INES HIJAZI // ENTRY N°3 - MASCO

Joseph P. Masco is a professor of Anthropology and the Social Sciences in the College of Chicago. He writes and teaches courses on science and technology, political ecology and critical theory. In this article he wrote in 2010 and entitled “Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis” he shows how the Western societies perception of Nuclear as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) changed throughout the twenty and twenty-one centuries. For him, there are three different periods of the nuclear vision in western societies. He divided his work in the three corresponding.

            The first part of his article is about the beginning of the Cold War and the emergence of Nuclear Weapon as an innovation. He shows in his part how Nuclear energy was seen as the main provocation or even the deep origin of ecological issues. At this moment, Western people thought Nuclear weapon as a danger of environment. The second part of his article, named “Nuclear Winter”, is about what happened in the mind of Western People from the 1980’s. The eighties match the moment of the Cold War were the end of the arm’s race was an obvious fact. Masco explains it because Western Societies understood how Nuclear weapon represents a huge danger not only for environment but also for human being. According to him, this moment is definitely an outlandish revelation as for Nuclear consequences. He took the same approach than Louis Alvarez in his research about the end of Dinosaurs reign on Earth since he shows how a climate change could caused by nuclear catastrophe could lead to the destruction of mankind history.  The last part is called “Global Warming as Nuclear War”. It relates to new environmental issues caused by the ecological crisis. He gave the example of the gripping movie’s release called “The day after tomorrow” in 2004. This movie shows the destruction of New York caused by climate change. According to him, Nuclear is since the beginning of our century seen as a big danger in such a way that the use of a Nuclear as weapon of mass destruction is more harmful for human life than for environment. In this anthropologic approach, Masco tries to explain how our representation of destruction is far more off-putting that the potential destruction itself.

            For me, the thing really interesting in this article is the way Masco explains the evolution of the representation of Nuclear as WMD. Such an approach can legitimate all the controversy about the development of Nuclear in some countries such as Iran. Nowadays, it is a big deal to regulate the development of nuclear by law. However, I do not think law pretends to be able to limit the development of nuclear that it is enough powerful to prevent the use of Nuclear as weapon of mass destruction. Then, Masco is certainly right when he said that our image of Nuclear is the most powerful to prevent us from the end of the mankind history. But there is something I cannot approve totally i.e, the Masco seems to say Americans today are so afraid of Nuclear bomb that they change their national security to not lead to a nuclear apocalypse. I think today, some tensions between United States of America and the Arab World but also the straight position USA took concerning the Israelo-Palestinan conflict cannot allow us to acknowledge that the fear concerning nuclear (as a WMD) impact deeply influence US national policy.