Nuclear Threat as Race Hatred

Abstract

Nuclear weapons, since their advent in the 1940s, have been regarded as so massively destructive and lethal that few have questioned whether particular groups might be targeted. Deaths across their geographical sweep seem to be total and indiscriminate. I argue, however, that it is no accident or coincidence that the Bomb was first used on a non-White nation; people of color in the United States such as Langston Hughes believed it would never be used against a White enemy. On the other hand, even if it is a race weapon, it is also still a species weapon, so that even if Blacks are first and worst targeted, as Jessica Hurley discovers, many Whites will suffer too. Since nuclear weapons as mass, seemingly indiscriminate killers have been studied and protested against, my aim is to examine their function as a race weapon. To claim, as some leaders have, that decades of deterrence have kept peace is to ignore the ambient fear and terror the Bomb has inflicted on the world. This is the ambient fear and terror that institutional racism inflicts on people of color. Charles W. Mills argues that a “racial contract” has existed for centuries to normalize a subpersonhood inflicted on people of color, and a particular targeting of nuclear weapons is consistent with that normalization. In a time of what Sabu Kohso calls “infinite ending,” a dismantling of nuclear empires may be the world’s best hope.