Vincent Le - Entry No 4 (Masco)

In The Nuclear Borderlands, Masco argues that the nuclear bomb is significant not only or even primarily for its awesome techno-military capabilities, but more for its global socio-cultural significations for States and their subjects of new, utopian dreams such as unlimited energy, technological progress and national security, as well as new (and old) nightmares such as terrorism, human mutation and extinction, and the very real possibility of the biblical apocalypse. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, raised global awareness of the individual human and social body’s susceptibility when caught between the firing lines of national violence, thereby resulting in the international network of alliances, deterrence diplomacy, soft force, and humanitarian aid (read: imperialism with a human face). 

Nonetheless, throughout our so-called post-war golden age of humanitarian intervention and peace talks (golden like the colour of certain nuclear substances perhaps!), superpowers new and old continue to proliferate and advance their nuclear arsenals and capabilities such that the nuclear state of exception has been normalized as the rule of everyday reality. Since such nuclear proliferation, however, is repressed (in the Foucaultian sense of the word) from the public gaze except in DECLARED times of crisis, nation-States’ nuclear black boxes are never opened for questioning and reassessment, but only ever fortified and strengthened. As such, nuclear black boxes have no exchange value when deployed militarily, but, as Socrates said of JUSTICE ITSELF, they are useful insofar as they are paradoxically NOT used--except as a message sent via the earth’s translating tectonic plates from U.S. nuclear test sites to their national enemies’ monitoring posts, which says that mutual destruction is assured if international conflict cannot be deterred. Given the bomb’s paradoxical omniscient absence in society that is akin only to GOD, Masco focuses on the way it shifted everyday conceptions of temporality, spatiality and the relation between the local and the global, the citizen and the State. Temporally speaking, nuclear materials’ toxic lifespan of hundreds of thousands of years incites us to think beyond the possible lifespan of the individual human, the nation-State, and even humankind itself. Moreover, nuclear materials mark a rupture with the chronological and successive temporal logic of cause and effect insofar as individuals and societies exposed to radiation only become riddled with cancer-causing dioxins decades later (not to mention the sustained post-mortem effectivity on their progeny, too). Apropos spatiality, the bomb’s capacity to strike anywhere across the globe inexorably intertwines the local and the global. Consequently, today’s paranoiac security States now justify imperialism on the basis that any marginalized rogue nation, or even a small group of individuals, could obtain a nuclear bomb and become a world player. More literally speaking, much of the world’s landmass covering the size of several American states combined has been annexed by nuclear programs and experiments. Even in American cities and towns, almost everyone who lived during the Cold War was contaminated with iodine-131, which has resulted in over four hundred thousand nuclear related deaths and the transformation of the space of the living into what Taussig in next week’s readings calls ‘spaces of death’. Living in the most nuclear-bombed country in the world with the paradoxical greatest security against nuclear bombing, Americans now occupy the post-apocalyptic future time and space IN THE PRESENT. The nuclear bomb, thus, invokes Freud’s concept of the uncanny to blur the spatio-temporal distinctions between past, present and future; the living and the dead (and the LIVING DEAD); the supernatural and eschatologico-religious beliefs of barbarism and the scientificy of civilization; post-apocalyptic wasteland fantasies and material reality; spaces of war and spaces of peacetime societies; the world of exteriority and human and social bodies; and accountable human actors and invisible inanimate agents. In this way, the very nuclear arsenal that was supposed to reinforce national security both harms citizens and disrupts and disorients ‘nation-space’ and ‘nation-time’. Further, the semi-biblical REVELATION of mass U.S. and Soviet nuclear experiments on their unwitting citizens transformed the public conception of the state as the protector of the people into its conception as a matrix of secret, conspiratorial master-narratives pulling the strings beneath the surface of everyday life, thereby turning everyone into Freudo-Marxo-Nietzschean masters of suspicion. Of course, the bomb, or more precisely its reified master signifier ‘the bomb’, was really always there in plain sight as it formed alliances with all of the major military, industrial, congressional, judicial, academic and scientific institutions in society. Recalling Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, however, the very secrecy of the bomb only further proliferated its socio-cultural omnipresence and geopolitical and psychosocial effectivity.