uncontested air space, against people or states unable (or in the case of Pakistan unwilling) to defend themselves. For these reasons, Chow’s theses about the locations of bomber and bombed have more cogency in the age of drone warfare, where remote operations produce and prey on what Lisa Parks calls “a new, disenfranchised class of ‘targeted’ people” who live outside the United States, in borderlands where “anyone and everyone is at risk and daily life is haunted by the specter of aerial bombardment.”89 Yet outside activist groups and human rights organizations, the disinterest in imagining drone strikes in the United States has not opened up a contrapuntal space in which the collateral victims in that distant “elsewhere” have become visible. Although filmmakers and playwrights have dramatized US/UK drone strikes in Asia and Africa, they have almost always redirected the audience’s gaze back to the United States or the United Kingdom – and in a startlingly new form. It is not those who are killed or injured in drone strikes who are portrayed as the central victims but those who carry them out: in the final, desperate instance it is their trauma that fills the screen or the stage. Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill (2014) and Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky (2015) do not shrink from showing the carnage on the ground, but their dramatic force ultimately resides in the effects of targeted killing on its executioners. Both films raise serious questions about remote operations, but they invest little screen space in the lives of the innocents caught up in the strikes. The distance between “here” and “there” is at once contracted by the military gaze and expanded by the cinematic gaze, so that these become remote operations in an altogether different sense.90 In George Brant’s play Grounded the split locations momentarily blur – a deeply troubled drone pilot transposes the arid landscapes of Nevada and Afghanistan, the face of her own daughter with the face of an Afghan child – but this is a solo performance in which the spotlight never moves far beyond her own anger and despair.91 We have been here before, of course; it is

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the lives of people “like us” that are made to matter, their trauma that is grievable, and the faces of others that are not our faces that are excluded from the frame.92 A rare exception is Sonia Kennebeck’s documentary National Bird (2016). The film opens with three former sensor operators whose memories of drone strikes still assail them. So far, so familiar. But then Kennebeck travels with one of them back to Afghanistan and stages a dramatic reconstruction of an air strike in February 2010 in which the sensor operator was involved – directed by a drone crew from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada but carried out by two combat helicopters93 – that killed more than twenty people and maimed many others, none of them combatants. Then, in truly remarkable sequences, Kennebeck incorporates amateur cellphone video and audio of the return of the bodies of the dead adults and children to their grief-stricken villages and follows the agonizing attempts of the severely injured to come to terms with their now violently diminished, prosthetic lives.

Little Boys and Blue Skies Kennebeck’s artistry will not dispel the disregard of those who emphasize the differences between the biophysical effects of Hellfire missiles and nuclear weapons. But the issue is not as straightforward as it seems. When Harold Koh served as legal adviser to the State Department between 2009 and 2013, he often declared that he “would have preferred targeted killings to Hiroshima.”94 Even so, this was a strange thing to say – nobody has ever suggested they are alternatives – but it does important rhetorical work. Positing drone strikes and nuclear weapons as opposites distracts attention from the other forms of aerial violence that range between them, which remain as ever-possible modalities of later modern war, and obscures the affective landscapes they share with other forms of aerial violence. Nuclear weapons and drones both target the social – only they do so in different ways. On 9 August 1945, the day Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, President Truman made a radio broadcast in which he told the American public that Hiroshima had been the target three days earlier because the United States “wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” It was a barefaced lie; there were military installations in the city, but Hiroshima had been selected because it was “the largest untouched target,” a city that had been spared from the firebombing campaign, so that its atomic destruction would be all the more spectacular. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were victims of a demonstration-effect.95 The explosive blast alone would mark these as the most indiscriminate of weapons, but they not only kill and maim bodies in a lingering present – and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki most 182

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of them were almost certainly civilians – they also devastate the infrastructures, ecosystems, and atmospheres on which the future conduct of social life depends. The stakes in targeted killing are plainly much lower. The United States claims that outside established war zones its drone strikes are preemptive and it unilaterally extends the horizon of anticipation – sometimes extravagantly so – so that the danger need not be imminent to qualify as legitimate self-defence. In order to identify those who pose a threat within this landscape of deadly anticipation the population at large is transformed into an object of surveillance through which, so the United States insists, it becomes possible to parse combatants from civilians and to put “warheads on foreheads” with unprecedented precision. In June 2011 John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, claimed that for almost a year the targeted killing program had not caused “a single collateral [civilian] death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” Brennan’s statement is not equivalent to Truman’s outright lie, but it is deeply problematic all the same.96 Drone strikes are directed against individuals or small groups, so fewer people are killed than in other forms of aerial violence – though one study found that in Afghanistan in 2010–11 drones were ten times more likely to cause civilian casualties than conventional strike aircraft97 – but in every case civilian status is conferred on, or withheld from, individuals by the assumptions and algorithms of the US military-intelligence apparatus. The categories of combatant and civilian are freighted with controversy, but there are good reasons to suppose that in practice the burden of recognition is increasingly being transferred from the combatant to the civilian, so that individuals under lethal surveillance are tacitly required to demonstrate their “civilianness” to those watching them from afar. There have been situations, again in Afghanistan, when being an adolescent or adult male, travelling in a group, praying at one of the times prescribed by Islam, and carrying a firearm in a society where that is commonplace have been enough for civilians to be judged as hostile by drone crews and attacked: this checklist is in fact from the air strike dramatized in National Bird.98 This is asymmetric war with a vengeance, in which people are made a part of the calculative apparatus of US counterterrorism but are not party to it. They do not know if they are under surveillance, if their everyday activities are being misinterpreted, or if the people they encounter in perfectly innocuous ways have been identified as targets (so that they risk being found guilty by proximity). A journalist held captive by the Taliban in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas reported: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”99 As a

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result parents become afraid to send their children to school, relatives scared to attend funerals, families reluctant to entertain guests in their homes; even shopping or going out to work become activities fraught with fear. “If I’m walking in the market … standing on the road … even in mosques, if we’re praying, we’re worried that maybe one person who is standing next to us is wanted.”100 This is how drone strikes target the social: not by devastating infrastructures, ecosystems, and atmospheres but by fraying the very fabric of social life so that, at the limit, society becomes atomized.101 This produces a doppelgänger landscape of deadly anticipation: just as the US military-intelligence apparatus scans the population to identify emergent threats, so in turn the people on the ground scan the skies for threats to their lives. This is a chronic feature across the spectrum of sustained aerial violence. The opening pages of Hersey’s “Hiroshima” were haunted by “the premonition shared by the city’s residents that an aerial attack was inevitable.” They could not have known what the United States had in store, but they were increasingly jittery. “No matter what city the Americans planned to hit” during their firebombing campaign, Hersey recorded, “the [b -29] Superfortresses streamed in over the coast near Hiroshima,” and as time and time again the city was missed from “Mr B’s” hit-list so a rumour went around “that the Americans were saving something special for the city.” Paul Saint-Amour has called this condition “traumatic earliness.”102 And in a later essay, he sutures the two together: “Like nuclear weapons, drones turn the prospect of death from above into a condition of everyday life.”103 After a strike has happened the circles of violence contract and the attack becomes intensely personal. In his account of Hiroshima, Morrison noted that “the great explosion had been for each survivor a bomb hitting directly on his house,” and that sense of the particular in the midst of the general, individual disaster in the midst of collective catastrophe, haunts many survivors’ narratives.104 There is something irredeemably singular and solitary – profoundly, existentially personal – about the response to sudden, violent death from the sky. Families searching the rubble for the bodies of their dead are as alone in Dhatta Khel as they were in Hiroshima. Mark Bowden, no shrinking violet from the horrors of war, reaches the same conclusion: “Drone strikes are a far cry from the atomic vaporizing of whole cities, but the horror of war doesn’t seem to diminish when it is reduced in scale. If anything, the act of willfully pinpointing a human being and summarily executing him from afar distills war to a single ghastly act.”105 And so I turn, finally, to two survivors who give my essay its title. Yukiko Hayashi (her real name is Sachiko Kawamura) was just sixteen when the Enola Gay appeared over her city. Here is part of her poem, “Sky of Hiroshima”:

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Daddy squats down, and digs with his hands Suddenly, his voice weak with exhaustion, he points I throw the hoe aside And dig at the spot with my hands The tiles have grown warm in the sun And we dig With a grim and quiet intent Oh … Mommy’s bone Oh … When I squeezed it White powder danced in the wind Mommy’s bone When I put it in my mouth Tasted lonely The unbearable sorrow Began to rise in my father and I Left alone Screaming, and picking up bones And putting them into the candy box Where they made a rustle My little brother was right beside my mommy Little more than a skeleton His insides, not burnt out completely Lay exposed … 106 And here is young Zubair Rehman’s heartbreaking admission after Hellfire missiles roared out of what he described as “a very clear blue sky” on 24 October 2012 to kill his grandmother while she innocently gathered okra in the fields around her home in Ghundi Kala in North Waziristan. One year later he travelled with his father and his sister to Washington to testify before Congress about what had happened. “I no longer love blue skies,” he told the handful of Congressmen who bothered to turn up to hear him. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”107 This is the ground zero where the past and present entanglements between drones and atomic bombs ultimately collide. There is nothing I can add to these two testimonies, except perhaps this: In the future I hope that “little boys” will not be bombs – and that they will no longer be afraid of blue skies.

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noteS 1 Little Boy was the progeny of the Manhattan Project’s unsuccessful development of the Thin Man nuclear bomb (which like Fat Man relied on plutonium rather than uranium for fission); Thin Man had been abandoned in July 1944. 2 The second b -29 dropped an instrumentation package by parachute, designed to measure the intensity of the blast and the radiation yield, while the third was equipped with high-speed cameras to provide a visual record. This followed the protocol established for the first detonation of an atomic bomb three weeks earlier – “Trinity,” a test carried out by a tower-blast in New Mexico on 16 July – when two instrumentation/observation b -29s circled the blast: Dvorak, “The First Atomic Bomb Mission,” 4–17. 3 Japanese radar detected incoming aircraft at 0715 and a yellow alert was issued, but the warning was rescinded shortly afterwards when radar operators determined that the flight was at most three enemy aircraft. 4 Campbell, Silverplate Bombers; Correll, “Atomic Mission,” 73–6; Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki, 283–98; Rotter, Hiroshima, 187–93. This is also why the bomb had to be dropped from such a high altitude. 5 Terkel, “One Hell of a Big Bang.” In fact, what Tibbets had to do was turn until the line from the detonation to the aircraft was a tangent to the turn radius. There is some dispute over the precise escape angle, which has been variously quoted as 150, 155, and 159 degrees: see the preface to Nahin, Chases and Escapes, xviii–xxvi. 6 Baldwin, “The ‘Drone.’” 7 Sherry, American Air Power, 187. This was not Arnold’s first flirtation with “robot” platforms. As a young major at the very end of the First World War, he had been sent to Europe by the US Army to persuade General Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, to deploy its new, unmanned “Kettering Bugs” against Germany. Charles Kettering had developed the aircraft in 1918 in association with Orville Wright. 8 Shalett, “Arnold Reveals Secret Weapons.” Indeed, when the cloud soared into the sky above Hiroshima, Tibbets’s co-pilot wrote they were like “Buck Rogers 25th-Century Warriors.” Ham, Hiroshima, 298. 9 Boyne, “The Remote-Control Bombers,” 86–8; Crane, Bombs, Cities and Civilians, 78–85; Schultz, Redefining Flight, 193–249. The radio remote-control system could not handle take-offs and so crews took the aircraft up to 2,000 feet, handed control to operators in the “mother ship,” and then parachuted to safety over Britain. Only fifteen (unsuccessful) missions were flown against v -1 missile launch sites and an expanded target list that included submarine pens and other targets inside Germany before the project was abandoned in January 1945. 10 Shalett, “Arnold Reveals.” Arnold thought that nuclear weapons were a mixed blessing, and in an essay ghost-written with William Shockley he noted that they had made destruction “too cheap and easy” – one bomb and one aircraft could replace hundreds of bombs and vast fleets of bombers. A similar concern is often raised by critics of today’s Predators and Reapers, who argue that their remote, often covert operations have lowered the threshold for military violence. 11 Baldwin, “The Atom Bomb and Future War.” 12 Baldwin, “The ‘Drone.’” 13 In fact the first high-level meeting convened to discuss nuclear targeting in May 1943 had tentatively agreed that the best target for the bomb would be the Japanese fleet at anchor in Truk Lagoon in the central Pacific, a reverse Pearl Harbor, but

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Oppenheimer concluded that an air blast would be of “negligible usefulness against ships”; work continued on underwater blasts at Los Alamos, but the thrust of the Manhattan Project was directed towards the development of an air-burst weapon to be used against cities: Molloy, “The Rules of Civilized Warfare,” 483–6. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini, 33. Print and broadcast journalists were allowed to file uncensored reports but all photographs were screened for security purposes. Shalett, “Atomic Bomb Test No Stunt to aaf .” “Drones Will Dive into Atomic Blast.” Leveiro, “Fliers and Robots.” Weisgall, Operation Crossroads, 187. The second (underwater) shot in the series, code-named Baker, more than made up for Able’s lack of visual spectacle. The strange shape of the Fat Man bombs had bedevilled the efforts of practice crews to hit their targets (the original missed its aiming point over Nagasaki too), but Tibbets – who had been denied permission to drop the bomb for Able – subsequently showed that the crew of Dave’s Dream had failed to make the proper corrections for wind speed and direction. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads, 190–201; see also Parsons and Zaballa, Bombing the Marshall Islands. The Navy also operated a fleet of “drone boats” to collect water samples from the lagoon. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini, 7; this was confirmed by Jackson, “Guide to US Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons.” This later report noted that for the first (Trinity) test, “nuclear-effects-related activities were understandably limited” because “the overwhelming issue for scientists was whether the bomb would work as predicted” (2-1); for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he explained, the focus was on physical damage and biomedical effects after the blasts. In his view, therefore, Crossroads was “the first nuclear weapons effects series” (4-1). Taylor, Air Force Atomic Cloud; De Ment, “Instruments of Operation Crossroads,” 414. It was also the most thoroughly photographed experiment. Weigall, Crossroads, claims that “half the world’s supply of film was at Bikini” (121), and the Air Force supplied “the world’s largest aerial camera,” mounted on a b -29 and “capable of recording on film the dial of a wrist-watch a quarter of a mile away”; De Ment, “Instruments,” 418. Taylor, History, 8–9. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini, 98. Baldwin, “The ‘Drone.’” Ibid. “All but One Bikini Drone.” Taylor, History, 23; Wolverton, “Into the Mushroom Cloud.” Fehner and Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold War, 35–44. The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project had sought to identify possible US sites since 1948. By 1950 the Pentagon feared that any expansion of the Korean War beyond the peninsula would threaten access to the western Pacific, and the Atomic Energy Commission recommended to the National Security Council that part of the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range be developed for nuclear tests. The first shot at the Nevada Test Site took place on 27 January 1951, but the Marshall Islands continued to be used for the most explosive tests until 1958. Similarly, US ground troops who were deployed to the Nevada Test Site during a series of exercises code-named “Desert Rock” between 1951 and 1957 were deliberately exposed to the blast and its radiation effects. During the Tumbler-Snapper

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George test on 1 June 1952, for example, troops were positioned in foxholes 7,000 yards from the blast; they were ordered to charge forward in battle formation as soon as the shock wave swept over their position – about 20 seconds – and to advance several thousand yards towards ground zero. See National Nuclear Security Information Photo Library (ts -52-77); Operation Tumbler-Snapper 1952; Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, chapter 10. Fehner and Gosling, Battlefield, 109–10, 144, 146; “Jet Pilotless Drones Collect Data,” Electrical Engineer 72, 567; Everett, Unmanned Systems, 564–9. It did not disappear over other locations; the Air Force continued crewed aerial sampling in order to monitor compliance with the treaty, and today two of its aircraft supplement the satellite sensor network of the US Atomic Energy Detection System. The Constant Phoenix program has been deployed to measure radioactivity from both the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents, and to monitor North Korea’s nuclear testing program. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini, 105. Trester, Thermonuclear Weapon Delivery, 275. Ibid., 291. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 349–50. Connor, “Remembering the Death.” “Radio Robots,” 1–5. Johansen, “No Live Operator Aboard.” Just two years before Crossroads the Navy’s Project Option had experimented with tdr -1 drones loaded with 500–2,000 lb bombs and equipped with nose-mounted tv cameras controlled from the back seat of an Avenger Torpedo bomber. Its Special Task Air Group used the drones to attack targets of opportunity throughout the Solomon Islands between 27 September and 26 October 1944. As with Aphrodite’s larger bombers, these were all kamikaze missions of sorts, in which the unoccupied aircraft plunged into its target and exploded. Quoted in “United States Ready for Push-Button Warfare,” Canberra Times, 19 September 1952. The Associated Press dispatch was dated 1 September but delayed and censored; it was published in several regional newspapers in the United States and in the Australian press almost three weeks later. Ibid. Ibid. “Korea Robot Raids ‘Interim Measure.’” I don’t know if there were ever any serious plans to arm those “robot planes” with nuclear weapons. Land-based guided missiles would eventually become one component of America’s nuclear triad, alongside the Air Force’s strategic bombers and the Navy’s submarines, but as I show below the development of drones took different directions. “Navy Uses Robot Missiles.” Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 15. Report of the Commanding General, 59. “The 36-Hour War,” 27–35; see also Wellerstein, “The 36-Hour War.” Maclear, Beclouded Visions; Marcon, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” 787–97. “War’s Ending,” 25–31. In an accompanying editorial on “The Atomic Age,” the unease of the magazine about the effects of the twin bombings haunted its uncertain prose. “Every step in [the] bomber’s progress has been more cruel than the last,” the editors wrote. “From the very concept of strategic bombing, all the developments – night, pattern, saturation, area, indiscriminate – have led straight

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to Hiroshima, and Hiroshima was and was intended to be almost pure Schrecklichkeit [terror].” The use of the German was deliberate; noting that the Hague “rules of war” had been persistently violated during the war by both sides, the editorial insisted that “Americans, no less than Germans, have emerged from the tunnel with radically different standards and practices of permissible behaviour toward others” (32). It was this artfully staged geometry of destruction that enabled some apologists to treat Hiroshima and Nagasaki as no different from other Japanese cities that had been subject to US firebombing and to erase the suffering of the victims of both air campaigns from the field of view. Morrison, “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand,” 1–15; Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “That the Survey had seldom, if ever, felt compelled to ask such a question as it pored over the ruins of Germany spoke to the sheer psychic effect of the magnitude of the new weapon”; Vanderbilt, Survival City, 74. Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 39–41. The published version included a selection of photographs, virtually all of them aerial views, and the only photograph showing a victim was of a Japanese soldier with superficial burns: bodies were rendered as biomedical objects. Although most of the images obtained by the survey remained classified, many of them are now available in Monteyne, Levy, and Dower, eds, Hiroshima Ground Zero 1945. Hersey, “Hiroshima.” Hersey later explained that he wanted “to write about what happened not to buildings but to bodies” and “cast about for a form to do that”; he found it on the marchlands between Eliot’s The Wasteland and Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (which he read onboard ship on his way to Japan). See Hersey, “The Art of Fiction No 92,” 1–23. For commentaries, see Gerstle, “John Hersey and Hiroshima,” 90–4; Sharp, “From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland,” 434–52; Yaavenditti, “John Hersey and the American Conscience,” 24–49. The Bantam edition appeared in 1948; Hersey, “Art of Fiction.” Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 211. Lear, “Hiroshima USA ,” 15. Ibid., 62. One year later the magazine devoted an entire issue to “the war we do not want” purporting to describe the defeat and occupation of the Soviet Union; the conflict was punctuated by air strikes on Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and Washington and missiles launched from submarines against Boston, Los Angeles, Norfolk (Virginia), San Francisco, and Washington. There were also Soviet nuclear strikes on London and US saturation strikes on the Soviet Union. Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 181. The map followed a press conference held by Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the aec , who explained that by “any city” he meant “the heart of Manhattan.” William Laurence, “Vast Power Bared.” Strauss also shared with the press part of the briefing he had given the president; his reported remarks minimized any dangers from radioactivity: “any radioactivity falling into the test area would become harmless within a few miles”; “Text of Statement and Comments by Strauss on Hydrogen Bomb Tests in the Pacific.” Chow, The Age of the World Target, 41. Galison, “War against the Center,” 29–30. “130 Bombers to Visit”; Berger, “101 b -29s over City”; sac tried again over Chicago in August but the results were even worse, and soon sac ’s exercises were shielded from the public gaze and relied on radar bomb scoring. This too

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subjected cities across the United States to simulated attacks. According to Eric Schlosser, sac “staged mock attacks on every city in the United States with a population larger than twenty-five thousand, practicing to drop atomic bombs on urban targets in the middle of the night. San Francisco was bombed more than six hundred times within a month.” Schlosser, Command and Control. See also Gregory, “Bombing the USA .” Masco, Theater of Operations, 22. During the war bombing runs had been staged against mock German and Japanese targets at the Dugway Proving Ground but the buildings had no occupants. As Tom Vanderbilt wryly remarks, now “the inhabitants had been rewritten into the picture” because the objective was to calibrate the lives of Americans. Vanderbilt, Survival City, 93. Coll, “What Bin Laden Sees”; Dower, Cultures of War, 87. James, “A Day of Terror”; Ray, “Ground Zero,” 51–9. Lines of sight become blurred, of course: the other, probably even more frequent comparison – though it also drew the public gaze back to Japan – was with Pearl Harbor. See Dower, Cultures of War, 161; Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 82–93. Mulrine, “Warheads on Foreheads,” 44–7; see also Gregory, “Moving Targets,” 256–96. Tactical Air Command (since absorbed into Air Combat Command) had refused to be involved in any drone program – its commander jibed that “when the Air Staff assigns 18-inch pilots to this command, I’ll reconsider the issue” – and in the 1960s sac used “Lightning Bugs” (converted Firebee target drones) to conduct photoreconnaissance of China’s nuclear program. The drones were launched from under the wing of dc -130 transport aircraft and followed pre-programmed routes before being recovered by parachute. The results were decidedly mixed but improved versions of the Bugs enjoyed more success in Vietnam, where they were flown in support of sac ’s non-nuclear bombing runs; some even transmitted real-time tv images back to the dc -130. By then the United States was toying with an “electronic battlefield” in Southeast Asia, which for a short time included drones flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to relay signals from a distributed network of ground sensors. This was far from successful, but its conceptual armature – an integrated sensor-shooter system – was far more consequential for the future of drones than the Cold War platforms themselves. See Gregory, “Lines of Descent,” 41–69. General Atomics was founded in 1955 as a division of General Dynamics for research and development in the use of nuclear energy; soon after it became a fullblown defence contractor. The Predator has a complicated pre-history, but General Atomics announced the first test flight of its version in August 1994, “within six months of receiving a Pentagon contract to demonstrate an advanced concept unmanned aerial vehicle.” See Whittle, Predator. For a far more skeptical view of the quality of the video feeds and the reliability of the visual identification, see Cockburn, Kill-Chain. Coll, Ghost Wars; Whittle, Predator, 171–83. Ehrhard, Air Force uav s, 39–40; Fornell, “International Treaty Implications,” 7–18; Whittle, Predator, 171–83. Woods, Sudden Justice, 23–7. Plotnick, “Predicting Push-Button Warfare,” 655–72. Transition to and from Hostilities, xvi, 163, 170. Scahill and Greenwald, “The nsa ’s Secret Role.” The pod was part of a system code-named distantfocus that intercepted and located cellphones. According

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to William Arkin, it involved “a set of black boxes” – Airhandler, Gilgamesh, Pennantrace, Nebula, and Windhammer – “all working together” to analyze and fuse data. Unmanned, 187. Amoore, “Algorithmic War,” 49–69; Wilcox, “Embodying Algorithmic War,” 11–28; Aradau, “The Signature of Security,” 21–8. The proud boast by Michael Hayden, a former Air Force General who served as director of the cia and the nsa under Obama, was that “we kill people based on metadata.” Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 216; Edwards, The Closed World; “Computing and the Manhattan Project.” Clinard, “Developments in Air Targeting,” 95–104; Nash, “The Bureaucratization of Homicide,” 22–7. In the 1950s the analytical techniques used to compose the Bombing Encyclopedia were also used to calibrate the effects of nuclear strikes on targets within the United States. Collier and Lakoff, “The Bombing Encyclopedia.” Weber, “Keep Adding,” 107–25. Adams and Barrie, “The Bureaucratization of War,” 245–60; Nordin and Öberg, “Targeting the Ontology of War,” 392–410; Asaro, “The Labor of Surveillance,” 282–314. Gregory, “The Territory of the Screen,” 126–47. Farocki, “Phantom Images,” 17. Weizman argues that satellite imagery used by investigators to reconstruct drone strikes is degraded to a resolution level incapable of registering a human body – which remains “hidden in the pixels” – so that forensic visual analysis is forced to focus on buildings not bodies. Forensic Architecture, 27–30. Derian, Virtuous War; Gregory, “Meatspace?” 5,000 Feet Is the Best stages a reversal in which Chinese troops occupy the United States, and a missile is launched from a drone against three men planting an ied somewhere in California; it narrowly misses a white American family in their car. The manoeuvre brings into view the racialization of drone strikes: like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of those killed have been Asian. For commentaries, see Chandler, “5000 Feet”; Delmont, “Drone Encounters,” 193–202; Vågnes, “Drone Vision.” I concentrate on visualizations because they are central to remote operations. The future development of rival systems has provoked an anxiety comparable to fears of nuclear proliferation. “We are in the same position now, with drones, that we were with nuclear weapons in 1945,” the editor of the New Yorker famously declared. “For the moment we are the ones with this technology … But it’s inevitable that other countries – including countries that are hardly American allies – will follow. Then what?” David Remnick, quoted in Carr, “Debating Drones.” A similar train of thought prompted Falk to explain “Why Drones Are More Dangerous,” 29–50. And in exactly the same way that the national security state has been haunted by the nightmare scenario of a terrorist with a “dirty bomb,” so there have been fears of terrorist groups adapting smaller-scale, commercial drones; Islamic State has now used commercial drones as aerial ied s in Iraq and Syria. Parks, “Grounded Dimension,” 22. I admire James Bridle’s Dronestagram project, which seeks to “bring home” the locations of drone strikes by posting satellite imagery of their locations: “The political and practical possibilities of drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies, and a technologically disengaged media and society. Foreign wars and foreign bodies have always counted for less, but the technology

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that was supposed to bring us closer together is used to obscure and obfuscate.” But because it is necessarily restricted to visual technologies close to those it seeks to undercut, its attempt is inevitably compromised. See Bridle, “Dronestagram.” Evans, “Drones, Projections and Ghosts,” 663–86, makes the extremely powerful observation that these transpositions ensure that empathy emerges not through recognition but through misrecognition (673). Butler, Precarious Life. This has become the “signature strike” cited in multiple critiques of drone strikes. See Gregory, “Sweet Target … Sweet Child.” Klaidman, Kill or Capture, 203. In Afghanistan and other war zones targeted killing is also carried out by ground troops, especially Special Forces, but Koh’s legal interventions focused time and time again on the use of drones. For example: “[T]he real issue … is not drone technology per se, but the need for transparent, agreed-upon domestic and international legal process and standards. It makes as little sense to attack drone technology as it does to attack the technology of such new weapons as spears, catapults, or guided missiles in their time. Cutting-edge technologies are often deployed for military purposes; whether or not that is lawful depends on whether they are deployed consistently with the laws of war, jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Because drone technology is highly precise, if properly controlled, it could be more lawful and more consistent with human rights and humanitarian law than the alternative.” See Friedersdorf, “Harold Koh’s Slippery.” Ham, Hiroshima, 148. Truman had issued a public statement about Hiroshima on 6 August in which he said that “the Japanese began the war from the air with Pearl Harbor” and went on to emphasize the tremendous scientific advance involved in the development of the atomic bomb. Woods, “US Claims of ‘No Civilian Deaths’”; Shane, “cia Is Disputed.” Much of the criticism has centred on the cia ’s accounting – who it counts as a civilian after a strike – but my concern is the larger question of how civilians are identified before a strike. Lewis, “Improving Lethal Action.” Wilke, “Seeing and Unmaking Civilians,” 1031–60; Gregory, “Sweet Target.” I borrow “lethal surveillance” from Kindervater, “The Emergence of Lethal Surveillance,” 223–38. Living under Drones, 80. Ibid., 98. Curtis, “The Explication of the Social,” 522–36. Gerstle, “John Hersey”; Hersey, “Hiroshima”; Saint-Amour, Tense Future, 1. Saint-Amour draws on Robert Lifton’s description of the premonitory atmosphere in Hiroshima in the weeks before the bombing, an “uneasy combination of continued good fortune and expectation of catastrophe.” Lifton, Death in Life, 17. Lifton subsequently treated the “war on terror” as apocalyptic too, because “it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite.” “American Apocalypse.” Saint-Amour, “Waiting for the Bomb.” Morrison, “If the Bomb,” 3–4. Bowden, “The Killing Machines.” Hayashi, “Sky of Hiroshima.” Henneberger, “From Pakistan”; see also Gregory, “Dirty Dancing,” 25–58.

Blaine caMPBell, tHe last Days, 2017—

The Last Days takes its title from the original serialization of nevil Shute’s 1957 nuclear post-apocalypse novel On the Beach. at the end of the Cold war – and despite the ongoing presence of substantial nuclear arsenals – most of Canada’s civil defence sirens were decommissioned and removed. of some 2,300 originally installed, few remain and even fewer are operational. with a thought to the prevalence of generational nuclear amnesia, this series seeks to document these symbols of past anxieties and give a voice to the continuing presence of the threat of nuclear war. Blaine Campbell

overleaf, left: The Last Days no. 1, 2017 (depicts the now decommissioned civil defence siren in Victoria Park, north Vancouver) overleaf, right: The Last Days no. 2, 2018 (depicts the still functioning siren in thorsby, alberta, one of only two remaining sirens of the 56+ that once stood in edmonton and vicinity)

Part tHree

Hiroshima after fukushima

through the lens of fukushima Julie salversOn anD Peter c. van WYck What you are reading looks different from the rest of this book. Here’s why: this is intended as a story told aloud. We want to make room for the different ways that scholarship is disseminated. Julie and Peter want you to listen, not read. If it helps to follow along, we have provided this transcript. We hope you enjoy this alternate way to listen. The recorded talk, given by the authors on the occasion of the Through PostAtomic Eyes conference in Toronto, October 2015, may be accessed here: https://archive.org/details/lens_of_fukushima.

The wind leaves traces behind: shadows, ruins, and a little bit of waste from which to make things. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida

Opening JULIE : We are here seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seventy

years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Sixty-seven years after the Canadian government began extracting uranium from a mine on aboriginal land. Seventy-eight years after Nanking. Four years after Fukushima. “I am, you are, by cowardice or courage, the one who finds a way back to a scene,” writes American poet Adrienne Rich. The act of mourning is a ritual of digging. It is not new to say that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. The phrase comes from the seventeenth century. It means, “to deteriorate rapidly.” What is new is not the idea of disaster as something that ends life. What is new is the end of the idea of life: the end of striving, dreaming, imagining, renewing. James Bridle left us yesterday with a structural existential threat.1 He also told us, “I am blown away that we got through the twentieth century without being blown away.” But, perhaps we didn’t.

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“We live no longer in tragic meaning,” says Jean-Luc Nancy. “We are being exposed to a catastrophe of meaning. Let’s not hurry to hide this exposure … Let us remain exposed, and let us think about what is happening to us.”2 31 March 2015. Sitting in the departure lounge beside my friend, who I have travelled with before. But not like this. In 2002, we flew north to Deline, home of the Eldorado uranium mine and the beginning of Canada’s atomic adventures. Port Radium, where old black and white photographs blur the distance between aboriginal and European, romance and exploitation, history and hysteria. Peter and I flew in our nascent innocence to try to make real an archive and an anxiety, one placing his years of reading into the architecture of his own first contact; the other confronting a shyness she had turned into a scholarly explanation for hiding. Somewhere over the Pacific, we change the time on our cellphones to Japan. We slip through time zones and glance off the day and night and day again. My husband was nervous about me going to Fukushima. “Be careful,” he said, when he dropped me at the airport. “I would rather you just read about it,” he said. “From here.” But where, in the world, is here? Here, says Catherine Malabou, is a planet that hurts. Impoverishment and “emotional coolness” are the new battlefield. The world is too full of pain. In 2015, living in these perpetual afters, we are the new wounded, suffering a “paralysis of touching … The impossibility of feeling anything blurs the mirror that connects us to ourselves and others.”3 Touch. Exposure. Contact. Slippery words. Susceptibility to disease, contamination, colonial conquest. Availability to learning, love, adventure. Which definitions give us more protection, more possibility? When Peter and I first wrote about our trip to Deline, we called ourselves bewildered strangers. We were courteous, respectful. Not a bad thing. But there are many ways to hide. Many ways to keep your feet from touching the ground.

Field Note: The Ground, April 2015 PETER : What are we doing in Japan? I suppose that part of the answer is simply that we needed to come here; to try to understand the strange kinship and connection between the military atom and the civilian atom. What is it that holds these practices together? Two unstable proper names: Hiroshima. Fukushima. “A vexatious rhyme,” as Nancy observes – laying bare, perhaps, his parochial European ear – but linking together, that is, hearing, the strong and deep line, the route in other words, that holds these things together. “It is not possible,” 200

It is this something shared that brought us here. The ferment, the reluctance. The complex connections between uranium mined in the far north of Canada – another moment in a long series of aboriginal erasures in Canada’s project of National self-realization – and the development of the bomb, its use at Alamogordo and then Japan in 1945, and the events of March 2011. But also … we are here because we want to write so that we can come to understand why it is that we have come to Japan; writing is just like that. We are here doing an exercise in field topistics; the only kind there is.

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he writes, “to ignore what is suggested by the rhyme of these two names, for rhyme gathers together – reluctantly against all poetry – the ferment of something shared.”4

Topistics, “a descriptive mode of proximity, an intensification of reading and writing, feeling and thinking in a particular locale or place.” It’s a concept proposed by E.V. Walter – derived from the Greek word topos – for the study of what he called placeways.5 And by way of explanation he invokes the well-travelled story of the Thracian slave girl; a story that locates us as well.6 Thales, one of the Seven Sages, while observing the stars fell into a well. A Thracian slave woman laughed at him, saying he wanted to know what happened in the heavens, but failed to observe what was in front of her own feet. In this simple way, she exposed the predicament of a theorist who loses his ground.7 Topistics, said Walter, was also aligned with the archaic sense of the word theoria, which meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, getting a worldview.8 Becoming exposed. So we see that the first theorists – and prototheorists, perhaps – were tourists. Their writing arose from the ground. Makes sense, really. Where else to become exposed?

Visiting JULIE : The visitor does not “knock,” writes Levinas, but interrupts through a kind of “burglary.” Is it possible to prepare for this abrupt encounter, this invested relationship, with no assurance except the possibility of receiving from the world something different? In a letter to Gershom Scholem about Kafka, Walter Benjamin wrote: “This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: First, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is, can such help do a human being any good? … There is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”9 This suggests risk, engagement, failure. The context is the inevitable pain of ongoing loss in the midst of an almost ridiculous insistence upon life, and a hope that is different 201

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from messianic hope, that does not offer reassurance or certainties. A fool’s help; a visiting that performs otherwise. In 2002, Peter called to say that much of the uranium used in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan came from a mine in northern Canada. He called me because for most of my adult life I have worked with survivors of trauma, and written about it, and made plays about it. What he didn’t know was, years of this had made me sick and I didn’t want to do it anymore. But the invitation was intriguing. Did I want to accompany him along the highway of the atom? The event became a proposition. Could we be neither paralyzed nor tragic, but foolish witnesses. Looking for not explanation, not explication, but haecceitas: “this-ness.” As I listened on my end of the phone, Peter said it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the Dene discovered the link between their land and Hiroshima. And then they did something extraordinary. Something we have spent the last thirteen years trying not to understand, but to receive. Fifty-seven years after Hiroshima was bombed, a delegation of Sahtu Dene from Deline, Canada, travelled to Japan to make an apology. Their trip was the result of a long and careful process: they talked, listened, consulted. The elders were with them. This was not an individual act; they went to send their respects. They went because the beginning was meeting the end.

Shadows and Light PETER : Like the Dene, whose retroactive knowledge reconfigured their past,

the Japanese too had no clear idea what had actually taken place. In the weeks following 6 and 9 August, Japanese military engineers, struggling to understand, knew neither where the detonation was focused, nor what kind of infernal weapons had been deployed. To the former they were able to estimate the location of the bomb’s hypocentre by triangulating the so-called atomic shadows left within its footprint. Infinitely melancholic shadows, ever adrift; shadows abandoned by their objects. Skiagraphs. As the media of exposure – with bodies and objects dodged on sidewalks and walls – the cities were rendered photographic; they became forensic sundials for the geolocation and symbolic reconstruction of the flash of the detonations. We know that photography was intimately connected with the unstable atom long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki – photography, the scandalous medium, was there from the start. We also know that the photographic flash left photography changed. No longer the pencil of nature inscribing a moment lifted from the idle passage of time – it was an intervention, through

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But these shadows, these atomic shadows reactivate another line of derivation. This one also to do with the flash of light. Long before photography discovered the flash, the flash had discovered photography. For quite some time – with reports dating back to the first century, but of particular interest in the nineteenth century – lightning was said to have the capacity to produce images, to record the exact details of exposure on receptive surfaces – both bodies and objects. Keraunography it came to be called. Lightning writing. Images. A tree and its branches. The likeness of an adjacent body. A perfectly engraved image of a church.

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the manufacture of light that would wrench the object into visibility. Capture versus cause; the flash reconfigured the shutter/film relation.

In 1871, Fonvielle noted in his treatise Thunder and Lightning, “Accounts published in certain journals before the discovery of Daguerre, mention a strange phenomenon which might have suggested the wonderful invention of photography.”10 “Witnesses who appear worthy of confidence have seen the shadow of an individual fixed spontaneously on a wall.”11 As reported in the St Louis and Canadian Photographer in 1900, “J.P. Sullivan of Salina Kan. has a horse in whose right eye there is a photograph of his wife.”12 It is as though the rise and popular uptake of photographic technologies and practice in the early nineteenth century – the Dageurreian moment – nurtured a forensic optical unconscious with a surplus of explanatory freight. It is odd though, that no one appears to have remarked on this strange keraunographic echo in 1945. Today, keraunographic marks – sometimes called “lightning flowers” or “lightning trees” – are said to be caused by “relativistic electrons” in the skin.13 No mention of sidewalks or walls. And as to what manner of bomb had been dropped, the Japanese too developed film. X-ray film. And found only shadows.

Wine Not Radiation JULIE : We travel with a Japanese friend who translates and organizes, well,

everything. Aya is from Hiroshima and grew up plagued with terrifying images and the insistence on the part of her elders that she make the world better. I give a resilience workshop for peace educators in Hiroshima. Many are the children or grandchildren of victims or survivors and are driven to account for their own existence. I called Aya a few months before our trip and said,

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“I want to see more than victims, I want to see the beauty. I want to meet the teacher who is more interested in wine than radiation.” “That’s good,” she said. “Everyone comes for the trauma.” On the train an hour from Fukushima, Aya gives Peter and I a safety briefing. “There is the outside, and the inside. Like everywhere in Japan, but here it is dangerous because alpha particles can be on the floor, the streets, the ground. TEPco workers are all over, including near the plant, and they stay at our hotel. So their boots will be on the hall and maybe room carpets. So – outside shoes stay outside. Inside, never let your bare feet or even socks touch the floor. Because you never know. It only takes one particle.” Peter pulls out a map that charts daily radiation levels. These are made by Safecast, a sensor network created by citizens who decided to find the information they needed themselves. “Everyone agrees there will be another big earthquake and another tsunami, eventually,” says Aya. She always carries two bottles of water, a chocolate bar, and a flashlight. “Enough for two days,” she says. I get up, find the woman with the cart and buy two bottles which I carry back to our seats. I give one to Peter. Mount Fuji Springs. “It’s really good, that water,” says Aya. At the bottom of the escalator in Fukushima train station are massive posters of cherry blossoms, statues from local festivals, and an alternative energy display. All bright colours and smiles. I count eleven people working in the tiny tourism office. “The most important job in town,” says Peter. We walk to our hotel; the streets are lively and occupied. We pass a man with a dog. I think, “That dog’s feet are on the ground. All the time. What does that mean for the dog? For the man’s house?” At the hotel I read an email from my husband, he has gotten sick, maybe flu. He asks me, “Should I have gotten a flu shot?” fLU shoT ? I am thinking in different terms about everything. “People who live here just forget about it,” says Aya. I say something about how we’re only in Fukushima for a few days. “A few days aren’t less. We are really playing Russian Roulette,” Aya says again. I wish she would stop saying this. At the corner 7-Eleven there is LoTs of alcohol, much more than in the same store in Hiroshima. How interesting. Hiroshima is now the safe place.

Trees PETER : In response to the fireball, the force and heat of the blast, and the immediate and massive dose of neutron and gamma radiation, virtually all of the vegetation within the one-and-a-half-kilometre blast radius in

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Many of these hibaku trees continued to grow, but in a curious way. The damaged side of the tree, the side facing the blast, was no longer capable of growing at the same rate as the opposite side. So gradually, these trees began to lean, and as they grew, they began to point toward the site of the detonation; growing and pointing toward the hypocentre.

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Hiroshima was incinerated immediately. Many of the trees not killed initially were subsequently consumed by the fires. Those that survived – many badly damaged, partially uprooted, scorched and scarred – came to be called the hibaku trees – hibaku jimoku – survivor trees.14 Empirical falsifications of the Hiroshima myth that nothing would grow for seventy-five years.15

More than silent witnesses to the destructive power of atomic invisibility, these trees point to the scene of the event. There! It happened over there. More than leafy witnesses to the past of events, they are active – they witness. The people in Hiroshima who take care of these trees tell me that – over the years and for various reasons – a number of them have been moved to other locations. When this has happened, their original orientation with respect to the hypocentre was not registered or respected. They were just replanted. I was shocked to learn this. This is not like turning a sunflower away from the sun in order to see its slow, heliotropic response. This is very different. This is to realign the very posture of the witness. It is to turn away from the event – something these trees – unlike much of Japan, were otherwise incapable of doing. Exactly, in other words, what Hiroshima wishes not to do in its efforts to become the atomic Geneva of Asia. There are today some 170 official hibaku trees in Hiroshima – each identified and cared for under the guidance of a Master Gardener. “One must be careful,” he told me, “you must not help the trees too much. You must understand their capacities, and help them achieve the health and growth for which they are capable.”

Trees II JULIE : Tokyo is trying to get it together before the 2020 Olympics. National

and local governments and countless businesses are inviting the world to come to Japan, a country proud of its hospitality. They want the disaster to go away. But many residents in the affected areas don’t trust their governments. And they don’t trust the Fukushima electric company, whose cost-cutting decisions maintaining the plant make many people say that 11 March was an act of negligence. As more Japanese face TEPco ’s evasions and what is perceived as the betrayal of the national government,16 a seismic shift is happening in the country. This shift from trusting authority to trusting each other is led by 205

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Fukushima and Iwate Prefectures. There is a saying in Japan, “When you need support, you lean on the biggest tree.” Rikuzentakata, a small city among the hardest hit on the coast, is rebuilding itself with bulldozers and the faith of its citizens. The symbol of that faith is the story of a single tree. When the tsunami destroyed 70,000 white pines that lined the city’s famous beach, it left one survivor. The city spent a fortune flushing the salt water from the tree’s roots, but within a year it had died. The tree has been preserved as a memorial, and seedlings from the “miracle tree of hope” are growing at the Tsukuba Research Institute. At a gas station we get directions. “It’s stuffed, like you would do with an animal,” says the attendant. Peter and I make our way down a carefully marked path that winds through the construction site that has replaced the city’s waterfront. A bird’s nest rests in the branches, and a young Japanese couple leave a bouquet wrapped in cellophane at its base. Among the souvenirs sold to raise money for the local volunteer centre is a T-shirt with a picture of the Tree of Hope, and the words, “Keep on Fighting.” We drive to a small fishing village and spend the night. I wake early and walk along the harbour. There is a small rebuilt wooden shrine. It is for safety for the boats at sea. I can’t seem to stop watching the water, how it moves. Suddenly the quiet is broken by a loud announcement. “Good morning everyone, it is morning.” A kind of “get ready for the day” announcement. The music is “Love Is Blue,” which Aya reminds us is a French song. We hear that they also broadcast in the evening, “It’s evening, everyone! Get ready!”

Field Notes – Camera Atomica exhibition, August 2015 PETER : When we return from Japan, everything – ourselves included – has

changed. We struggled to turn from the east, to disorient ourselves. Japan had just waited a barely discrete two days after the commemorative events of the seventieth anniversary to flip the on switch at the Sendai nuclear station, bringing back into operation the first of its now forty-three operable reactors – stations dark since that Friday in March when the ground lurched into motion and the ocean rose up. Even the name of this event had shifted in our absence – transforming the very nature of our sight and our seeing – from “Atomic Eyes,” to “Post-Atomic Eyes.” Just how many afters must we endure?

JULIE : Peter and I head to Toronto to visit the exhibit.17 I stand at the entrance, mesmerized by the disturbing beauty of the chandelier. Directly across the room a child runs across a narrow passageway. A moment of life, the children’s play area interrupts the suspended preoccupations of adults. I move on through the cold quiet. Soft murmurs of visitors, leaning in, pulling back. 206

When Peter called me in 2002 and invited me on this atomic adventure, I had gotten sick. I had become an unreliable witness, I only listened for the pain. My doctor, hearing about my work with trauma, advised, “Next time, why don’t you research paradise?” As I stumble out past the last photographs, I am stopped by the title of the next exhibit: Where Is Paradise on Earth?

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I spend about an hour, slowly absorbing. Standing in front of one of Carole Gallagher’s panels of text I stop breathing. I turn, look around, and think, What do we do now? What do we DO with all this?

PETER : “The wind will blow the fire of pain across everyone in time.”18 That’s how Robert Frank figured it. Maybe. Such a profusion of images. Exposures of expansive exposure. All in a way testimony to what we could think of as the spatial annexation of time. We are all exposed – in the gallery and elsewhere. Archival, documentary, conceptual, and some so real and achingly sublime as to merit curatorial instruction to visit proper Canadian landscape painting on the floor above.

JULIE : We return the next day. I move more slowly, examine the photographs more closely, the rooms, the visitors. Pain collides, and colludes, with elegance. Echoes of Adorno, the forbidden and the necessary job of art. There is a kind of cool remove in these rooms. Glimpses of historical location, are they teases or trauma fragments? Is the emotional coolness ahistorical, or inviting? Performing perhaps an affective power found in the gaps between images, a place of what Julie Burelle calls “productive collusions,” activating a “network of references and comparisons in the audience’s minds,” not telling us how to think and feel but pointing to history and “hurt by showing what was.” Does this ask us to take responsibility, look further, ask questions? Refusing empathic identifications, easy narratives? Or does it float us timeless, placeless? PETER : From Brizner’s instantaneous, technical impossibilities; to

Matsushige’s scenes of bloodless horror; to Del Tredici’s uncanny matterof-factness and Carole Gallagher’s painful ethno-photography; all of these moments of exposure, borne by images and a poverty of text, presented here as a genre, a politico-aesthetic genre, and still we sit. Still here, in the second most nuclearized precinct on the planet, still here in the second atomic age. The images at the outset are archival and documentary – except for Ishiuchi Miyako’s haunted dress. They are all secured in a kind of melancholic past‑ness – that-has-been. Henry Busse is there. As we walk into the third room I recognize his image of the miners at Port Radium at Great Bear Lake from the archive in Yellowknife. He took hundreds of photos there, and was 207

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part of the Port Radium photography club – he might have started it, I can’t remember. And closer still to where we sit today, the uranium processing plant at Port Hope is there, too – a kind of via negativa – a catalogue of absence. But then I think, how can we locate the Dene here? Where are they? I ask this not as a curatorial question, not exactly, but as a matter of narrative, as a matter of justice. They were there too, at the beginning, and before the beginning. As they tell it, they were the ones who told the white miners where to look for the money rock, as it was called. But more to the point, the whole Canadian story comes to light to begin with only as a result of their retroactive realization of what they had been involved with. Deline, the village of widows. As scholars we have worked for many years trying to bring to light the archival silence – and proxy archives of erasure – beneath Canada’s involvement in the bomb’s development; to hear and record the stories and testimony of a First Nation – one among many – who have materially and symbolically suffered the ongoing effects of their atomic exposures.

JULIE : How can we locate the Dene here? It’s not a simple question. When I

first visited Deline I was paralyzed by how little I knew as a white woman from southern Ontario. I planned to write mainly about Port Hope, because I grew up nearby. But I knew nothing about Port Hope either, not really. In Deline people said, “We’ve been left out of the story.” My fear of doing the wrong thing almost made me continue that erasure. Chickasaw scholar Jodi Bird mobilizes a word that calls up the complication of how to adequately represent the ramifications of aboriginal dispossession: agnosia, from brain science, “the loss or diminution of the ability to recognize familiar objects.” Bird calls our incapacity to interpret, “colonial agnosia.” New work in brain science and brain plasticity tells us that stories change the brain. We become the narratives we create. When I first went to Deline, all I could see was the sorrow of the place. Cancer. Political betrayal. When I returned ten years later, I saw more. I heard about arguments. Love affairs. Babies born. Wild flowers. Jealousies. Teenagers exploding in joy and anger. Old people teaching. Old people hiding away. I was able to see life. The sound of a plane, its propellers slicing the air, marks both the beginning and the turning point of Shelter, the opera I wrote with composer Juliet Palmer. To quote Juliet: The plane transports us into the imaginary realm – of history intermingled with allegory … A cartoon plane reminding us that this is not 208

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real – but that in singing the plane into being, any one of us can become the plane; none of us are bystanders. As the engine subsides, the Pilot climbs out and follows the desert road. In his hand is the musical instrument of the post-atomic age: the Geiger counter. Mounted on the dashboard, the instrument plays a starring role in videos of illicit drives through the Fukushima dead zone. It authenticates danger for tourists wandering the abundant greenery of Chernobyl. It verifies history in the desert of Alamogordo. Geiger counter in hand, the Pilot listens for a spasm of clicking. Like a cicada’s mating call, the instrument unleashes a flurry of rat-a-tats as the Pilot approaches the nuclear family home.19

PETER : Comments overheard at Camera Atomica on a Sunday afternoon in August:

A grandmother (presumably) with her teenaged granddaughter as they exit the exhibit: “I remember this!” she says. “What?” asked the young girl. “The bomb,” she said. “I remember when they dropped the bomb.” “Oh, was that here?”

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noteS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

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See Bridle’s chapter in this volume. Nancy, After Fukushima, 8. Malabou, The New Wounded. Nancy, After Fukushima, 14. Walter, “Placeways,” 21. Hans Blumenberg tracks this story through the long history of its retelling, laying bare philosophy’s perpetual predicament: the disconnect between philosophizing about the world and living in it. See Blumenberg, The Thracian Woman. Walter, “Placeways,” 21. Ibid. Benjamin, “To Gershom Scholem,” 565. Fonvielle, Thunder and Lightning, 216. Ibid. Cited in Jay, “Keraunography,” 670. See Vernon and Cooray, “Mechanism of Keraunographic.” See, for example, Conti and Petersen, “Survivors.” As you exit the Hiroshima Peace Museum, there is a plaque that reads: That autumn In Hiroshima where it was said “For seventy-five years nothing will grow” New buds sprouted In the green that came back to life Among the charred ruins People recovered Their living hopes and courage. tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, owns the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Through Post-Atomic Eyes was an international conference that accompanied Camera Atomica, an exhibition curated by John O’Brian at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015. Halifax Infirmary, 1978, in Frank, The Lines of My Hand, plate 117. “Dusk of Tears,” from the opera Shelter. Music by Juliet Palmer; libretto by Julie Salverson.

katy MccorMick, HiBakU JUmokU / tHe a-BomBeD trees, 2013—

among the ashes of hiroshima and nagasaki, rumours spread that an “atomic plague” would leave the cities barren for seventy-five years. yet by midSeptember, wildflowers, fireweed, and morning glory wound their way through the rubble and bloomed with vigor. in the following years, some seemingly lifeless trees sprouted new growth, giving hope. to this day, mentions of the cities evoke the image of a mushroom cloud hovering above ruins. Visiting the cities for the first time in 2008, i stumbled upon tagged “a-bombed” trees in vibrant landscapes. Unable to shake the impact of these encounters, i returned in 2013 seeking to make these survivors come to life in my photographs. i later came across a registry indexing some 160 hiroshima hibaku jumoku – “explosionaffected trees.” Photographing survivor trees has become something of a personal pilgrimage. Journeying to Japan three more times, i crisscrossed both cities, camera and maps in hand, aiming to capture the spirit of these silent witnesses. often, i relied upon the kindness of locals to help me find trees, open gates, or grant me access to schoolyards, shrines, and private gardens. Prominent in many of the photographs are contraptions supporting weakened constitutions. Like humans, they grow infirm with age. Some, even after dying, are preserved. these photographs reflect my perspective as an empathetic outsider, shifting hiroshima and nagasaki out of an historic past and into the living present – where nuclear confrontation remains an ongoing threat. Katy McCormick

overleaf, left: A-bombed Giant Pussy Willow, Hiroshima Castle Moat, 770 meters from the hypocenter, 2013. overleaf, right: A-bombed Pepper Supported by Muku Tree, Shiroyama Elementary, Nagasaki, 600 meters from the hypocenter, 2018.

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as if nothing Happened, as if everything is the same: composure in the Wake of fukushima kYO maclear

We can’t keep our composure. Life cannot be lived by remaining composed. Woman in Fukushima, interviewed in the film a2 -B -c : Hôshanô to kodomotachi (2013) Composure … is the least innocent of virtues. Adam Phillips, On Composure Composure: The state or feeling of being calm and in control of oneself: she was struggling to regain her composure. Origin: Late 16th century (in the sense “composing, composition”): from compose + -ure. Oxford English Dictionary

Preface In Ian Thomas Ash’s 2013 feature documentary A 2-B -C , a mother wanders the street with her small Geiger counter. It is eighteen months after the 2011 nuclear meltdown in Fukushima and children in the area are suffering from severe nose bleeds, skin rashes, and thyroid cysts. This mother along with many others has lost her composure. Facing a lack of transparency in the official medical testing of their children and ineffective efforts to decontaminate their homes and schools, she has taken radiation monitoring into her own hands. It’s a small part of the documentary yet I can never escape the metronomic click, click, click of the counter as she wanders down ordinary roads. With that click, click,

Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 1830–31.

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9.1 | Katsushika Hokusai,

click, what has been mostly off-stage, invisible to post-atomic eyes, is made present or at least acknowledged as an absence. That click, click, click – small yet insistent – is the sound of the human and non-human world in jeopardy. I want you to hear that click. That mother feels tidal waves of weariness in the film. She feels it when she faces this disembodied thing called government response and post-disaster recovery. She feels it when she is urged to show gamman (perseverance) and patriotic spirit, pull herself together, act composed. She understands these words – recovery, composure, pulling yourself together – to be a defence against the unknown medical, existential, emotional import of her situation. The clicking is a reminder to avoid clever and authoritarian interpretations at all costs. The filmmaker Ian Thomas Ash, who follows her, is there to tell her that he feels tidal waves of weariness too, and that maybe the storm calms after a time. But the clicking continues, regular, metrical, a fixed aural pulse. As the country moves on to different tempos at different times, she is absorbed, discomposed by the clicking.

11 March 2011 On 11 March 2011, the Tohoku region of Japan experienced a catastrophic earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. The raging tsunami rushed over embankments, flowing into towns and cities, erasing concrete roads and steel bridges. It plucked buildings from the ground 215

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and hurled them across districts. In the town of Otsuchi, a ferry landed on top of someone’s home. In Miyagi prefecture, an entire tree with roots was deposited in a school corridor. Witnesses watched from rooftops as smoke billowed from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor. A few days later, the nuclear power plant, which had been flooded by the tsunami, began to fail, releasing high amounts of radioactive material into the air. In Japan, the events have collectively come to be known as the “triple disaster” or “3/11.” In the days and months following 3/11, a narrative emerged in the international media about Japanese stoicism that seemed dramatically at odds with the crisis facing the country. This story, aided by the compositional device of the camera and stereotypes of Japanese fortitude, testified to the triumph of social order in the face of terrifying discomposure. In this essay I call forth the multiple meanings of the word “composure” to think about the Fukushima disaster and its unsettling aftereffects. More than four years have passed since the meltdown, and the ruined facility is still spilling radioactive waste into the ocean. Approximately 120,000 people, forced to evacuate their irradiated homes, remain in internal exile. Cancer rates have increased to almost 6,000 per cent in areas near the reactor meltdown. It is in this shattered context that I explore the work of a group of photo artists whose images trouble the discourse of composure in post-nuclear Japan. I focus on photography that was included in an exhibition titled In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 that took place at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in spring 2015. This was notably the first exhibition in the west or Japan to examine the first generation of response to Fukushima in photography. As the Japanese government under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe moves towards a rapid and arguably repressive reconstruction, backing an industry push to return to nuclear power despite public opposition, many of these artists are rejecting the directive to behave as if nothing happened, as if everything is the same.1 They claim the right to be disturbed and to be disturbing. By lingering in the places and moments where things break down, where life is at its limits of composure, their art evokes a lingering disquiet. As viewers we are invited to shed our own composure, and make ourselves perturb-able, all the while remembering that it is a fragile world, made all the more so by our efforts to suppress this awareness in the name of a pro-atomic future.

The Arrival It is 5 May 2015, and I have come to Boston to meet with Anne Havinga and Anne Morse Nishimura, the curators of In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11. The morning has taken me by surprise. I 216

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am not prepared for the high security at Logan airport. An automated self-service custom kiosk asks me basic questions about my items to declare, scans my passport, takes a picture, and spits out a receipt. I then present my passport and receipt to a customs agent to finalize the inspection. The man officiously taps my passport with his index finger and repeats something in an urgent, interrogative tone. I feel my skin prickle and my palms dampen before I finally understand that he is saying: “Nihongin, nihonjin, nihonjin.” He has noticed my first name and is asking if I am Japanese. He wants to bond with me. He is married to a Japanese woman and has a happa son. One of the curious things about rapid travel is that you can forget where you are going. You can forget that the new city you have arrived in (despite its familiar signposts, its Starbucks cafes and Nike shops) has a specific history. But if I’ve forgotten, I am soon reminded. It is the two-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings. In less than two weeks, one of the bombers will be sentenced to death. The city is on high alert. (When I speak with two security guards later in the day, they tell me that this state of high alert was only intensified by the Marathon bombing. In fact, it is the indelible legacy of 9/11, when the two hijacked planes that crashed into the World Trade Center left from Logan airport. Their choice of Boston left a difficult mark on the city, one result of which has been a culture of heightened vigilance and securitization.) As the airport shuttle bus hurtles me towards the city centre, I notice people jogging in the street and posters at fire stations that read “Keep Running Boston.” Shop windows and public buildings sport upbeat and uplifting marathon slogans while street banners for the 2015 race announce: “There’s Only One Boston.” These signs are ostensibly directed at the tens of thousands of marathon participants who flooded the streets ten days before my arrival, but they have a broader message: Nothing will destroy the spirit of the city. I mention the mise en scène of my arrival because I believe it speaks to how society recomposes itself in the wake of disaster, how the lines between inside and outside are redrawn. I have come to an American museum to consider how an exhibition of photography attempts to recompose an event that took place in Japan only to find a city in the midst of wakeful recomposition. Boston’s story is an old story or maybe a new story. A city, or country, is shaken so hard that everything cracks. In that moment of disorientation, no one knows what to do, how to bring things together. The discourse of security (already present to a lesser degree) and the civic spirit of perseverance and ambition are reinscribed as a way of coping, carrying on. The airport bus is moving through a symbolic environment charged with memorial texts and subtexts. The post-disaster city might itself be understood as a curatorial project in its display of forbearance and

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exhibition of pride. (Here, I take curation to be a form of cure, from its Latin root curationem, nominative curatio, a “taking care, attention, management,” especially “medical attention.” To curate, in this sense, is to be entrusted, like a parish priest, with the cure of uneasy souls.)

The Museum But now I have arrived at this beautiful museum. The museum, cool and composed, is so many things, but today I want to emphasize this aspect: the museum with its technologies of display (planning, installation, viewing, discussing, maintenance) is always an ordering. There are currently three major installations related to Japan: a recently renovated Japanese garden called Tenshin-en (“The Garden of the Heart of Heaven”), a major Hokusai exhibition, and In the Wake. I am slightly early for my meeting with the curators so I take a moment to view Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (1831–32). Known colloquially as “The Great Wave,” it is indisputably Hokusai’s most famous work, a metonym for “Japanese art,” and possibly one of the most recognizable graphic images in the world. It shows an enormous wave imperilling boats off the coast of Kanagawa, just south of Tokyo. While Hokusai was likely depicting an okinami – a “wave of the open sea” – most people assume the wave to be a tsunami. (In fact, it has become an iconic image in the public imagining of tidal waves, a fact that will shortly become significant.) In person, the print surprises me. I have seen it in reproduction so often, memorized its particular Prussian blue, and always assumed that because it seemed to represent a massive force it must be very big. Actually, it is very intimate – roughly 10 × 15 inches – almost disappointingly tiny. I continue walking through the museum. In the ordering of its displays, I am beginning to understand that Japanese culture is both prominent and highly valued here at the Boston mfa . According to the museum’s literature, its collection of Japanese art is “celebrated as the finest outside of Japan.” All of this provides an important context for understanding the decision to curate In the Wake. As the curators will soon tell me, “our well-established love of Japan gave us the freedom and latitude to be more critical.”

In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 There are two ways to enter In the Wake but I begin with the Lost and Found project, a series of ghostly, damaged family snapshots salvaged from the town of Yamamoto after the tsunami and earthquake. Tokyo 218

Lost and Found Project, 2011– .

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9.2 | Munemasa Takahashi,

artist Munemasa Takahashi, who led the project with volunteers from across the country, recovered nearly 750,000 photographs, which were then washed, digitized, catalogued on a public database, and circulated in a touring exhibition, in the hopes that they might be claimed. Nearly 400,000 photos have been repatriated to their rightful owners. But a vast number, including the approximately 200 photos displayed here, remain orphaned. Arranged in an undulating wave formation on a museum wall, the decomposed photos have been placed in plastic photo sleeves and mix eerie anonymity with the familiarity of a family album. I wade through the cascade of pictures, finding pieces of a familiar puzzle – a recognizable toy, a vending machine, the smiles of faces all but disappeared by water damage. I spot kimonos and a sliver of a wedding and a birthday cake, shorelines of traditional selves, eroding and then restoring, and then giving way again. It is a powerful visual allegory of recovery. In the absence of a complete picture, these images invite a different kind of not knowing. We might ask: what happened to the “non-artists” whose photographs have been so reconfigured by this disaster? What does it mean to take what was private and lost and place it in a new public order? In the book that accompanies the exhibition, the curators note that with this project, “Photography became part of the mourning process.”2 At a time when there were few collective places to grieve, when there were few mechanisms for dealing with loss of such magnitude, the Lost and Found project created a community and ceremony of grieving. As I stand before the photos, I wonder at the decorative way the snapshots have been arranged. Given the unlikelihood of anyone claiming these 219

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photos here at the Boston mfa , they have a more muted, less communitarian presence. There is a tension I am already beginning to discern between the content of the exhibition and the demands of curation, underscored by my own desire as a museum visitor to confront something beautiful, ordered, containable. On the one hand, I want an exhibition about a real-world tragedy to be faithful to events (which are messy and chaotic) and yet I want to enter the experience like a gallery (smooth, cool, minimal). How do we balance our almost atavistic attraction to order and beauty with the need to keep things loose and reflective? Can a photographic exhibition “do” unruly feelings of grief, anger, shame? Can its testamentary effects have any bearing on our sense of present responsibility? These are some of the questions I have as I make my way to the section of the exhibition devoted to the Fukushima disaster.

Nuclear Recovery The events of 3/11 are still largely viewed as a natural disaster. In Japan, immediate responses tended to focus on civil activism – from generating aid for affected regions to energy-saving measures in other areas of the country. This continued focus on private charity and responsible citizenship has made it difficult to voice frustration over the government’s disaster management and energy policies. The framing of 3/11 experiences, including the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, as a blameless national/natural tragedy has detracted attention from the political causes and uneven social effects of the nuclear disaster. Although there is a growing anti-nuclear movement in Japan, efforts to condemn the actions of the government and electric companies (which are lobbying to restart the reactors) are often depicted in the media and by government leaders as going against the patriotic mood of recovery. As I will discuss, the mothers of Fukushima who were the first to address the government’s negligence in protecting the children of the area from the effects of radiation often find themselves isolated by their communities and pilloried by nationalists for being overly anxious and hysterical.3 Under such conditions, an arguably restricted view of disaster and state-promoted composure has attached to the idea of recovery. In this context, it bears emphasizing that in both its exhibition and book texts, In the Wake is emphatic about the need to promote ongoing conversations and to distinguish Fukushima as an “ongoing man-made disaster” separate from the “discrete natural events of earthquake and tsunami.”4 The repercussions of this event are far from over. As Anne Morse Nishimura notes in her curator statement (mounted on the wall of the

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exhibition), “Visiting Tohoku this past year it is clear that much remains to be done to restore the lives of its residents.” Several of the artists in the Fukushima section of the exhibition challenge the dominant framing of events, and the very notion of appearances, by invoking the disruptive residue of Japan’s nuclear past. Towards the exhibition’s main entrance are a series of six large-format black-andwhite photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki. The photos, each marked with a date in the corner, depict a range of subjects, from female nudes to images of the sky to Godzilla figurines. Thick gouged lines extend across each photo. On 11 March, Araki went out to photograph the sky, as he does every morning, when the disaster happened. He quickly returned home, took scissors, and gouged all his negatives – to express his frustration, but also to signal that everything in daily life had been affected. In Diary of a Photo-Mad Old Man (2011) Araki’s emotional distress is as much the subject as anything literally portrayed. (One scissor-marked image in particular shows umbrella-toting pedestrians – a shadowy evocation of atomic “black rain.”) As I stand before them, it is the scale that makes the difference. The slashes and lacerations feel violent and visceral. A few metres away, Tomoko Yoneda’s Cumulus (2011) series references past moments in Japan’s history in a quieter, though no less urgent, way. Photographs of the evacuated village of Iitate in Fukushima prefecture are set alongside images of wilted white chrysanthemums (flowers normally associated with the imperial family), a ceremony at the contentious Yasukuni Shrine, and two images from Hiroshima (including one of “Peace Day” and one of “Sadako’s Paper Cranes of Prayer”). Through juxtaposition, Yoneda examines the contours of national collective memory and questions the bowing to authority that paved the way for nuclear power to be pushed forward and rebranded “for peaceful purposes” after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her work pulls the viewer back to other points in time as a way of opening the present (Fukushima) to the legacy of Japan’s nuclear and imperialist past. As with Araki’s Godzilla and “black rain” photographs, Yoneda’s intertextual references evoke a deep-running anxiety about nuclear technology, an anxiety that predated but was further heightened by the meltdown in Fukushima. Unlike Araki, Yoneda’s work is more explicitly political, interreferencing events so as to come to grips with Japanese identity and the perils of patriotic compliance, thus paving the way to ask what future political action should be taken. Across the room, Takashi Homma’s Mushrooms from the Forest (2011) also turns to symbols of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in this case by photographing the radioactive mushrooms from a forest near the Fukushima

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plant. The specimens loom large, roughly 5 feet by 4 feet, set against a white field. The tone of the images is cool and minimalist. In this series, meaning emerges in the disparity between the mushrooms’ lovely outward appearance and their terrible inner toxicity. Do not let surfaces beguile you, Homma seems to suggest. As I walk through the exhibition, what strikes me most is the concerted effort to move beyond static remembrance to a dialectical reckoning with Japan’s nuclear and imperialist legacy. At the same time, with the possible exception of Araki’s series, there is very little in the gallery that is viscerally difficult to encounter. Lovely, calm, elegant are some words that come to mind as I continue to wonder: Is there friction in approaching these events with a presentation that is so elegant and well composed? Or to quote James Elkins, “Can beauty answer something that is not beautiful?”5 Frequently I have the sense that the aestheticized form is overpowering the content. For example, Shimpei Takeda’s Trace (2012) series

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makes use of a cameraless photographic technique known as “autoradiography” to expose spaces around Fukushima that have been affected by radiation. The results are visually abstract images of irradiated soil. In person, these images seduce the eye, recalling galaxies and stars in the cosmos – emanating a decorativeness that, for me at least, subdues the ostensible “subject” (contamination) and its potential impact. It seems there is something implicit to photography (both the compositional device of the camera and the formal bias towards balance) that calls events to order. To quote Susan Sontag: “To photograph is to compose. It is to arrange elements into a pictured whole.”6 Araki’s gouged negatives are one attempt to interrupt the sanctity of that wholeness. In notable ways the quiet and minimalist presentation of the Fukushima section is the natural result of events that defy visual representation. In the exhibition book, the curators remind us: “One of the challenges for photographers has been devising an iconography for the disaster in Fukushima. Radiation by its nature is invisible to the naked eye. Furthermore, access to information about the current situation and to images of the affected areas has been hard to obtain or suppressed, just as it was after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”7 The atmosphere of restraint might also be understood to have an ethical thrust, providing a productive and possibly reflective contrast to the storm of news images that surrounded 3/11. (The curator Anne Nishimura Morse expresses

9.4 | Shimpei Takeda, Trace #16, Lake Hayama (Mano Dam) from the series Trace, 2012.

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this sense of visual moderation as an antidote to spectacle. “We tried not to get melodramatic images,” she tells me.) Within this curatorial frame, the work gains its power from what Charlotte Cotton would call its “anti-reportage stance.” As Cotton writes: Contemporary art photographers have, in the main, taken an anti-reportage stance: slowing down image making, remaining out of the hub of action and arriving after the decisive moment … [r]ather than being caught up in the chaotic midst of an event or at close quarters to individual pain and suffering, photographers choose instead to represent what is left behind in the wake of such tragedies, often doing so with styles that propose a qualifying perspective.8 Nonetheless, I cannot shake the feeling that many of the images risk being absorbed within a decorative and decorous visual grammar (a grammar that pervades the museum’s collection of Japanese art). It concerns me that the dynamic range of viewer response might be limited by the curatorial favuoring of work with a high technical finish and images that rely on the metaphoric and the oblique for meaning. Though the viewer may experience moments of soulfulness and reflection, the mood of general quietude in the exhibition gallery places what is already geographically/ digestibly distant in an even more remote frame – verging on what historian Edward T. Linenthal has termed the “comfortable horrible.”9

News Footage I will tell you a secret. There is a small room in the back corner of the exhibition gallery that is crowded with people and feeling. It contains three screens that complicate the curatorial address by introducing other genres of disaster imagery. On one screen is a video installation of a deserted intersection in Futaba, Fukushima, part of the nuclear exclusion zone, accompanied by the clicking sound of a Geiger counter. On the second screen are slides from the “3/11 Tsunami Photo Project,” organized by Kodansha Press as a fundraiser for the Japanese Red Cross. It features photographs of the disaster area in Japan taken by fourteen international photographers who visited the area. But it is the third screen that has drawn the crowd. A dozen visitors stand or sit in silence, watching silent real-time footage that the Japanese network nhk broadcast in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. A thick black cloak reaches across Sendai’s rice paddies and fields. Seen from an aerial perspective, it is difficult to gauge its force. At first 224

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it seems swampish and slow. It is only in seeing its destructive sweep of roads and trucks and houses that the tsunami’s terrifying momentum becomes clear. It is obliterating everything in its path. We watch a driver stand on the flatbed portion of his truck, contemplating his next move as the viscous wave moves closer. “Oh no,” says the woman beside me, hands to her mouth. “Run, get to higher ground,” says a man behind me. I hear the Geiger counter clicking rapidly as everyone falls quiet. Then, mercifully, the camera shifts. I remember watching similar footage on 11 March 2011. I was in Montreal attending a literary event and I hid away in my hotel room for hours, watching cnn until I was bloated with images. I was watching to stay connected with my family in Japan. But I also felt at the time that I was immersing myself to find out how much I could bear. How much could I stand? How much until I reached my limit?10 In the gallery I relive that moment, the horror mixed with a sense of awe and astonishment. How can it be? How can the most technologically advanced and quake-resistant nation in the world be so vulnerable? When I later ask the curators about the decision to include this footage, which seems to be the exhibition’s main draw, Nishimura says: “I felt fairly strongly about including the nhk footage because a lot of people in this country needed some reminder that the tsunami didn’t look like the great wave. I think in some people’s minds it was this beautiful cresting thing.” The other curator, Anne Havinga, adds: “We realized at some point that most of the photos we had chosen were not of people. They were all photos that were so conceptual and metaphorical that there was no human story. That’s why we included the Lost and Found images, the Kodansha app, and the news footage.” They tell me they made the decision to mute the audio on the footage (which contained panicked narration) so as to “let the motion of nature speak for itself.” I am aware that a formal binary is being created between evidentiary and more aesthetic forms of photo witnessing in the exhibition. I am also aware that among the visitors I encounter, the refinement and conceptual demands of the art on view seem to have produced a hunger for the seeming artlessness of the news camera. In fact, I suspect that many visitors feel that this final room is where you’ll find the unfiltered “truth” about what happened. As Susan Sontag once observed, “Pictures of hellish events seem more authentic when they don’t have the look that comes from being properly lighted and composed, because the photographer is either an amateur or – just as serviceable – has adopted one of several familiar anti-art styles.”11 I appreciate that the curators are open to the contradictories: the dialogic tensions between narratives of order and chaos, perfection and imperfection, art and artlessness. They do not over-valorize the power and

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agency of art as a form of resistant remembering in the face of state and mainstream media remembrance. They are awake to the precariousness of the meaning-making process; namely, that no interpretation of an event or of history can be made definitive, no matter how carefully it is framed. Yet, this is precisely what is hopeful for the cultivation of a critical historical consciousness: it leaves room for the possibility of reinterpretations, and for the potential to interrupt preferred or hegemonic meanings as they are encoded within particular representations and practices.

Japan as One In an essay written for the In the Wake companion book, Japanese art historian Michio Hayashi addresses “the surging nationalistic sentiment after 3/11.” He points to how the shaping of a unitary Japanese identity in recovery discourse (complete with slogans such as “Japan as one” and “Go Japan”) has fuelled a rise in racism and xenophobia targeting foreigners, especially other Asians. This nationalism, when combined with Prime Minister Abe’s rapid right-wing reforms and the monolithic image of Tokyo being created in the lead up to the 2020 Olympics, “has tended to both flatten out the complexity of the multidimensional network of voices in order to simulate a sense of collective unity, and to suppress or foreclose voices that speak from a distance”12 In drawing our attention to Judith Butler’s notion of the “‘framing’ of the space of representability,” which excludes “the noise of unwanted voices,” Hayashi speaks to the need to resignify the historical presence of “foreigners” and Asian immigrants throughout Japan, including the large communities living in the Tohoku region.13 As Hayashi writes: “the coverage of 3/11 tended to portray the affected communities, both before and after the incident, as harmonious and ideal by excluding unwelcome images from the frame of representation. The mass media repeated images of ideal families, friendships, or communities with an emphasis on the type of mourning that evokes generalized mass sympathy.”14 The media’s focus on certain victims who were seen to be more relatable was aided and narratively organized by the camera, playing out in photo essays about the evacuation centres and the rescue efforts of Japan’s Self Defence Force. The imagining of an ideal subject whose reaction to emergency was exemplary coincided with discrimination against refugees from Fukushima in other areas of Japan.15 The Japanese concept of kizuna – or communal bonds – that rules out “unwanted noise,” Hayashi argues, has been misappropriated to “block perception of the history that brought the nation to the present situation, as well as to erase differences and dissonances among involved 226

The Limits of Composure There is an implied morality and discipline to the concept of composure. Appraising this composure, photographer Jean Chung, a participant in Kodansha’s “3/11 Tsunami Photo Project” notes: “Because of this dignity they held, this natural disaster did not turn into further chaos.” By celebrating the “traditional Japanese qualities” of dignity, gamman, and obedience, a particular view of social and emotional cohesion was put forward. This emphasis on model (individual and national) behaviour created aberrant and unruly subjects both outside and within Japan itself. For example, much has been made of the purported “zero reports of looting” following 3/11, with spoken and unspoken comparisons to the “rampant looting” in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. (Never mind that the response in Japan was a troubling indicator of a society conditioned to trust too heavily in its government and its leaders, too apt to acquiesce to the rule of law and order.) The racial subtext was that Japanese fortitude and restraint were inconceivable elsewhere. Within Japan itself, it is perhaps unsurprising that a dominant discourse of “staying composed” in post-3/11 Japan continues to make it difficult for those still living in the wake of the disaster to express unresolved grief and grievances. Normal psychological and political responses to the triple disaster, and Fukushima specifically, continue to be presented as pathological anti-patriotic behaviours. What becomes apparent is that “composure” in not simply a measure of a society’s capacity for endurance or a measure of a seismically vulnerable country’s adaptation to nature’s remorseless and disastrous rhythms. Rather, it is a vision of conformity that renders any opposition to the status quo impermissible. It is an effort to sublimate emotions and moods – particularly feelings of grief and anger – that might compel citizens to think about the circumstances that led to the human-made tragedy of Fukushima. “Composure, if it is a quality, is the least innocent of virtues,” writes Adam Phillips. “Provoked by an excess of excitement, composure becomes a way of accommodating such experience, a belated refusal; it becomes, in fact, a superstition of confidence in the integrity of the self.”18 This is a kind of mastery, Phillips suggests – this domination of the (individual and social) body, this disavowal of its agitations. It comes with the injunction to behave as if nothing happened, as if everything is

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parties including the community of victims and survivors.”16 Even the language of Japanese composure (repeatedly used by both the Japanese media and the international community) has depicted stoicism as a “virtue of the Japanese” – implying that if you do not stay composed in the face of terrifying calamity, you are not really Japanese.17

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the same. Composure – seen as a “putting back together” of public order and individual morale – provides a restrictive and acquiescent vision of recovery.

Making Grief

9.5 | Eiko Otake, A Body in Fukushima, 22 July 2014, Tomioka, No. 810

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“The French phrase faire le deuil, to make your grief, is accurate, I think, in its description of grief as a work you must do, rather than a time you submit to, waiting for it to end or pass.”19 So writes Rebecca Reilly towards the end of her beautiful memoir Repetition. You must make your grief, she insists. What brings things and people (back) together is the work of grief. This attitude of grief work pervades the art of several artists whose work was not included in In the Wake, in part because it is more performance based.

real times, April 2011.

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9.6 | Chim↑Pom, still from

A Body in Fukushima (2014), for instance, is a touring exhibition of photographs by William Johnston featuring sexagenarian dancer Eiko Otake performing in deserted train stations and neighbourhoods in Fukushima.20 The photos, elegantly composed but also unsettling, show Eiko “performing” such emotions as bitterness, anger, sadness. (“As we got closer and closer to the reactor site, I got sadder and sadder. I wailed and lamented not only for the people, particularly children, who were affected by the radiation in addition to the natural disaster but also for the naked earth and sea that were irradiated, contaminated, and stained.”) Eiko uses her body as a spectral memorial. She says: “I danced so as not to forget … I thought of the generations of people who used to live there. Now desolate, only time and wind continue to move.”21 The intense physicality of Eiko’s presence in the wasted landscape of Fukushima – a presence bordering on what curator Morse might call the “melodramatic” – makes it harder to forget the disastrous human effects of the meltdown. Among the best-known artists responding to Fukushima is a sixmember artists’ collective called Chim↑Pom. They drew international attention less than a month after the reactor exploded, when they filmed themselves in hazmat suits as they breached the barricades around Fukushima Daiichi. There, within a few hundred yards of the stricken and smouldering reactors, they unfurled a white banner, spray-painted it with a red circle to represent the Japanese national flag, and then added three demarcations around the circle to turn it into the universal symbol for nuclear radiation before hoisting it on a flag pole. Chim↑Pom also gathered flowers and plants that were growing in the “no go zone” and decontaminated them, measured them with a dosimeter, and brought them back to Tokyo, where they created an elaborate 229

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flower arrangement. The traditional art of ikebana took on unnerving resonance as a Geiger counter recorded the radioactivity.22 Chim↑Pom uses agit-prop strategies and the détournement of familiar national motifs to spotlight abuses and misuses of power. Their confrontational approach – including a series of photos of pets abandoned in the “no go” zones – plays on the public’s desire for images that the media and the government have suppressed. I mention these works not to detract from In the Wake and its curatorial intentions but to suggest that there are other Fukushima photographs that are also worth looking at and thinking about: images that are forceful and adversarial and perhaps less refined. Ariella Azoulay has written about the privilege pertaining to “the right to view disaster – to be its spectator.” “What is at stake,” she writes, “is not the enjoyment that potentially attaches to the act of spectatorship, but the act itself, which is reserved for the privileged bearers of citizens’ rights who are able to observe the disaster from comparative safety, whereas those whom they observe belong to a different category of the governed, that is to say, people who can have disaster inflicted upon them and who can then be viewed subsisting in their state of disaster.”23 Compromising their own physical and mental well-being, Eiko Otake and Chim↑Pom shifted the spectatorial frame by travelling to the “no go” zone in Fukushima and exposing themselves to radiation. Chim↑Pom, in particular, placed themselves in considerable jeopardy when they entered the radioactive nerve centre. In 2015, they unveiled a group exhibition inside the zone titled Don’t Follow the Wind that will remain unseen until – if ever – the area is fully decontaminated and made liveable again. In the meantime, these unviewed works generate aura by virtue of their complete inaccessibility and absence.

The Lost Tranquility of Hibakusha Addressing the situation at the Fukushima facility, Haruhide Tamamoto, an eighty-year-old Hiroshima hibakusha, or atomic-bombing survivor, says: “Speaking from my experience of suffering diseases and health concerns for a long time since being exposed to radiation … I want them to have more of a sense of crisis.”24 Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe argues that it was Japan’s failure to truly feel Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s pain that paved the way for Japan’s postwar nuclear power project.25 How, but through a failure of attention and a blind belief in “progress,” could a country as seismically exposed as Japan (a country that experiences 1,500 seismic events every year) even consider building power plants on its coastlines? The sorrow and outrage that, once again on Japanese soil, a new generation of hibakusha 230

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has been born shadows the documentary film A 2-B -C : Hôshanô to kodomotachi (Dir. Ian Thomas Ash, 2013). The film captures something of the government’s monstrously calm veneer in responding to mothers whose families were not evacuated and whose children have since been found to have thyroid cysts and nodules. By challenging the story that has been composed for them, these mothers of Fukushima seek to deny Japan its composure about radiation, but when their anxiety meets the composure of government officials they are deemed hysterical. The mothers, who have chosen not to be identified for fear of reprisal, are categorized by Japan’s pro-nuclear scholars and right-wing media as crazy and unpatriotic. How dare they poison the image of Japan with their talk of radioactive poison? A2-B-C: Hôshanô to kodomotachi is often heartbreaking. The mothers attempt to model calmness for their children who need reassurance and who are taking emotional cues from their caregivers.26 But what is the best way of expressing care under these deranged circumstances? At one point, while discussing how the snow melt will release more radiation into the river system, an older woman says to a younger woman: “We must get angry … Even the women of Fukushima are afraid to get angry. They’re trying to remain composed. It’s infuriating! … I’m crying from frustration” (she says as she wipes away tears). “We must get angry … We can’t keep our composure. Life cannot be lived by remaining composed.” At this moment, something knotted and subterranean surfaces and we witness a wavering defence of self. Composure as protective armour, as disavowal, cannot be maintained. It comes at too high a cost.27

Refusing the Call to Order How do we resolve to live with discomposure, with being undone, if the option is an order that presumes a kind of a naturalized national identity that is predicated upon authoritarianism and denial? Can we, I wonder, have another sense of what might rearrange us/put us back together (albeit differently) that allows us to build something new in common? In their book The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney ask what it would mean to refuse what they term “the call to order.” What would it mean to allow dissonance to continue and refuse the reinscription of the law? It’s important to acknowledge how hard it is not to do that. In other words, how hard it would be, on a consistent basis, not to issue the call to order – but also to recognize how important it would be, how interesting it might be, what new kinds of things 231

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might emerge out of the capacity to refuse to issue the call to order. In recognizing all kinds of other shit that could happen, see what happens when you refuse at that moment to become an instrument of governance, seeing how a certain kind of discomfort will occur.28 Refusing the call to order is not a matter of clinging to chaos, nor is it a melancholic acceptance of things as they are; rather it is about leaving ourselves open, so that we do not harden with purpose, or recompose ourselves too quickly in the name of efficiency, respectability, or a pseudo-peace. As Eric Ozawa writes in The Nation: One of the lessons of Fukushima is how difficult it is to distinguish between the feeling of security and the fact of it, between freedom from fear and freedom from danger … Freedom from danger is never guaranteed by the assurances of those in power. When there are accidents, as there inevitably are, it’s up to the people to demand that a full and transparent accounting have consequences. And that may mean giving up our freedom from fear.29 In the case of Japan, we still do not know all the effects of chronic low radiation exposure. Do radioactive particles survive for thirty years, or seven million? We do not know the wider long-term ecological impact of the still-leaking plant.30 The wake of this disaster is not ordered. It is more like a great pacific gyre, churning things up we thought we had forgotten. Unexpected things surface – memories but also emotions, moods, cancers, reverberations. In the face of all that remains unknown and unfinished, refusing the call to order is an affirmation of solidarity. We make common cause with those people and positions that are perturbed and ill composed, and in this alignment provoke the possibilities of new action and a reshaped future.31

Postscript: The Departure It is time for me to leave Boston, via Logan airport, through a heavily securitized terminal. As I stand inside the glass-enclosed scanning device with my arms in the air, I am patted down. It is a familiar if exaggerated routine; a reminder of how disasters magnify repressive principles that are already operative to a lesser degree within democracy. I am feeling less composed. When I was younger, I was convinced that art was the wellspring of ethical witnessing; first we would change the pictures, then we would change the world. I believed in the power 232

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of art to create openings that might allow for counternarratives to emerge. And I was fairly clear about what a “summoning” image might be – conceptual, metaphorical, embracing an aesthetics of the trace. It was something that could be identified if not named. I tried to support my convictions by limiting contact with art that might disorganize my ideas. But I am confronting my stale certainties. As I said, I am losing my composure.

I would like to acknowledge Anne Havinga, Anne Morse Nishimura, Tomoe Otsuki, Ian Thomas Ash, Aparna Mishra Tarc, Warren Crichlow, Mario Di Paolantonio, Claudette Lauzon, John O’Brian, Brandon Shimoda, and The Volta. 1 At the time of writing, all nuclear reactors in Japan are non-operational despite Prime Minister Abe’s lobby to restart them. In April 2015, a district court blocked the restarting of two nuclear reactors in Takahama that had been approved to start in December. “The Fukui court judge’s ruling was based on the people’s right to human dignity. But the government and probably most Japanese are living lives based on economic values, and making judgments based on economics,” said Tadashi Matsuda, also one of the nine plaintiffs. See Eric Johnston, “Takahama Nuclear Restart Injunction Polarizing,” Japan Times, 16 April 2015, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/04/16/national/takahama-nuclearrestart-injunction-polarizing/#.XgEgK0dKiUk. 2 Nishimura and Havinga, In the Wake, 2–12. 3 Speaking to the culture of silence after Fukushima, Montreal scholar Tomoe Otsuki recently told me: “I have met with a Japanese woman who moved to Montreal from Tokyo because of the radiation concern (her husband is from Montreal). She told me that she was not able to address the concern of the radiation in food in her sons’ kindergarten; there was silent pressure that you are not supposed to talk about it. When she found one mother, who shared the concern with her, they had to take a metro to discuss it far from the kindergarten.” 4 Nishimura and Havinga, In the Wake, 152. 5 Elkins and Slavnick, After Hiroshima, 12. 6 Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 53. 7 Nishimura and Havinga, In the Wake, 155. 8 Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, 167. 9 Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 267. 10 I am in my hotel room when my mother calls to tell me that my cousin in Tokyo is feeling anxious. She has recently undergone chemotherapy for breast cancer and her sense of vulnerability has lingered. In her attempt to be healthy, she has removed mushrooms, milk, and white rice from her diet and upped her intake of green tea, but now all of these efforts feel ridiculous. My cousin has always been a model of composure. The escalating crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is threatening her equanimity. 11 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 26–7. 12 Hayashi applauds the work shown in In the Wake for challenging the notion of a “unified Japanese voice,” comparing the exhibition to municipal art projects and 233

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13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30

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museum exhibitions addressing 3/11 in Japan that have tended to focus on the “theme of consolation and encouragement.” Nishimura and Havinga, In the Wake, 166. Ibid., 167. Ibid. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 177. A sampling of headlines from March/April 2011: “No Looting, Just Keeping Calm and Carrying On” (15 March 2011, Daily Mail); “Reuters Photographer Says He’s Amazed by the Calm of the Japanese People” (17 March 2011, Radio Free Europe); “Amid Disaster, Japan’s Societal Mores Remain Strong” (10 April 2011, cnn); “Why So Little Looting in Japan? It’s Not Just about Honesty” (16 March 2011, Slate); “Japan’s Earthquake: Amazing Grace amid Calamity” (13 March 2011, Toronto Star); “Japanese, Waiting in Line for Hours, Follow Social Order after Quake” (15 March 2011, abc News.) Phillips, “On Composure,” 4. Reilly, Repetition. Johnston and Otake, A Body in Fukushima. Ibid. When I asked the curators of In the Wake why they didn’t include Chim↑Pom in the show, they remarked that while they considered it, ultimately the work “didn’t fit tonally.” Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 1–2. Kirby and Macdonald, “Fearing the Fallout.” Maxwell, “Kenzaburo Oe: Japan ‘Burned by the Nuclear Fire.’” But there are moments of unsettling rupture. At one point, fifty-three minutes into the film, children on a couch are matter-of-factly itemizing their cysts when one boy blurts out: “We are going to get leukemia or skin cancer and die.” Downcast gaze, pursed lips, these non-verbal moments of discomposure when we lose our train of thought mid-conversation, when we are momentarily confused, offer a glimpse of vulnerability before we pull ourselves together. It is all the more terrible to learn from director Ian Thomas Ash (via Tomoe Otsuki) that the families of Fukushima featured in A 2-B -C : Hôshanô to kodomotachi are literally disintegrating/breaking down because of the polarized response to the disaster and its lingering effects. There are divided views over the radiation risk. Most of the time, “women/mothers are more concerned about the radiation risk than their counterparts. But, if they persist in voicing their concerns their husbands call them ‘hysterical’ or ‘crazy.’” Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 126. Ozawa, “Fukushima’s Invisible Crisis.” We do not know, and yet … There is a book titled To Know (Shirukoto), which has sold very well in Japan. The focus is on “removing” anxieties about the risks of radiation. It calls on Japanese people to “stay calm” and assures the reader that there is “no need to worry about your future.” The mode of narrative is very soft and gentle, and discourages questions and investigation. According to Tomoe Otsuki, who introduced me to this book, one of the authors is a “hard-core pro-nuclear scholar in Tokyo University.” See www.1101.com/shiroutosurukoto/. Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 11.

donald weBer, someBoDy’s Boots, namie, FUkUsHima exclUsion Zone, 2011

that first morning in March 2011, as the fukushima-daiichi nuclear Plant neared a nuclear meltdown, the authorities evacuated the towns and villages surrounding the facility and created a thirty-kilometre exclusion Zone around it. the tens of thousands of residents had fifteen minutes to leave, and never returned. i was one of the first journalists to travel into the heart of the exclusion Zone, to get a close glimpse of the new reality these people were facing. what i found was a haphazard community of “spectral survivors.” their “things” were here, and yet it was so totally, utterly abandoned. what i saw was a new breed of citizen, transformed by the dire consequences of fukushima into a presence of absence. Donald Weber

10

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toward non-missing A number of years ago I experimented with panning a video camera in a complete circle. Very slowly. One revolution every ten minutes or so. I was interested in how the image informs how we anticipate what is to come and how we remember what has been. But also how we forget and care less. The camera was mounted on an automated, rotating head, and the head on a tripod. After shooting, I would look at the entirety of the footage without skipping forward. I was not sure what I was doing. But, for some reason, I was faithful to the principle of a one-to-one ratio of the time of shooting to the time of looking. This was at the Cube Microplex Cinema in Bristol, UK. The Cube is a social art experiment composed of a rag-tag collective of volunteers. It, the collective, first appropriated and then purchased an old theatre in central Bristol. The Cube hosts screenings, concerts, discussions, lectures, and happenings of all sorts. My friend, the musician Eric Chenaux, and I were invited to participate in a two-week residency there, at the end of which we were scheduled to perform a new collaborative piece – something to do with the problem of equality. The equality of image and sound. The equality of live performance and recorded material. The equality of a building and what is produced inside it. The equality of a collective and those who are not part of it. And, of course, the impossibility of equality itself. Our question: What could this aesthetic inquiry of equality teach us about equality as a philosophical and political category? Actually, we never asked such a vulgar question. This question comes to me only in retrospect. On the last day before the performance I was shooting in an outdoor courtyard with my camera mounted on the automated head. Chenaux was improvising. I decided to set up a second camera on a second tripod right below the first one. I manually panned the second camera in the opposite direction as the first. I tried to match the speed of the programmed revolution. Later that day while editing, I placed the footage from the two cameras side by side in the same frame so that I could see how the synced images coordinated. This produced another problem on top of the one between image and sound, now between image and image – which is, at once, a return to the fundamental problem of cinema (the edit) and a leap past cinema to the fundamental problem of philosophy (how to think the relation between time, space, and change). When I returned home to Toronto, I kept looking at the footage. And decided to play with a third camera, this time mounting the second and third cameras directly on the first and sending all three in the same

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direction. And then, why not, a fourth camera. At this point I had four cameras each pointing in a different ninety-degree direction, moving at the same automated speed, from the same space above the tripod, and in the same direction. I shot with this rig almost every day that summer. In the same park in Toronto. And I looked at the footage every night, always with the same composition – splitting the frame into four quadrants with the footage of each camera occupying one of the four frames. I still adhered to the principle of looking over the same amount of time as shooting and still was not sure why I imposed such a principle on my practice. I sensed that it had something to do with alternative forms of listening and reading. I started to make friends in the park. And to question what it means to shoot in a public place. What it means to make images. To steal someone’s image without asking permission. But it was the looking, after the shooting, that changed everything. The looking was fairly boring. Hours of takes. Hundreds of mistakes. (As if the very category of a mistake means anything at this stage of an experiment.) One evening while looking at the footage I had shot earlier that afternoon, I began to track the movement of a man walking around the park. He would appear in one quadrant of the four-channel frame and after exiting that quadrant, a few seconds later he would appear in another quadrant. The few seconds in between constituted a kind of blindspot (or what, at the time, I thought was a blindspot). I had already started to notice this missing slice of time-space over the weeks of looking, but something truly weird happened on this occasion. At some point after exiting one of the quadrants the man did not appear again. I waited. He had disappeared altogether. It was impossible. Given the logic of the camera system, the logic of the geography of the park, and the logic of the man’s body, he should have reappeared in another one of the four quadrants. Did he duck and crawl underneath the bottom edge of the frame? Did he change his speed so that once he exited one quadrant he would hold that speed for the rest of the take, never entering any of the other quadrants? Waiting for the man to appear again reminded me of an experience I had over twenty years earlier watching Nam Jun Paik’s classic 1965 film Zen for Film. Paik’s film consists entirely of exposed leader, so that all we see during the entirety of the film is the white rectangle of the projected light – with all of the accumulated dirt on the screen, decay of the celluloid, and wear of the projector. After coming across a sixteen-millimetre print of this film, I took it home to view on an old Bell and Howell projector. Since I had yet to know anything about Paik’s film, I had no idea what to expect. I threaded the film and started the projector. I waited.

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Five seconds. Ten seconds. One minute. Nothing. Is something broken? Is this a defective print? And then, oh ... of course, nothing! But at this point I was faced with a choice. Do I continue to watch the film through to the end, or, rather, appreciate the gesture and call it a night? Since my projector was finicky, without the convenient stop button of a videocassette or dvd player, let alone the stop icon on all of our current viewing devices, I had to run the print all the way through the machine. I was then faced with the choice of whether or not to look at the white rectangle. I chose to look. And this looking immediately presented a series of problems. What would it mean to look at this film without waiting for it to end? Or, for that matter, when does this, or any film, end? What would it mean to look at Zen for Film without imposing on it a preconceived understanding of film, of time, of space, of aspect ratio, of matter, of conceptual art, not to mention of John Cage’s twin-sister piece 4'22"? Paik’s film brought me closer to my principle of a one-to-one ratio of shooting to looking, the principle that I had been applying to the park footage. I had already been training myself to look at each day’s footage all the way through despite the fact that the content might have been boring or predictable, if not insufferable. The form of this kind of looking is not unlike the form of a certain kind of psychoanalytic listening, by which the shrink listens for something other than the patient’s beloved plot points, for something that might not even actually exist in the present but that could come into being in the future – a kind of unconscious coming from the future. Without yet knowing it, I was one step closer to seeing through post-atomic eyes, or what I would later call blindspot praxis. These questions all collapsed for me into the single problem of missing. The missing man in the park footage. The missing space and time of the scene. The affect of missing the man who I expected to meet again in another frame. The missing of the past (in this case, of analog film and all of its material demands) and the missing of a future (a future beyond the expectations and desires of film itself). At bottom: missing the impossible (to overlook the impossible) and missing the impossible (to feel the absence of the impossible). we think we know what a blindspot is We think we know what a blindspot is. It is what we cannot know, what we cannot see, what we cannot represent. From human anatomy to aesthetics, from philosophy to psychology to politics, the blindspot, we think, is the missing element that structures the visible, the thinkable, the feelable, the actable. But this definition-as-lack is not what the

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blindspot is. The blindspot is not some transhistorical category with a singular function. It is, rather, nothing but the dominant ideology of what the blindspot is at any given time. And today, the blindspot – the dominant ideology of the blindspot as that which is missing – is the deadliest weapon used by those in power. The blindspot is wielded by our politicians. By our business executives. By our academics and our artists. They push it like drugs and swing it like a baton to the knees. They use it to justify the billionaires and to clear-cut the trees. They make their case to go to war with it. For our part, we whip our heads around to see it. We stage failed suicides to be present with it. We construct elaborate philosophical (and anti-philosophical) systems to think it. We build satellites and write one-word poems. We invent a million different names to signify the blindspot. When we make sense of the blindspot in this way, we invariably colonize it with our desire to expose it. We are forensic junkies. We crawl around with our head lamps on. We dig it up like the good detectives we think we are. But we not only colonize the blindspot with this desire, we also colonize the very concept of the blindspot itself. What if the blindspot is not that which is missing? What if the blindspot is not a design flaw built into our eyeballs and bodies? What if it is not an ontological limit of perception or that place in our psyches where we cannot know ourselves? If we can accept the premise of these questions, then we should be careful not to turn things around and make the blindspot into something sacred, something never to be revealed. By presuming to liberate the blindspot with our desire to conceal it, to fetishize it, to bow down to or mystify it – this shares the same formal logic as exposure and is no less colonizing. Even as we resist treating the blindspot like a detective, therefore, we often end up treating it like a priest. We light incense for it. We leave doors ajar, rooms empty, and speak in hushed tones. Beyond exposure and concealment (beyond the detective and the priest), there is a third compromised mode of engaging the blindspot – total disregard. We could care less about it. We do not name it. Or even construct it as an object to be considered in the first place. We do not come at it from the other direction or put it in relation to its opposite. It is neither a condition nor a concept. Nor even a fantasy. We do not play schoolboy games with it. We do not ask the question of the blindspot of the blindspot, and then the blindspot of the blindspot of the blindspot … all the way down to where infinite refraction meets the stupidity of the overthinker. And now we are left with a question: if to expose, to conceal, and to disregard the blindspot are equally debilitating, equally reactionary,

Through Post-Atomic Eyes the machine as totality

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then where does this leave us regarding the blindspot at our current historical moment? I claim that all the dominant discourses of the blindspot today make us docile and weak political subjects. They drive us crazy. They reproduce what is and squeeze dry what can become. But they are also things that never remain still, both the blindspot and the concept of the blindspot. Therefore, they can also become something else, they can make room for their own radical potential.

Since the initial experiment, I have continued to build and rebuild the Blindspot Machine. It is still composed of four video cameras and an automated rotating head and it is still intended to make blindspots, rather than to expose them. In this way the Blindspot Machine is diametrically opposed to surveillance: whereas surveillance desires to make everything visible, the Blindspot Machine desires not to make everything invisible, but to make room for something else. One of the things for which the Blindspot Machine makes room is the very way we understand what a blindspot is in the first place. And how we might experience it. It took me several years to realize that the Blindspot Machine is not the apparatus itself. It is, rather, a totality. And like all totalities (contrary to how they are often understood), it is unrepresentable, dynamic, and open. This machine as totality is composed of various elements: 1) the materiality of the multi-camera rig; 2) the films that the rig generates; 3) the live overnarrations that accompany certain screenings of the films; 4) the concepts of, and the arguments about, the blindspot and associated categories; and 5) the written documentation of the project itself, including this chapter. This chapter, therefore, is not about the Blindspot Machine, it is part of the Blindspot Machine. At the point of writing this chapter I have made six long-form blindspot films as well as a series of experiments ranging from interviews and music videos to a real-time projection by the Blindspot Machine in a gallery setting. Some of the long-form films are presented with an overnarration that I perform live while standing beside the screen. I take inspiration for this practice from early Japanese cinema, and the figure of the in-house commentator, the benshi, who would play various roles (actor, critic, scholar, fan) and whose intervention would necessarily change the film from one screening to the next. In my case, each film is performed several times, but each time with a substantially different overnarration. Sometimes the overnarrations are extemporaneous and, at other times, they are tightly scripted. The narrative, however, is always contingent on the following two principles: 1) to develop the concept 243

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and practice of the blindspot; and 2) to connect to the question or problem being posed by those inviting me to present work. My presentation at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference, therefore, was a theorization of the post-atomic by way of the Blindspot Machine. post-atomic death The presentation at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference began with a black frame on the large screen behind me and two negative claims that I spoke: first, the blindspot is not that which is missing or underneath or outside or that which exceeds our sightline; and second, the blindspot is not that which supplements what is present. But if the blindspot is neither absence, nor design logic, nor constitutive lack (which are the usual ways it is understood, from either the perspective of human anatomy and the optic nerve, to so much structuralist and poststructuralist theory), if it is not that then what could the blindspot possibly be? This is what I wanted to theorize and to put in relation to the post-atomic. As for the post-atomic itself, what does the “post” signify in this phrase? Is it the way we are disciplined to see after the birth of atomic weaponry? Is it the way we might see after the death of atomic weaponry? Either way, the post has always figured ambiguously as a periodizing signifier (think, postmodern or post-colonial). Here we might want to remember the book series by Duke University Press started in the early 1990s: “Post Contemporary Interventions.” I have always loved the time-warping of this phrase – forcing us to account for the way that the most compelling intellectual contributions of the present moment will necessarily transform and switch directions in the future, if not die off altogether. There is something about the way that thought itself radically changes and dies that I want to pursue in connection to the post-atomic. Today, the dominant discourse of death and dying is tied to the logic of global capitalism. If the most significant and violent power play of the nineteenth century was to produce homogeneous time (the colonization of alternative lived experiences of time leading to what Walter Benjamin criticized as empty time) – and if the great power play of the twentieth century was to produce homogeneous space (think Henri Lefebvre’s or David Harvey’s critique of capitalism’s uneven spatial relations), then the great power play of the twenty-first century, I submit, is to produce homogeneous death. Homogeneous death dissociates the death and dying of a person from the death and dying of other things, of other phenomena, of other animals. One alternative to this homogeneous death is another kind of death, one that prioritizes the shared inner logic between a dying person and

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atomic exposure There are medical clinics in Japan today where victims of the atomic bombs are sitting right next to victims of the Fukushima meltdown. Those who suffered from radiation exposure over seventy years ago (mostly leukemia) are waiting to see the same doctors as those who were living around Fukushima in 2011 and have just been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. There is a peculiar temporality at stake here. One in which the illness and ultimately our deaths swing from short term to long term, from acute to terminal to chronic, and back again. Atomic exposure is, at once, something that can be managed over a lifetime, and something that can do its frightful destruction in an instant. In The Already Dead I write about this perverted temporality – in which the meanings and effects of such key temporal categories as crisis, the meantime, the short-term and long-term, the chronic and terminal are losing their integrity, as they invert, stretch, and shrink. In that book, I begin by tracking the shift in dominant treatment paradigms within medicine – ones that no longer prioritize cure, but now concentrate on disease management. Of course, the new pharmaceutical advances (targeted therapies, precision interventions on the molecular level) in which formerly terminal illnesses are now made chronic (from hiv to certain cancers) have captured the imagination and desires of many the world over (or, at least, of those who could afford the life-saving medications in the first place). Who could be against such miracles and life-saving treatments? Still, there’s room for suspicion. Mainly about how the celebration over the possibilities of management insinuates itself into how we understand non-medical issues. The newly dominant prioritization of management over cure (and “cure,” as we know, is a troubled category even at the best of times), this feverish shift to management, seems to go hand in hand with the shift to manage (to make sustainable, to tinker with) social, ecological, psychological, and political problems rather than to significantly transform them. Management is to cure in the medical realm as reform is to revolution in the political one. My move in The Already Dead was to reclaim death, and to reclaim the terminal – not, however, as some apocalyptic fantasy or suicide wish. Rather, I reclaim the terminal (away from the opportunistic exploitation of it by the state and by business) by stressing its utopian dimension, that is, how it contains the always existing possibility of the end of our present (not the end of our present lives, but the end of our present

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the dying of, say, a language, the dying of a building, of a politicaleconomic system, a memory, a temporal order, a nation, another species. For now, I will call this other discourse of dying “post-atomic death.”

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configuration of unequal social relations, the end of our present configuration of suffering, the end of our present configuration of the possible and the impossible, the end of capitalism) – a direct engagement with terminality can be enlivening, not to mention psychologically and politically radical insofar that it opens up to profound change and otherness. The Blindspot Machine attempts to flash this other death.

Tashiro-jima how to film it? 10.2

And this brings us to the summer of 2015 and to figure 10.2. I had heard about a place in Japan called Tashiro-jima, which goes by two nicknames, 1) Terminal Island and 2) Cat Island. The story goes like this: this island, about forty minutes from the mainland of Miyagi prefecture in northeast Japan (the prefecture that was most devastated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and in which the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is located), was a relatively thriving fishing village (with an elementary school and long-standing cultural traditions). Over the past seventy years, the population has decreased considerably, so that now less than one hundred people live on the island. The elementary school has been closed, and most of the younger generation has moved to the cities and towns. The island is thus designated by the government as genkai shuuraku (or terminal village), since almost 100 per cent of its dwindling population is over the age of sixty-five. Put simply: The human culture will not reproduce itself, it will not survive. 246

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The dying population seems quite happy to have the occasional traveller spend time with them and the cats. On this day, it is just me and these two young women from Tokyo (who made the five-hour trek to Tashiro-jima for some quality cat-time since their university dormitory has a strict no-pets policy; see figure 10.2). As for the cats, there are hundreds and hundreds of them, vastly outnumbering the human population. My original idea was to get to the island and make a film, one that I could show at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference and that would inform how I theorize the post-atomic. But how to film it? The postatomic? The island? The elderly? The cats? And this brings us to back to the blindspot. As you saw with the kids in figure 10.1, the Blindspot Machine is a portable rig that is fitted with four cameras, each pointing in a different ninety-degree direction, which slowly rotates to record a panorama. When watching the synced images, at the same time in four quadrants, a panorama emerges, but one with blindspots. Depending on how I position the cameras, set the speed of the rotation, or choose the focal lengths of the lenses, the blindspot shifts. an experiment It is the next day on the island and I want you to pay attention to the man in the upper right frame with his wheelbarrow (in figure 10.3). 10.3

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Now he enters the slice of space-time in which he is not captured by the cameras (figure 10.4). We exchange words in Japanese …

… before he appears again in the lower left frame (figure 10.5).

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before reappearing again in the lower-right frame (figure 10.7).

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Again, he disappears into the blindspot (figure 10.6),

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He proceeds to walk at about the same speed as the automatic panning of the cameras, although in the opposite direction (figure 10.8). 10.8

He enters the blindspot again, which is not the space that is missing, nor out of frame, but is right in the centre of things, so central in fact that we cannot see it despite the way that it spreads over all time-space (figure 10.9). 10.9

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And there he is again in the upper-left frame (figure 10.10).

That is the thing about blindspots, they do not remain still – they are always on the move. We are looking at grab-frames extracted from the original video, which qualitatively changes the effect. But there is something about the category of the grab-frame that is interesting in its own right. The grabframe is not a photograph, nor is it a video. Unlike a photograph, the grab-frame is detached from the images before and after it, even though these images are indispensable to and inscribed in it. And unlike a video, the grab-frame is still. The grab-frame, therefore, always exceeds itself as it necessarily includes its before and after. How might this theorization of the grab-frame relate to the blindspot? This all depends on how we understand what constitutes the blindspot in the first place. If it is understood in the orthodox way as something missing and that obeys a certain logic of time and space that can be divided and measured, then the grab-frame can only be a poor representation of the blindspot. But if the blindspot is conceptualized as that which is immeasurable and that spreads over time and space (to the visible and the invisible; to the past, present, and future), then the grab-frame gives us a profound way of experiencing the blindspot and all of its radical operations and effects. It is precisely this different blindspot (as immeasurable and omnipresent, as intensive rather than extensive) that the Blindspot Machine has produced and that shares an inner logic with the post-atomic. 251

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Back to the story. I decided to take the blindspot machine to Japan, to Terminal Island. But, I was distracted on the way to the island. Distracted by other places, other buildings, other people, and other objects that seemed to have something important to teach about the postatomic, about looking, about terminality, and about the blindspot.

IV Toward Not Building nakagin capsule tower One of the first distractions was the building in figure 10.11, seen from the inside and the outside.

This building is called the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kurokawa Kisho. The capsule tower is arguably the most iconic and important building of modern Japan; it is emblematic of a vital architectural movement, called Metabolism. And it is on the chopping block, slated to die in the near future. The Metabolists, who themselves were reacting to persisting atomic fears following the Second World War, were composed of mostly young architects who followed the lead of the most important architect of the day, Tange Kenzo. The movement, founded in 1960, developed utopian visions of the future and practices ranging from floating cities to artificial land and, as we see here, modular structures that can be built and unbuilt like so many puzzle pieces. 252

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The Nakagin was imagined as a kind of shelter, a shelter that can withstand radiation and seismic activity. This double desire of impermanence and permanence is not unlike the fourth-century Ise shrine that inspired it.

The inner shrine of Ise, as you see in the top right of figure 10.12, is destroyed and rebuilt piece by piece (killed and reborn cell by cell) on an adjacent plot of land every twenty years. When I stayed in the Nakagin on my way to Terminal Island, the man who owned the capsule near mine insisted that the building should be killed off – think of the land value, he said, not to mention the disturbing smell in this building that might very well give him cancer. Irony of ironies. One architect who would see no irony in this is Isozaki Arata. Isozaki was a fellow traveller of the Metabolists but never fully endorsed their project. He could not buy into their techno-utopias and underlying desire to manage crisis and pre-empt the great ruptures of history. Isozaki had a more developed sense of breakdown and ruins, one informed by his own theoretical commitments to what in Japanese is called ma – an aesthetic, philosophical, and political concept that is something like negative time-space. The image in the bottom-left frame of figure 10.12 is called Hiroshima Ruined Again in the Future in which Isozaki overlays a contemporary utopian project (we are in 1969 now) onto an enlarged photograph of Hiroshima right after the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Isozaki 253

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saw this image as a future scene of collapse, insofar that such buildings and cities (and utopian desires) that were currently being built by the Metabolists were already ruined. Which is not a critique of utopia, just a different iteration of it. This reminds me of the time loops of the post-contemporary and the kind of temporality I am trying to tease out of the post-atomic. The question for the Nakagin (and beyond) comes down to this: do we renovate the building, let it organically decay, or tear it down? What does it mean to preserve something? To save something? To rebuild or unbuild or not-to-build? For what? For whom? ishinomaki This takes us to Ishinomaki, the port town where you catch the ferry to go to Terminal Island. Ishinomaki was severely damaged by the tsunami in 2011. Much of the lowlands were submerged under water, where thousands upon thousands of its population died. 10.13

In the bottom left quadrant of figure 10.13 we are looking at the lowlands, from one of the high points in the town. Look at the photographs in figure 10.13, one on the railing of the top-right quadrant and one on the railing of the bottom left. These were taken before the disaster, so that now you can look at the photograph and train your sights on the exact space below – in a current state of rebuilding (this is a kind of before-and-after exercise for schoolchildren and tourists and, in our 254

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case, local artists). My new friends here are from Ishinomaki and they have taken to painting the disaster. One eye on the photo, one eye on the disaster below – a double vision that is mixed with the past, present, and future. The title of this episode could be “How to Film a Disaster at the Spot of the Disaster while Looking at Others Paint the Disaster as They Look at a Photograph of the Disaster That Was Taken before the Disaster.” The multiplicity of time here, not to mention the almost interminable sentence, is enough to make time stand still, or at least give us a splitting headache. It is hard to convey the simplicity of the gesture here. This group of men and women, all currently living in Ishinomaki, all managing intense personal and collective traumas (of seeing so many of their neighbours, on the same day, die) and all sitting here, next to each other, painting Time. Capital T. Despite the apparently different kinds of crisis, the dominant temporality of the earthquake and tsunami (short-term, immediate, abrupt, terminal) compared to the dominant temporality of Fukushima (slow, gradual, continuing, acute), the post-atomic knows no difference. The logic of the post-atomic is one in which crisis is not an exception or an accident or a mistake, but is built right into the system itself. Crisis, capital C. A little bit later in the day, more people showed up and the artists and I decided to take a break from our work. We talked about what sounded like the non-stop banging of a drum that filled the space where we were – which, in fact, was not drumming but construction noise as workers rebuilt the main bridge in the town below.

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“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to paint again without that sound,” the man in the grey cap tells me (figure 10.14). As for me, all I can think is that I have found a free soundtrack to a film I might never make. I asked the woman (in the white jacket) what she painted. “The in-between” (ma-naka she said in Japanese). I wait for her to end the sentence. And then realize that there is no end to this sentence, just as there is no end to the disaster or to the meltdown, just as death does not mean the end of something or someone. We are always in the middle, always in the thick of things. “What are you filming with that crazy machine?” she asks me in return. I want to say, “I have no idea,” but instead I say, “nothing in particular.” I should have said, “I want to film you moving around the Blindspot Machine at the exact speed of the rotation of the cameras, with your body always in the blindspot, so that you are continually present but never visible.” This is an almost impossible sentence to follow, so I will try to show it to you in figure 10.15.

There she is. In the blindspot. Moving in perfect time with the machine so that we will never see her; but, she is there. That night while looking at the footage in a hotel room not much larger than one of the Nakagin capsules, I remembered the lady in white and thought again about our conversation. Now, alone, I realized that I am filming what comes in between dying and death. An atomic duration that, at one and the same time, spreads over an entire lifetime and lasts for only a split-second. 256

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yoshida-san

The unclockable time of the post-atomic: not a bad way to get at the unspeakable feelings of Mr Yoshida, the taxi driver with whom I spent the next afternoon. Yoshida-san survived the tsunami while his wife, sadly and tragically, was not so lucky. As we walk around the ground zero of the tsunami (figure 10.16), or, at least, the ground zero that the government has chosen to represent the disaster (for, as we know, the ground zero is never in one spot, just as our death is never at one moment), Yoshida finds the state-sponsored slogans profoundly distasteful. Fukkou, gambarou (Recover! Keep at it!): or the one in Japanese on the sign in the top right frame: “Let’s step towards the future” (figure 10.17). 10.17

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Yoshida draws my attention to the junior high school above the sign and explains that the new building was already being built before the disaster. “We didn’t need the tsunami to stand up, to rebuild,” he said. At the same time he makes it clear that the town was losing much of its population before the tsunami and Fukushima meltdown (the younger generation leaving for nearby and distant cities – nearby and distant jobs). But the population decline is not just about jobs, cities, starting over, but also a more general population decline that Japan has been experiencing for decades. We will return to this zero-ing population and how it might relate to the post-atomic when we make it back to Terminal Island and its cats, but for now Mr Yoshida directs my attention back to the sign, with the English words “Stand up” followed by the Japanese ideograms Kadowaki. Kadowaki is the name for the elementary school that used to exist on the exact plot of land where the sign is now. Its ruins have been cleaned up. Mr Yoshida apologizes for wondering whether Ishinomaki really needs this rebuilt elementary school. “Is that because there are so few children currently living in the area?” I ask. “No, because sometimes it’s better not to build things.” He says this in a tone that betrays neither sorrow nor indifference. How can we live without building? ark nova

I love the moments in figure 10.18 when the trucks remind us how the space is organized, moving from one frame to the next, reminding us 258

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that space, and time, is cut up and broken while at the same time whole and indivisible. This is not a bad definition of ma, the Buddhist concept I wrote about earlier when referring to Isozaki’s Hiroshima Ruined Again in the Future. Ma, like the blindspot, is not that which comes in between two points in space or two moments in time and that can, therefore, be measured extensively, but it is an intensive quality of indivisible time-space that is always transforming and destabilizing the very points and moments from which any measurement could take place. Isozaki has written quite a bit about ma and has based many of his architectural designs and built structures on it, such as the one called Ark Nova in the top-right frame in figure 10.18. This human heart–like structure is in honour of those who suffered (living and dead) as a result of the 2011 disaster. Ark Nova is a portable, inflatable structure that can hold up to four hundred people before being deflated and transported to another area or to the next disaster. Isozaki wanted to build something that could provide shelter, and a space for various collective activities (from music concerts to a refugee shelter, from a community meeting centre to a medical clinic). One thing we know, for sure, is that this purple-red doughnut would make a horrible bomb shelter. Isozaki intends for this structure to be impermanent, unfixed, and mobile. After it serves its function it will disappear without leaving a physical trace. endless tower 10.19

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I was unable to make it to Ark Nova when it was first inflated back in September 2013, in Matsushima city. And I was unable to go to the second installation in Fukushima. So on my way to Terminal Island, I took Isozaki’s suggestion and decided to bring the Blindspot Machine to another one of his buildings, the Art Mito Tower (built in 1990, and in Mito city about an hour and a half northwest of Tokyo). This complex is made up of a concert hall, art gallery, theatre, and the most peculiar titanium tower that you have ever seen (figure 10.19). The tower is exactly one hundred metres high, composed of tetrahedrons, of triangles stacked on top of each other looking like a helix strand of dna and a strip of film stock. The tower is based on a concept by the famous Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who created a form called the endless column. By replicating the same abstract shape, Brancusi emphasized its potential for vertical expansion, “an endless column.” So Isozaki produced an endless tower. This tower might physically end at exactly one hundred metres high, but when looking at it from the outside or the inside (as you see in figure 10.20), it is hard not to continue it up through the sky. It continues within our imagination, which means that the part of the tower that exceeds one hundred metres is not unreal, but very much part of the real. This is how you can build without building. And how a temporality like the post-atomic can contain its own future. 10.20

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sendai mediateque We are almost back to the cat island, but how could I not make one last detour at Ito Toyo’s marvellous Sendai Mediateque, a building that was badly shaken by the quake and has since functioned as one of the largest archives specializing in visual material regarding the Fukushima disaster and the nuclear question (figure 10.21). The inner structure of this building replicates the form of the Zelkova trees that line the Sendai streets outside. What does this have to do with our question of the postatomic? Ito is famous for integrating his architecture with the natural environment and for making buildings that can withstand natural disasters. Ito notes that the Fukushima Daiichi power plant was supposed to withstand earthquakes too. But does this mean that the problem with the nuclear plant was that it needed a better architect? Or should the architects have refused to build it – just as we ask our psychologists not to provide their skills to torturers? 10.21

The Sendai Mediateque is empty, save the maintenance crew checking escalators and cleaning elevator bays. When I contacted Ito about filming in his building with the Blindspot Machine, he was enthusiastic and scheduled my shoot for the day before the one we are looking at in figure 10.21. On Ito’s preferred day, the building was bustling with pensioners and students. And although the machine performs better with constant activity, I did not have the heart to shoot. Instead, I checked out the collection and stumbled upon a video by a young rapper who 261

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had spoken the year before at the Mediateque. He had taught himself biochemistry, nuclear physics, and how to analyze radioactivity levels. He spoke of half-lives and gamma rays, of internal and external exposure and of Sievert levels, and stressed a critical mistrust of the state and its scientists. His bottom line: what is invisible, undetectable, unknown, not-yet, and off-limits … is what we must train ourselves to see. I took this as a vote of confidence for the Blindspot Machine. But the Blindspot Machine is intended as a prosthetic not to see the imperceptible present, but to flash so many possible and impossible futures. This is why I claim that the blindspot itself is not that which is missing or supplementary, but it (the blindspot) is these futures. The blindspot is something like sensing a time-traveller from the future, whose vibration turns your head and makes you wonder why you keep the doors locked at night. cat cottages and reading from the other direction 10.22

The inhabitants of Tashiro-jima (Terminal Island) do not lock their doors, day or night. In figure 10.22, we are back on the island, in two separate places. On the top-right and bottom-left frames we are on the top of the highest hill of Terminal Island, with … surprise, surprise … cat cottages, while the top left frame shows the old elementary school (which has not been in operation since 1989) and the bottom right shows the school’s surrounding area. 262

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What is immediately noticeable is that no one is around, except a woman (now in the top-left frame of figure 10.23) who I met on the ferry and who agreed to walk around the school in order to give the space some scale. I asked her to walk clockwise (and then counter-clockwise), first from left to right and then from right to left. Why? I had read somewhere that the US secret service train their members to scan a landscape from right to left – since readers of English always scan a page of text from left to right, to scan a scene in the opposite direction makes the secret service members more attuned to the details that might indicate danger and threat. But the Japanese language is different. Book pages are usually read from right to left, and sentences often read from top to bottom. Regardless of which way we turn, or which way we read, the question remains: where is the threat in these images? And where is the promise? This question, together with the dilapidated elementary school, returns us to the relation between depopulation and the post-atomic. I cannot think of a more crucial topic in contemporary Japan. Of course, there is the decades-long economic recession and the dubious changes being made to the post–Second World War peace constitution by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, but it is the fear that the population of Japan, within the next generation or so, will decrease so much that the nation will be threatened with extinction. The fears are pervasive. As are the gratuitous statistics that are repeated over and over. By 2020, adult diapers are projected to outsell the infant kind. By 2040, the country will 263

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have more people over eighty than under fifteen. By 2060, the number of Japanese is expected to fall from 127 million today to about 87 million, of which almost 40 per cent will be sixty-five or older. By 2080 there will be no one left. The fear is that the shrinking younger generation will not be able to care for the expanding older one, and the whole welfare state will come crashing down, followed by the death of the nation itself. Of course, these fears are hysterical (and based on a capitalist logic that requires constant expansion and growth, which, as we know, is not necessarily the only way to organize ourselves). At any rate, the hysteria over human extinction and the logic of destructive growth do not seem to be shared by the old folks of Tashiro-jima. Instead they assume and accept their end. They are going about their everyday business; they are fishing and gossiping and feeding the cats. And in so doing, they seem to be asking another question about the future: What is our legacy to other species? And more specifically: What will happen to the cats? For me, the islanders of Tashiro-jima are not celebrating their demise or giving up too soon. Nor are they desperately pleading for others to recognize their fragility and save the day. Rather they are claiming their deaths, not in some cheerless or despairing way, but in a way that seems to recognize that sometimes we do not need to reproduce, or even to live, in order to survive. the fuji kindergarten

Finally, this takes us back to the beginning, back to the Fuji kindergarten where this chapter and my presentation began (figure 10.24). This 264

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building is one of the most fascinating and talked-about structures in present-day Japan. Made by husband-and-wife team Tezuka Takaharu and Tezuka Yui in 2007, the kindergarten is oval, with no fixed rooms, but rather a series of sliding glass doors that open to a central playground. On the roof is the racetrack, where the kids run their circles or play on the old-growth trees that shoot through the whole school. Everything in the kindergarten (walls, desks, chairs, tables) is modular, specifically engineered to be manipulated by the hands of a four- or five-year-old. The open and transparent architecture was made in coordination with the pedagogical principles at the school: that divisions of all kinds are OK, but these divisions should never become permanent; they should, rather, always be open to reconfiguration, to experimentation. Insideoutside, classroom-kitchen, volunteer-teacher, all of these pairs should overlap and intersect so that nothing is off limits. And the kids themselves should be fully involved in this process. We can add to this list of interwoven pairs that of life and death. But maybe we should go even further, all the way to the end, perhaps to the most challenging conflation: living and dying. To interweave living and dying is another way of challenging the dominant discourse of death today, not to mention a way of figuring the post-atomic. We are always already contaminated. Of course, there are degrees, and there is always a threshold on the other side of which is certain death. This paradox of being always identical to and always different from death might also be experienced as a model for how to deal with the paradoxes of the post-atomic. 10.25

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And this is my answer to the unanswerable question of what is the post-atomic. Rather than marking what follows the blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or the meltdowns of Chernobyl and Fukushima), or rather than marking the future free of atomic blasts and meltdowns, the post-atomic might be most productively thought of as a code word for the post-capitalist – ultimately, for the fundamental paradox of the post-capitalist itself, namely how to imagine and build an alternative social system that is not at once contained and colonized by the overarching capitalist logic of the present system. Like the post-capitalist, the post-atomic is impossible to think, but possible to make. We make it by speculating and practising our way out of the entrapment of the present – acts that will necessarily demand radical experiments at a distance from the dominant capitalist ideologies of time and space. My final provocation, therefore, is to argue that when we are attempting to think the post-atomic we are at once attempting to think the post-capitalist – a thinking and practice that cannot outsmart or even escape the logic of capitalism, but that still can play tricks on it, stare right back at it, and bust it up like the kindergartners proceeded to do to my Blindspot Machine (figure 10.25). And these acts, life practices really, are ones that effectively make room for radically different systems to come into being (post-capitalist and post-atomic ones) as well as radically different subjectivities that will necessarily inform, and be informed by, a qualitatively different logic of the blindspot: The blindspot of the post-atomic. 10.26

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the Trace Evidence video trilogy explores the geological, meteorological, and hydrological appearance of nuclear evidence secreted within the molecular arrangements of matter. Shot on-location over several years, it focuses upon three key events: the revelation of ancient nuclear reactors at the uranium mine site in oklo, gabon, in 1972 and its colonial legacy of radioactive tailing ponds; the discovery of Chernobyl’s airborne contaminates at the forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden in april 1986 amidst widespread Soviet denial; and the 7,600-kilometre, five-year journey of Caesium-137 from fukushima-daiichi through the waters of the Pacific ocean to Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver island. Susan Schuppli

Part fOur

atomic anthropocene

cHarles stankievecH, tHe Distant early Warning ProJect, 2015

today the same regions invested in the arctic during the Cold war are again turning their attention towards the north – driven this time by melting temperatures and greater pressure for natural resource extraction resulting in a renewed confrontation that could be called the “warm war.” the Distant Early Warning (dew) Project (in a series of works that look at military outpost architecture) revisits the fluidity of boundaries – both in regards to the environment and sovereignty – while observing how communication technology plays a pivotal role in the definition and delivery of such ideologies. Charles Stankievech

11

the Half-life of Yasser arafat eYal Weizman

One of the main exhibits that the Arafat Museum, now nearing completion next to Arafat’s grave in Ramallah, planned to display – alongside the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, which Hamas confiscated when taking over Gaza in 2007 – was Arafat’s famed keffiyeh.1 In a museum that aims, according to its organizers, “to tell Arafat’s life story factually, not polemically, as part of the broader trajectory of the people and movement he led,”2 these items were central in representing each a different pole of Arafat’s life: the militant founder of the modern Palestinian national movement, and the negotiator and peacemaker. But just like the golden Nobel medal, the last keffiyeh worn by Arafat will not be made available to display in Ramallah. The one he took with him on 29 October 2004, as he left Palestine for the last time for medical treatment in France, has recently acquired a new status as evidence in a murder investigation. The keffiyeh was one of a few personal items handed over to the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne by Arafat’s widow Suha at the request of Al Jazeera in the summer of 2012. It is in these items that traces of the radioactive poison of polonium-210 were first discovered. The polonium trail led to the grave, which was exhumed on 27 November 2012. The examination of the remains revealed an extraordinarily higher than normal concentration of polonium-210. What most Palestinians already believed since Arafat’s death has now received scientific validation. Arafat was likely murdered, and Israel is, in the words of chief Palestinian investigator Tawfik Tirawi, who was with Arafat in the compound of the Mukataa in his last days there, the “first, fundamental and only suspect.”3 The new revelations pose a set of problems for the Arafat museum when it opens. It is not only the keffiyeh but also Arafat’s siege time of-

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fice – which the museum also planned to present to the public at the culmination of the visitor path – that have become evidence to an alleged crime. Both the forensic investigation and exhibition making are about presenting material evidence of the past, but the logics of this presentation are different and they tend to generate different consequences. Indeed, the radioactivity detected in Ramallah poses a set of political challenges far and wide. These challenges are not only curatorial or historiographical in nature. They also describe the fundamental options facing Palestinians today. Should they continue in the path of negotiations and stick with what is here sometimes referred to as the “Kerry process,” or should Palestinians return to the path of resistance – a term that encapsulates a large spectrum of confrontational action that ranges from non-armed civil action to the armed struggle. Having the story of Arafat’s life told in a language of forensic science makes it hard to ignore and supports those who call for the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority (understood here often as an instrument completely captured by Israel and the US) and return to the way of resistance. Although the general mood in Palestine is rather passive or complicit these days, the polonium intifada might indeed be in the making. It is important to understand just how spatially circumscribed the main elements in this story are, confined to al-Mukataa (literally “the district”) at the northern end of Ramallah. It is the site from which Arafat left alive, and to which he returned dead. The room in which Arafat allegedly ingested the lethal polonium, the compound where he was under siege for his two last years, the gravesite, the museum and the new presidential offices of the Palestinian Authority are all located adjacent to each other within this compound whose underground radioactivity unleashed processes that threaten to make it implode. The history of the Mukataa embodies the continuities between the area’s various modern rulers. The “district” was built by the British as part of a network of military and police outposts during the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. It was during this time that the British crushed the Palestinian military force, a blow from which they did not recover in time to face the Zionist forces in 1948. The Mukataa, however, remained in the area protected by the Jordan Legion and served there as a base. After the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, the Israeli army used the site and added to it a notorious prison. After the site was ceremonially handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 1996, in one of the culminations of the Oslo Peace Process, there was a short period of catharsis. Former prisoners gave guided tours that told stories of horrific abuse. But Arafat decided to set his headquarters there, using the site’s seclusion and fortifications to protect the hub of his new regime over the West Bank archipelago. As the Authority’s (and Israel’s) enemies were rounded up, the

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prison was put into new use and has once more become notorious for horrific abuse, this time perpetrated by Palestinians. It was thus ironic that it was within this very compound that Arafat, together with a close entourage, were made prisoners during a two-year siege that started in the spring of 2002 when the Israeli military occupied all Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. The Israeli army was held back at the gates of the Mukataa by Sharon, who was determined, it then seemed, to keep his promise to US President Bush not to harm Arafat, despite his compulsion to do so. The Mukataa compound was then, people in Palestine bitterly joked, like the small Gallic village in the Asterix comic series: the only part of Palestine left unoccupied. However, in September 2002 the Israeli military entered the compound and its bulldozers started slowly and deliberately demolishing all buildings but Arafat’s headquarters in it; then, sadistically, they used their mechanical arms to scrape at the walls of his headquarters. As Arafat and his entourage, fearing the bulldozer arms as well as Israeli snipers, retreated deeper into the windowless core of the building, the space of free Palestine shrank into an architectural dimension. But where snipers could not take a straight shot, and where their bullets would be too conspicuous a method, a dose of lethal polonium seems to have made its way across the architectural frontier. The death of Arafat led to the end of the siege and, with the election of Abbas as the Palestinian president less than two months later, to a truce that effectively ended the Second Intifada. Sharon was free to increase the rate of assassination of Hamas’s political and military leadership in Gaza and evacuate the settlements there. He fell into an irreversible coma a little more than a year later. When an uneasy peace had been restored to the West Bank, the compound was rebuilt with funds from Japan according to a vision that saw the presidential headquarters there as a place where, in the words of Rafik Husseini, chief of staff for Mahmoud Abbas, “the President can meet world leaders and deal with the world in a civilized and modern manner,”4 signalling a departure from the line of militant resistance. The museum and the mausoleum, built over the grave, were designed by the office of the internationally acclaimed Jordanian architect Jafar Tukan, who knew Arafat well. They were elegant structures, whose modern and sober look sought to reflect the Palestinian Authority’s aspiration for a new legitimacy. In 2007 the mausoleum was completed, replacing an improvised monument that had been erected in the otherwise largely destroyed compound. It is an 11 × 11 metre cubic structure (representing 11 November, the day of Arafat’s death) surrounded by a reflecting pool. A pillar was designed to shine a laser beam towards the al Aqsa mosque, the resting place Arafat’s will specified. But Israel refused to allow both burial in Jerusalem and the laser beam.

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The Palestinian Authority declared that the Mukataa was only Arafat’s temporary resting place until a Palestinian state was formed, and Arafat’s remains were excavated to be reburied in Jerusalem’s Harram al Sharif. But on 27 November 2012, workers removed the carved tomb stone and dug through a layer of concrete and a metre of soil in order to give Arafat’s skeletal remains to Palestinian physicians, who handed over sixty samples of bone and soil to three separate forensic teams from France, Switzerland, and Russia tasked with searching for polonium traces.5 The museum, whose construction began in 2010, connects the presidential headquarters and the mausoleum. The visitor route begins at the mausoleum and leads to the entrance of the museum building. There, two long ramps will take visitors up along a timeline sequence in which photographs, documents, filmed material, and books will narrate Arafat’s life. On the second floor, the path culminates in a bridge that leads to a section of the original presidential headquarters in which Arafat was holed up during the years of the siege. When the architects decided to preserve Arafat’s windowless office and his sleeping quarters with all their items, the desk, the objects and utensils on and near it in an aquarium-like glass box “as they were during a prolonged Israeli siege,”6 they did not imagine that they were thus preserving the likely scene of the crime. The opening, initially scheduled for the summer of 2012, has been continuously delayed. The reason, according to Nasser al-Qidwa, Arafat’s nephew and chairman of the Yasser Arafat Foundation, which oversaw both the architecture and the exhumations, was the severe financial crisis in the Palestinian Authority. Indeed, in August 2016 the pa announced an outstanding debt of $5 billion, with international donations failing to cover even 50 per cent of the deficit. The occupation itself continues to strangle Palestinian economic development, with the World Bank recently claiming that Israeli control costs the Palestinians the equivalent of 35 per cent of their gdp a year.7

Á Arafat is not the only leader who has recently undergone exhumation. In recent years in South America there has been a wave of exhumations of political leaders whose death occurred under suspicious circumstances. The exhumation of a political leader not only is a scientific undertaking, but tends to become a hybrid between a national ceremony, a forensic investigation, and a political intervention. This was the case in regards to both the televised exhumation of Simon Bolívar (organized by Hugo Chaves) in 2010 and that of Allende in Chile in 2011.8 Both exhumations, however, proved unsuccessful at demonstrating murder. A truth 279

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commission examining the abuses of Brazil’s long dictatorship exhumed João Goulart, former Brazilian president toppled in a 1964 coup supported by the United States, in order to check whether he was poisoned while in exile in Argentina in 1976, presumably by the agents of Operation Condor.9 Che Guevara, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda were also recently exhumed. Forensics, it seems, could become the tool of radical politics. That the anti-colonial or anti-imperial leaders of the past need to be exhumed testifies that – at the very least – the politics they pursued is direly absent among the living. But there is another reason why exhumations will continue to proliferate. Exhumations, as the political exposure of state crime, are responses to the increased use of assassinations as tactical and political tools by powerful states. Arafat is now the most senior victim of this warfare as exercised during the long war on terror. Political assassinations have of course a longer history, and have certainly been a central component of Israel’s war on the Palestinians since its inception. Israel’s logic behind leadership decapitation is that without a “toxic” leader the Palestinians might become more conducive to Israeli control. Developing and perfecting the technologies and techniques of assassination have become an industry of many branches – killings by snipers, by gravity bombs, by booby-trapped cars or cellphones, by guided missiles launched from helicopter or drone, or by poison. Many of Arafat’s closest colleagues – Abu Jihad in Tunis for example – and rivals within Palestinian ranks, such as members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have been assassinated by Israel. As long as he was on the move, Arafat was indestructible, escaping Israel’s countless attempts at killing him in Beirut, Libya, and Tunis. Only when he agreed to settle close by, as a part of an interim agreement with the Israeli government, could he be successfully eliminated. The tactic of targeted assassination and the collapse of war into crime is now being reproduced across the expanding frontiers of the war on terror, especially in the context of the drone campaign exercised by the US in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Similar to what Western militaries now call “focused lethality munitions” designed to reduce “collateral damage” by producing a blast more lethal, but also more circumscribed, of smaller radius than traditional explosives – and which are used increasingly with drones – polonium poisoning is a blast of radioactive energy that is highly localized and fast decaying. Polonium emanates alpha rays that do not penetrate the body and must therefore be introduced directly into it by food, drink, or medicine. It will not endanger the person carrying and administrating the poison, nor anyone in proximity. The half-life of polonium-210 – the time it takes for an element’s radioactivity to decrease by half – is 138 days, compared, for example, to the hundreds of millions of years that it

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takes more stable nuclear isotopes like uranium to decay by half. After 22 half-lives, the polonium in Arafat’s body had decayed to such an extent that the investigation precluded the measuring of polonium itself. Instead, the conclusions were drawn from the traces that polonium leaves behind – the high presence of lead-210, for example. Polonium thus gradually destroys not only the body that ingested it, but also its own traces, supporting the possibility of denial. Without the Alexander Litvinenko murder investigation, two years after the death of Arafat, which found polonium as the toxic agent,10 it would not have occurred to anyone to run these late tests. The forensic investigation has not, however, managed to place science above politics. Although the new culture of forensics seemingly seeks to replace the ambiguity and messiness of politics with the cold misanthropic conclusiveness of science, findings in the natural science are all subject to probability and error margins. The precise qualifying statements with which science expresses its findings have always left room for political manipulations and negations. The Swiss scientific team’s suggestion that their findings “moderately support” the conclusion that Arafat was poisoned by polonium, also expressed in the bizarre figure of 83 per cent confidence, allowed the spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, Yigal Palmor, to characterize the forensic results as “inconclusive, at best.”11 But these findings demand the question to be turned around – perhaps Israel would like to offer an alternative explanation for the presence of polonium-210 in Arafat’s bones? Only a nuclear reactor could realistically produce a lethal dose of polonium-210.12 The infrastructure and expertise required to produce it mean that it is implausible for amateur production, and its short halflife – 138 days – means that someone using it for a poison would need timely access to a fresh supply. If Arafat was assassinated with a nuclear product, then the “war on terror” has gone nuclear, not in the Cold War sense of ballistic missiles aimed at each other to assure mutual destruction, but nevertheless one in which the nuclear process is used for a lethal purpose. The fields of targeted assassinations and those of nuclear warfare have already become entangled with the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists. But the implications of the fact that Israel’s nuclear program has become lethal might also impact its standoff with Iran and the West’s negotiation with the latter. It seems that next to Nataz and Dimona, the radioactivity of the Mukataa – although more shallowly buried and emanating weaker traces – could further destabilize the region.

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noteS 1 Editors’ note: This chapter was written before the Yasser Arafat Museum opened on the West Bank in 2016. Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize medal and his last keffiyeh were on display, contrary to the author’s prediction they would be unavailable. Rather than rewrite the piece to reflect these changes, and others that have occurred in the region since the museum opened, the author wishes the piece to remain in its original form. 2 Arafat Museum adviser Mansour Tahboub, cited in Joel Greenberg, “Double Take: Presenting Arafat’s Legacy,” Haaretz, 24 July 2012, https://www.haaretz.com/ double-take-presenting-arafat-s-legacy-1.5270274. 3 Said Ghazali and Jodi Rudoren, “Palestinian Investigator Blames Israel in Arafat’s Death,” New York Times, 8 November 2013. 4 Khaled Abu Toameh, “Arafat’s Tomb to Get $1 Million Facelift,” Jerusalem Post, 26 October 2005. 5 Jihan Abdalla, “Samples Taken from Arafat Corpse for Poison Tests,” Reuters, 26 November 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-arafat/ samples-taken-from-arafat-corpse-for-poison-tests-idUSBRE8AP1A120121127. 6 Greenberg, “Double Take.” 7 The World Bank, “Income Stagnation and Worsening Living Standards Continue for Palestinian Families,” press release, 14 September 2016, http://www.worldbank. org/en/news/press-release/2016/09/15/income-stagnation-and-worsening-livingstandards-continue-for-palestinian-families. 8 Pereira, “Dead Commodities.” 9 bbc News, “Brazilian Ex-President Joao Goulart ‘Not Poisoned,’” 2 December 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-30287633. 10 Esther Addley and Luke Harding, “Key Finding: Who Killed Alexander Litvinenko, How and Why,” Guardian, 21 January 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2016/jan/21/key-findings-who-killed-alexander-litvinenko-how-and-why. 11 Isabel Kershner, “Swiss Report Supports Theory Arafat Was Poisoned,” New York Times, 6 November 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/world/middleeast/ swiss-report-supports-theory-arafat-was-poisoned.html. 12 United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Background on Polonium-210,” last updated 8 April 2016, https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/ fact-sheets/polonium.html.

david McMillan, tHe cHernoByl exclUsion Zone, 1994–

i first photographed in the Chernobyl exclusion Zone in 1994. within its millions of acres, there are fields left to lie fallow and cities and villages where the vestiges of the defunct Soviet empire and the everyday remnants of the lives of the former citizenry remain. i’ve photographed almost exclusively within the city of Pripyat. once home to 45,000 people, it was built to house the workers from the nuclear power plant, and several apartments were still under construction at the time of the accident. the city was considered one of the finest places to live in the former Soviet Union, with many schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, hospitals, and cultural facilities, but it will never be lived in again. within this area, virtually untouched by civilization since the 1986 accident, there have been dramatic changes that have become the subject of my photographs, particularly the proliferation of nature and the deterioration of the built environment. David McMillan

overleaf, left: Kindergarten Locker Room, Pripyat, 2012 overleaf, right: Lobby, Children’s Hospital, Pripyat, 2016

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the future-Past, the futurePresent, the future-Possible: the chernobyl exclusion zone Photographs of David mcmillan karla mcmanus

Beginning in 1994, the photographer David McMillan1 has repeatedly photographed the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and its surrounding exclusion zone, a region of 4,700 square kilometres maintained by the Ukrainian and Belarusian authorities.2 Since his first trip to the region, McMillan has devoted his photographic practice to the subject of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, focusing on the abandoned city of Pripyat, where citizens of the former Soviet Union lived and worked in support of the nuclear plant. His project, The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, has become a vast and largely private visual archive made up of thousands of images from the photographer’s many journeys to the region where the world’s worst nuclear disaster took place. With no end to the series envisioned, McMillan recently made his twenty-second trip to the region in November 2018. McMillan’s commitment to the subject of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster stands as a testament to his fascination with its ever-changing nuclear landscape: a site that was irrevocably and drastically altered, and continues to be shaped, by a single catastrophic event. In an interesting reversal, the exclusion zone, designed to keep people out, has become a porous border for the non-human, as animals and plants have repopulated many places once strictly groomed of nonauthorized life. McMillan has written that “the exclusion zone is a remarkable and surprising place, not dead and static, as one would expect,

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but full of growth and change.”3 McMillan’s photographs are not sublime images of industrial decay, a genre of photographs that has risen out of deindustrialization – most recently in images of economically abandoned Detroit4 – but instead, in the vein of Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” they can be interpreted as one person’s response to the renewal of a land poorly treated by its human managers.5 McMillan’s repeated trips to the exclusion zone, and his keen observations of the growth and decay of plant life, echo Leopold’s call for a commitment to place. In A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Leopold wrote that “when we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”6 While Leopold’s book on land ethic was devoted to a very local landscape and recounted how the changing seasons intimately impacted the flora and fauna of his family’s farm in Wisconsin, McMillan’s care for the exclusion zone, with its ruinous buildings and verdant growth, shares a common goal: to record, witness, and respond to the ecological shifting of a site emblematic of twentiethcentury progress into a place of failure, decay, regret, and regrowth. McMillan’s strength of response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, like that of many writers, thinkers, and artists who were profoundly impacted by the sense of planetary risk engendered by the event, has made the exclusion zone a place of belonging for the artist, whose images work to reveal the passage of time and complicate the simplicity of the before-and-after disaster scenario. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon writes that the slow violence of environmental crisis – marked by disasters that happen incrementally and out of sight, leading to the deterioration of the health and well-being of both people and environments – offers a representational challenge to writers, artists, and especially photographers, who rely primarily on the image’s instantaneous reproducibility and visual accessibility for its authority and impact. Nixon points to the emphasis on speed and dramatic spectacle in our technologically driven world as one of the major difficulties to representing and making visible slow violence. For Nixon, the lack of attention to environmental slow-violence catastrophes relates to questions of power: “Who gets to see and from where? When and how does such empowered seeing become normative? And what perspectives – not least those of the poor or women or the colonized – do hegemonic sight conventions of visuality obscure?”7 The darker implication of McMillan’s images comes through an understanding of the limitations of photography as a medium bounded in space and time, reduced to representing the noeme – the what-hasbeen in Barthes terms8 – and only able to infer and hint at the insidious and imperceptible radioactive contamination. It is particularly true that

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the single image enacts the very space-time compression that Nixon deplores, capturing the what-has-been and circulating it through geographical and historical space. In this chapter, I argue that not all photography is driven by spectacle and speed and that some photographs, such as McMillan’s Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Series images, can help viewers to better understand the state of our global environment by slowing down the speed at which we look. Through his practice of repeat photography, McMillan encourages us to re-evaluate a place ravaged by both time and circumstance. More than that, McMillan uses the photograph’s limitations as a form of space-time compression as an opportunity to consider the past, present, and future bounded by the frame. McMillan’s Chernobyl Exclusion Zone series resonates with today’s increasing sense of global ecological risk by picturing the past, present, and future as dialectical. The tension in these images, between future and past, between the ecological adaption to nuclear crisis and humanity’s destructive impact on nature and our own existence, speaks to our current anxiety about environmental crisis, from climate change to the geological legacy of nuclear waste, and the human struggle to adapt or perish in uncertain times. Drawing on the concept of the environmental imaginary, which informs the symbolic and cultural understanding of nature in its many forms, in this chapter I will connect McMillan’s images in their imaginary past, present, and future with the hope that my insights might help us all, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, “to think in the present and to think the present.”9 For Nancy, this means rejecting the understanding of the future as a condition of finality or an achievable aim. Instead, as Marc Augé writes, we must think of the future as “a time of conjunction” made up of “current events which give a content to the future by occurring.”10 Photography is an ideal medium through which to do this type of thought experiment, offering the viewer an experience predicated on the conjunction of time and space and fact and emotion, shaped heavily by our imaginations and sense of contingency – which Barbie Zelizer describes as the viewer’s “as if ” response, our subjunctive reception of the image.11

The Event: 26 April 1986 The Chernobyl nuclear meltdown had an enormous impact on the global imagination as people all over the world were driven to reconsider the risks of nuclear fission power generation, its relationship to Cold War arms technology, and the flaws in human stewardship.12 On the evening of 25 April 1986, engineers working at the Chernobyl plant took some of the safety systems offline to run tests on the fourth reactor. After several hours (of inattention?), they noticed that the reactor core had over288

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heated, leading to dangerously high core temperatures, which caused an explosion that subsequently set off a chain reaction: fire, nuclear fuel melting into lava, and an off-gassing of radioactive particles into the air which continued for days. Before long, sensors in Sweden and American satellites had picked up radioactive activity in the region and the whole world became aware that something terrible had happened. This legacy of risk and catastrophe plays out in McMillan’s photographs as viewers are faced with the past disaster, its photographic present, and the future implications of nuclear toxification on the landscape of Chernobyl and beyond. The town of Pripyat, which was built in 1970 to house the Chernobyl nuclear plant workers and their families, was not evacuated until thirtysix hours into the disaster; many of the people from the village would fall ill in the following years. As Thom Davies has argued in his ethnographic research of the surrounding communities, survivors continue to suffer from the cultural and social dislocation that occurred when they were forcibly evacuated.13 Following the disaster, some locals returned to live in the exclusion zone, living off gardens, husbandry, and foraged food collected from the overgrown forests, rather than live in crowded urban housing.14 The ongoing health, economic, and ecological impacts of the Chernobyl disaster on the people who lived there and the postSoviet governments who must pay for the maintenance, along with the global environmental implications of the contamination, continue to situate Chernobyl prominently in the global imagination. McMillan’s photographs of the plant, the city of Pripyat, the people who once lived there, and the people who continue to live in the zone demonstrate the devastating effect that the nuclear accident had on the local communities who relied on this major industry. In particular, McMillan’s images of Pripyat show a place left quickly and without consideration or hope of return. In what is perhaps his most famous image, of an abandoned kindergarten room in Pripyat, Portrait of Lenin, October 1997, McMillan documents the decay of a classroom that would once have echoed with excited voices. Shot from the centre of the room, towards what once was the front of the class, the image shows that there is little furniture left in the space but for some kid-sized chairs, knocked aside. Upon one chair lies a forgotten toy, a soft cloth doll in slightly faded purple and yellow. Bare floorboards run vertically from the foreground of the image, in perfect one-point perspective, towards the centre of the photograph. Yet the main wall, with its open doorway creating a dark shadow off to the right of the image, stops the direction of the eye. Moisture has done its worst to the wall’s surface, peeling it back to its raw material, and leaving strips of crackled paint hanging in discoloured clumps. In the very centre of the picture, a faded portrait of

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12.1 | David McMillan, Portrait of Lenin, Pripyat, October 1997.

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Lenin leans against the wall and floor, half-hidden by the little school chairs and some pink cables that hang down from the ceiling. Lenin has seen better days: his face is torn open at his nose, leaving a jagged gaping hole, and his colour has yellowed like old paper. Nevertheless he is recognizable, his piercing eyes and bald domed forehead all that is needed to identify the iconic figure.

The decay in McMillan’s images reminds us that time and history move on, even in the face of great tragedy and crisis. Devoid of people, yet riddled with references of human social and political life – after all, schools are the institutional training grounds of good citizens – Portrait of Lenin, October 1997 is a record of McMillan’s experience in this abandoned place. It is the photographer’s presence – not the spectre of children studying in this classroom – that most haunts the image. Viewing this photograph of squalid abandonment, it is easy to imagine McMillan setting up his large-format camera, adjusting his tripod, and framing the perfect shot. In October 2009, McMillan would do so again: Lenin’s face is no longer present but we, the viewers, know it was once there. The nuclear image once again reminds viewers that we will be gone from this world one day, as will McMillan, leaving behind this image as a record of what has been, a moment of catastrophe, now past, that continues. In a series of images taken at a playground in Pripyat (1994–2005), McMillan shows a world abandoned by children, overgrown and overtaken by nature. Seedlings, saplings, and larger trees bristle with branches that have never been pruned. Old and rusted playground structures, the kind that no one buys today because they are metal and coated in oil-based paints, remain upright but seem to have become another part of the landscape. Fallen leaves, jutting branches, and ever-expanding trunks give the impression that something terrible happened to drive away all the fun. In one image, Playground, October 1997, the viewer is shown the grey and faded remnants of a former playground, a space designed for children to run and climb, where the growth of grasses and saplings has continued unchecked. From the bottom of the photograph, leading straight up into the wild space, a cement pathway remains the only surface not overgrown. Yet the path ends abruptly in the middle of the image, as if unfinished. Three metal tubular climbing structures stand in the middle ground, filling the image from left to right like soldiers at attention. They are shaped – ironically – into childish symbols of the modern world: a rocket to the moon, a slide across space, and a globe to unite us all. Their colours have faded away, becoming grey and rusted. Among the open structures where kids would once have contorted their limbs to climb between the bars like monkeys in the forest, tree branches have grown through the forms, jutting in and out of the openings, reminders of former arms and legs. The bush continues to flourish towards the back of the image where breaks in the canopy open up to show the white back of an apartment complex and the steel grey clouds of the sky overhead. An underlying unease is present in this faded ruination of childhood. What has caused this wildness to flourish unchecked? Nuclear disaster? Toxic pollution? Displacement because of climate change or war? Is this the post-apocalyptic world and what kind 291

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12.2 | David McMillan, Playground, Pripyat, October 1997.

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of horrors are lurking in the shadows? Or is not the horror, in fact, the very thing that this toxic garden has overthrown? McMillan’s images of Chernobyl often inspire personal and visceral reactions from viewers. In her accompanying essay to the exhibition “Exclusion Zone” (2014) at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba,

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curator Natalia Lebedinskaia writes of how her response to McMillan’s images is mediated by her childhood in Russia. Lebedinskaia writes of the Geiger counter gifted to her mother in the summer of 1986, “so that [she] could take it to the farmer’s markets to measure the radiation in fruit.”15 Writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Anne Marie Todkill is overwhelmed by the “sheer environmental madness of it all,” when presented with an exhibition of images from McMillan’s first six trips to the Zone at the former Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.16 I cannot remember, exactly, the first time I saw one of McMillan’s photographs of the Chernobyl exclusion zone but they have profoundly shaped my sense of the place, the 1986 disaster and, more broadly, my sense of the risks embodied in nuclear energy. It may have been at gallery, the Winnipeg artist co-op gallery that ran from 1995 to 2005 in the Exchange District, where McMillan now has his studio. Or it may have been when McMillan, a retired professor of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, gave a talk about this project in one of my art history courses on the history of photography around 2001. Or was it in a course on Canadian art history? Regardless, what I do remember was thinking about how horrific it must have been to visit a place so contaminated, so abandoned, so sad. Yet when McMillan speaks of his visits to the site and his creation of images, it is without the emotional pathos that we, the viewers, may bring to his images. This is the ultimate contingency of the photograph, an individual response that cannot be anticipated by its photographic creator.

The Camera Enviroca In its early days, nuclear photography contributed to the Cold War culture of risk and uncertainty. Cold War imagery presented both the official positive image of nuclear power and military supremacy, translating the propagandistic vision promoted by governments into an iconic visual rhetoric that still resonates today, while at the same time contributing to a larger existential and physical fear of unknown risk. Cold War photography – from images of global realpolitik, to mushroom clouds, to “The Family of Man” exhibition – was a powerful visual record of the cultural and political era.17 In his history of nuclear imagery, Spencer R. Weart writes: “Radioactive monsters, utopian atom-powered cities, exploding planets, weird ray devices, and many other images have crept into the way everyone thinks about nuclear energy, whether that energy is used in weapons or in civilian reactors. The images, by connecting up with major social

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and psychological forces, have exerted a strange and powerful pressure within history.”18 The most powerful nuclear image will always be the so-called mushroom cloud, a symbol that has proven its iconic status through its adoption as both a sign of progress and of the folly of man. Much has been written over the years about this iconic shape, but a dominant surge in interest began in the mid- to late 1980s.19 Vincent Leo, writing on the symbolism of the mushroom cloud in the magazine Afterimage, argues that the mushroom shape became a naturalized visual trope, a photographic cliché, that “emphasize[d] a discrete physical event at the expense of the historical contextualization.”20 In her analysis of the many meanings of the mushroom cloud, Peggy Rosenthal writes that following the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, she was shocked to hear the rhetoric of military and scientific congratulatory triumph regurgitated in television and news reports. As a result of her personal reaction, she was drawn to make sense of the multiple responses to the image, which seemed so straightforwardly negative to her eyes. Rosenthal concludes that “for all its clashing and alarming messages, the mushroom cloud at least projects its meaning loud and clear. Although it’s a complex symbol, it’s not a subtle one. It keeps its powerful meanings dramatically before us and so sustains our collective urgency about them.”21 Blake Fitzpatrick has written that “being possessed by a crisis with no end in sight requires viewers to imagine the unimaginable.”22 Yet to a degree, there was an end to the crisis. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall were definitive moments in history that contributed to the end of the Cold War, from which all that has come after can now be described as “post.” What cannot ever be considered past is the pollution that nuclear power, nuclear testing, nuclear bombing, and nuclear accidents have contributed to the global environment, shaping human biology as well as the human psyche. In a sense, post–mushroom cloud nuclear photography fights an ongoing battle with time and against the smoothing over of questionable decisions and painful history. Such nuclear photographs are an attempt to come to terms with the legacy of the many technological and historical artifacts that continue to be present, but not always visible, on the landscape. Through his research on the photography of the atomic age analyzing how images circulate in various contexts, from textbooks to exhibitions to postcards, John O’Brian has described its visual legacy as the “Camera Atomica.”23 O’Brian has argued that it is the “atomicity” of nuclear photographs, their techno-scientific structure, that is central to their visual impact and meaning.24 He writes, “atomicity places a premium on scientific nuclear discourse as opposed to discussions of the

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bomb’s realpolitik instrumentality as a weapon, its power to obliterate whole populations, to contaminate the natural world and to awe enemies.”25 For O’Brian, atomic photographs are reminders that “we shall not be here one day – except, perhaps, in the form of images that have been left behind.”26 The pathos in nuclear photography speaks to the uncertainty inherent in our relationship with nuclear technology and its risk to the future: of the environment, human existence, and the hope we place in technological solutions. During the 1980s and 1990s, images of nuclear power and nuclear protest began to picture a more ecologically nuanced vision of the camera atomica, echoing a growing environmental anxiety. From John Pfahl’s Power Places (1981–84), which sought to picture the nuclear industrial complex within the beauty of its surroundings,27 to Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos (1981–87), which has looked at various military and nuclear installations throughout the deserts of the western United States,28 to John Kippin’s Cold War Pastoral series (1998–2000), about the closing of Greenham Common military base and the Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, England,29 to Edward Burtynsky’s sublime Uranium Tailings images (1995), which pictured the waste product of the industry, the camera enviroca has taken a closer look at the interaction of the environment and the contemporary nuclear landscape. Yet as the events of 11 March 2011 in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan have highlighted, the instability of nuclear power in the Anthropocene has raised the spectre of climate change to a larger level of risk.30 The Fukushima-Daiichi meltdown, which followed the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, was the worst global nuclear accident since Chernobyl. When an earthquake measuring 9.0 Richter scale hit 130 kilometres off the east coast of Japan, it precipitated the largest tsunami in recorded history. Inundating the northeast Pacific coast of the island, it flooded an area of 561 square kilometres and cut off power to a large part of the country’s east coast.31 This led to the meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant, which has had the most significant impact on Japan’s environmental, economic, and energy landscape since the Second World War. As the first nuclear disaster since the social media age, images, blog entries, online news stories, and opinion editorials about the triple disaster quickly spread. Photographs taken in the aftermath focused on the cleanup crews and dead bodies, the displaced people, and destroyed infrastructure. These images presented the situation in typical disaster reporting fashion, focusing on the “horror and grief of the events and communicating basic information about the scale of the destruction wreaked by the earthquake and the tsunami.”32 They also showed the

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terrible ravaging of the landscape, where natural disaster combined with the human-made to devastating effect, alongside aerial shots and maps to help the viewer gain a sense of perspective on the disaster. Photography will continue to play an important role in these debates, projecting back at us our fears and hopes for the future while helping us anticipate and imagine the larger implications of our world risk society. While the atomic age has provided us with a wealth of images, of both catastrophe and renewal, these images do not remain as inert moments in history. They continue to speak across time and around the world, echoing the complex symbolism of Cold War cultural values, while adapting to reflect more recent socio-political and cultural meanings. Placed in context, today’s nuclear photography offers viewers insight into the interrelated concerns of the environmental imaginary, simultaneously reminding us of the legacy of the atomic age and Cold War culture and the pressing concerns for the future climate and human existence. While the power of nuclear photography lies in its evocation of our past and our potential future, it is ultimately through our viewing and imagining the unimaginable that these images gain their significance.

Disasters, Ruins, of Nature and Man There is a deep sense of entropy in McMillan’s Chernobyl Exclusion Zone series as the abandonment of human infrastructure and places once inhabited – offices, schools, and homes – leads to their eventual ruin. In a 1918 essay, the sociologist Georg Simmel describes architecture as the only art form that does not dominate nature, but instead balances the “will of the spirit,” humankind’s urge to dominate and create, with the power of nature in its form. Accordingly, it is when the building shifts in favour of nature that it becomes a ruin, “an object infused with our nostalgia; for now the decay appears as nature’s revenge for the spirit’s having violated it by making a form in its own image.”33 This state of return, which renders a human-created object into a form of nature, seems to embody an acknowledgment of a kind of rightful return, or in Simmel’s words, “a secret justice of destruction,”34 which reaffirms that the past can still echo into the present while reminding us that we will be remembered. The seduction of ruins is, as Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle have written, “an experience as inescapable as it is old.”35 For Andreas Huyssen, ruins offer a “promise of authenticity, immediacy, and authority”36 by representing the past as glorious and engaging in nostalgia in the present. Svetlana Boym calls this nostalgia for the ruin “ruinophilia,” a

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fascination for ruins as “physical embodiments of modern paradoxes reminding us of the blunders of modern teleologies and technologies alike, and of the riddles of human freedom.”37 Brian Dillon has argued that “the modern ruin – the industrial ruin, the defunct image of future leisure (the vacant mall or abandoned cinema), or the specter of Cold War dread – is in fact always, inevitably, a ruin of the future. And that future seems, retrospectively, to have taken over the entire twentieth century: all of its iconic ruins … now look like relics of lost futures, whether utopian or dystopian.”38 In the case of Chernobyl and Pripyat’s ruins, it is the wreckage of nuclear positivism, scientific modernism, and techno-scientific control that is pictured, alongside that of decaying physical and social structures. Since 2002, Chernobyl has been opened up to guided tourism, and interest in the site, along with the number of photographs, has only increased.39 Addressing the tourist photography of Chernobyl, Daniel Bürkner argues that the visual representation of nature as an “apocalyptic counter-reality” that mythologizes the visitor as a heroic traveller, increases its appeal as a destination.40 Indeed, this is reinforced in Paul Dobraszczyk’s thoughtful account of his trip to the exclusion zone as a form of “dark tourism,” which was inspired by his practice of visiting illicit industrial sites as an urban explorer.41 Dobraszczyk uses his photography from the trip to present to the viewer his experience of Pripyat, an affective account that feeds his sense of disquiet over the future, a future threatened by climate change and other unknown risks.42 The ruins of Chernobyl and Pripyat give us a sense of temporal dislocation while picturing a paradox: by showing the past, they also send us into the future through the contingency of the photographic image, predicting the decay of our current society. As Dillon so eloquently puts it, “the ruin casts us forward in time; it predicts a future in which our present will slump into similar disrepair or fall victim to some unforeseeable calamity. The ruin, despite its state of decay, somehow outlives us.”43 McMillan presents us with civilization’s ruin, as artists have done since the Enlightenment, a reminder of human frailty and of hope for a better future. There is something shocking about this response: how can the worst nuclear disaster of human history offer any sense of hope for the future? Is there any redeeming quality to be found in the ruins of an engineering feat that was meant to provide clean and cheap energy to all and instead poisoned thousands of people? Drawing on the aesthetic tradition of the ruin, McMillan’s landscapes of Chernobyl and Pripyat offer a vision of a wilderness reborn. The reversal of human habitation to natural splendour – the rejection of dominance to embrace wildness – reminds us of the long reach of history

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and of the different temporal and spatial scales at play. McMillan’s representation of the collapse of human agency on the landscape can have both a negative and a positive impact on the imagination: to some, the thought of human civilization in ruin is a crisis in itself, but to many the idea that nature can recover – can re-wild – an iconic ruin as damaged as Chernobyl lends hope. Biocentric nostalgia inhabits these images, as the embattled nature of our modern world is pictured overcoming the techno-scientific – a romantic battle between good and evil in the eyes of many environmental activists and thinkers today. The reversal of human habitation to natural splendour – the rejection of dominance to embrace wildness – reminds us of the failure of humanity’s aim of transcendence, the dream of modern progression that embraced technology as a means to an end rather than, as in Nancy’s words, “a mode of our existence.”44 Yet the beauty and sublimity of the ruin are balanced dialectically in McMillan’s photographs between the viewer’s longing for a romantic rewilding of humanity’s failure, representing the fantasy of a utopic return to a once pure state, and an ecological understanding of nature and civilization as inextricable. From the acceptance of ecological instability and complexity as normal, to the understanding of “nature” as intrinsically cultural is not a far leap. The wilderness myth, as William Cronon has named the romantic decoupling of culture and nature, acts as a form of historical erasure, either through its recreation of the innocence in the garden or a “savage world at the dawn of civilization.”45 Yet “nature” as an ideological formulation of purity, continues to call to us like an intrinsic state of being or purpose, an “other” that we admire and long for from afar. The crisis of ontological certainty in nature, civilization, technology, and chronology has been a long time coming, heightened by the economic development of the global landscape. As Nancy wrote in his rumination on the Fukushima triple disaster, “there are no more natural catastrophes: there is only a civilizational catastrophe that expands every time. This can be demonstrated with each so-called natural catastrophe – earthquake, flood, or volcanic eruption – to say nothing of the upheavals produced in nature by our technologies.”46 Timothy Morton has described the acknowledgment that “Nature” is inseparable from human action, politics, ideology, and aesthetics, caught in an interconnected mesh of life and matter, history and geography as “dark ecology.”47 While Morton’s polemical argument that humans must throw off the rigid separation of culture and nature by “thinking big” calls for a conceptual interconnection of everything in an ecological mesh of relationality,48 we also need to fight the universalism and dystopian lethargy that can come to dominate if we accept the “uncivilisation” process as inevitable.49

As a result of his frequent trips to the exclusion zone, McMillan began to rephotograph particular images, drawn to the changes he saw over repeated visits and to the opposing forces of decay and growth in the landscape. In an abandoned gymnasium in the Pripyat Palace of Culture, a Soviet-era building once meant to glorify the heroic worker and now tainted with failure, McMillan captures a scene of dystopic ruin, unpeopled, and empty. Gymnasium “Palace of Culture,” taken first in October 1996 then again in 2004, shows the slow creeping of new growth in what once was an institutional gymnasium meant for human recreation. At first glance the two images, taken eight years apart, appear emblematic of modernity’s failure, the hubris of man, and the folly of progress – all the tropes that come to mind in the wake of human driven techno-ecological disaster. Yet in the first image, we see the beginnings of renewal, albeit gradual, in the success of a tree shooting up from the rotting floorboards. By the second image, success seems assured as the building further degrades around the new life. By practising a form of repeat photography, McMillan demonstrates that change and growth are still possible as the plants and animals that once were controlled – not to mention spores and seeds once washed and swept away – are now allowed free rein. Twenty years of moisture and decay can do a lot of damage, even while trees shoot up and birds build nests in abandoned classrooms. In a paradoxical way, these images offer a sense of hope for the future of the planet, even as they represent the ongoing nuclear and environmental catastrophe. As abandoned agricultural and urban land has become overgrown with vegetation, animals – including top predators, insects, and birds – have come to repopulate the exclusion zone, albeit at some cost to themselves and future generations.50 The implications of Chernobyl’s toxic landscape on the region’s plants and animals, something scientists – and viewers – have become increasingly interested in, is still to be determined, although a long-term census of wildlife recently published suggests populations are thriving, in part because the threat of nuclear contamination to humans keeps that predator’s population low.51 As studies on low-dose radiation, underfunded and obfuscated by international policy, have slowly begun to reveal, thriving nature does not always tell the whole story.52 While McMillan’s images show nature winning, they are coloured by our knowledge that contamination is invisible, insidious, inescapable, and ever changing. McMillan’s repeat photographs don’t promise scientific objectivity or usable data, as much repeat photography tries to do. Instead they reveal the photographer’s deep engagement with a place that is constantly

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Repeated Histories

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k arla m cm an u s 12.3a | David McMillan, Gymnasium, Palace of Culture, Pripyat, October 1996

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changing. McMillan’s continued fascination with Chernobyl is a quiet commitment to a site of significant importance to the world. His images suggest that the recording of this transformation is more than enough, as a visual response to the conjunction of past, present, and future. While McMillan’s photographs could never tell the whole story of the devastating Chernobyl accident, nor provide answers to our ongoing problems of anthropogenic climate change, they do offer the viewer a chance to actively imagine the future through the viewing of past events, in the present.53 More importantly, they prick the imagination and present contingency as part of the image, offering a darkly hopeful “what if ” for the future of the earth. They ask: what does the rewilding of Chernobyl mean for the future of the site, of humanity, of the planet?

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Through their temporal conjunction, to repeat Nancy’s call, they offer us a way “to think in the present and to think the present.” While addressing a particular environmental disaster, McMillan’s photographs of Chernobyl also act as a warning of what is at stake should climate change – or any other major environmental threat – take full hold, as well as question how we will survive. They ask us to consider how humanity will adapt and what might be lost. In much the same way that nuclear events (past and present) are a challenge to the imagination, the photographic representation of our current and ongoing environmental crisis is a difficult subject to picture. The photography of risk, whether it is the risk of nuclear apocalypse or climate change, depends on the viewer’s ability to translate images of the present

12.3b | David McMillan, Gymnasium, Palace of Culture, Pripyat, October 2004

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into emblems of future threat, to imagine the future of the world when armed only with knowledge of the past and the present. As nuclear risk continues to be insidious, and often visually banal until the very moment of crisis, climate change requires the acceptance of an invisible and projected future risk on behalf of the viewing public. Through the work of imagining the future, we need to also imagine the future of our nuclear landscape in the ongoing climate change discussions of politicians, environmentalists, artists, and multiple publics.

noteS 1 Born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1945, McMillan was raised in the United States and came to Canada in the wake of the Vietnam War, armed with a master of fine arts degree. He and his wife ended up staying in Canada permanently, although it wasn’t until 2016 that McMillan finally became a citizen of Canada. 2 Greenpeace International, “Scale of Chernobyl.” 3 McMillan, “Chernobyl Photographs.” 4 This is sometimes called “ruin porn,” for the glossy quality of the images being produced at a high rate today. Miller, “Panic in Detroit.” An example might include Robert Polidori’s Metropolis, which includes images of Chernobyl and Pripyat, bombed Beirut, flooded New Orleans, and decaying Havana all in one book. 5 Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” 201–26. 6 Ibid., viii. 7 Nixon, Slow Violence, 15. 8 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115. 9 Nancy, After Fukushima, 37. 10 Augé, The Future, 1. 11 Zelizer, About to Die, 6. 12 Heise writes that as a result of the wind forcing radioactive dust across the planet, “Chernobyl therefore turned into a truly transnational risk scenario.” Sense of Place, 179. 13 Davies, “Visual Geography of Chernobyl,” 118. 14 Nieduzak, “Rena Effendi, Chernoby.” 15 Lebedinskaia, Exclusion Zone. 16 The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography has since closed and their collection, including McMillan’s work, is now part of the National Gallery of Canada. Todkill, “Overexposure,” 1604–5. 17 For a discussion of the larger photographic context of the Cold War see Langford and Langford, A Cold War Tourist, 19–30. For an American focus, see Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden. 18 Weart, Nuclear Fear, i. 19 Leo, “The Mushroom Cloud,” 6–12; Weart, Nuclear Fear; Rosenthal, “The Nuclear Mushroom Cloud,” 63–92; Hariman and Lucaites, “The Iconic Image of the Mushroom Cloud”; Lippit, Atomic Light. 20 Leo, “The Mushroom Cloud,” 7. 21 Rosenthal, “The Nuclear Mushroom Cloud,” 89. 302

Fitzpatrick, “Atomic Afterimages,” 187. O’Brian, “The Nuclear Family of Man”; O’Brian, Camera Atomica. O’Brian, Atomic Postcards, 6. Ibid., 6–7. O’Brian, “On Photographing,” 187. Pfahl, A Distanced Land. Misrach, Crimes and Splendors. Kippin, Cold War Pastoral. Parkins and Haluza-DeLay, Social and Ethical Considerations. Koseki, “The Unfolding of the Triple Disaster,” 11–12. Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen, and Cottle, Disasters and the Media, 51. Simmel, “Two Essays,” 380. Ibid., 382. Hell and Schönle, eds, Ruins of Modernity, 2. Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins,” 20. Boym, “Ruinophilia.” See also Boym, “Ruins of the Avant-Garde,” 58–85. Dillon, “Fragments from a History of Ruin.” Johnson and Ludwig, “The Nuclear Tourist.” Bürkner, “Chernobyl Landscape,” 33. Dobraszczyk, “Petrified Ruin,” 370–89. Ibid., 387. Dillon, Ruins, 11. Nancy, After Fukushima, 36. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 79. Nancy, After Fukushima, 34. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 181. Morton, Ecological Thought, 20–58. Kingsnorth and Hine, “Uncivilization.” For a long-term study of how animals, particularly birds, are adapting to radiation in the exclusion zone see Galván et al., “Chronic Exposure”; Møller and Mousseau, “Reduced Abundance of Insects,” 356–9. 51 Deryabina et al., “Long-Term Census Data,” r 824–26. 52 Møller and Mousseau, “Investigating the Effects,” 551–65; Møller and Mousseau, “Genetic and Ecological Studies,” 704–9. 53 For a deeper discussion of how artists are actively working to create awareness of climate change using the imagination see Yusoff and Gabrys, “Climate Change,” 516–34.

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for Zero Hour, Public Studio (elle flanders and tamira Sawatzky) created a 360˚ projection in a geodesic dome, situated just in front of toronto’s McLaughlin Planetarium, each orb refracting the other. the immersive installation takes viewers on a journey into current weather patterns and climactic disturbances taking place in the southern hemisphere. Public Studio invited essayist, painter, poet and philosopher etel adnan to create a poem set to the dome projection. Zero Hour gathers the cosmos outside the planetarium in toronto and reflects back not the stars of the northern hemisphere but rather the weather it has disrupted and the words that come back in protest. Public Studio

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troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness karen BaraD

In these troubling times, the urgency to trouble time, to shake it to its core, to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable and the past as something that has passed and is no longer with us is something so tangible, so visceral, there is a sense in which it can be felt in our individual and collective bodies. This urgency is both new and not new. With fascism on the rise around the globe and the threat of an accelerated nuclear arms race at hand, tied to a perverse sense of the usability of nuclear weapons, the false security of global strategic deterrence based on mad (the military doctrine of mutually assured destruction) left exposed and undone by madness, compulsiveness, and hubris, the twentieth century is anything but past/passed. The same can surely be said of previous centuries. And if debates on marking the origins of the Anthropocene suggest anything beyond an exacting reading of the layering of sediments used to justify adding a new segment of time to earth’s geological clock, it is perhaps that the structure of temporality that timelines (in their linearity) smuggle into the discussion is inadequate to this moment. For if the climate experts in their official report to the International Geological Congress meeting in Cape Town in August 2016 mark the origin of the new epoch to be “defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests”1 beginning in 1950, and strong arguments have been made by scientists and non-scientists that offer reasons for using other dates as the “golden spike,” the debates have mostly been about laying down the marker at the right time (whether at 1492, 1610, 1945, 1950, or 1963–66), and they have not for the most part questioned whether these times ought to be thought of as falling in a line, as if they were separated

Á Over the course of the years, I’ve been working my way back to where I started: re-turning to the questions that have always been with me and continue to drive my work, the ones that drove me to become a student of the humanities in order to learn how to think about justice while I followed my intellectual passions into the world of physics; coming back to the questions I wrestled with as I began my graduate studies in physics and became involved in anti-nuclear and other activist work. How can I be responsible for that which I love in the face of its violent historical legacy and its continuing involvement in the military industrial complex? Is there a way to do physics responsibly in the aftermath of the atomic bomb? Is the field itself so utterly tainted by, indeed saturated with, violence that there is no possibility of subversive participation? If, as feminist science studies scholars have convincingly argued, ethical issues are not limited to the applications of scientific theories, but, rather, values are made together with facts inside the operations of what gets called “pure science,” then are the very practices of theorizing and experimenting caught up in war making, capitalist projects of expansion and extraction, growth and development, such that they inevitably lead to the production of new forms of violence? How are its theories of space, time, and matter marked by gender, race, sexuality, nationalism, and colonialism? Can we find the traces of this violence even in its most abstract instantiations? And, if this is so, are there nonetheless openings that exist within physics that might trouble its hegemony, its authority, its unapologetic epistemological imperialism that claims to cover all of space, time, and matter? Is there a way to use physics’ own insights to undermine its (entanglement with) colonizing practices? Indeed, is it possible that inside such practices we might find radical political imaginaries that are resources for survival rather than destruction, for justice rather than the perpetuation of violence? Agential realism has been my attempt to begin to approach some of these questions. I have been committed to the political deconstructive project of opening up this seeming totality called Physics in order to

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from one another by temporal distance.2 But rather than understand these differing proposals as merely a simple disagreement about origins, perhaps we should take this as evidence that faith in the existence of a singular determinate origin and the unilinear nature of time itself (the fact that only one moment exists at a time) is waning. Is there a sense of temporality that could provide a different way of positioning these markers of history and understand 1492 as living inside 1945, for example, and even vice versa?

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nurture the cracks and bring forward its radical possibilities. Interestingly, this deconstructive dynamic – the inevitable generation of its own undoings from within – is an insight that can be found within physics (and not only within Derridean deconstruction, which is itself a Derridean or indeed quantum insight).3 I want to be clear: The point is not to glorify physics, to leave it off the hook, as being outside of politics, but on the contrary, to hold it accountable, while at the same time being attuned to the radical political possibilities of its deconstructive openings – to the fact that it might indeed offer new material imaginaries, other possibilities, other worlds that are not merely to come, but exist in the thickness of the now. I also want to emphasize that it’s important to keep in mind that the physics that I offer up for your consideration is not offered as the Truth (capital T) from the Scientists (capital S, as if from on High). But rather, agential realism combines insights from my own unique way of understanding quantum physics (my own interpretation) as diffractively read through insights from a host of different theories that concern themselves with questions of social and ecological justice: including feminist, queer, trans, critical race theory, disability studies, post-colonial and decolonial studies, Marxist theories, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. That is, the goal is nothing less than finding ways to engage in the practice of doing physics differently, in ways that lend themselves to addressing injustices rather than merely reiterating, reinforcing, and proliferating them.4

Introduction A pine tree is time … and bamboo is time. Mountains are time. Oceans are time … If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated … Time itself is being … and all being is time … In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Time isn’t what it used to be. Perhaps it never was. It surely hasn’t been itself since the Doomsday Clock – an instrumental measure of time’s own demise – was set at just minutes to midnight. Time has been shattered, imploded into bits, dispersed by the wind; moments caught up in turbulent flows forming eddies, circling back around, re-turning, reconfiguring what will have been. Time is diffracted: entanglements of past, present, and future, superpositions of now-then-to-come caught up in and performing iterative undoings of the self in its sedimenting historicities.

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In these troubling times how can we not trouble time? This chapter is drawn from a larger work, which is about troubling time/s, about the nature of being and time, or rather, time-being.5 It concerns itself with thickly entangled tales about the atom bomb, physics, war, militarism, imperialism, racism, and colonialism. Raising questions of history, memory, and politics (all of which are rooted in and invested in particular conceptions of time and being), this is a story of the inseparability of physics’ deconstructive as well as destructive potentials. This account does not offer an alternative history so much as an alternative sense of history. It engages with alternative conceptions of temporality and history, such as the coexistence of multiple material historicities condensed into a moment, an infinitesimal point of spacetimemattering. When the splitting of a point, indeed, its tiny nucleus, destroys cities and remakes the global geopolitical field, the tracing of entanglements might be a better analytical choice than any nested notion of scale. How large is an infinitesimal? What is the measure of nothingness? What would it take to be able to hear the silent cries, the murmuring silence of the void in its materiality and potentiality? What are the conditions of im/possibilities of living-dying in “voids” produced by technoscientific projects and other forms of colonial conquest?

Time-Being Matter fell from grace during the twentieth century. It became mortal. Very soon after that it was murdered, exploded at its core, torn to shreds, blown to smithereens. The smallest of smallest bits, the heart of an atom, was broken apart with a violence that made the earth and the gods quake. In an instant, in a flash of light brighter than a thousand suns, the distance between Heaven and Earth was obliterated. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” thus spoke physicist Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from Bhagavad Vita, in the wake of the first atomic bomb explosion. There was a time when matter stood outside of time. But in the intervening years between the two world wars, physicists broke with a more than one-thousand year-old tradition, inherited from the Greeks, and placed matter in the hands of time. Quantum field theory (qft ) – a mixture of quantum theory, special relativity, and classical field theory – was responsible for this radical change in the order of things. Physicists began working on qft starting in the late 1920s, but quickly ran into difficulties – most seriously, the so-called “infinities problem,” which was not resolved before the war. The war effort interrupted the development of the theory (at least in the West) because

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the same physicists who were hard at work on qft were called on to work on and take the lead in the development of new military technologies. This is not a coincidence. Nuclear physics developed alongside and inside qft , and many of the top physicists around the world were working on qft and nuclear physics. Skills, techniques, approaches to cracking hard problems, and more, were traded back and forth between military research and the most abstract efforts in physics. In many ways, the war effort for physicists around the globe was dis/continuous with work in “pure” theoretical physics.6 Whether time was marked as continuous or discontinuous, it is important, and importantly not coincidental, that the physicists working at the forefront of the development of qft were integrally involved in the production of wartime technologies, including the atom bomb.7 It is perhaps no surprise then that at the very core of qft are questions of time and being.

SpaceTime Diffraction and the Superposition of All Possible Histories Diffraction is a matter of patterning attuned to differences. Waves make diffraction patterns precisely because multiple waves can be in the same place at the same time, and a given wave can be in multiple places at the same time. Particles do neither; by definition, particles are localized entities that take up space: they can be here or there, but not in two places at once. However, it turns out that entities we take to be “particles” can produce diffraction patterns under specific circumstances. How can this be? According to quantum physics this is because a given particle can be in a state of superposition. To be in a state of superposition between two positions, for example, is not to be here or there, or even here and there: rather, it is to be indeterminately here-there – that is, it is not simply that the position is unknown, but rather there is no fact of the matter as to whether it is here or there. That is, it is a matter of ontology, not merely epistemology. As a result of this indeterminacy of position (the precise principle is the position-momentum indeterminacy principle), things we take to be “particles” can in fact exhibit diffraction patterns under particular circumstances. Or rather, when they do exhibit a diffraction pattern it is an expression of the fact that they are in a state of superposition. Note that while it is tempting to say that a given particle in a state of superposition is in two places at once, this is a simplification that doesn’t fully capture the complexities: for one thing a particle, by definition, has a determinate position (for example, is either here or there); and furthermore, if one were to perform a measurement to directly test the 310

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hypothesis that a particle is in two places at once (by testing, for example, which slit it goes through), then it wouldn’t be (in two places at once) (!), because a particle whose position is detected will behave like a good particle and only ever show up in one place at a time, even though the pattern produced when the position isn’t being measured (as in the case of a two-slit experiment without which-slit detection) can only be accounted for if “it” were at least in two places at once, that is, if “it” behaved like a wave, in which case “it” isn’t a particle. Patterns of differences (differencing/différancing) are arguably at the core of what matter is, and are at the heart of how quantum physics understands the world.8 Indeed, Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman proposed an understanding of quantum physics based solely on the notion of diffraction (that is, superposition). To see this, it is first of all important to note that according to quantum physics, there is no determinate path that a particle takes in going from one position to another – that is, no such path exists. But what physicists can do is calculate the probability that a given particle that starts out here will wind up there. The quantum probabilities are calculated by taking account of all possible paths connecting the two points (see figure 13.1). In other words, a given particle that starts out here and winds up there is understood to be in a superposition of all possible paths between the two points, or, in its four-dimensional qft elaboration, all possible spacetime histories. But these “possibilities” are not to be thought of in the usual way: it is not that each history is merely possible and ultimately only one will be manifest. The very meaning of a superposition is that all possible histories are happening together; they all coexist and mutually contribute to the overall pattern, else there wouldn’t be a diffraction pattern. Quantum physics opens up another possibility beyond the relatively familiar phenomenon of spatial diffraction: namely, temporal diffraction! The existence of temporal diffraction is due to a less well-known indeterminacy principle: the time-energy indeterminacy principle. (This indeterminacy principle plays a key role in quantum field theory.) As a result of this indeterminacy principle, a given “particle” can be in (a state of) superposition of different times: for example, this one “particle” right here (between my fingers) can be in a state of coexisting at multiple times – for example, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Temporality is not merely multiple, but rather temporalities are specifically entangled and threaded through with one another such that there is no determinate answer to the question, What time is it? This takes a bit of getting used to, even more so than spatial diffraction, but temporal diffraction has in fact been observed experimentally,9 and in an important sense, although it’s not usually talked about this way, it lies at the core of qft . Indeed, it

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13.1 | Diffraction Gratings. In these four diagrams, α indicates

a1

β

the source of particles or the origin point, and β is a point on the screen marking the place where the particle arrives. A) Shows a

α

diffraction grating with multiple slits

a2

a3

(a1, a2, and a3). B) Shows multiple diffraction gratings (a & b) each with multiple slits. C) Diagram suggesting the limit case in which there a1

are an infinite number of diffraction

b1

gratings with an infinite number of

β

slits, which then allows the particle to be anywhere between the source α and the screen β. D) Shows some

b2

α

a2 b3

possible paths, all of which must be a3

included in a Feynman path integral.

b4

β

α

β

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is possible to do a diffraction experiment in both space and time: whereupon a single particle will coexist in multiple places and times. In the case of spacetime diffraction, a diffraction pattern can be accounted for by taking account of all possible spacetime histories, understanding that each such possibility coexists with all others. This chapter itself is a diffraction experiment in which I diffractively read different fragments of the atom bomb through each other, most prominently a novella by Kyoko Hayashi and the story of quantum field theory (qft ) (being performatively crafted here as we go). qft resides inside Hayashi’s story, and Hayashi’s story is in the interior of qft , its inner workings: a strange topology. Diffraction as methodology is a matter of reading insights through rather than against each other in an effort to make evident the always already entanglement of specific ideas in their materiality. The point will not be to make analogies, but rather to explore patterns of differentiating-entangling that not only sprout from specific material conditions, but are enfolded in the patterning in ways that trouble binaries such as macro/micro, nature/culture, centre/periphery, and general/specific, that tempt and support analogical analysis.

From Trinity to Trinity Time and being are themes at the heart of From Trinity to Trinity, a remarkable novella by award-winning author Kyoko Hayashi.10 Hayashi has spent the past three decades chronicling the experiences of hibakusha (explosion-affected people), atomic bomb victims. Having, at age fourteen, lived through an event that refuses to end, that decays with time but will forever continue to happen, she has spent time labouring through time/s – “travel hopping” – in order to unpack some of the infinite density of one particular spacetime point: Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945, 11:02 a.m. Kyoko Hayashi’s novella From Trinity to Trinity traces the spacetime wanderings of an older unnamed woman on a spiritual-political pilgrimage, a journey of re-turning to a land she had never before visited but knew better than the geography of her own body, a land whose wounds and woundedness live inside her bones. Making her way to Trinity site in New Mexico where the first (plutonium) atomic bomb test took place, Hayashi’s protagonist “travel hops” from one spacetime point to another, circling back, re-turning and turning our attention to a multiplicity of entangled violent colonial histories condensed into 9 August: she is at once in Nagasaki working alongside classmates in the Mitsubishi arms factory; on a US air force base in New Mexico visiting the National Atomic Museum as a lone Japanese visitor among otherwise white tourists who are there to learn about the US “nuclear defense 313

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history”; and in sixteenth-century North America, when Spanish explorers invaded the land now called “New Mexico.” Her goal is not one of personal healing per se, but rather a political and spiritual commitment to take responsibility for re-membering the countless people who were robbed of their own deaths by unspeakable violence. Centring the relationship between time and justice, together with Derrida, she might say that what drives her is “this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there … those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living.”11 From Trinity to Trinity is a story that embodies questions of history, memory, politics, nationalism, colonialism, race, species, violence, and sensuality. Her point is not to try to make sense out of senselessness, as if a rational story could be made of the madness, or a refreshingly mad story made of the rationalisms, but rather, to take hold of the radical possibility of the undoing of 9 August. This is a journey across spacetime, nation-states, species being, and questions of being/non-being. But it should not be mistaken for a time travel story, not in the usual sense. This travel-hopping tale is very different from time travel novels where the protagonist is an autonomous unified subject who continues to live in the time of “their present” while returning to a past that once was, a past that continues to exist and remains accessible to those with sufficient ingenuity and technical know-how, in an attempt to rework some crucial point in a chain of events that will then propagate forward in deterministic fashion in a rewriting of history. Hayashi’s travel hopping does not lend itself to such stories. In Hayashi’s story, what is at stake is not setting time aright (as if that were possible), but rather the undoing of time, of universal time, of the notion that moments exist one at a time, everywhere the same, and replace one another in succession; it is also a story of time-being that undoes the unified notion of self and what it means to be human. The travel hopper must risk her sense of self, which never will have been one, or itself. Travel hopping, tracing the entanglements of spacetimemattering, is not the same as writing a linear chronology mistaken for personal or collective history. Travel hopping is the embodied material labour of cutting through/undoing colonialist thinking in an attempt to come to terms with the unfathomable violences of colonialism in their specific material entanglements. How else might she begin to approach the infinite inhumanity of this weapon of instantaneous mass destruction that in a flash obliterates time?

Tracking Entanglements and the Material Traces of Erasure Tracing paths is no easy task. It takes work. During the waning decades of the twentieth century, the most murderous century in history, 314

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the notion that the past might be open to revision through a “quantum eraser” came to the fore. The quantum eraser experiment is a variation of a two-slit diffraction experiment, an experiment that Feynman said contained all the mysteries of quantum physics. Against this fantastic claim of the possibility of erasure, I argue that in playing close attention to the material labours entailed, the claim of erasure’s possibility fades, while at the same time bringing to the fore a relational ontology sensibility to questions of time, memory, and history. The key features of the “quantum eraser” experiment are as follows.12 Recall that the famous two-slit experiment can be used to show that particles under the right conditions exhibit wave behaviour; namely, they produce a diffraction pattern (figure 13.2a). This pattern is produced only if each entity we take to be a particle goes through both openings at once, as a good wave does. On the other hand, if you modify a two-slit apparatus by adding a device to measure which slit a particle goes through, it does in fact go through one slit or the other, like a good particle, contributing to the creation of a scatter pattern, not a diffraction pattern (figure 13.2b).13 Now, here’s where the quantum eraser part comes in (figure 13.2c): If the experimenter adds a device that enables the erasure of the information about which slit a particle goes through after it’s already gone through the diffraction grating … remarkably, a diffraction pattern appears! – indicating that each particle will have gone through both slits at once! This raises the seemingly impossible possibility that one can determine after the fact whether the particle will have gone through one slit or the other – like a particle does – or through both slits at the same time – like a wave – after it has already passed through the diffraction grating and made a mark on the screen. The claim made by the physicists who proposed and conducted the “quantum eraser” experiment claim that this is evidence of changing the past. But it’s important to slow down and carefully examine the evidence behind this claim because the nature of time and being (or rather, time-being) itself is in question and can’t be assumed. For one thing, the experimenters underestimate the nature of the evidence at hand. What this experiment tells us is not simply that a given particle will have done something different in the past but that the very nature of its being, its ontology, in the past remains open to future reworkings (i.e., whether it will have been a wave or a particle, which are defined to be ontologically different kinds). In particular, I have argued that this experiment offers empirical evidence for a relational ontology (hauntology) and against a metaphysics of presence. The physicists who proposed the quantum eraser experiment interpret these results as the possibility of “changing the past”; they speak of

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13.2 | This set of diagrams illustrates some variations on a

intensity

atom beam

A

two-slit experiment. The source used in each case are atoms. The graphs to the right show the resulting patterns made after many individual particles pass through the two-slit diffraction grating (one at a time). A) An illustration of the usual two-slit experiment. The graph shows the resulting diffraction pattern (characteristic of waves which make a diffraction pattern as a result of the fact that

intensity

they go through both slits at once and combine on the other side of the barrier). B) An illustration of a

B

a which-slit detector that enables a detection of which slit each individual particle passes through. The graph shows a resulting scatter pattern (characteristic of particles), indicating that each particle did in

which-slit detector

two-slit experiment modified with

fact go through one slit or the other. C) An illustration of a quantum eraser experiment that entails which-slit detection followed by the erasure of the information regarding

intensity

which slit each individual particle graph shows that inside the scatter pattern there is an extant diffraction pattern that can be found by tracing the entanglements.

C which-slit detector with quantum eraser

passed through. Significantly, the

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the diffraction pattern as having been “recovered” (as if the original pattern had returned) and the which-slit information having been “erased.” But this interpretation is based upon assumptions that are being called into question by this very experiment, assumptions concerning the nature of being and time. Crucially, the diffraction pattern is not immediately evident once the information is erased. That is, it is not the case that the original diffraction pattern returns. Rather, a new diffraction pattern can be found within the scatter pattern if and only if the experimenter finds out how to trace the existing entanglement, and materially engages in that practice. This point is crucially important. For the labour expended in tracing the entanglements (including figuring out how to find the extant entanglements and then tracing them) is a necessary step in making the experiment work. Remarkably, this experiment makes evident that entanglements survive the measurement process, and furthermore, that material traces of attempts at erasure can be found in tracing the entanglements! Indeed, these experiments show that while it is possible to erase particular marks that seem to suggest that the “past” has been changed, it is a fantasy to believe that this constitutes an erasure of all traces of this history. Erasure is a material practice, an iteratively intra-active sedimenting practice, that leaves its trace in the very worlding of the world. I have argued that an interpretation that seems to be in better accord with the empirical evidence than the one offered by the experimenters, is that while the past is never finished and the future is not what will unfold, the world holds, or rather, is the memories of its iterative reconfigurings. All reconfigurings, including atomic blasts, violent ruptures and tears in the fabric of being – of spacetimemattering – are sedimented into the world in its iterative becoming, and must be taken into account in an objective analysis.

History, Memory, and Traces of Erasure: On the Way to Trinity Soon my eyes caught some big letters on a panel: “Count Down to Nagasaki.” [Hayashi’s protagonist is visiting the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico, an unexpected stop on the way to Trinity Site.]14 I felt time stop in front of the panel. “Count Down to Nagasaki.” While the time towards death in Nagasaki was ticking, what were Kana and I doing in the Ohashi Arms Factory? … at the very moment the bomb left the plane, I was trying to locate the sound of a small roar the factory chief told us he had just heard. 317

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I closed my eyes and bowed my head to the photograph. The ruin of a fire printed underneath the explanation was the city of Nagasaki with Inasayama across the river. Bockscar pilot Sweeny said in the first report of the attack on Nagasaki. Here is the photograph of that destroyed city. The photo shows a burned field, but under what is seen on that printed paper is teacher T, who died instantly, and classmates A, O, and others.15 In this brief passage, where chronology has no p(l)ace, where multiple temporalities present themselves without any one of them being present, their very coexistence disassembling the allegedly determinate distinction between memory and history, Hayashi offers us a pointed contestation of official museum history: a tale told in chronological time, a scientized and sanitized account of “objective reality” – the God’s-eye view from above, the view from nowhere. Disrupting this chronology helps us see through the photograph to what is behind it: namely, all the various material-discursive apparatuses of production that make up this exhibit – what it contains, what it erases, which facts matter and how they are collected and framed. What the official photo shows is an aerial view of a city destroyed, the levelling of buildings into a structural void. What the museum history invisiblizes is the structure of the void – the entangled material histories of death and dying, all the ravages of untold violence, histories of colonialism, racism, and militarism, and all the attempted erasures that constitute it. By contrast, what is at stake for Hayashi is a matter of empirical reality: the reality (literally) on the ground. We come to see that what the photo shows is not the bare facts of history, but rather a record of erasures – the literal erasure of lives obliterated like so many buildings, people in the streets on foot and on bicycles, workers stacking shelves in neighbourhood shops, schoolchildren working in factories, old people and children in their homes – but also a particular framing of the event that makes use of distance to sanitize the suffering and devastation of lives, while erasing some histories of violence, and not others. (Japanese imperialist aggression is the given background against which this history is shot, while US imperialism and militarism are outside the frame. Also outside the frame: Japanese aggression against Korea and the tens of thousands of Korean slave labourer lives lost in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Erasures upon erasures.

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But erasures are never complete – traces always remain. In her disjointed time hopping, Hayashi’s narrator is bodily tracing these extant entanglements. The official photograph freezes time and reifies space. But there were other photographs taken during the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, photographs on the ground, not ones engineered by humans designed to capture the successes of military operations, but rather very up-close and personal photos taken by the bomb itself. Shadows of incinerated bodies – human and non-human – captured on walls made into photographic plates by the intensity of the blast. What lies inside the boundaries of a shadow? Where are its edges? Diffraction unsettles colonialist assumptions of space and time: beginnings and ends, continuity and discontinuity, interior and exterior. Standing in the museum, she notes another integral part of the official museum history and its contemporary framing: “There were no black or Mexican visitors. Not only in this museum but also in Los Alamos and at the all the visitors were white.”16 Jumping in time but continuing the thought, Hayashi introduces another invisibilized piece of the story, one so covered over by colonialism’s practices of erasure and erasure of erasure that the white visitors might (at least at first) question its relevance. What is the story of this very land that the museum stands on, and that on which the bomb was first dropped? It is a story of late sixteenth-century European colonial conquest of Native American peoples and lands, entangled with the early twentieth-century US colonial annexation of “New Mexico” in the wake of the US invasion of Mexico half a century earlier, entangled with the wartime designation of native land deemed “uninhabited” as “Trinity site,” entangled with existing and future cancers of the “no-bodies” who were downwind from the test site.17 Importantly, attempts at erasure always leave material traces: what is erased is preserved in the entanglements, in the diffraction patterns of being/becoming. In tracing the material entanglements extant in practices of erasure, Hayashi’s narrator gives us a sense of how boundaries of lands and bodies get diffractively materialized and sedimented through one another. The various forms of violence, including all the erasures, are written into the very fabric of the world, into the specific configurings of spacetimemattering, so that it is crucial that she make the pilgrimage to trace the entanglements with her marked and wounded body. Hayashi’s narrator bodily traces these entanglements of colonialist histories, violent erasures, and avoidances as an integral part of a sacred practice of re-membering – which is not a going back to what was, but rather a material reconfiguring of spacetimemattering in ways that attempt to do justice to account for the devastation wrought, and to

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produce openings, new possible histories, reconfigurings of spacetimemattering through which time-beings might find a way to endure.

Quantum Field Theory and Re-membering: The Un/doing of Self and a Counter-Politics to Colonialism’s A-Void-ances and Erasures Land occupation, as a mode of empire building, has been and continues to be tied to a logics of the void.18 Justification for occupying land is often given on the basis of colonialist practices of travelling to “new” lands and “discovering” all matter of “voids”: for example, population voids (e.g., lands allegedly unpopulated before the arrival of the settlers), voids of ownership, of development, of territorial sovereignty, land devoid of civilization, or of inhabitants with labour relations to the land. The doctrine of terra nullius is one such tool of empire building. Whatever the specific nature of the alleged absence, a particular understanding of the notion of the void defines the colonialist practices of avoidance and erasure. The void occupied a central place in Newton’s natural philosophy. He wavered about the existence of an aether that permeated empty space, but unlike many of his contemporaries who were still committed Aristotelians and equated matter with extension, Newton insisted that the void was a spatial frame of reference within and against which motion takes place. Matter is discrete and finite and the void is continuous and infinite. The void extends indefinitely in all directions and bits of matter take their position in the void. All in all, the void is quite literally universal (measuring the full extent of the universe and beyond), and therefore only very sparsely populated. And since property rests with matter as one of its founding characteristics, the absence of matter is the absence of property, and also the absence of energy, work, and change. The void, in classical physics, is that which literally doesn’t matter. It is merely that which frames what is absolute. While the so-called “voyages of discovery,” bringing data (including astronomical and tidal changes) culled from European journeys to non-European sites, aided Newton in his efforts to develop a natural philosophy that united heaven and earth, Newtonian physics helped consolidate and give scientific credence to colonialist endeavours to make claims on lands that were said to be devoid of culture and reason.19 If classical physics insists that the void has no matter and no energy, the quantum principle of ontological indeterminacy – in particular the indeterminacy relation between energy and time – calls into question the existence of such a zero-energy/zero-matter state or, rather, makes it into a question with no decidable answer. Not a settled matter, or rather, no matter. And if the energy of the vacuum is not determinately

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zero, it isn’t determinately empty (since energy and matter are equivalent E=mc2). That is, according to qft , the vacuum can’t be determinately nothing because the indeterminacy principle allows for fluctuations of the quantum vacuum. How can we understand “vacuum fluctuations”? If the physicist’s conception of a field can be likened to a drumhead, with a zero-energy state being akin to a perfectly still drumhead, and a field with a finite energy being a drumhead in one of its (quantized) vibrational modes (like the 3d analogue of harmonics of a string), then while the classical vacuum state would be perfectly still, without any vibrations, a quantum vacuum state, although it has zero-energy, is not determinately still as a result of the energy-time indeterminacy principle. Vacuum fluctuations are the indeterminate vibrations of the vacuum or zero-energy state. Indeed, the vacuum is far from empty, for it is filled with all possible indeterminate yearnings of spacetimematterings, or in this drum analogy, the vacuum is filled with the indeterminate murmurings of all possible sounds: it is a speaking silence. What stories of creation and annihilation is the void telling? How might we approach the possibility of listening? Putting this point in the complementary language of particles rather than fields, we can understand vacuum fluctuations in terms of the existence of virtual particles: virtual particles are quanta of the vacuum fluctuations. That is, virtual particles are quantized indeterminacies-inaction. Virtuality is the indeterminacy of being/non-being, a ghostly non/existence. The void is a spectral realm; not even nothing can be free of ghosts. Virtual particles do not traffic in a metaphysics of presence. They do not exist in space and time. They are ghostly non/existences that teeter on the edge of the infinitely thin blade between being and nonbeing. They speak of indeterminacy. Or rather, no determinate words are spoken by the vacuum, only a speaking silence that is neither silence nor speech, but the conditions of im/possibility for non/existence. There are an infinite number of possibilities, but not everything is possible. The vacuum isn’t empty, but neither is there any-thing in it. Hence, we can see that indeterminacy is key not only to the existence of matter but also to its non-existence, that is, to the nature of the void.20 In fact, this indeterminacy is responsible not only for the void not being nothing (while not being something), but it may in fact be the source of all that is, a womb that births existence. Particles (together with their antiparticles, in pairs) can be created out of the vacuum by putting the right amount of energy into the vacuum, thereby giving a virtual particle (-antiparticle pair) enough energy to emerge from the vacuum; similarly, particles (together with their antiparticles, in pairs) can go back into the vacuum, emitting the excess energy.21 Hence, birth

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and death are not the sole prerogative of the animate world. “Inanimate” beings also have finite lives. “Particles can be born and particles can die,” explains one physicist. In fact, “it is a matter of birth, life, and death that requires the development of a new subject in physics, that of quantum field theory … Quantum field theory is a response to the ephemeral nature of life.”22 The void is a lively tension, not an opposition between living and dying, but a dynamism of indeterminacy, a threading through of one with the other, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming that necessarily entails living-dying. The vacuum is far from empty; rather, it is flush with yearning, with innumerable possibilities/imaginings of what was, could be, might yet have been, all coexisting. Don’t for a minute think that there are no material effects of yearning and imagining. Virtual particles are experimenting with the im/possibilities of non/being, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real – on the contrary. Consider this headline: “It’s Confirmed: Matter Is Merely Vacuum Fluctuations.”23 The article explains that most of the mass of an atom, its nucleus made of protons and neutrons (which constitutes the bulk of an atom), is due not to its constituent particles (the quarks), which only account for 1 per cent of its mass, but rather to the contributions from virtual particles.24 The void can no longer be thought of as that which doesn’t matter! qft reworks the classical understanding not only of the void, but also of matter in its inseparability from the void. Consider the classical physics view of an electron, one of the simplest particles – a point particle – a particle so small as to be of zero dimensions. Not only is it without extension, it is without an interior, completely devoid of structure. And yet, it causes a great deal of trouble for both classical and quantum physics.25 According to qft , as a result of time-being indeterminacy, the electron does not exist as an isolated particle but is always already inseparable from the wild activities of the vacuum. That is, the electron is always (already) intra-acting with the virtual particles of the vacuum in every imaginable way. Let’s take just a very small peek “into” the electron and the infinite number of wild things going on. Electrons are charged particles, which means they are susceptible to, or we might even say inclined towards, touching and being touched. Indeed, touching, according to physics, is but an electromagnetic intraaction between charged particles. (The reason the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can even hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of electromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the other whose touch we seek.) The electromagnetic force experienced between two charged particles depends on the relative nature of their charges: opposites attract, and like charges repel one another.

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Now since a charged particle emits an electromagnetic field and charged particles positioned in electromagnetic fields feel an electromagnetic force on them, the electron being charged both emits and intra-acts with its own field. This self-touching intra-action, a constitutive part of what an electron is, turns out to be source of unending anxiety in the physics community. Commenting specifically on the electron’s self-energy intra-action, the physicist Richard Feynman expressed horror at the electron’s monstrous nature and its perverse ways of engaging with the world: “Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a [virtual] photon [which is the carrier of the electromagnetic field]; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does it!”26 This self-energy/self-touching term has also been labelled a perversion of the theory because its value is infinite, which is an unacceptable answer to any question about the nature of the electron (such as, what is its mass or charge?). Apparently, touching oneself, or being touched by or in touch with oneself – the ambiguity may itself be the key to the trouble – is not simply troubling but a moral violation, the very source of all the trouble. But it’s worse (better) that that! For this simple self-energy intraaction is not a process that happens in isolation either. All kinds of more involved things can and do occur in its intra-action with this frothy brew of nothingness. In fact, there is a virtual exploration of every possibility, an infinite set of possible ways of self-touching. So there is an infinity of infinities.27 In fact, Feynman proposed a “renormalization” procedure that attempts to reel in the electron’s queerness, its unruliness. According to this procedure the “bare” electron (which is mathematically infinite) is “dressed” with the infinite contributions of the virtual particles of the vacuum such that in the end the physical electron is finite.28 (I’m using technical language here!) That is, what renormalization entails is the subtraction of two infinities to get something finite. This renormalization procedure entails taking into account all possible intra-actions with all virtual particles in all possible ways, that is, all possible histories. Hence, according to qft , even the smallest bits of matter are an enormous multitude! Each “individual” is made up of all possible histories of virtual intra-actions with all others; or rather, according to qft , there is no such thing as a discrete individual with its own roster of properties. In fact, the “other” – the constitutively excluded – is always already within: the very notion of the “self ” is a troubling of the interior/ exterior distinction. Matter in the indeterminacy of its being un/does identity and unsettles the very foundations of non/being. Together with Derrida we might then say: “identity … can only affirm itself as identity

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to itself by opening itself to the hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself. Condition of the self, such a difference from and with itself would then be its very thing … the stranger at home.”29 What is being called into question here is the very nature of the “self ”; all “selves” are not themselves but rather time-beings. The self is dispersed/diffracted through being and time. In an undoing of the inside/ outside distinction, it is undecidable whether there is an implosion of otherness or a dispersion of self throughout spacetimemattering.30 Hence, matter is an enfolding, an involution: it can’t help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes into contact with the infinite alterity that it is. Ontological indeterminacy, an unending dynamism of the opening up of possibilities, is at the core of mattering. How strange that indeterminacy, in its infinite undoing of closure, is the condition for the possibility of all structures in their dynamically reconfiguring stabilities (and instabilities). According to qft then, the void is not absence. Indeed, nothingness is an infinite plentitude, not a thing, but a dynamic of iterative reopening that cannot be disentangled from (what) matter(s).

Re-turning and Re-membering Ironically, the land that was denounced as became cultivated by the invaders’ bloody battles and desires.31 Every hibakusha knows their survival carries within it the wailing and silence of the dead.32

The climax of the novella is the narrator’s trip to Trinity Site, the place where the first plutonium bomb was detonated on 16 July 1945 at 5:29 a.m. It is here, at the end of her journey, the very place where it all began, standing in the midst of a desert, inside a fenced area with nothing inside it save a monument to nothingness – to ground zero – that the fullness of these embodied tracings of all the various colonial entanglements comes full circle. Hayashi is committed to being a chronicler of 9 August.33 Given that she deliberately writes against the grain of chronology, perhaps Hayashi’s commitment to tracing the material entanglements condensed into the spacetime point of 9 August might be more aptly captured by the more unconventional title “travel-hopping scribe” of 9 August.34 From Trinity to Trinity is not a time-travel novel but a time-diffraction tale, an embodied pilgrimage committed to tracing the material entanglements: a risky journey of placing one’s body in touch with all matter of specific colonialist histories, an iterative circling back around, touching the in324

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13.3 | This “Feynman diagram” is one expression of the non/emptiness of the void. It represents the void performing a vacuum fluctuation (just one of an infinite number of fluctuations of the void in its specific structuration). This one shows the virtual creation and annihilation of an electron-positron pair (which are jointly created and annihilated, and where the positron is an anti-electron, that is, its anti-matter partner). This can also be understood as a photon self-energy diagram. Wavy lines represent photons (quanta of the electromagnetic field,

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e-

or light particles, a particular case of which might be a gamma ray or high-energy radiation relevant to nuclear decay), while solid lines are electrons (and positrons): e- represents a virtual electron travelling forward in time, and e+ a virtual positron moving backward in time. The loop diagram is (itself) infinite and needs to be renormalized; it represents but one of an infinite set of possible spacetimemattering-histories. That is, there are an infinity of infinities that constitute each finitude. The diagram displays fluctuations of the nothingness: virtual creation-annihilation, birth-death, with all the potential that that holds. It sets up an interesting set of reverberations with a diagram we might draw of the pilgrimage of Hayashi’s travelhopping narrator who re-turns to the spacetime point Trinity 16 July 1945, from another crucial spacetime point Nagasaki 9 August 1945. Braving a re-turn to the void, the narrator risks this self-energy intra-action, this undoing of self, and is thereby transformed from victim to survivor, in concert with all entangled beings (“human” and “non-human”) who are hibakusha. In particular, this diagram is part of a self-intra-action diagram where touching oneself involves touching Others. The renormalized self is a collectivity, not an individual, in an undoing not only of self/other but human/non-human. Hence, as Hayashi points out, revenge doesn’t make any sense. Redemption and re-membering are made possible by the fact that nothingness (the wounded desert, the devastated cityscape) is not empty.

finite alterity that constitutes a point (see figure 13.3). What is the structure of the infinity of a point labelled (on some calendars) 9 August? Re-turning to a point to face the incalculable. Being a 9 August travel-hopping scribe is different from being a historian. For one thing it involves making the journey in space and time, tracing the multiple histories with one’s body, putting the self at risk as part of a committed response-ability to those who have died and those not yet born. It entails re-cognizing material kinship with this exploded/ imploded moment in time. 325

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I am going to Trinity [she tells her friend] … the truth is, even today I still want to break away from August 9. I have always wished I was not related to August 9. Katsura [my son] is a second-generation hibakusha … he disliked being an inmate on death row without a prison term … He wanted to live away from August 9. … Trinity is the starting point of my August 9. It is also the final destination of hibakusha. From Trinity to Trinity ---. If I make that journey, I can hold August 9 within my life circle. If I can never be free from the event, I should end my relationship by swallowing it.35 What does it mean to swallow an event? Perhaps this is an evocation of the ouroboros, the mythical symbol of the serpent biting its tail, representing “creation out of destruction, Life out of Death.”36 Or perhaps it means to ingest the event like radiation: to take it into your gut, to feel it leech into your bones, mutate your innards, and reset your cellular clocks. Perhaps it is about the im/possibility of metabolizing the trauma, transforming the self from victim to survivor. Perhaps it is a way of un/ doing the self, of touching oneself through touching all others, taking in the multitude of Others that make up the very matter of one’s being in order to materially transform the self and one’s material sense of self.37 Perhaps it is about the willingness to put oneself at risk, to place one’s body on this wounded land, to be in touch with it, to have a felt sense of its textures, to come to terms with a shared sense of vulnerability and invisibility, to feel the ways that this land, this void, which marks the colonizers’ continuing practices of avoidance always already inhabits the core, the nucleus of your being. I walked to … From this point in July, fifty years ago, the flash of light of the atomic bomb ran all directions in the desert. I heard, on the day of the experiment, it had been raining hard since morning, unusual in New Mexico. The experiment was carried out in the heavy rain. The flash of light boiled the downpour and, with that white froth, ruined the fields, burned the helpless mountains, and shot up to the sky. And then silence. Without time to defend and fight back, the wilderness was forced into silence.38 Let us pause before this silence, before rushing on, this silence threaded through with all matter of murmurings, so many cries that might yet have been but never were.

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Here at Ground Zero, time-being was shaken to its core: matter was split off from itself – traumatized. Violence tears holes in the very fabric of the world in its sedimenting iterative intra-activity. Woundedness is not reserved for human beings. Landscapes are not stages, containers, or mere environments for human and non-human actors. Landscape is not merely visually akin to a body; it is the skin of the earth.40 Ask O’Keeffe. Land is not property or territory, it is a time-being, a material geo-bio-graphy of bones and bodies, ashes and earth, where death and life meet. Etymological entanglements already hint at a troubling of assumed boundaries between allegedly different kinds: Earth, humus (from the Latin), is part of the etymology of human, and similarly, Adam (Hebrew: [hu]man[kind]) derives from adamah (Hebrew: ground, land, earth), giving lie to assertions of firm distinctions between human and non-human, suggesting a relationship of kin rather than kind – a cutting together-apart.41 Timebeings do not merely inhabit, but rather are of the landtimescape – the spacetimemattering of the world in its sedimenting enfoldings of iterative intra-activity. Memory is not merely a subjective capacity of the human mind; rather, “human” and “mind” are part of the landtimescape of the world. Memory is written into the worlding of the world in its specificity, the ineliminable trace of the sedimenting historicity of its iterative reconfiguring. No wonder Hayashi understands land, in this case, this marked void, this silenced land, as the ground for respectful, just, and non-violent mourning, for re-membering. Re-membering is a bodily activity tied to the materiality of the land as time-being. She must place her body on this wounded land in order to hear its murmuring silences and muted cries, to re-member and re-configure the spacetimemattering of all hibakusha in their material entanglements.

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From the bottom of the ground, from the exposed red faces of faraway mountains, from the brown wasteland, the waves of silence came lapping and made me shudder. How hot it must have been --Until now as I stand at the , I have thought it was we humans who were the first atomic bomb victims on Earth. I was wrong. Here are my senior hibakusha. They are here but cannot cry or yell. Tears filled my eyes.39

I have always been aware of being a hibakusha. But as soon as I started walking through the small passage within the fenced area

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led by a guide, my always-present awareness of being a victim disappeared from my mind. It was as if I became a fourteenyear-old again. I may have been walking toward an unknown as though I were someone from before August 9, but it was when I stood in front of the memorial that I was truly exposed to the atomic bomb. Looking back, I did not shed a tear on August 9. As I ran with the pack of people whose hands, feet, faces no longer looked human, no tears came to me … For the first time here at Trinity, however, I might be crying with human tears that I did not shed on August 9. Standing on the land that speaks no words, I shivered, feeling its pain. Until today, I have lived with merciless pains that hurt my mind and body. But it could have been the pain of the skin that grew from August 9. Here in this desert I had momentarily forgotten my life as a hibakusha.42 It is here, in the midst of the nothingness, the place where living and dying meet, where time-being is indeterminately multiple and filled with all matter of desiring im/possibilities, that the travel-hopping scribe can finally lay to rest her fifty-two classmates who were denied their own deaths. Long ago she had taken on this response-ability for the fifty-two and carried them around with her all these years. It is in putting herself at risk, in risking her sense of self, this work of embodied re-membering, that she can finally release her tears and let them rain down on the ground. In re-turning to the nothingness she brings one void in its particularity (Nagasaki) to another (Trinity), not to renormalize these infinite violences, avoidances, and erasures, but to bring to bear the clouds of im/possibilities that surround these entangled events.43 What does it mean to confront the nothingness, to touch its fullness? This is a question that cannot be answered in the abstract, not once and for all, but must be asked over and over again with one’s body. This question, which must be lived, re-turns us to a question that has been held in suspension: For whom is Ground Zero empty? Clearly, this land is far from empty: on the contrary, it is teeming with all matter of im/possibilities – material conditions of living and dying. Living and dying in this void are a multitude of beings excluded from the designation of (Hu)Man. Not only those beings living here at ground zero at the time of the Trinity test, including rattlesnakes, insects, plants, rocks, and soil, but also all those time-beings downwind from the test site, including those who don’t get counted as (fully) human, together with the ghosts of their deceased ancestors and their future offspring. That

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is, what resides in the void are all those who endure despite layer upon layer of colonial and racialized violence: all those whom the (Hu)Man counts as Other: including those marked as subhuman, non-human, inhuman. In fact, this parcel of Turtle Island, designated as the wilderness of New Mexico, on and around the Trinity site, is “home to nineteen American Indian pueblos, two Apache tribes, and some chapters of the Navajo Nation.”44 The fact that there were 19,000 people living within a fifty-mile radius of the secret test is something that was not only ignored by the US government until 2014, but unfortunately is also not mentioned by Hayashi, though they surely belong among her kin. For Hayashi, it is precisely the question of re-membering and just mourning that defines being human. What makes us human is not our alleged distinctiveness from – the non-human, the inhuman (those denied animacy and defined by their indifference), the subhuman (humans who don’t count as [fully] human), those who do not matter – but rather our relationship with, and responsibility to the dead, to the ghosts of the past and the future.45 Her pilgrimage is a work of mourning, a concerted ongoing labour, never finished nor complete. Hayashi’s political-ethical commitment to the activism of re-membering the hibakusha has been a life practice of tracing the entangled violences of colonialism, racism, and nationalism dispersed across spacetime. Crucial to this ongoing labour of mourning is the work of decomposition, composting, turning over the humus, undoing the notion of the human founded on the poisoned soil of human exceptionalism.46 Not in order to privilege all other beings over the human, in some perverse reversal, but in order to begin to come to terms with the infinite depths of our inhumanity, and the infinite possibilities for living and dying otherwise.

noteS I am grateful to Elaine Gan for her careful, patient, and skillful crafting of the diagrams. Many thanks to Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian for extending a (post)invitation to me to the wonderful Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference. And to Claudette Lauzon for her special hospitality, kindnesses, and patience with me in bringing this talk to publication. 1 Carrington, “The Anthropocene Epoch.” Under consideration for a specific date marking the new epoch: 16 July 1945, the date of the Trinity test. 2 Particularly incisive critiques include Todd, “Relationships”; Ahuja, “The Anthropocene Debate”; and Luciano, “The Inhuman Anthropocene.” 3 Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance.” For another, book-length diffraction of physics and Derridean deconstruction, see Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies. 329

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4 See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 5 Barad, Infinity, Nothingness, and Justice-to-Come. 6 Work on the construction of qft in the late 1920s and early 1930s enabled Japanese physicist Heideki Yukawa’s development of a fundamental theory of the nuclear forces in 1935. Yukawa was awarded the Nobel Prize for this accomplishment in 1949, a few years after the war ended; he was the first Japanese physicist so recognized. The 1965 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two American physicists, Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger, and a Japanese physicist, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, for their contributions in providing a workable solution (i.e., the renormalization approach) to the infinities problem. Tomonaga, who studied with Heisenberg before the war, and who was Yukawa’s classmate, worked on the infinities problem throughout the war, in isolation from physics developments in the West. For a more detailed discussion see Barad, Infinity, Nothingness, and Justice-to-Come. 7 This is only to suggest the barest hints of a rich history, which can’t be told here. For a more in-depth account as it relates to the story being told here, see Barad, Infinity, Nothingness, and Justice-to-Come. One crucially important reference is Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It. 8 And not just some so-called microworld, as if there were a line in the sand between “micro” and “macro,” as if scale were already given. As Bohr was fond of pointing out, if Planck’s constant (the measure of discreteness or lack of continuity of the physical world) had been larger, then we wouldn’t have talked ourselves into a metaphysics of individualism to begin with. In a performative relational ontology, it’s differentiating-entanglings all the way down. 9 See, for example, Moshinsky, “Diffraction in Time”; and Brukner and Zeilinger, “Diffraction of Matter Waves in Space and in Time.” 10 Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity. The translation from Japanese to English and the substantial introduction and afterword are by dancer and choreographer Eiko Otake, who has been doing some amazing artist-activist work on Fukushima. I engage with this latter work in Barad, “Ecologies of Nothingness: Haunted Spacetimescapes, Dances of Devastation and Endurance” (unpublished paper). 11 Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix. 12 I offer only an abbreviated discussion of the quantum-eraser experiment here. For a detailed description and analysis, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. I also try to highlight some of its implications in “Quantum Entanglements,” 240–68. 13 Wave-particle duality is discussed at length in chapter 3 of Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. On the quantum-eraser experiment, see chapter 7. 14 The National Atomic Museum was rebuilt at another location under a new name, National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, in 2009. 15 Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, 16–17. All angle quotes are from the original text. 16 Ibid., 20. 17 The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is often assumed to mark the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used. This is far from the case considering the thousands of nuclear arms tests, mostly exploded on the lands of the world’s most vulnerable inhabitants. And only now is a tiny spotlight being shone on the first atomic bomb victims – Americans, or more precisely, Turtle Island’s original inhabitants, the Indigenous peoples of the southwest, and others who belong to the land. It took the US government nearly seventy years to acknowledge that it was even worthwhile to do a study of the possible adverse effects on the people who were exposed to radioactive fallout from the 1945 Trinity

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test, despite the fact that following the test blast, “American Indians would begin to experience many types of cancers – rare cancers as well as multiple primary cancers.” Lee, “H-Bomb Guinea Pigs.” This section includes excerpts from Barad, What Is the Measure of Nothingness?; and Barad, “On Touching,” originally published in differences 23, no. 3 (2012), although this version included unfortunate typographical errors that the editors privately acknowledged but refused to correct due to aesthetic considerations. This is far too rapid a trot through a thick set of histories, but I’m afraid it will have to suffice for now. For far more developed and detailed accounts, see O’Brien, “‘These Nations Newton Made His Own,’” 290. See also Jacobs and Stewart, Practical Matters; and Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being.” In reading this paragraph, in particular, it is well to remember my specific use of the slash, as in im/possibility: to evoke the enactment of an agential cut that cuts together-apart (one move), differentiating-entangling. It is through this means that physicists create new particles using accelerators, by putting energy into the vacuum. (See, for example, the discovery of the Higgs particle at cern in July 2012.) The existence of antiparticles was postulated by Paul Dirac in 1928 in an essay in which he put forward a relativistic theory of quantum mechanics. The first antiparticle to be discovered was a positron (an anti-electron) in 1932. Antiparticles have the same mass but opposite charge as the corresponding particle (e.g., while electrons have a negative charge, positrons have the same mass as an electron but a charge of opposite sign), and they travel backwards in time. More on this in Barad, Infinity, Nothingness. Zee, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, 3–4. Battersby, “It’s Confirmed: Matter Is Merely Vacuum Fluctuations.” As we’ll soon see, all particles, including quarks (which are the constituent particles of protons and neutrons making up the nucleus of an atom), are inseparable from and constituted by the virtual fluctuations of the vacuum. From the point of view of classical physics, either the electron is unstable or its mass is infinite – not good choices, but physicists thought this puzzle might be solved by providing a quantum physics understanding of matter. But the quantum account of matter presented its own set of difficulties. The difficulties, whether from a classical or quantum-physics vantage point, stem from the particle’s so-called self-energy: in particular, because it is a charged particle, it emits an electromagnetic field, and in calculating its mass one must take account of its interactions with itself (i.e., its infinite self-energy). Feynman, qed , 115–16. For more details see Barad, “TransMaterialities.” Feynman, qed . Derrida, Aporias, 10. This is true of moments of time as well as bits of matter (being), each of which is indeterminately infinitely large and infinitesimally small, where each bit is specifically constituted through an infinity of intra-actions with all others. Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, 24. Ibid., xi. As described by Eiko Otake, the book’s translator, in Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, xii. This honorific is of course inspired by Hayashi’s own term, “travel hopping” (which in any case sets up wonderful resonances and dissonances with the

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overused and much misunderstood term “quantum leaping,” which has been (mis)appropriated by capitalist markets to sell all kinds of consumer products). Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, 9, 11. “The ouroboros has several meanings interwoven into it. Foremost is the symbolism of the serpent biting, devouring, or eating its own tail. This symbolizes the cyclic Nature of the Universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death. The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal” is copied all over the web; original source not clear; see, for example, http://www.tokenrock.com/explain-ouroboros-70.html. “Life is a circle, into which O’Keeffe offered her bones. Is it reincarnation?” Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, 28. Not only her fifty-two classmates, all of whom she’s been carrying around all these years, but also her other fellow hibakushas here in New Mexico, including the land, the people, the rattlesnakes, the wind. Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, 49–50. There is a factual error here: while it is true that it did rain that morning and the rain was quite unusual, the test was delayed until the rain stopped. This error is noted and addressed by the translator, Eiko Otake. I take up this point further in Barad, Infinity, Nothingness. Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, 49–50. Hayashi references American painter Georgia O’Keeffe frequently. The vibratory bodily sensuality of the land is uniquely, vividly expressed in O’Keeffe’s nonrepresentational realist paintings of the New Mexico desert. Hayashi specifically mentions the fact that O’Keeffe’s bones are scattered on the mountain peak (From Trinity to Trinity, 3). At the same time, it is important to note that some of O’Keeffe’s paintings have been objected to for their cultural appropriation. For example, Pueblo neighbours of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum “have expressed strong opinions against public exhibition of Katsinam, including katsina tithu, in sculptures and paintings,” which O’Keeffe began to paint after seeing them in Pueblo ceremonies and dances performed in 1929. See for example, Schwendener, “The Spirit of Cultural Objects.” The very question of different understandings of landscape – particularly, the important differences between American cultural conceptions and those of Indigenous and Japanese cultures – is important to this discussion and requires further elaboration. See Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction,” for more details on the agential realist notion of “cutting together-apart” (that is, differentiating-entangling). Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, 49–50. It was crucial to Hayashi’s efforts to come to terms with humanity’s inhumanity that she be in touch with all matter of inhumanness, including that which courses through all being. The reference to clouds here is simultaneously to clouds of virtual particles and rain clouds. Lee, “H-Bomb Guinea Pigs.” Which is not to suggest that this way of marking the human is yet another opportunity for human exceptionalism, since all time-beings mourn. With gratitude to Donna Haraway, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Kristina Lyons, among others, for the rich soil of this fertile material imagery.

illustrations

Kristan Horton, Blast! Blast! Blast!, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

18–19

1.1 The Canadian Press/Fred Chartrand, The 53-Year-Old Chalk River Reactor Has Been Out of Operation for Repair of a Radioactive Water Leak, 19 December 2007. Published in the Globe and Mail, 8 July 2010. 24 1.2 Chris Lund, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Chalk River, May 1955. cmcp Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. ngc / mbac ex -82-157. 26 1.3 US Department of Defense. Nuclear Device Detonated at the Trinity Test Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 16 July 1945. jo’b Atomic Archive. 27 1.4 United States Information Service, Detecting Disease with Atoms: A Patient Sits Underneath a Complicated Contrivance with Dangling Wires Called a Multidetector, Which Can Pinpoint a Brain Tumor, c. 1950s. Brookhaven National Laboratory. 27 1.5 Ted Grant, Untitled (The Children of Chernobyl), 1992. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. ngc / mbac ex -92-184. 29 1.6 David McMillan, Negatives and Shoe, Photographer’s Studio, Pripyat, 2016. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist. 30 1.7 Plastic Suit Protects against Atomic Radiation. From the article “Who Will Police Our Peacetime Atoms?,” Star Weekly Magazine, 19 November 1960. jo’b Atomic Archive. 31 1.8 Mary Kavanagh, The Expulsion (in White), 2012–13. Inkjet print on archival paper. Courtesy of the artist and the Canadian War Museum. 32–3 1.9 Chris Wattie/Reuters, Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt (right) Enters Parliament Yesterday with Press Secretary Jasmine MacDonnell, 2009. Published in the Globe and Mail, 4 June 2009. 34 1.10 zeep and nrx Nuclear Reactor Buildings, Chalk River, 1945. National Research Council Canada Archives. 35 1.11 Associated Press, Checks for Radioactive Contamination, nrx Reactor, Chalk River, Ontario, 29 December 1947. jo’b Atomic Archive. 36

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1.12 The Chalk River Research Centre of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, on the Ottawa River near Chalk River, Ontario, 1959. Four-colour lithographic postcard. jo’b Atomic Archive. 38 1.13 Bonnie Devine, Set for “Rooster Rock, the Story of Serpent River,” 2001. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. 40 Edward Burtynsky, Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario, 1995. Courtesy of the artist. 44–5 2.1 Blake Fitzpatrick, View: Cameco Refinery, Alexander Street, Port Hope, 1992. Courtesy of the artist. 46 2.2 Blake Fitzpatrick, Radioactive Poster: Loading the Radium Express, Dorset Street, Port Hope, 1992. Courtesy of the artist. 47 2.3 Blake Fitzpatrick, Pine Street Extension, Port Hope, 1992. Courtesy of the artist. 48 2.4 Blake Fitzpatrick, Bird House-Radon Detector, cn /cp Viaduct Area, Port Hope, 1992. Courtesy of the artist. 49 2.5 Blake Fitzpatrick, muidar : Exterior, Dorset Street, Port Hope, 1992. Courtesy of the artist. 50 2.6 Blake Fitzpatrick, muidar : Interior, Dorset Street, Port Hope, 1992. Courtesy of the artist. 51 2.7 Blake Fitzpatrick, “Port Hope” Landfill, Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, 1993. Courtesy of the artist. 52 2.8 Robert Del Tredici, Abandoned Uranium Sacks. Port Radium, Vance Peninsula, Great Bear Lake, nwt , 18 July 1998. Courtesy of the artist. 53 2.9 Robert Del Tredici, Broken Pipe. Lynne Prower at Brand Beach off Lakeshore Road, Port Hope, 2 July 2008. Courtesy of the artist. 54 2.10 Robert Del Tredici, Soil remediation in Port Hope. Private home on Shuter Street, 300 Yards from the Cameco Uranium Conversion Plant, Port Hope, 1 July 2011. Courtesy of the artist. 55 2.11 Robert Del Tredici, Cruciform. Alexander and Hayward Streets, 250 Meters from the Cameco Uranium Conversion Plant, Port Hope, 22 July 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 56 2.12 Robert Del Tredici, Welcome Dump: Keep Out. Welcome Township, 22 July 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 57 2.13 Robert Del Tredici, The Cameco Port Hope Uranium Conversion Facility. 1 Eldorado Place, Port Hope, 10 August 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 57 2.14 Blake Fitzpatrick, Radioactive Autograph Album: Donna Reed and Greer Garson, Port Hope, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. 58 2.15 Blake Fitzpatrick, Radioactive Autograph Album: Walter Pidgeon, Port Hope, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. 58 2.16 Robert Del Tredici, Dan Rudka, Port Hope, 15 March 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 60 2.17 Robert Del Tredici, Pat Lawson at Her 60th Wedding Anniversary Celebration to Tom Lawson at Trinity Church, Port Hope, 2 April 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 61 2.18 Robert Del Tredici, A Thorn in the Side. Port Hope, 20 November 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 62

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Andrea Pinheiro, Hot Dam Black Veil, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

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2.19 Blake Fitzpatrick, Access Road, Berm and Homes, Port Hope, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 63 2.20 Robert Del Tredici, High Density Liner. Longterm Waste Management Facility, Welcome, Hope Township, Municipality of Port Hope, South of Highway 401, 4 May 2017. Courtesy of the artist. 64 66–7

3.1 Oak Ridge High School. Photo credit: Lindsey A. Freeman. 68 3.2 Atomic rowing. Photo credit: Lindsey A. Freeman. 73 3.3 Girl Scouts at Oak Ridge, photograph by Ed Westcott, 6 September 1951, US Department of Energy photo. 74 Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, No Immediate Threat, 1985–86. Courtesy of the artists. 84–5 4.1 Time-lapse sequence of the Trinity Explosion, 1945. Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 87 4.2 Nuclear Flashblindness Studies. In Ralph G. Allen Jr, David E. Jungbauer, Donald J. Isgitt, Brian E. Arment, and John A. Russell, Nuclear Flash Eye Effects: Technical Report for Military Planners (Brooks Air Force Base: usaf School of Aerospace Medicine, 1967). 89 4.3 Aerial view of Trinity Ground Zero, July 1945. Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. 92 4.4 Armed guard protection of Ground Zero Monument, Trinity test site, 16 July 1995. Photo credit: Joseph Masco. 93 4.5 Photographic displays at Trinity Ground Zero. Photo credit: Joseph Masco. 95 4.6 Jack Aeby’s photograph of the Trinity detonation. Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. 98 4.7 Illustration of Trinity mushroom cloud set against building profiles. From Julian Mack, July 16th Nuclear Explosion: Space-Time Relationships (Los Alamos: Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1946). Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. 98 4.8 J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves at Trinity Ground Zero. Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. 101 4.9 The Trinity Supercomputer. Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. 102 4.10 Still images from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Trinity Sequence. 103 4.11 Cai Guo-Qiang’s pyrotechnic performance piece, commemorating the 75th anniversary of Enrico Fermi’s fission experiment at the University of Chicago, 2 December 2017. Courtesy of the University of Chicago. 105 Mary Kavanagh, Atomic Tourist / Trinity, 2014–. Courtesy of the artist.

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5.1 “Troops of the Battalion Combat Team, US Army 11th Airborne Division, watch a plume of radio-active smoke rise after a D-Day blast at Yucca Flats [sic, 1 November 1951], as the much prepared Exercise ‘Desert Rock’ reaches its peak.” Photograph by “Cpl. McCaughey.” US National Archives (111-sc -389297). 116

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Mark Ruwedel, A Very Cold Winter, 2000/2004. Courtesy of the artist.

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6.1 James Bridle, Big Data? No Thanks, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. 136 6.2 Bertrand and Edith Russell leading anti-nuclear march in London on 18 February 1961. Photo credit: Tony French, cc by -sa 3.0. 137 6.3 Voice of Nuclear Disarmament poster c. 1961. Courtesy of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. 137 6.4 Spies for Peace, Danger! Official Secret rsg -6 (cover), 1963. Photo credit: Mike Kenner. 138 6.5 Outside the National Nuclear Science and History Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013. Photo credit: James Bridle. 139 6.6 Fat Man replica. The National Nuclear Science and History Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013. Photo credit: James Bridle. 140 6.7 “Broken Arrows” (bombs accidentally dropped on Palomares, Spain, 1966). The National Nuclear Science and History Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013. Photo credit: James Bridle. 140 6.8 ibm Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ascc ) – Harvard Mark 1. Photo courtesy of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. 141 6.9 eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, c. 1947–55. US Army Photo. 141 6.10 Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (ssec) /ibm 701, c. 1948. Photo credit: Computer History Museum, California. 142 6.11 BlueGene/L, Terascale Simulation Facility, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cc by-nc-sa 4.0. 142 6.12 Photograph of the nsa ’s Utah Data Center, taken by an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation during an airship flight, 2014. Photo credit: Electronic Frontier Foundation. 143 6.13 The main house at Bletchley Park, 2005. Photo credit: Magnus Manske, cc by-sa 3.0. 144 6.14 “Secrets Revealed” exhibition at Bletchley Park, 2013. Photo credit: James Bridle. 145 6.15 Chicago Pile-1, Stagg Field, University of Chicago, 1942. Photo credit: Argonne National Laboratory, US Department of Energy, cc -by -nc -sa 2.0. 147 6.16 Aerial photograph of the National Security Agency on Fort Meade, Maryland, by Trevor Paglen. Commissioned by Creative Time Reports, 2013. Courtesy of the artist, cc 0 1.0 Universal (cc 0 1.0). 147 Erin Siddall, Peace Camp (as part of Proving Ground: Nevada), 2017. Courtesy of the artist. 150–1 7.1 The Enola Gay’s approach to and escape from Hiroshima (drawn by co-pilot Robert Lewis from sketches at briefing made by weaponeer William “Deke” Parsons). 153 7.2 Air Force b -17 Flying Fortress drone landing at Eniwetok Island via ground control station mounted on a jeep. In Operation Crossroads: The Official Pictorial Record, Office of the Historian Joint Taskforce One, 1946, 50. 156

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7.3 US Navy Grumman f6f -5k  Hellcat drones during the “Operation Crossroads” atomic tests at the Bikini Atoll in July 1946. US Navy photo. 157 7.4 Ground control officer landing Navy f6f Hellcat drone, Operation Crossroads. Naval Aviation News, July 1951. US Navy photo. 157 7.5 “The Atom Bombs Descend on U.S.” In “The 36-Hour War: The Arnold Report Hints at the Catastrophe of the Next Great Conflict,” Life 19, no. 21 (19 November 1945). 165 7.6 “By the marble lions of New York’s Public Library U.S. technicians test the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity.” In “The 36-Hour War: The Arnold Report Hints at the Catastrophe of the Next Great Conflict,” Life 19, no. 21 (19 November 1945). 166 7.7 Cover illustration for the mass paperback edition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima. 169 7.8 Atomic cloud (“cauliflower cloud”) from Baker shot of Operation Crossroads superimposed over Manhattan. In W.A. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads (New York: Wise & Co, 1947), plate 32. 169 7.9a Chesley Bonestell, Atom Bomb Hits New York City, 1950. Oil on paper laid on board, 54.6 × 45.7 cm. Appeared on cover of “Hiroshima USA ” issue of Collier’s, 5 August 1950. Collection of the New York Historical Society, 1956.7. Gift of Chesley Bonestell. 170 7.9b Chesley Bonestell, Atom Bombing of New York City, 1950. Oil on paper laid on Masonite, 44.1 × 83.2 cm. Appeared as an illustration in “Hiroshima USA ” issue of Collier’s, 5 August 1950, 12–13. Collection of the New York Historical Society, 1956.8. Gift of Chesley Bonestell. 171 7.10 Fallout plume from Castle Bravo superimposed over eastern US, Atomic Energy Commission. 172 7.11 Blast radius from Castle Bravo superimposed over New York. New York Times, 1 April 1954. 172 Blaine Campbell, The Last Days no. 1, 2017, giclée on Dibond, 43.5 × 53.3". Courtesy of the artist. 194 Blaine Campbell, The Last Days no. 2, 2018, giclée on Dibond, 43.5 × 53.3". Courtesy of the artist. 195 Katy McCormick, A-Bombed Giant Pussy Willow, Hiroshima Castle Moat, 770 meters from the hypocenter. Color photograph, 122 × 96 cm, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 212 Katy McCormick, A-Bombed Pepper Supported by Muku Tree, Shiroyama Elementary, Nagasaki, 600 meters from the hypocenter. Color photograph, 122 × 96 cm, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. 213 9.1 Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 1830–31. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 215 9.2 Munemasa Takahashi, Lost and Found Project, 2011– . Courtesy of the artist. 219 9.3 Tomoko Yoneda, Hiroshima Peace Day, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. 222 9.4 Shimpei Takeda, Trace #16, Lake Hayama (Mano Dam) from the series Trace, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. 223

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9.5 Eiko Otake, A Body in Fukushima, 22 July 2014, Tomioka, No. 810, photo by William Johnston. Courtesy of the artist. 228 9.6 Chim↑Pom, real times , 2011, © Chim↑Pom, Courtesy of the artist and mujin-to Production, Tokyo. 229 Donald Weber, Somebody’s Boots, Namie, Fukushima Exclusion Zone, 2011. From the series Post Atomic, 2006–2012. Courtesy of the artist. 236–7 10.1–26 Eric Cazdyn, The Blindspot Variation II, Japan, 2015 (screen grabs). Courtesy of the artist. 238, 246–66 Susan Schuppli, Trace Evidence, hd video colour with fourchannel sound, 53 minutes, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 268–9 Charles Stankievech, The Distant Early Warning Project, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. 274–5 David McMillan, Kindergarten Locker Room, Pripyat, 2012. From The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 1994–. Courtesy of the artist. 284 David McMillan, Lobby, Children’s Hospital, Pripyat, 2016. From The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 1994–. Courtesy of the artist. 285 12.1 David McMillan, Portrait of Lenin, Pripyat, October 1997. Courtesy of the artist. 290 12.2 David McMillan, Playground, Pripyat, October 1997. Courtesy of the artist. 292 12.3a David McMillan, Gymnasium, Palace of Culture, Pripyat, October 1996. Courtesy of the artist. 300 12.3b David McMillan, Gymnasium, Palace of Culture, Pripyat, October 2004. Courtesy of the artist. 301 Public Studio, Zero Hour, Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 2015. Courtesy of the artists. 304–5 13.1 Diffraction gratings. Image courtesy of Elaine Gan. 312 13.2 Variations on the two-slit experiment. Image courtesy of Elaine Gan. 316 13.3 The Feynman Diagram. Image courtesy of Elaine Gan. 325

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contributors

karen BaraD is professor of feminist studies, philosophy, and history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, post-structuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is the director of the Graduate Training Program of the Science & Justice Research Center at ucsc . James BriDle is an artist and writer working across technologies and

disciplines. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. His writing on literature, culture, and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. New Dark Age, his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK and US) in 2018, and he wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing for bbc Radio 4 in 2019. His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.

eDWarD BurtYnskY ’s photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over sixty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bib-

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liothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Exhibitions include Anthropocene (2018) at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada; Water (2013) at the New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Art Center; Oil (2009) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, dc; China (2005); Manufactured Landscapes (2003) at the National Gallery of Canada; and Breaking Ground (1988) produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Burtynsky’s distinctions include the ted Prize, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Outreach Award at the Rencontres d’Arles, the Roloff Beny Book award, and the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award. In 2006 he was awarded the title of officer of the Order of Canada and in 2008 he was awarded the icp Infinity Award for Art. In 2018 he was named Photo London’s Master of Photography and the Mosaic Institute’s Peace Patron. Most recently he was honoured with the 2019 Arts and Letters Award at the Canadian Association of New York’s annual Maple Leaf Ball. He holds eight honorary degrees.

Blaine camPBell is an Alberta-based artist working in photography,

sculpture, and video, and currently dividing time between Edmonton and Vancouver. Campbell’s thematic interests have included the inherent properties of the photograph and its relation to the viewer, landscape use and modification, processes of mediation and artifice in relation to transcendent experience, and parallels between Jacques Derrida’s “textuality” and quantum theory. A 2007 graduate of Emily Carr University with a bfa in photography, he previously obtained B.Math and M.Sc. degrees in mathematics. Campbell recently completed artist residencies at the triumf particle and nuclear physics lab at ubc and at the Banff Centre. He is represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver.

eric cazDYn is distinguished professor of aesthetics and politics at the

University of Toronto, where his research and teaching encompass critical and cultural theory, film and video, political economy, architecture, literature, and Japan. He is the author of The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness (Duke, 2012); Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton, University of Chicago Press, 2015); After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); and The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Duke, 2002); and editor of Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke, 2010) and Disastrous Consequences (saq , 2007). Cazdyn is also a filmmaker and has been engaged in a long-term, multifaceted project called The Blindspot Variations, which has been screened in Canada, the US, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, and throughout Europe. 356

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carOle cOnDé and karl BeveriDge have collaborated with various trade union and community organizations in the production of their staged photographic work over the past forty years. Their work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in both the trade union movement and art galleries and museums. Recently their work has been included in exhibitions: Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Noorderlicht Photofestival, Groningen, Holland; Manif d’art 7 in Quebec City; and Toronto: Tributes and Tributaries, the Art Gallery of Ontario. Carole and Karl have been active in several labour arts initiatives including the Mayworks Festival in Toronto and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. They received the Ontario Federation of Labour’s Cultural award in 1997; an honourary doctorate from ocad University in 2010 and nscad University in 2015; the Cesar Chavez Black Eagle Cultural Award from the United Food and Commercial Workers (ufcw ), Canada, in 2011; the Prix de mérite artistique from the Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam ) in 2013; and the Min Sook Lee Mayworks award for outstanding contribution to labour in 2014. rOBert Del treDici is an artist, photographer, and teacher who has been

tracking the nuclear age since 1979. His first book, The People of Three Mile Island (Sierra Club Books, 1980), explored nuclear power through the eyes of those directly affected by America’s gravest nuclear catastrophe. His second book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (Harper and Row, 1987), documented and illuminated the culturally invisible US nuclear weapons complex. He was principal photographer for three major reports for the US Department of Energy, each dealing with the challenging attempts at radioactive remediation of America’s H-bomb factories – past, present, and future. Del Tredici’s photographs and other artistic works have been exhibited in London, Stockholm, Semipalatinsk, Berlin, Essen, Hiroshima, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Boulder. His artistic works include a book-length series of silkscreen illustrations to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and a series of vivid collages (Evolution Pages) on the post-9/11 “War against Terror.” He founded the Atomic Photographers Guild in 1987, and he currently teaches the Art of Animated Film at Concordia University in Montreal.

mattHeW farisH is associate professor of geography and associate chair,

undergraduate, at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses in cultural and historical geography. He is the author of The Contours of America’s Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and a forthcoming co-authored history of the Distant Early Warning (dew ) Line. His research concerns the militarization of the planet by the United 357

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States during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the geographical knowledge generated to aid this process, and the North American landscapes created or transformed as a result.

Blake fitzPatrick is professor in the school of image arts at Ryerson

University. His research interests include the photographic representation of the nuclear era, visual responses to contemporary militarism, and post–Cold War history. He is a member of the Atomic Photographers Guild and has exhibited his photo-based work in Canada, the US, and Europe, including exhibitions at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin and recent group exhibitions with the Atomic Photographers Guild in Australia, Switzerland, and the US. His curatorial projects examine the work of contemporary artists who respond to zones of conflict and include War at a Distance; Disaster Topographics; and The Atomic Photographers Guild: Visibility and Invisibility in the Nuclear Era. His writing and visual work have appeared in the journals Public, Topia, History of Photography, Fuse, Ciel Variable, pov , racar , and Prefix.

linDseY a. freeman is a writer and sociologist. She is author of This Atom Bomb in Me (Redwood/Stanford University Press, 2019) and Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Originally from atomic Appalachia, Freeman teaches on top of a sci-fi mountain in British Columbia in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Simon Fraser University. She writes about art, atomic and nuclear culture, atmosphere, and colour.

Derek gregOrY is Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia, where he is based in the Department of Geography and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. The author of The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he is currently completing two new books: one on the geography and genealogy of aerial violence from the First World War through to today’s drone wars in the borderlands of the global South, and the other an examination of the wounded and injured body in conflict zones. He was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 2006 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy. kristan HOrtOn is a Berlin-based visual artist who has forged a studio

practice rooted in bricolage. He studied at Guelph University and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Since the 1990s, Horton’s preoccupations have included the consumption of texts and mass media, the representation of simultaneous and rotated scenes, and the visualization

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of power generation. He is well known for his photographic series Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, 2003–06, for which he recreated scenes from the Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Using items from his studio, Horton presents a range of sculptural forms that challenge and question the boundaries of the real, the approximate, and the virtual. His work has been shown at Glassbox, Paris; zkm , Karlsruhe; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Inter Communications Center, Tokyo; Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto; York University Art Gallery; and Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. His work is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects in Toronto.

marY kavanagH is an associate professor and graduate program chair in the Department of Art, University of Lethbridge, Canada. She has exhibited her work in over fifty peer-reviewed solo and group exhibitions, and is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and residencies. Combining moving and still images, drawing and installation practices, Kavanagh’s work addresses the sentient body and intergenerational trauma in the context of material culture, toxic ecologies, and state violence. Since 2005, she has researched and documented activities and ephemera at historic and active nuclear sites in Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska, Japan, and Canada. Kavanagh was recently awarded an Insight Grant (2017) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for her research-creation project, Atomic Tourist: Trinity, which explores nuclear anxiety in the post–Cold War era. Kavanagh is a member of the Atomic Photographers Guild, an international collective of artists dedicated to making visible all aspects of the nuclear era. clauDette lauzOn is an assistant professor of contemporary art history

and theory in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, where she specializes in visual culture, critical theory, and conflict studies. She is the author of The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Natalie Alvarez and Keren Zaointz) of Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave, 2019). Her current research, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight program, examines cultures of surveillance, militarization, and artificial intelligence through the lens of critical post-humanism.

kYO maclear is an essayist, novelist, and children’s author. She was born in London, England, to a Japanese mother and British father and moved 359

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to Canada at the age of four. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages and published in over twenty countries. Kyo lives and works in Toronto on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the HuronWendat. She holds a PhD in environmental humanities and education (York University) and is currently associate faculty with the University of Guelph Creative Writing mfa program and Humber College’s School for Writers. Her first major scholarly work, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (1998), is widely cited. She is the author of Birds Art Life, which won the Trillium Book Award in 2018.

JOsePH mascO is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago,

where he writes and teaches courses on science and technology, US national security culture, political ecology, mass media, and critical theory. He is the author of The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), which won the J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research and the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science; he was also co-winner of the Merton Prize from the American Sociology Association. His second book, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2014), examines the evolution of the national security state in the US, with a particular focus on the interplay between affect, technology, and threat perception within a national public sphere. Masco’s work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

katY mccOrmick ’s photographic work examines commemorative sites, revealing narratives and social histories embedded in landscapes. Her current project, Rooted among the Ashes: The A-Bombed Trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, begun in 2008, comprises a series of Japan’s survivor trees. Tagged and carefully tended, each is a witness to catastrophic encounter with nuclear war. Other projects include Destinies Made Manifest: Reading the Washington Mall (2012) and The World in a Folly Garden: Dancing ’Round the Ruins (2006). In March 2019, McCormick presented Searching for a Body: Finding Trees at the University of Toronto symposium “A Body in Fukushima: Reflections on the Nuclear in Everyday Life.” In 2017, she presented her performance video Nagasaki 11:02 in the panel Nuclear Families: From Trinity to Nagasaki at the Society for Photographic Education annual conference. McCormick is associate professor of photography studies at Ryerson University. 360

Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. Her research focuses on how historic and contemporary concerns about the environment are visualized photographically. From 2017 to 2019, Karla was an assistant professor at the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University. In 2019, she curated the exhibition Inside/Outside: Images of the land in Artexte’s Collection based on a 2017 research residency at Artexte Information Centre. Her recent publications include “How Anthropo-scenic! Concerns and Debates about the Age of the Anthropocene,” in the exhibition catalogue Anthropocene: Burtynsky, Baichwal, De Pencier (2018), and “Above, Below, and Behind the Camera: The Perspective of Animals,” in From Ego to Eco: Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism (2018). Alongside the photographer Andreas Rutkauskas, Karla was a 2018 research fellow at the Canadian Photography Institute (National Gallery of Canada), where they investigated the nfb Still Photography project Between Friends (1976).

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karla mcmanus is an assistant professor of art history in the Faculty of

DaviD mcmillan began his career as a painter but eventually realized his

sensibility was more aligned with photography. His interests grew from a formal concern with colour and space to depicting the often uneasy relationship between nature and culture. This led him, in 1994, to visit the guarded zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which had been evacuated after the 1986 accident. The initial visit was productive and McMillan decided to return the following year, beginning a pattern that has continued until today. One of the unanticipated consequences of this lengthy involvement has been the opportunity to witness the surprising proliferation of the natural world coinciding with the vanishing traces of civilization. The work has been brought together in the book Growth and Decay: Pripyat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

JOHn O’Brian is the author or editor of twenty previous books, including

Camera Atomica, David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting, Ruthless Hedonism, and the four-volume edition of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, which was named by the New York Times as a “best” book in 1986. He is also the organizer of five exhibitions on nuclear photography, which have been shown in Copenhagen, London, Toronto, and Vancouver. In 2000, he was awarded a Killam Research Prize, and in 2011 he received the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University and an honorary doctorate from Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Until 2017, he was professor of art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

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anDrea PinHeirO works in photography, print, mixed media, clay, paint,

film, and installation. Pinheiro began her studies at White Mountain Academy of the Arts in Elliot Lake, on, and completed her mfa in print media at the University of Alberta. She has exhibited across Canada and internationally and has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff; sim Residency, Reykjavik; Montello Foundation, Nevada; and a curatorial residency at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver. Her work is represented by Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto and Republic Gallery in Vancouver. She is an associate professor of visual art at Algoma University and is also the director of 180 Projects, an experimental exhibition space. Pinheiro currently lives and works in Searchmont and Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.

PuBlic stuDiO is the collective art practice of filmmaker Elle Flanders

and architect Tamira Sawatzky. Since 2009, Public Studio has employed a diverse range of media resulting in large-scale public artworks, films, immersive installations, lens-based works, and socially engaged projects. Public Studio was founded with the intent of exposing the antagonisms that define issues of public space and its disappearance, as well as the effects of globalization on our everyday landscapes. Their multidisciplinary practice has engaged topics such as war and militarization, ecology and urbanization, and political dissent. Central to their work is a desire to bridge notions of the aesthetic and the ethical, and question the role art can play in not simply “making meaning,” but “making meaning matter.”

mark ruWeDel lives in Long Beach, California. He received his mfa from Concordia University in Montreal in 1983 and taught there from 1984 to 2001; he is currently professor emeritus at California State University. He received major grants from the Canada Council for the Arts in 1999 and 2001. In 2014 he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award and has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize for 2019. Ruwedel is represented in museums throughout the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Yale Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Australia; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was included in the National Gallery of Canada’s Biennial in 2012. Ruwedel’s work was the subject of an Artists Room at Tate Modern in 2018. Publications include Westward the Course of Empire (2008) and 1212 Palms (2010), both from Yale Art Gallery; Pictures of Hell (RAM Pubs, 2014); Mark Ruwedel Scotiabank Photography Award (Steidl, 2015); Message 362

Julie salversOn is a theatre artist, writer, and scholar who publishes ex-

tensively on atomic culture, the artist as witness, ethics and the imagination, and creativity and play in response to trauma and violence. Her focus is the task of the foolish witness in this terribly beautiful world. She collaborates frequently on research, travel, and speaking/writing with Peter van Wyck. Recent works include Shelter (2012), a cartoon chamber opera about the atomic bomb (libretto); Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (2016); and “Shameless Acts of Foolish Witness” in Comedy Begins with Our Simplest Gestures: Levinas, Ethics and Humour (Duquesne, 2017). She has edited books on community arts and political/popular theatre in Canada and runs drama/resilience workshops for trauma survivors, including first responders, sexual assault survivors, and the military. Her edited collection of Canadian libretti will be released in 2020 (Playwrights Canada Press). Julie is a professor of drama at Queen’s University, Kingston, and professor (adjunct) at the Royal Military College of Canada.

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from the Exterior (Mack Books, 2017); Dog Houses (August Editions, 2017); and, most recently, Ouarzazate (Mack, 2018).

susan scHuPPli is an artist and researcher whose work examines ma-

terial evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US. Recent commissioned works include Learning from Ice (Toronto Biennial); Nature Represents Itself (SculptureCenter); Trace Evidence, a video trilogy commissioned by Arts Catalyst UK and Bildmuseet, Sweden; and Atmospheric Feedback Loops, a Vertical Cinema project for Sonic Acts, Amsterdam. She has published widely within the context of media and politics and is author of the forthcoming book Material Witness (mit Press). Schuppli is director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, and is an affiliated artist-researcher as well as board chair of Forensic Architecture.

erin siDDall is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose work encourages

the viewer into thinking about looking rather than what they are looking at, especially the corporeal experience of media. Siddall’s practice considers the problem of how to represent the unrepresentable with photography: invisible environmental hazards, hidden histories, and traumatic events. Her current work investigates nuclear histories within a new era of escalating risk, examining Canada’s role by meditating on actual and metaphysical landscapes of northern uranium mining communities. Siddall holds an mfa from the University of British Columbia

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and a bma from Emily Carr University, and has screened and shown in solo, public, or group contexts at galleries and festivals such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery 44, Access Gallery, Satellite Gallery, csa Space, the Helen and Morris Belkin Art Gallery, the Western Front Gallery, Winsor Gallery, and the Burrard Art Foundation Studio.

cHarles stankievecH is an artist, writer, and curator who has exhibited,

written, and lectured on a variety of interests for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Palais de Toyko, Paris; hkw , Berlin; as well as Documenta, Venice, Berlin, Kiev, Montreal, Santa Fe, and other biennales. He is the co-founder of K. Verlag in Berlin and an editor of Afterall Journal in London. His writings have appeared across a broad spectrum from mit Press to Verso. He was a founding faculty member of the Yukon School of Visual Arts (under the governance of the Indigenous sovereign nation of Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in). Currently, he is the director of visual studies at the University of Toronto.

Peter c. van WYck is professor of communication and media studies at Concordia University’s Department of Communication Studies, where his work arises from multidisciplinary training in forestry, ecological sciences, philosophy, and media studies. He has published widely on environmental themes including deep ecology and nuclear history and culture. His writings include The Highway of the Atom; Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma and Nuclear Threat; a photographic essay “An Archive of Threat” in Future Anterior; chapters in Thinking with Water and Bearing Witness; “Theory in a Cold Climate,” a special volume of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies; “The Anthropocene’s Signature,” an essay for The Nuclear Culture Source Book; and “What Was the Anthropocene?” for the collection Critical Topographies. Current projects include experimentation with a cloud chamber to photograph radioactive decay; a catalogue essay for Mary Kavanaugh’s 2019 exhibition “Radium’s Daughters”; an essay on fieldwork as method with Julie Salverson; and a monograph entitled The Angel Turns: Memos for the End of the Holocene. DOnalD WeBer was originally educated as an architect and worked with

Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Much of Weber’s photographic work is concerned with making visible the technological, spatial, legal, and political systems that shape our current condition – the infrastructures of power. For him, the role of photographer is that of “translator” or “interpreter” – to present information in a convincing, precise, and accessible manner – qualities that are crucial for the pursuit

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of accountability. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, and the Duke and Duchess of York Prize, and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Photography Prize, among other citations. He serves on the faculty of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, The Netherlands, and is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

eYal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and pro-

fessor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he founded the Centre for Research Architecture in 2005. He has conducted research and taught at many universities worldwide. He was a Global Scholar at Princeton University and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of several managing and advisory boards, including the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the board of trustees of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. He is also a founding member of the architectural collective daar in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Weizman studied architecture at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1998. He received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of several books, including The Conflict Shoreline (Steidl and Cabinet, 2015), Mengele’s Skull (Sternberg, 2012), The Least of All Possible Evils (Verso, 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), and Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (mit , 2017).

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index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. 5,000 Feet Is the Best (Fast), 191n87

a2-b-c: Hôshanô to kodomotachi

(Ash), 214, 231, 234n27 A-Bombed Giant Pussy Willow (McCormick), 211, 212 A-Bombed Pepper Supported by Muku Tree (McCormick), 211, 213 achre (Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments), 129n18, 131n72 Adnan, Etal, 305 Adorno, Theodor, 207 Aeby, Jack, 97–8 aec (United States Atomic Energy Commission), 75, 114, 159, 169, 171, 179, 187n30 aecl (Atomic Energy of Canada Limited) Chalk River, 24–5, 28, 31, 33, 35–7, 41n7 Afghanistan, 160, 175–7, 181–3, 192n94 afswp (Armed Forces Special Weapons Project), 114, 120–1, 124, 126, 128n10, 131n79 agential realism, 307–8, 331n20, 332n41 Ahmed, Sara, 81n1 aircraft: ad –2q Skyraider, 162; Bockscar, 4, 318; Boeing b -17 Flying

Fortress, 155, 156, 158; Boeing b -29 Superfortress, 153, 156, 173, 184; Boeing b -47 Stratojet, 161; Enola Gay, 154–63, 173–5, 180, 183, 186, 188, 190; Grumman f 6f Hellcat, 157, 158, 162–3, 180; Lockheed f -80, 160. See also drones Aldermaston March, 136, 138 Anthropocene, 11, 12, 306 anti-nuclear activism, 91, 93–4, 137, 149, 163, 220, 307 apocalypticism, 4, 96, 101, 117, 169–70, 192n102 Arafat, Yasser, 12–13, 276–82 Araki, Nobuyoshi, 221; Diary of a Photo-Mad Old Man, 221 Ash, Ian Thomas, 214–15, 231, 233, 234n27; a 2-b -c : Hôshanô to kodomotachi, 214, 231, 234n27 Ashley Madison, 145 atmospheric nuclear detonations, 88, 108, 160 Atom Bomb Hits New York City (Bonestell), 170 atomic age, 5, 6–7, 14, 23, 38, 107, 156, 294, 296 Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Chalk River (Lund), 25, 26 atomic tourism, 38–9, 93, 107–9 Atomic Tourist/Trinity (Kavanagh), 107, 108–9

in D eX

atomic weapons, 3–6, 25–6, 35, 37, 47, 51, 88, 90–7, 107, 152–5, 163–7, 186n2, 192n95, 253–4, 307, 309, 319–20, 326–8, 330n17; Castle Bravo, Fat Man, 92, 140, 153, 155–6, 178, 182, 186n1, 187n19; Little Boy, 68, 153–5, 166–7, 178, 186n1. See also Hiroshima bombing; Nagasaki bombing Augé, Marc, 288 Azoulay, Ariella, 230 Baldwin, Hanson, 155, 159, 177 Ballistic Research Laboratory, 141 Barad, Karen, 5, 13, 14n15 Barber, George, 181; The Freestone Drone, 181 Barthes, Roland, 287 Beckett, Samuel, 71 Bel Geddes, Norman, 141 Benjamin, Walter, 41n21, 75, 82n17, 201, 244 Bergson, Henri, 75 Beveridge, Karl; No Immediate Threat, 83, 84–5 big data, 5, 139, 142, 144–6, 178 Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands): nuclear test, 108, 120, 156–7, 159, 169; documentary, 131n54; documentation, 187n14 bin Laden, Osama, 174–7 Bird, Jodi, 208 Blaney, William (Vice-Admiral), 156, 158 Blast, Blast, Blast (Horton), 17, 18–19 Bletchley Park (United Kingdom), 144–5 Blue Sky Days (van Houtryve), 181 Body in Fukushima, A (Otake), 228, 229 Bolívar, Simon, 279 Bonestell, Chelsey, 169–71; Atom Bomb Hits New York City, 170 Bowden, Mark, 184 Boyer, Paul, 68, 164 Boym, Svetlana, 296–7 Brancusi, Constantin, 260 Brant, George: Grounded, 181 Bridle, James, 9, 136, 148, 199; Dronestagram, 191n90

368

Brixner, Berlyn, 97, 99 Burtynsky, Edward, 295; Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario, 43, 44–5 Busse, Henry, 207–8 Butler, Judith, 226 cabinet noir, 148 caesium-137, 34, 267 Cage, John, 241 Cai Guo-Qiang, 105–6 Cameco Corporation, 46–7, 51–2, 54, 56–7, 61 Camera Atomica (Art Gallery of Ontario), 115, 209–10 Campbell, Blaine: The Last Days, 193, 194–5 Canada: participation in nuclear era, 7, 47, 52, 208; aecl , 24–6, 28, 35, 38, 40–1, 52; civil defence, 193, 200–2; uranium mining, 149, 200–2 cancer: and children, 28, 234; diagnosis of, 33; growth in rates of, 216; Indigenous populations affected by, 39, 53, 330–1n17; and low radiation exposure, 232, 253, 319; treatment of, 33, 245  candu reactor, 25, 57 Carter, Jimmy (US President), 40–1 Castle Bravo, 23, 172–3. See also atomic weapons Cazdyn, Eric, 4, 12 Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories (Ontario), 7, 23–6, 28, 31–3, 35–42, 52, 59; nru reactor, 7, 24–5, 32–5. See also aecl ; candu reactor Chamayou, Grégoire, 180 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster, 11, 13, 28–9, 31, 34, 188n33, 266, 286, 288–9, 302n4, 302n12; Exclusion Zone, 13, 29, 209, 283, 286–9, 292–3, 297, 299; representations in art, 267–9, 283–5, 286–8, 289–93, 296–302 Chicago Pile-1, 147–48. See also Fermi, Enrico Chim↑Pom, 229–30, 234n22; Real Times, 229

Chow, Rey, 6, 173, 181 climate change, 5, 12, 13, 288, 291, 295, 297, 300–2 cnd (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), 136 colonial agnosia, 208 colonialism, 14n15, 86, 119–20, 307, 309, 313–14, 318–20, 329. See also nuclear colonialism Condé, Carole: No Immediate Threat, 83, 84–5 Constant Phoenix Program, 188n33 Cooney, James, 120, 122 Crawford, Meredith, 125–6, 132 Creech Air Force Base (Nevada), 10, 160, 182. See also drones Cumulus (Yoneda), 222 Curie, Marie, 50, 59 “dark tourism,” 297 Davenport, William, 169 Davies, Thom, 289 Dean, Gordon, 118, 121, 124 Dene Nation, 39, 47, 53, 202, 208. See also Indigenous peoples of the Americas Derrida, Jacques, 314, 323 Desert Cantos (Misrach), 295 Desert Rock exercises (Nevada), 115, 116–17, 121, 125–6, 128–9, 131–2; Operation Buster-Jangle, 113, 115; Operation TumblerSnapper, 115, 125–6, 187n31. See also Nevada Proving Ground Detecting Disease with Atoms (United States Information Service), 25, 27 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 10, 152 Devine, Bonnie, 39–40, 42n32; Set for “Rooster Rock,” the Story of Serpent River, 39; Stories from the Shield, 39 Diary of a Photo-Mad Old Man (Araki), 221 Dillon, Brian, 297 Dirac, Paul, 331n21 Distant Early Warning Project (Stankievech), 273, 274–5 Dobraszczyk, Paul, 297 Doomsday Clock, 5–6, 14, 308

Einstein, Albert, 4, 14n4 Eldorado Mining and Refining, 33, 47, 50 Eldorado Nuclear Ltd, 51–2, 57, 200 Eniwetok Atoll, 156, 158 eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator, Analyser and Computer), 141–2, 178 Epstein, Jacob, 17 Expulsion (in White), The (Kavanagh), 32–3 Eye in the Sky (Hood), 181 Fackler, Paul, 160 Farish, Matthew, 9 Farocki, Harun, 180, 191 Fast, Omer, 181, 191n87; 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 191n87 Fermi, Enrico, 94, 105, 120, 148 Feynman, Richard, 108, 312, 315, 323, 325, 330n6 Fitzpatrick, Blake, 7, 294 Fonvielle, Wilfred de, 203 forensic architecture, 13, 191n85 Freeman, Lindsey A., 8 Freestone Drone, The (Barber), 181 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, 4, 5, 11, 28–9, 31, 32, 34, 40, 199–200, 204–6, 214, 216, 221–4, 226–7, 229, 230–3, 235, 245–6, 258, 261, 266, 295, 298; representations in art, 221–6, 228–30, 235–7, 267–9 Galison, Peter, 173 Gallagher, Carole, 207 Geiger counter, 36–7, 50, 209, 214, 224–5, 230, 293

Godzilla, 23, 25, 34, 221 Good Kill (Niccol), 181 Goulart, João, 280 Grant, Ted, 28–9; Untitled (The Children of Chernobyl), 29 Gregory, Derek, 10 Grounded (Brant), 181 Groves, Leslie (General), 97, 101–2 Gymnasium, Palace of Culture, Pripyat (McMillan), 299, 300–1 Hales, Peter, 117, 128n16 Harney, Stefano, 231 Havinga, Anne, 216, 225 Hayashi, Yukiko, 184–5 Hayden, Michael, 145, 191n78 Heideki Yukawa, 330n6 Hersey, John, 168–71, 174, 184, 189n56 hibaku jumoku, 204–5, 211 hibakusha, 230, 313, 324–9 Hiroshima Peace Day (Yoneda), 222 Hiroshima bombing, 4, 10–11, 23, 38, 63, 68, 69, 83, 86, 90, 93, 101, 105, 107, 115, 152–6, 158, 164–71, 173–4, 180, 182, 184–5, 200, 202–5, 266, 294, 318–19, 330n17; Peace Museum, 210n15; representations in art, 104, 211–13, 221–32, 253–4, 259 Hokusai, Katsushika, 215, 218; Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 215, 218 Hood, Gavin: Eye in the Sky, 181 Horton, Kristan, 17; Blast, Blast, Blast, 17, 18–19 Hot Dam Black Veil (Pinheiro), 65, 66–7 Houtryve, Thomas van, 181; Blue Sky Days, 181 Humrro (Human Resources Research Office), 124–5, 132 hydrogen bomb, 141, 143, 161, 173, 179, 189n6

ibm Blue Gene, 142–3

Indian Springs (Nevada), 10, 160, 176–7. See also Creech Air Force Base Indigenous peoples of the Americas, 9, 39; destruction

of land belonging to, 119–21, 130n46, 330n17, 332n40 In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), 216–34 Isozaki, Arata, 253, 259–60 Ito Toyo, 261 “Ivy Mike,” 173, 179

in D eX

drones, 6, 9–10, 152, 175–8, 180–5, 190n69, 191n85, 191n88, 192n94; campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, 160, 177, 280; mq -1 Predator, 10, 117–18, 126, 152, 154, 160, 186, 190n70, 299; mq -9 Reaper, 6, 10, 152, 160, 177, 180–1, 186n10; and nuclear tests, 155–63; and surveillance, 180, 183; representations in art, 181, 191n87, 191n90 Dyson, George, 178–9

Johansen, Herbert, 162–3 Johnston, William, 229, 233–4 Kafka, Franz, 201 Kavanagh, Mary, 32; Atomic Tourist/Trinity, 107, 108–9; The Expulsion (in White), 32–3 Kennebeck, Sonia, 182; National Bird, 182–3 Kepner, William (Major-General), 156 keraunography, 203 Kettering, Charles, 186n7 Kirsch, Scott, 117 Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray, 199 Kodak, 96, 100 Koh, Harold, 182, 192n94 Kurokawa Kisho, 252 Kurtz, Lawrence (Lt Cdr), 163 Last Days, The (Campbell), 193, 194–5 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 142–3 Lear, John, 169–70 Lebedinskaia, Natalia, 293 Lepselter, Susan, 77 Lewis, Wyndam, 17 Life Magazine, 116–17, 164–6 Lifton, Robert, 192n102 Linenthal, Edward T., 224 Linfield, Susie, 6–7, 15 Lista, Michael, 37 Litvinenko, Alexander, 281–2 llrwmo (Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office), 48 Lobby, Children’s Hospital, Pripyat (McMillan), 283, 285 Longo, Robert, 17 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 37, 102, 118, 120, 141, 158 369

in D eX

Los Alamos (New Mexico), 9, 38, 68, 86, 99–100, 109, 120, 124, 144, 179, 187n13, 319 Lost and Found Project (Takahashi), 218, 219, 225 Lund, Chris, 25–6; Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Chalk River, 25–6, 26 Lynch, David, 103–4; Twin Peaks: The Return, 103, 104 Mack, Julian, 97, 106 Maclear, Kyo, 11, 165 Malabou, Catherine, 200 Manhattan Project, 7–8, 24, 35, 37–8, 51, 68, 70, 74–6, 78, 82n13, 87, 91, 93–4, 96–7, 101, 105, 108, 128n10, 141, 154, 177–179, 186n1, 187n13 Maralinga test site (Australia), 126–7 Masco, Joseph, 8–9, 15n16, 107, 129n19, 174 Massumi, Brian, 14 Matsushima (Honshu Island, Japan), 260 McCarthy, Cormack, 69 McCormick, Katy, 211; A-Bombed Giant Pussy Willow, 211, 212; A-Bombed Pepper Supported by Muku Tree, 211, 213 McManus, Karla, 13 McMillan, David, 13, 30, 296–302; Gymnasium, Palace of Culture, Pripyat, 299, 300–1; Kindergarten Locker Room, 283, 284; Lobby, Children’s Hospital, Pripyat, 283, 285; Negatives and Shoe, Photographer’s Studio, Pripyat, 30; Playground, Pripyat, October 1997, 291, 292; Portrait of Lenin, Pripyat, October 1997, 289, 290, 291 Metabolists, 252–4 military camps: Camp Cooke (California), 128n12; Camp Desert Rock (Nevada), 115, 121, 121, 126, 128–9n17; Camp Roberts (California), 128n12; Camp Mercury (Nevada), 115, 121; Greenham Common (Berkshire), 295

370

military testing sites: Nevada Proving Ground, 113–14, 117–20, 122–4, 127, 128n8; Pacific Proving Grounds, 108, 120, 131n54, 160; White Sands Missile Range, 91–2 Miller, Robynne, 39 Misrach, Richard, 295 missiles, 6, 9, 91–2, 118, 137, 139, 152, 161–3, 176–7, 180, 182, 185, 188–9, 191–2, 280–1; Cuban Missile Crisis, 108; Hellfire, 152, 176–7, 182, 185 Mondrian, Piet, 71, 77 Mooradian, Ara, 39 Morrison, Phillip, 166–7 Morton, Timothy, 107, 298 Moten, Fred, 231 Mushrooms from the Forest (Homma), 221–2 Nagasaki bombing, 4, 10, 23, 37, 63, 86, 90, 92–93, 101, 105, 107, 109, 128n8, 141, 153, 155–6, 158, 164–5, 167–8, 173–4, 180, 182–3, 187n19, 187n22, 191n87, 199, 202, 211, 221, 223, 230, 266, 313, 317–19, 325, 328, 330n17 Nakagin Capsule Tower, 252, 253–4, 256 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 3, 6, 11, 200, 288, 298, 301 National Bird (Kennebeck), 182–3 Navajo Nation, 109, 329. See also Indigenous peoples of the Americas Negatives and Shoe, Photographer’s Studio, Pripyat (McMillan), 30 Neumann, John von, 178–9 Nevada Proving Ground, 113–14, 117–20, 122–4, 127, 128n8. See also Desert Rock exercises; military testing sites Newe Segobia, 113, 119 Newton, Isaac, 320 Niccol, Andrew: Good Kill, 181 Nishimura, Anne Morse, 216, 220–1, 223–4, 225 Nixon, Rob, 12, 119, 127, 287–8 No Immediate Threat (Condé and Beveridge), 83, 84–5 Norfolk, Simon, 143

nsa (National Security Adminis-

tration), 138, 145–6, 148, 191n78; Utah Data Center, 143, 144 nuclear colonialism, 119, 126, 130n46, 267 Oe, Kenzaburo, 230 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 327, 332n36,40 Operation Crossroads (Marshall Islands), 120, 122–3, 156–9, 161–2, 169, 187n23. See also Pacific Proving Grounds Operation Pacific (US), 173 Operation Sandstone (Marshall Islands), 122, 159–60. See also Pacific Proving Grounds Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 101–2, 154, 166, 178–9, 186–7n13 ouroboros, 326, 332n36 Otake, Eiko, 228–30; Body in Fukushima, 228, 228–9 Otsuki, Tomoe, 233n3, 234n30 Ozawa, Eric, 232 Ozeki, Ruth, 308 Pacific Proving Grounds (Marshall Islands), 108, 120, 131n54, 160; Operation Crossroads, 120, 122–3, 156–9, 161–2, 169, 187n23; Operation Sandstone, 122, 159–60. See also military testing sites Paglen, Trevor, 113, 138, 147 Paik, Nam June, 240–1; Zen for Film, 240–1 Palmer, Juliet, 208–9 Parks, Lisa, 181 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 160, 188n33 Peace Camp (Proving Ground: Nevada) (Siddall), 149, 150–1 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 104 Perrow, Charles, 28 Pfahl, John, 295 pharmakon, 25, 28 Phillips, Adam, 214, 227 Pinheiro, Andrea: Hot Dam Black Veil, 65, 66–7 Playground, Pripyat, October 1997 (McMillan), 291, 292 Portis, Ben, 17

quantum physics, 13, 308–11, 320, 322, 329–31, 331n21, 331n25; quantum field theory (qft ), 309–13, 320–4 radiation, 24, 28–29, 97, 186n2, 325; dangers of exposure to, 32, 36, 37, 89, 93, 94, 100–1, 113, 114, 120, 122–4, 126–7, 160, 168, 171, 187n31, 204, 214, 220, 223, 229–34, 245, 330n17; risk perception, 7, 23, 25, 41; safety gear, 31, 32, 113 radioactivity, 6, 7–8, 12, 23–4, 28, 34, 35–6, 37, 39–40, 47–8, 50–6, 59, 61, 63, 64, 72, 77, 82n6, 91, 100–2, 109, 149, 155–6, 160, 166, 188n39, 216, 221–2, 230–1, 232, 262, 267, 276–7, 280–1, 287–8, 289, 306 Real Times (Chim↑Pom), 229 Reilly, Rebecca, 228 Rekmans, Lorraine, 39 Rich, Adrienne, 199 Rosenberg, Howard, 120, 128n3 Rosenthal, Peggy, 294 Roy, Arhundati, 148 ruins: aesthetics of, 253, 296–8; Chernobyl and Pripyat, 30, 297; Fukushima, 199, 258; Hiroshima, 210n15, 211 Russell, Bertrand, 136–7 Ruwedel, Mark: A Very Cold Winter, 133, 134–5 Salverson, Julie, 11 Schlosser, Eric, 189–90n64 Schuppli, Susan, 12, 146; Trace Evidence, 267, 268–9 Sendai (Japan), 206, 224 Sendai Mediateque (Ito), 261–2 Set for “Rooster Rock,” the Story of Serpent River (Devine), 39–40, 65 Shoshone Nation, 119, 130. See also Indigenous peoples of the Americas

Shute, Nevil, 193 Siddall, Erin: Peace Camp (Proving Ground: Nevada), 149, 150–1 Sides, John (Rear Admiral), 163 Simmel, Georg, 296 Sinaï, Agnes, 11 “slow violence,” 12, 127, 287 Solnit, Rebecca, 119, 128n16 Somebody’s Boots, Namie, Fukushima Exclusion Zone (Weber), 235, 236–7 Sontag, Susan, 223, 225 Spies for Peace, 138 St-Amour, Paul, 184, 192n102 Stankievech, Charles: The Distant Early Warning Project, 273, 274–5 Stein, Gertrude, 3–4 supercomputing, 102, 143 surveillance, 5, 9, 144–6, 169, 175, 177, 181, 183, 243 Takahashi, Munemasa: Lost and Found Project, 218, 219 Takashi, Homma, 221–2; Mushrooms from the Forest, 221 Takeda, Shimpei, 222–3; Trace #16, Lake Hayama (Mano Dam), 223 Tashiro-jima, 246–7, 252–4, 258, 260–2, 264 Teller, Edward, 141, 178 Three Mile Island accident, 28, 30 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (Penderecki), 104 Tibbets, Paul (Lt Col.), 152–4, 158, 186n5, 187n19 Tomonaga, Sin-Itiro, 330n6 Trace #16, Lake Hayama (Mano Dam) (Takeda), 223 Trace Evidence (Schuppli), 267, 268–9 Truman, Harry (US President), 121, 182–3, 192n95 Twin Peaks: The Return (Lynch), 103, 104

Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario (Burtynsky), 43 Utah Data Center. See nsa (National Security Agency)

in D eX

Portrait of Lenin, Pripyat, October 1997 (McMillan), 289, 290, 291 Power, Max S., 33–4 Project Aphrodite, 155–6, 161–2, 188n41 Public Studio: Zero Hour, 304–5

Van Wyck, Peter C., 11 Very Cold Winter, A (Ruwedel), 133, 134–5 Virilio, Paul, 8–9 Voice of Nuclear Disarmament, 137 “war on terror,” 177–8, 192n102, 280–1 Weart, Spencer R., 25, 293 Weber, David: Somebody’s Boots, Namie, Fukushima Exclusion Zone, 235, 236–7 Weizman, Eyal, 12–13, 191n85 Welsome, Eileen, 115, 122, 129n18 Wendover Army Air Field, 153–4 White Sands Missile Range (New Mexico), 91–2. See also military testing sites Wiener, Jon, 4 WikiLeaks, 138, 146 yellowcake, 57, 82n6 Yoneda, Tomoko, 221–2; Cumulus, 221; Hiroshima Peace Day, 222 Yucca Flat (Nevada), 113–14, 116–17, 125. See also Nevada Proving Ground

zeep (Zero Energy Experimental

Pile), 35 Zen for Film (Paik), 240–1 Zero Hour (Public Studio), 304–5

Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Hokusai), 215, 218 unmanned aerial vehicles (uav s). See drones Untitled (The Children of Chernobyl) (Grant), 29 371