American Nuclear Literature on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoko Itoh
Keyword(s):  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Los Alamos ◽  
Nuclear Bomb ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Planet X ◽  
The Cold War

Literature on Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot be limited to works on the atomic bomb or fiction referring specifically to these locations. Rather, in the nuclear age, it must include a variety of literary works that are conscious of the destiny of the earth, given the danger of nuclear pollution, and engage with the terrible fantasy of the end of the world. As John W. Treat states in his influential critical work, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, “The concept of hibakusha now has to extend to everyone alive today in any region of the planet” (x–xi). The range of nuclear-themed works that symbolically invoke Hiroshima or Nagasaki is enormous. Nuclear literature as a creation of survivors, or spiritual survivors, focuses on an awareness of the planetary catastrophe concerning Los Alamos, Trinity Site, the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other global nuclear zones. The two nuclear sites in Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and in the United States (Los Alamos and Trinity Site) are historically connected. The authors and protagonists of nuclear literature have literal and affective transpacific and cross-cultural experiences that when considered together seek to overcome the tragic experience of the first nuclear bomb and bombing, including the Japanese acceptance of American nuclear fictions during the Cold War.

scholarly journals Why Arms Control?

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-115
Author(s):  
Jon Brook Wolfsthal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

America survived the nuclear age through a complex combination of diplomatic and military decisions, and a good deal of luck. One of the tools that proved its value in both reducing the risks of nuclear use and setting rules for the ongoing nuclear competition were negotiated, legally binding, and verified arms control agreements. Such pacts between the United States and the Soviet Union arguably prevented the nuclear arms racing from getting worse and helped both sides climb off the Cold War nuclear precipice. Several important agreements remain in place between the United States and Russia, to the benefit of both states. Arms control is under threat, however, from domestic forces in the United States and from Russian actions that range from treaty violations to the broader weaponization of risk. But arms control can and should play a useful role in reducing the risk of nuclear war and forging a new agreement between Moscow and Washington on the new rules of the nuclear road.

‘Gentlemen, you are Mad!’: Mutual Assured Destruction and Cold War Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan T. Berend
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Lewis Mumford

In the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the historian and critic Lewis Mumford made a dramatic attack on the insanity of the nuclear age. In his article entitled ‘Gentlemen: You are Mad!’, Mumford said: ‘We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security’. According to Mumford, the modern superweapon society, for all its technological supremacy, was unable to recognise the looming disaster. People were sleepwalking towards the abyss of atomic war. The Cold War arms race created and served to maintain what Winston Churchill termed ‘the balance of terror’. By the end of the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had more than enough nuclear weapons to withstand a first strike and still be able to retaliate. This article explores how mutual assured destruction (MAD) was reflected and refracted in European culture and society from 1950 to 1985, and shows how film and fiction played a key role in highlighting the potential effects of MAD – a global nuclear holocaust.

Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident

2021 ◽  
pp. 030631272098660
Author(s):  
Vincent Ialenti
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
National Laboratory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Department Of Energy ◽  
Los Alamos ◽  
Performance Incentives ◽  
Los Alamos National Laboratory ◽  
Political Economic

In February 2014 at the WIPP transuranic waste repository in New Mexico, a drum erupted in fire. It exposed 22 people to radiation, shut down the underground facility for 35 months and cost the United States over a billion dollars. Heat and pressure had built up in the drum due to chemical reactions with an organic kitty litter, Swheat Scoop, which had been mistakenly added to it at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. This article disrupts two prominent narratives: (a) that the accident was induced by a typographical error made after a waste packaging operations supervisor misheard ‘inorganic kitty litter’ as ‘an organic kitty litter’ during a meeting, and (b) that it was induced primarily by ‘mismanagement’ at WIPP, Los Alamos and the DOE’s New Mexico field offices. It does so by exploring how a series of overambitious political initiatives, fraught labor relationships, financialized subcontracting arrangements and US Department of Energy (DOE) performance incentives set the stage for Los Alamos’s notorious error by accelerating US waste packaging, shipping and repository emplacement rates beyond systemic capacity. Attention to operational temporalities shows how an often-overlooked nexus of schedule pressures, political-economic imperatives and regulatory breakdowns converged to modulate nuclear waste management workflows and, ultimately, trigger a radiological accident.

Masses and Historical Consciousness: Beauty and the Nation in Western Culture during the Atomic Age

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942097474
Author(s):  
Laura Ciglioni
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
The United States ◽  
Habits Of Mind ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Atomic Age ◽  
Relevant Role ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Cultural Responses ◽  
The Cold War

The article proposes an analysis of atomic culture in the United States and Western Europe, during the first 20 years of the Cold War, in the light of George L. Mosse’s work and approach. It shows how ‘habits of mind’ and the ‘general mood’ concerning the atomic bomb and risk of nuclear war were profoundly intertwined with deep-seated representations of the nation. It also exemplifies how the romantic attitudes toward life analyzed by Mosse – the longing for ‘shelter’ felt by men and women the more the world demythologized, and their need for symbols, especially connecting man with nature and its permanence – played an extremely relevant role in shaping attitudes about the ‘atomic age’. The nuclear question is thus ‘framed’ within longer term attitudes and cultural responses to modern war, as well as put in context with Western postwar culture, as investigated by Mosse: a culture marked by a renewed fear of technology, nihilism and widespread fears of alienation, as well as the continued relevance of nationalism and respectability. The article mainly examines two national cases: the USA and France. In the final section, comparison with other European countries is proposed and some general conclusions advanced.

scholarly journals Nuclear weapons, extinction, and the Anthropocene: Reappraising Jonathan Schell

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rens van Munster ◽  
Casper Sylvest
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Nuclear Environment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Do So

Abstract In the Anthropocene, International Relations must confront the possibility of anthropogenic extinction. Recent, insightful attempts to advance new vocabularies of planet politics tend to demote the profound historical and intellectual links between our current predicament and the nuclear age. In contrast, we argue that it is vital to revisit the nuclear-environment nexus of the Cold War to trace genealogies of today's intricate constellation of security problems. We do so by reappraising the work of Jonathan Schell (1943–2014), author of The Fate of the Earth (1982), who came to regard extinction as a defining feature of the nuclear age. We show how a deep engagement with nuclear weapons led Schell to an understanding of the Earth as a complex, delicate ecology and fed into a sophisticated, Arendtian theory of extinction. Despite its limitations and tensions, we argue that Schell's work remains deeply relevant for rethinking human–Earth relations and confronting the Anthropocene.

The Nuclear Revolution

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Campbell Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter, which examines the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War and the role of the Cold War in the nuclear revolution, argues that the development of nuclear weapons significantly affected the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union beyond the nuclear crises and arms races. It investigates the role of the atomic bomb in making impossible the postwar cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and evaluates the role of nuclear fear in invalidating the Soviet's Marxism-Leninism ideology. The chapter also considers how the mutual assured destruction pushed the superpowers away from direct military confrontation and into senseless weapon overproduction at home.

In the Shadow of the Bomb: U.S.-Soviet Biomedical Relations in the Early Cold War, 1944–1948

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolai Krementsov
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Nuclear Bomb ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Military Applications ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The Cold War

The deterioration of U.S.-Soviet scientific relations in 1946–1948 traditionally has been seen as simply a consequence of the growing political conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Scientific activities with direct military applications—most clearly manifested in the nuclear bomb—have been depicted as the primary motive for a variety of Cold War science policies, ranging from restrictions on international cooperation to the veil of secrecy placed over military-related scientific research. This article explores U.S.-Soviet relations in oncology in 1944–1948 and shows that science became an integral part and an instrument, rather than a mere reflection, of the Cold War confrontation. Science played a central role in the formulation of certain Cold War policies and informed Soviet decision-making on a wide range of policy issues that were essential to the growth of the Cold War. In this context, the symbolic value of science as a propaganda tool became no less important than its military applications.

The Complex World of Plutonium Science

MRS Bulletin ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (9) ◽  
pp. 672-678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siegfried S. Hecker
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Electrical Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Testing ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Current Concerns ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

Plutonium symbolizes everything we associate with the nuclear age. It evokes the entire gamut of emotions from good to evil, from hope to despair, and from the salvation of humanity to its utter destruction. No other element bears such a burden. Its discovery in 1941, following the discovery of fission in 1938, unlocked the potential and fear of the nuclear age. During the Cold War, the primary interest in plutonium was to provide triggers for thermonuclear weapons that formed the basis of nuclear deterrence. Beginning in the 1950s, plutonium also became an integral part of the quest for nearly limitless electrical power. The end of the Cold War has dramatically altered the military postures of the United States and Russia, allowing each to reverse the engines fueling the nuclearweapons buildup. Now, both countries face the challenge of keeping the remaining stockpile of nuclear weapons safe and reliable without nuclear testing, as well as cleaning up nuclear contamination and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and terrorism. Moreover, current concerns about energy availability and global warming have rekindled interest in nuclear power.

scholarly journals Containing the Atom

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Reid Pauly
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Operational Effectiveness ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Strategic Commitment ◽  
The Cold War

Immediately following the first and only uses of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Truman described nuclear stewardship as “an awful responsibility that has fallen to us.” The decision to use the bombs did clearly demonstrate the operational effectiveness of a new and awesome weapon, as the atomic bomb was generally accepted to have been critical in bringing about the Japanese surrender. Moreover, new weapon technologies have consistently been used in subsequent warfare throughout human history. Policy-makers in the post-1945 period, therefore, would have had to work energetically against that precedent if they sought to meet Truman’s “responsibility” and establish a tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons. This paper will defend the proposition that this is exactly what key American policy-makers sought and accomplished. In the narrative that follows, the key dates to be examined are between 1945 and 1950—a transformative period in American foreign affairs when Paul Nitze and other key US policy-makers were setting the stage for the Cold War. The key to this study is not in episodically assessing why the United States repeatedly stepped back from the brink of the nuclear abyss, but rather in seeking to discern the development of a tradition of policy considerations concluding in the practice of nonuse. This policy evolution is tracked through three key debates of the early Cold War: establishing the uniqueness of nuclear weapons, creating the hydrogen bomb, and the writing of NSC-68. Scholars have proposed two key explanations for the widely unexpected legacy of atomic weapons: the tradition of non-use and the nuclear taboo. The taboo explanation stems from a constructivist appreciation of the role of ideas and social action in state behavior, while the tradition of non-use comes from an assessment of the material and reputational factors considered by rational and strategically-oriented policy-makers. Both of these explanations need to be taken into account when assessing the non-use of nuclear weapons. Overall, I argue in this paper that US nuclear policy, with the early support of policy-makers like Paul Nitze, developed in a way that allowed for the emergence of a tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons. Evolving practices in the early years of the Cold War contributed substantially to a strategic commitment that helped prevent the use of nuclear weapons and prepare the ground for later struggles against proliferation.

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