In his 2010 article “Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis,”
anthropologist Joseph Masco argues that Cold War nuclear science was at once
the genesis of two different threat perceptions: the scientific understanding
of the world as an integrated and destructible biosphere, and the reduction of
all threats to the paradigm of atomic devastation. The first part of Masco’s
article is highly empirical. Masco draws extensively on documents from Cold War
nuclear testing to illustrate the manner in which the Earth Sciences—which
would eventually produce an understanding of the world as an interconnected,
interdependent, and fragile biosphere—only became a well-funded scientific
discipline as a result of national nuclear ambitions. One example of the way in
which nuclear tests are directly responsible for the scientific understanding
of the ‘integrated biosphere’ can be found in the numerous nuclear tests that
were conducted to monitor the transportation of strontium-90 through ecosystems
and food chains following a nuclear blast. These kinds of tests promoted a
scientific focus on what Masco calls ‘cartography’; on measuring and mapping
earth systems to understand how different regions of the planet are
interconnected.
Masco argues that Cold War nuclear science not only reified
the nation-state’s focus on nuclear threats, but also gave rise to a competing
paradigm of threat perception based on ecosystemic fragility. These two modes
of threat perception are mutually exclusive, insofar as the nuclear realpolitik
only considers state actors, and only knows how to respond to threats with a
clear culprit who can be retaliated against. The security apparatus built
around cold war nuclear security is incapable of even recognizing environmental
challenges, insofar as they can’t be attacked with military armaments and they
can’t be counterbalanced or deterred by increased weapons research.
What is most interesting to me is the latter part of the
article, in which Masco draws our attention to the ways in which the nuclear
national security paradigm has changed the way that citizens conceive of
themselves and experience the world around them, “weaving potential
annihilation into the routine of every day life” (18). In this sense, it is not
just that the security state has built up material infrastructure that cannot
be readily repurposed to deal with new and different kinds of threats, but
rather that the effects of the nuclear state on society itself preclude the
recognition of these new threats. The fact that so many people cognitively
translated Katrina into a nuclear attack is evidence of this ontological
transformation.
I think Masco errs, however, by focusing too much on the
state apparatus and the ‘cold warriors.’ According to Masco’s reading of the
situation, these profound changes in the way ‘national citizens’ are
constituted and in the way that they perceive the world around them are a
direct result of an intentional campaign by politicians to overstate the
threat of nuclear war (eg. ‘missile gaps’) at the expense and exclusion of
other kinds of threats. I am more sympathetic to a Foucauldian reading here; if
we want to understand how a society changes its collective behavior and
cognition, then we have to begin by trying to understand the everyday practices
of power that produce a specific kind of subject—one that is only capable of
perceiving threats through a nuclear lens.
Masco hints at this kind of Foucauldian analysis in his
discussion (In Nuclear Borderlands)
of the ‘new intimacy’ of the nuclear age. Masco uses the example of solidarity
between Soviet and American nuclear scientists to highlight the formation of
new kinds of subjects; the shared experience of being an earth scientist in the
Cold War had lead the two groups to experience new, trans-national (Masco says
post-national but I think he’s being overly optimistic) affinities and a new
sense of community that was not mediated by national allegiances or belonging.
This is an example of how non-state forces (earth sciences) produce and enable
different experiences of subjectivity to emerge, opening up space for new
identities and new kinds of subjects that perceive the world through a lens
that is contrary to the one imposed by the nuclear nation state. This example
is not as strong as it could be, however, given that the meeting between the
two groups and even the possibility of identification and solidarity was
promoted and accepted by the two national governments – which were attempting
to reconcile and put an end to cold war antagonisms at the time.
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