Rethinking the beginning of the ‘nuclear age’ through telling feminist nuclear stories

Abstract

Bringing a feminist perspective to the global politics of nuclear weapons not only allows us to expand who and what counts as worthy of study in nuclear politics, but also contests core ideas and narratives that have shaped the literature to date. This paper asks how telling feminist nuclear stories rooted in an understanding of the everyday impacts of nuclear weapons challenges the traditional nuclear history. The standard history of ‘the bomb’ focuses on the military-industrial development of the Manhattan Project in the context of World War II, focusing on the figure of the elite male scientist as embodying the unique moral dilemmas of a new ‘nuclear age’. Feminist stories of the development of the first atomic weapons can instead illuminate the marginalised bodies and expansive, everyday harms of the development of nuclear weapons technology, altering both the timeline and the space of nuclear politics.