Postnuclear Research Articles

Uploading into Eternity

Uploading into Eternity

Contradiction Set Free

“The human other, each singular and whole in its own right, is never the same but always a different person. Human beings don’t repeat each other; they contradict each other” (Goldschmidt, Contradiction Set Free). Originally published in German in 1976, in the long shadow of the Shoah, in response to the threat of atomic holocaust, and amidst growing recognition of ecological disaster, Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free argues that emancipation lies in diversity rather than in unity, in the freeing up of contradiction rather than in uniformity. I offer a close reading of Goldschmidt’s plea for pluralism, the foundation for our inescapable moral and political responsibilities to others. Today, what insights—and what hope—does his dialogic offer for the “joyfully creative” realization of our responsibilities to the other, both human and in the natural world?

Nuclear Weapons and Extinction As Progress

Nuclear weapons have delivered more near-extinction encounters than any other anthropogenic threat, but for the three decades after the Cold War discussion of this threat was relatively sidelined. This paper points to some of the historical connections between 'war-ending' weapons, deterrence logic and its breakdown, and the binding between the sublimation of politics into commerce and an extinction logic held within it. It firstly gestures towards roots in the ideal of market mediation as civilisation rising in the eighteenth century; secondly it looks at some writing on the conception of nuclear weapons and the surprisingly long history of awareness of anthropogenic extinction risk this brings; thirdly it suggests that a post-Cold War revival of the binding of market realism to progress that had led to the 'weapon to end war', and the condition of deterrence, helps explain the fall in discussions of nuclear extinction; and fourthly it notes that current proliferation and destabilisation question this deep and largely unspoken conventional wisdom over nuclear 'non-violence'. It points to various moments in the imagination and realisation of viable nuclear weapons and their embedding in democratic regimes in Atlantic powers in particular, and to points of serious scientific consideration of extinction during the Cold War, and suggests that the long naturalisation of nuclear weapons has taught us to 'live extinction' in a way that speaks to other anthropogenic risks. Climate and nuclear crises indeed can be read as nodes on a trajectory of extraction and exchange defining a narrow conception of progress that has extinction as its telos. Ideas of 'total' deterrence become widespread during the imperial rivalries following this extractive-productive ethics, and take nuclear form as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. After 'stable' deterrence, though, as nuclear arsenals remained to back the Anglo-American 'victory' in the Cold War, these arsenals reached the apotheosis of their long depoliticising, dehumanising mission, standing as a silent horizon absorbing conflict and helping to explain a lack of political 'newness' often felt during late neoliberalism. With the more recent complex and largely obscured re-arming, nuclear weapons are being rediscovered as both an existential threat and an imperative to rethink the scope of political action.

Bomb and Climate Change in Fact and Fiction

This essay counterpoints two existential threats in our lifetimes—nuclear apocalypse and climate catastrophe—comparing how they have been recorded in historical documents and how they have registered in the American imagination. It surveys non-fiction and fiction, including a few films, to uncover persistent patterns of American denial that may lead—in fact, scientists increasingly believe will lead—to climate apocalypse. Strong historical and thematic similarities exist until, surprisingly and even shockingly, they diverge at their imagined endpoints. My essay turns to examples from the United States’ history as a nuclear power. These include governmental suppression of information after the bombing of Hiroshima, willful distortions of how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, and controversial museum exhibitions since 2000. I also analyze American perceptions of climate change, as directly informed by numerous, but flaccid, reports, conferences, and summits on “global warming” that activist youth groups now parody in postings and memes. The essay examines the kind of doom-laden fantasies that I myself once had about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It looks to the worlds of fiction and film for iterations of the same kind of dread and doom. Imaginative projections in fiction include motifs such as “empty cities” with no sense of human responsibility for the absence of people, strong themes of racial disparity, and the exploration of human depravity versus the possibility of cooperation and community. Primary fictional examples of nuclear plots include Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler, and the suppressed 1959 racial drama The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens. For cli-fi fiction, the essay touches on similar preoccupations in novels by Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a host of 21st-century others. My topic has renewed urgency in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reintroduced the nuclear threat and forestalled action to slow climate change. But—and this emerges as an important payoff in the essay—nuclear and climate change narratives differ strongly in how we conceive of their endpoints. Despite sporadic fears about terrorists after 9/11, about North Korea, and now about Ukraine, Americans still by and large expect that, absent a true madman (Putin being a chief suspect), nuclear restraint will hold. In contrast, with regard to climate catastrophe, an increasing number of examples in both fact and fiction now expect climate catastrophes that will end humanity but (unlike nuclear winter), not end life on Earth which will remain, and increasingly become, both inventive and fecund. The essay ends with a meditation on the possible, even likely, consequences of expecting, and even accepting, the inevitability of climate apocalypse on a human scale. Archive: Selected 20th and 21st-century American novels, grouped by theme and outcome and cited briefly; a few 20th and 21st-century films; best-selling non-fiction books: Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. Weisman’s The World Without Us, the History Channel’s Life After People, Scranton’s We’re Doomed, Now What? Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, Rich’s Losing Earth and others. Academic books by Nixon, Scranton, Ghosh, Purdy, McClintock, and others.

New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup

Reviewed by: New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup Antonia Spencer Monika Kaup, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 347 pp. In the first line of the introduction to her study New Ecological Realisms, Monika Kaup asks her principal theoretical question: what comes after poststructuralism? The parallel literary question her study poses is what comes after apocalypse, and how do the protagonists of post-apocalyptic narratives learn to navigate their worlds. Through a sudden epidemic of blindness, extreme violence and social breakdown, a nuclear holocaust, or a mass poisoning by pharmaceuticals, post-apocalypse narrates the end of one world and the assembly of a new. Via a discussion of four fictional post-apocalyptic scenarios, Kaup demonstrates that reconceptualizing the subject is a primary concern in each. When apocalypse has exposed our innate dependencies, [End Page 314] the concept of a discrete human subject distinct from others and from "nature" is no longer tenable. Remaking subjectivity after a cataclysm consequently requires concepts of the real that reject dichotomies of subject/object and reflect the newly vulnerable position of the human. Structuralist and poststructuralist theories of reality as mediated through language and ideology, in Kaup's view, lose their explanatory power when there is no longer, in the post-apocalyptic setting, any society or authority to bear influence. Current realist approaches, in contrast, grapple afresh with problems of "being, existence, reality, world" (1), making them singularly appropriate to pair with post-apocalyptic fiction. In this fashion, Kaup advances a broad-spectrum, anti-realist reading of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, to underline the inability of these positions to fully engage "the real" in the era of climate change, in which our capacity to respond actively to non-linguistic phenomena is imperative. However, this entails what for some may seem a rather clear-cut demarcation between new realist theories and constructivist approaches encapsulated in Jacques Derrida's often misappropriated "there is nothing outside the text", tending to leave a figure such as Gilles Deleuze, influential in both poststructuralism and present materialist and realist thought, nomadically traversing the smooth space between fortified linguistic and ontological turns. Yet Kaup's analysis of the broad field of new materialist and speculative realist work is as granular as any reader could wish. In her first chapter she clarifies the particular focus of her study within the umbrella of new realisms, making the case for realism specifically over theories of materiality, in order to account for the reality of non-material, humanistic phenomena—a central aim of her study. She largely sets aside the perspective of object-oriented ontology, which posits objects as essentially independent of their relations within systems, in favour of relational and context-based approaches to the real. This is the ecological emphasis which she signals in the book's title, referring to the networked interrelations prominent in the theories she advocates but also the concern of her fictional texts with the emergence of entire contexts. Chapter two sees Bruno Latour's work paired with Margaret Atwood's Madd-Addam trilogy, and Kaup argues compellingly that post-apocalypse stresses the compositional, in Latourian terms, the reassembling of reality. Key here is Latour's concept of the "factish" designed to suture the assumed dichotomy between autonomous facts and human-fabricated "fetishes". The Crakers in Atwood's trilogy are read as an example of the factish, non-violent, human-like creatures designed to inherit the earth. Yet the Crakers increasingly exhibit emergent behaviours not specified in their genetic design, revealing them as both constructed and autonomously "real." The neurophenomenology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and their theory of autopoiesis is the subject of chapter three, coupled with José Saramago's [End Page 315] novel Blindness, which narrates the transformation of community and individual experience during an epidemic loss of vision. Kaup underscores the ways in which blindness undermines the primacy of vision, privileging instead a haptic exploration of the world, and embodying Maturana and Varela's non-representationalist conception of mind and world as mutually constitutive. Yet to be blind also means, for Kaup, to be "post-individual" (151), and subjectivity and agency must...

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany, by Frank Biess

In October 1983, 17-year-old Frank Biess participated in a ‘human chain’ demonstration in south-western Germany, protesting the stationing of American Pershing II missiles, armed with nuclear warheads, in the Federal Republic. As did many of his peers, Biess professed a profound fear of a ‘nuclear holocaust’, the destruction of the world in a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers. Afraid was how he felt at the time, writing (by his own admission) dark and very bad poetry, walking through the Swabian forest to see its alleged dying (the infamous German Waldsterben) for himself, reading the novels of Gudrun Pausewang about the consequences of nuclear war, or watching movies such as The Day After, depicting what nuclear war would do to the American Midwest. The historian Frank Biess uses this autobiographical sketch as an entry point for a history of the Federal Republic, from its foundation to the present, through the lens of one emotion: fear. What were Germans afraid about, he inquires, and what did this mean for the country’s political history? Did fear undermine the project of building a democratic polity in the aftermath of National Socialism, or did fear actually help with West Germany’s democratisation? Asking these questions, Biess seeks to challenge narratives of post-war German history that portray the Federal Republic somewhat uncritically as a ‘successful democracy’. ‘Was there not a peculiar tension between the optimistic story of the Federal Republic as told by historians and the pessimism of contemporaries’, Biess wonders (p. viii).

How not to war

Abstract While the Cold War seemingly ended the prospect of nuclear annihilation, in the West it also brought about renewed belief in the utility of force. A warming international political environment and developments in precision technology (as demonstrated by the 1990–91 Gulf War) appeared to create a permissive environment in which western states, particularly the United States, armed with smart weapons, international resolutions and a capacity to engage anywhere and whenever they want to—and all at a low cost—could bring about improvements in some of the most desperate and war-torn places on the planet. Nations who possessed a large, technologically precise and sophisticated hammer could suddenly view world problems as convenient, easily fixed nails. The end result of this vision, however, has been disaster—resulting in flawed intervention after failed intervention, including Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Indeed, these supposedly ‘easy wars’ have become ‘forever wars’. The question is: why has the West continually failed to learn this lesson? This article explores how the chaos that ensues in the wake of ‘easy war’ conflicts has reinforced a tendency within Washington policy-circles to utilize weapons that are more automated and/or remove individuals from the battlefield entirely. The lesson that technology cannot conquer the ‘fog of war’ to create costless victory or replace the hard work of politics and diplomacy is never learned. And even as President Joe Biden's administration begins to pivot towards Russia and Asia, it is likely that this tendency will endure.

Our Shared Future: Common Security 2022 and beyond+

The year 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of Olof Palme’s Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues. The Commission presented its report in 1982, at the height of the Cold War. It developed the concept of common security – the idea that nations and peoples can only feel safe when their counterparts feel safe. By taking the concept of common security as its starting point, the Common Security 2022 initiative has analysed the world we live in and some of the great challenges facing humanity on the planet earth. At the time of 50th anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm Conference (Stockholm+50), the Common Security 2022 recommendations are indications, or steps forward for our shared future that would include addressing the climate change, a process of removing the threat of nuclear annihilation and turning around the ‘super tanker’ of war.

Peace movements and the war in Ukraine: The opportunity

AbstractThe February 2022 Russian invasion into Ukraine is the largest land attack in Europe since World War II. Threats of the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russian President Putin has raised the eyebrows of nations throughout the world. The possibility of another world war and prospects for nuclear annihilation has provided an opportunity for non‐governmental international peace organizations to work together collectively to educate citizens about the importance of peace movements as agencies of humanitarian relief. More than opposing war peace movements are reform instruments, which highlight the importance of peace by providing aid and assistance to the innocent victims of armed aggression. Presently, peace organizations are doing their part by providing food, shelter, clothing, first aid, and other forms of non‐lethal aid to the Ukrainian people caught in the crosshairs of this violent conflict. This is how peace movements can demonstrate the real meaning of peace in the current situation and serve the larger task of nonviolence beyond political dialogue and nationalistic rhetoric.

The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith by James Carroll

Reviewed by: The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith by James Carroll Peter Steinfels The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith. By James Carroll. New York: Random House, 2021. 383 pp. $28.99. In August of 2018 something in James Carroll “snapped” (25). He stopped going to Mass. The cause, surprisingly, was Pope Francis. In Carroll’s view, the pope’s statements in visiting Ireland of shame and sorrow at priests’ molestation of minors was shockingly insufficient and Francis’s denial of previous knowledge about the harsh church-run Magdalene asylums for unwed mothers was preposterous. Carroll’s response was this exposé of what he considers the “essential pathology” at the root of all these abuses—the priesthood itself and its poisonous clericalism (57). His book weaves together church history, theology, and personal memoir of his own anguishing journey in and out of the priesthood. In fact, James Carroll’s anguishing over his Catholicism began, it seems, at age six or seven when he learned about heaven, hell, the need for Confession, and the doctrine of “no salvation outside the church.” He lived, by his account, in dread of eternal hellfire, in dread of the damnation of his Jewish best friend, and later in adolescent dread of a nuclear armageddon. Rescued from this “God of doom” by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, Carroll sought ordination to the priesthood (157). Then, as a campus chaplain in the late sixties, he took his anguish public, joining demonstrations against the Vietnam War, denouncing the American hierarchy’s acquiescence in the war, and challenging the [End Page 85] church’s refusal to ordain women with liturgical improvisations. After five years, he left the priesthood. He took his anguish, however, to a wider audience as a writer for the Boston Globe and New Yorker, and in a prize-winning 1996 memoir, An American Requiem. Carroll traces the church’s corruption, first, to the anti-Jewish turn of early Christianity in its struggle with emerging rabbinic Judaism and, second, to the assumption of imperial roles after Constantine. But the main sources are “the two most controlling works of Christian theology ever written”: (104) St. Anselm’s “inhumane theology” (103) of atonement and St. Augustine’s theology of original sin. “Augustine and Anselm together gave to us a doom-threatening monster God,” as well as “totalitarian sexual repressiveness” (118), misogyny, and mandatory celibacy. “Humans are fallen. God damns sinners. God damns sex, especially female sex” (104). “From this omnipotent, sadistic God, as Catholics are taught, only a Catholic priest can offer rescue—a deep-seated theology that undergirds clericalism and its worst abuses” (104). Carroll’s alternative to this hateful God and abusing church veers from the familiar to the radical. He can, finally, wax positively about Pope Francis, call for expanding the diaconate to women and the priesthood to the married, welcome the “popular” Catholicism of devotions and prayers, look forward to the continuing work of Catholic schools, universities, hospitals, and religious orders—while simultaneously advocating an “anti-clericalism from within,” a magisterium-free, lay-run, do-it-yourself church that reads very much like the self-styled underground church of the 1970s and 1980s. He also declares the need to radically reinterpret “key symbols of revelation,” including Jesus and the Godhead—eliminating some traditional beliefs while stoutly protecting but perhaps significantly recasting the language of others (274). His “explicitly Christian affirmation of a kind of secular faith” is frustratingly brief and ambiguous (275). Its bottom line is “In Jesus, we know we are not alone—not even at death,” but he offers no explanation of what that might actually mean (263). For Carroll, the personal is often the paradigmatic. Not every Catholic child lived in fear of damnation, even in benighted pre-Vatican II days. More than a few nuns were kind enough to explain that to get to hell you had to do something really bad, like rob a bank or murder your brother. If they mentioned “no salvation outside the church” at all, they were quick...

Dr. Strangelove and the Psychology of Comic Distance

In 1964, near the height of Cold War nuclear anxiety, millions of Americans flocked to movie theatres to see their own nuclear annihilation hilariously enacted for them in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. How did Kubrick transform one of his time’s most pressing causes of psychological distress into a source of humorous pleasure? To answer this question, I offer a cognitive account of how comic distance works on film, building on research indicating humor to be an evolved response to benign violations. I show that Kubrick consistently optimized for psychological distance in Dr. Strangelove, comparing his narrative and stylistic choices to those of Sidney Lumet in Fail Safe, a contemporaneous film that plays the same essential story for drama instead of laughs.

Review: American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by Naoko Wake

Naoko Wake’s American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki centers her eighty-six interviews with U.S. hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), conducted in English and Japanese from 2011 to 2017, and two other oral history collections in our memories of nuclear holocaust. By giving voice to the U.S. citizens who lived with sickness and scars for decades after August 1945, Wake dismantles the United States’s righteous atomic victory narrative. Wake’s work is indeed trans-Pacific, reflected by her definition of U.S. survivors as Japanese Americans with U.S. citizenship living in Japan in 1945 and post-war Japanese and Korean immigrants to the United States who became citizens, and by her focus on how survivors defied and deconstructed national boundaries and memories.After a detailed introduction to the project’s methodology and its themes of colonialism, justice, remembering, and gender, Wake organizes her work into six substantial chapters covering the 1880s to the early 2000s. She positions Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immigrant cities where American-born Japanese and Korean residents experienced layered identities that later undermined national narratives. Her analysis of American victims’ memories destabilizes ideas about belonging and shows how nuclear holocaust’s horrors crossed boundaries of “nationality, age, class, or gender” (pp. 74–75). These categories re-emerged as survivors interacted with each other: men focused on saving other victims while women made medicine and cared for hibakusha. Wake posits that U.S. survivors responded to their identity with silence from 1945–1960, marking an era of cross-national “hiding and healing” (p. 133). Starting in the 1960s, U.S. survivors used community ties, personal testimony, and alliances to create a collective memory that fought for medical care from the U.S. government.Wake’s meticulous analysis adds crucial strands to atomic bomb history, including her documentation of the erasures U.S. survivors experienced in America. She notably argues that the Korean War introduced U.S. survivors still in East Asia to U.S. service personnel, resulting in marriages and convincing Korean survivors to immigrate to the United States. Wake proves that the Cold War obstructed survivors’ voices as the U.S. fixated on future nuclear destruction, but their interactions with each other during this era resisted historical portrayals of the United States, Japan, and the Korean peninsula as purely national actors. American Survivors is grounded in immigration, identity, and the Cold War, yet it avoids familiar cultural and political assessments of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and geopolitics in favor of counter-memories that ask new questions about nuclear holocaust’s morality and that link the silences of hibakusha to those of the United States’s incarcerated Nikkei. One of Wake’s major contributions is her critique of the ways U.S. racism and nationalism forced survivors to negotiate their identities as Americans in a society that marked them as Asian and foreign. This affected medical care available to hibakusha—especially women—and caused American citizens to seek treatment in Japan, reminding them again of their status as “perpetual foreigners.”Chapter introductions are sometimes too lengthy, but provide the nuance needed for the oral histories that follow. Survivors’ stories are occasionally incomplete as Wake privileges analysis over narrative; this may be purposeful, but it does leave unanswered questions. Ultimately, Wake presents a complicated, ambitious addition to atomic bomb historiography in an accessible style that builds upon her scholarship on gender, medicine, and the Hiroshima Maidens. She gives power to unheard survivors, many of whom had never been interviewed. She questions the U.S. government’s refusal to confront the universality of the horrors it inflicted on its own citizens, including radiation sickness, discrimination, legal and human rights violations, and lack of American justice.

Notes from the Editors, April 2022

buy this issue
 As we write these notes at the beginning of March 2022, the eight-year limited civil war in Ukraine has turned into a full-scale war. This represents a turning point in the New Cold War and a great human tragedy. By threatening global nuclear holocaust, these events are also now endangering the entire world. To understand the origins of the New Cold War and the onset of the current Russian entry into the Ukrainian civil war, it is necessary to go back to decisions associated with the creation of the New World Order made in Washington when the previous Cold War ended in 1991.

Stranger Things, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

<i>Stranger Things</i>, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

The Nascent Milliquasar VT J154843.06+220812.6: Tidal Disruption Event or Extreme Accretion State Change?

We present a detailed multiwavelength follow-up of the nuclear radio flare VT J154843.06+220812.6, hereafter VT J1548. VT J1548 was selected as a ∼1 mJy radio flare in 3 GHz observations from the Very Large Array Sky Survey. It is located in the nucleus of a low-mass () host galaxy with weak or no past active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity. VT J1548 is associated with a slow rising (multiple year), bright mid-IR flare in the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer survey, peaking at ∼10%L edd.. No associated optical transient is detected, although we cannot rule out a short, early optical flare given the limited data available. Constant late-time (∼3 yr post-flare) X-ray emission is detected at ∼1042 erg s−1. The radio spectral energy distribution is consistent with synchrotron emission from an outflow incident on an asymmetric medium. A follow-up, optical spectrum shows transient, bright, high-ionization coronal line emission ([Fe x i] λ6375, [Fe x i] λ7894, [S x i i] λ7612). Transient broad Hα is also detected but without corresponding broad Hβ emission, suggesting high nuclear extinction. We interpret this event as either a tidal disruption event or an extreme flare of an AGN, in both cases obscured by a dusty torus. Although these individual properties have been observed in previous transients, the combination is unprecedented. This event highlights the importance of searches across all wave bands for assembling a sample of nuclear flares that spans the range of observable properties and possible triggers.

Framing and Enframing: Events in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice

The Sacrifice of the Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, is imbued with conspicuous Christian elements, which involves the viewers’ abandoning the conventional framing and adopting the Christian frame to appreciate the inner logic of the movie. In the film, Alexander conducts two sacrifices when humans are confronted with the nuclear apocalypse resulting from modern technology. The first sacrifice saves humanity from impending nuclear doom. Alexander presents the artwork that eulogizes God; meanwhile, he makes possible humanity’s return to the real home. The movie, in a way, calls for the men to abandon the blind dependence on technology and explore a new direction under the guidance of art.

Far Cry 5, American Right-Wing Terrorism, and Doomsday Prepper Culture

The article explores Far Cry 5’scommentary on the rise of the radical right, domestic terrorism, and extremism in America. The game's two primary modes for this narrative critique involve its use of Christian symbolism and its exploration of doomsday prepper culture. What emerges from this analysis is that Far Cry 5 provides a harrowing reckoning in the rise of extremist thought in this country and its ramifications, one that is a timely reflection of current American culture. In Far Cry 5, America becomes the next great empire poised to fall throughout the game and finally, in its tense final sequences, succumbs to nuclear annihilation.

Fiat Lux/Fiat Lex: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Reason and Law

Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) is an enigmatic text. It is a depressing tale of the evitability of technoscientific civilization ending in apocalypse, a comedic story of ignorant monks producing gold-embellished illuminated copies of electronic circuit blueprints and an ambiguous examination of the tensions between faith and science. This paper reads A Canticle for Leibowitz as an examination of legality. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s observation that Catholicism has a “juridical logic,” this paper identifies that A Canticle for Leibowitz brings to life, and questions, the Thomist worldview of reason, reasonability and layered orders. It is a novel that brings to life, but also interrogates, Catholic intellectualism. It is tempting to conclude that Miller argues for a Thomist ethic of responsibility to temper technoscientific self-destruction. However, that is not where the novel ends. Its endings are hopeful, notwithstanding the nuclear holocaust in the final pages. There are suggestions of new nomoi: In the diasporic human extra-terrestrial colonies, ministered to by a nomadic Church, and a radiated Eden inherited by humanity’s prelapsarian successors anticipated in the coming to life of Rachel.

Visualizing Faith and Futility in the Nuclear Apocalypse

This paper explores the intersection of personal responsibility, futility, and faith in visual representations of nuclear apocalypse. In two films produced during the late Cold War, Testament (1983) and When the Wind Blows (1986), the protagonists attempt to follow public guidance, maintain daily routines as their health and communities break down, and make muddled connections to religious faith. In Testament, a mother is left to care for her children in suburban California for months after an unexplained nuclear attack isolates and contaminates the town. In When the Wind Blows, a retired couple living in the British countryside diligently follow government instructions to “protect and survive”, while quickly succumbing to radiation poisoning. In a contrasting post-Cold War visual representation, the speculative artwork of the artists Erich Berger and Mari Keto imagine the storage of nuclear waste as a personal responsibility. In OpenCare (2016), waste is encased in steel pellets mounted on a bronze disc, and a series of artifacts and instructions assist in determining continued toxicity. While Testament and When the Wind Blows project the futility of personal responsibility and faith in nuclear survival, Berger and Keto’s system envisions a deep nuclear future requiring continued personal management and care.