Deconstructing the Struggle Against Nuclearism

In such a complex and uncertain world, it may help to think like a Hindu, and accept contradiction as more in keeping with social and political reality than is finding a right answer to complex policy puzzles. What is almost impossible for those trained within Western frames of reference is to grasp that there are diverse perspectives of understanding that may result in seemingly contradictory recommendations despite shared values and goals. Civilizational perspectives and personal experience inevitably color what we feel, think, and do, and so being likeminded when it comes abolishing nuclear weapons is often coupled with somewhat divergent views on what to advocate when it comes to tactics and priorities. In this spirit, this paper tries to depict a set of reasons why the goal of nuclear disarmament will never be reached so long as arms control and nonproliferation of nuclear weaponry are seen as the pillars of global stability in the nuclear age.

‘The World is Her Home’: The Role of Women Volunteers in Dutch Civil Defence in the 1950s and 1960s

This chapter describes, and attempts to explain, the contrast between a successful campaign by women volunteers to prepare women for protecting their families in the event of nuclear war and the stumbling efforts of the official Dutch civil defence organisation. The explanation is sought in the perception (or sociotechnical imaginary) of these women of their role in the nuclear age, and the grassroots quality of their work, as opposed to the top-down views and practices of the civil defence organisation, in a society which had a low opinion of the government’s efficacy in the extreme emergency of a nuclear war. The chapter illustrates the influence of widespread and deeply engrained perceptions, such as trust in the government and gender stereotypes, on attitudes towards a new threat.

Embedding Preparedness, Assigning Responsibility: The Role of Film in Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Civil Defence

This chapter examines the role of film and television in embedding sociotechnical imaginaries of civil defence during the early nuclear age (c. 1949–1965) by zooming in on Sweden and Denmark, two neighbouring countries that differed both in terms of their political position in the Cold War and in the scale of their civil defence efforts. Following a theoretical discussion of the psychosocial effects of films and their manner of circulation, we analyse Swedish and Danish films in two periods demarcated by the thermonuclear disruption of civil defence during the mid-1950s. The analysis highlights how films were used to frame technologies and script and perform social norms. We argue that films constitute an important source for understanding the difficulties of embedding sociotechnical imaginaries of civil defence.

Nuclear Realism

The forms collected here as “nuclear realism” seek ways to imagine what everyday life in the ontological bunker of the ’80s created by the nuclear age would look like if stripped of the ideological obfuscations of the nuclear imaginary of the Cold War. This chapter explores the tensions of survival in near-future speculations about life during wartime imagined through realist, often oppositional modes of writing and filmmaking. There are three sections: the first examines the melancholy and liberatory workings of memory in dramas of nuclear war created in the realist mode; the second studies the related forms of nuclear satire; the third looks at pop music’s reaction to the nuclear condition. In all forms of nuclear realism in the ’80s, the shelter and accompanying bunker fantasy play small but emblematic and always ultimately futile roles within the broader social world they both partake of and split apart. Despite their adherence to reality effects and avoidance of overt fabrication, the anti-bunker fantasies of nuclear realism are as “fantastic” and stylized in their own way as the survivalist scenarios discussed in Chapter 7. Each form affords to the present different arguments about the basis of society: fellowship and community or neo-barbarian Hobbesianism. Even the most defeatist form of the bunker fantasy uses doomsday to argue political philosophy: when the bombs drop, we’ll finally discover once and for all who was right about human nature and American democracy.

Detecting Post-Nuclear Crisis in Hanna Jameson’s The Last

Hanna Jameson’s post-apocalyptic detective novel, The Last (2019), addresses contemporary issues that affect us on both a collective and an individual level. The author diagnoses the denial of nuclearism and calls for an awareness of the nuclear age combined with the looming threat of climate change. The novel negotiates alternative strategies for the treatment of crisis brought about by the nuclear attack and borrows many of the thematic and structural elements from twentieth-century nuclear fictions in which the apocalypse is not necessarily regarded in negative terms but as a chance for regeneration. The events of the post-nuclear months in a Swiss hotel are narrated by an American historian whose written account serves several goals. It gives the illusion of delaying crisis, but it also reveals his fears and traumas conjured up by radioactive spectres. There are two different types of narratives at work, the narrative of the crisis and that of the investigation. The narrator-protagonist becomes obsessed with finding the solution to a murder mystery, which in a metaphorical sense is to give a soothing answer to the death of millions. However, this attempt keeps failing, and thus the narrative of the crisis devours all kinds of rational initiatives to resolve chaos. In order to elaborate on the psychological impact of the post-nuclear crisis in subject construction, I do not only examine the character of the amateur detective of the whodunit whose intervention aims to restore order, but I also apply Gabriele Schwab’s concepts of post-nuclear subjectivity and nuclear hauntology.