Geographies of Nuclear War

Abstract

Nuclear warfare is a global issue that presents a unique set of geographies. The detonation of the first nuclear weapon on 16 July 1945 irrevocably changed the physical and cultural landscape. While the mushroom clouds produced by nuclear weapons are ephemeral, their fallout generates an (in)visible yet lingering signature of technoscientific progress, destruction, and power that persists into deep time. It is for this reason that fallout is included within the proxies used to describe the Anthropocene. The impacts of nuclear weapons stretch across place, space, and time. Almost limitless distance and speed make nuclear warfare a phenomenon of velocity and blurred boundaries. It is everywhere and nowhere, it transcends war and peace, it merges war zone and homeland, and melds the actual and the possibilities of the virtual. These blurry distinctions are made visible by the ways that geopolitics and boundaries affect the likelihood and actualization of nuclear war. They are characteristics that facilitated a Cold War that persisted until 1991—and that continue to produce and reproduce nuclear threats today. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are recognized nuclear weapon possessors by the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea also have nuclear weapons. Nuclear warfare is embedded within a globalized military-industrial complex of extraction, processing, and manufacture. Its geographies manifest within places that have been left unmapped, or that become remapped and remade. This has created spaces of peace—but also of oppression, colonization, and harm. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park has been remapped from radioactive ruins to memorialize the devastating atomic bombing. Conversely, the necropolitical unmapping of nuclear testing and manufacture sites constitutes a component of institutional and cultural amnesia, whereby nuclear harms are denied. Thus, nuclear legacies remain uncharted terrain due to either ignorance or intention. Every species on this planet is affected by nuclear weapons due to their lethal potentiality for mutually assured destruction. Nuclear weapons are bounded and described by landscapes, geotechnologies, zones, bodies, and communities. Specific communities affected by nuclear warfare include nuclear sector workers, military personnel, and those within the hinterlands of sites of nuclear weapon activity. Conversely, nuclear-weapon-free zones have been instigated to reduce nuclear harms, and anti-nuclear activists have resisted nuclear weapons since their development.