"SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS"

Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America

Has any nation-state invested as profoundly in ruins as Cold War America? Although many societies have experienced moments of self-doubt about the future, perhaps even contemplating the ruins that might be left behind as testament to their existence, it took American ingenuity to transform ruination into a form of nation building. In this regard, the invention of the atomic bomb proved to be utterly transformative for American society: it not only provided the inspiration for a new U.S. geopolitical strategy—one that ultimately enveloped the earth in advanced military technology and colonized everyday life with the minute-to-minute possibility of nuclear war—but it also provided officials with a new means of engaging and disciplining citizens in everyday life. For U.S. policy makers, the Cold War arms race transformed the apocalypse not only into a technoscientific project and a geopolitical paradigm, but also a powerful new domestic political resource.

Put differently, a new kind of social contract was formed in the first decade of the nuclear age in the United States, one based not on the protection and improvement of everyday life but rather on the national contemplation of ruins. Known initially as civil defense, the project of building the bomb and communicating its power to the world turned engineering ruins into a form of international theater. Nuclear explosions, matched with large-scale emergency response exercises, became a means of developing the bomb as well as of imagining nuclear warfare (see, for example, Vanderbilt 2002; Glasstone and Dolan 1977; Kahn 1960). This test program would ultimately transform the United States into the most nuclear-bombed country on earth, distributing its environmental, economic, and health effects to each and every U.S. citizen. By the mid-1950s it was no longer a perverse exercise to imagine one's home and city devastated, on fire and in ruins; it had become a formidable public ritual—a core act of governance, technoscientific practice, and democratic participation. Indeed, in early Cold War America it became a civic obligation to collectively imagine, and at times theatrically enact, the physical destruction of the nation-state.

It is this specific nationalization of death that I wish to explore in this chapter, assessing not only the first collective formulations of nuclear fear in the United States but also the residues and legacies of that project for contemporary American society. Today we live in a world populated with newly charred landscapes and a production of ruins that speaks directly to this foundational moment in American national culture (see Stoler with Bond 2006). The notions of danger, preemption, and emergency response that inform the U.S. War on Terror derive meaning from the promises and institutions made by the Cold War security state. Indeed, the logics of nuclear fear informing that multigenerational state- and nation-building enterprise exist now as a largely inchoate, but deeply embedded, set of assumptions about power and threat. How Americans have come to understand mass death at home and abroad has much to do with the legacies of the Cold War nuclear project, and the peculiar psychosocial consequences of attempting to build the nation through the contemplation of nuclear ruins.

What follows is largely a study of visual culture, and specifically the domestic deployment of images of a ruined United States for ideological effect. I argue that key aspects of U.S. security culture have been formed in relation to images of nuclear devastation: the constitution of the modern security state in the aftermath of World War II mobilized the atomic bomb as the basis for American geopolitical power, but it also created a new citizen-state relationship mediated by nuclear fear. This chapter considers the lasting effects of nation building through nuclear fear by tracking the production and ongoing circulation of nuclear ruins from the Cold War's balance of terror through the current War on Terror. It is not an exercise in viewer response but rather charts the development and circulation of a specific set of ideas and images about ultimate danger. I begin with a discussion of the early Cold War project known as civil defense and track how the specific images created for domestic consumption as part of that campaign continued to circulate as afterimages in the popular films of the 1980s and 1990s. I show that the early Cold War state sought explicitly to militarize U.S. citizens through contemplating the end of the nation-state, creating in the process a specific set of ideas and images of collective danger that continues to inform American society in powerful and increasingly complex ways. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the affective coordinates of the Cold War arms race provided specific ideological resources to the state, which once again mobilized the image of a United States in nuclear ruins to enable war. Ultimately, this chapter follows Walter Benjamin's call to interrogate the aestheticized politics that enable increasing militarization and that allow citizens to experience their own destruction as an "aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (1969, 242).

Be Afraid but Don't Panic!

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.... To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it. —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Nuclear ruins are never the end of the story in the United States—they always offer a new beginning. In the early Cold War period, ruins become the markers of a new kind of social intimacy grounded in highly detailed renderings of theatrically rehearsed mass violence. The intent of these public spectacles—nuclear detonations, city evacuations, duck-and-cover drills—was not defense in the classic sense of avoiding violence or destruction but rather a psychological reprogramming of the American public for life in a nuclear age. The central project of the early nuclear state was to link U.S. institutions—military, industrial, legislative, academic—for the production of the bomb, while calibrating public perceptions of the nuclear danger to enable that project. As Blanchot suggests, this effort to think through the ultimate crisis colonized everyday life as well as the future, while fundamentally missing the actual disaster. The scripting of disaster in the imagination has profound social effects: it defines the conditions of insecurity, renders other threats invisible, and articulates the terms of both value and loss. In the United States, civil defense was always a willful act of...