Nuclear Pasts and Presents

Mark Frauenfelder, founder of Boing Boing, has reported about this little gem he found on Realtor.com: 87 Hale Hill Lane, Lewis, NY 12950. Or, to be less precise, an old missile silo that has been converted into a home. It’s on sale for only $750,000. Scott Garner (who I assume is the listing agent) has explicitly advertised it as: “Live in the Launch Control Center of this Cold War Missile Silo.”

missile silo

On the phenomenon of old missile silos and bunkers being repurposed, see photographer Richard Ross‘s Waiting for the End of the World (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), a fairly wonderful photo-essay on the subject. Sarah Vowell also interviews Ross in the book.

silo

The Nuclear Uncanny of Robert Longo

When looking earlier today at a bunch of striking photorealist painting and drawing, I came across the image below. It is a charcoal drawing of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki by artist Robert Longo. (Strangely enough, in addition to being an artist, he also directed the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, based on a William Gibson short story. It was Longo’s only feature film.) He has a whole series of charcoal drawings of nuclear explosions. His website is here. His work is also currently part of a group exhibition, “Disaster: The End of Days,” at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris.

Robert Longo Drawing of Nagasaki

Archiving the Hyperarchive

A pretty great video about The Internet Archive is here. “Library of Alexandria 2.0 will exist for (hopefully) many more centuries than version 1.0 did.” And not only is The Internet Archive archiving the Internet, it’s trying to preserve real live books as well. “Burning books isn’t the problem; people get flooded–there’s so much information.” Hyperarchival realism, indeed.

Nuclear Morale Crisis?

On 8 May 2013, Michael R. Gordon for The New York Times and others reported that “The Air Force removed 17 officers assigned to standing watch over nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles after finding safety violations, potential violations in protecting codes and basic attitude problems.” This has caused the AP  to ask “Is There a Morale Crisis in the US Nuclear Force?” Well, yes. And it is history and those damned politicians’ faults. If they just stopped trying to reduce the nuclear arsenal, morale would be higher. An excerpt:

Bruce Blair, a former missile launch officer and now a national security scholar at Princeton University, said Friday that morale has dropped in part because the ICBM mission that originated in 1959, deterring the Soviet Union from attacking the U.S. or Europe, is less compelling than it was generations ago.

“This dead-end career is not the result of shrinking nuclear arsenals, but rather because the Cold War ended decades ago and because so few senior commander jobs exist within the missile specialty,” Blair said. “Most crews can’t wait to transfer out of missiles into faster-track careers such as space operations, but the Air Force doesn’t make it easy.”

[Air Force Secretary Michael] Donley came close to blaming the White House for any malaise. He said that when officers see “the national leadership” contemplating more nuclear reductions “this does have a corrosive effect on our ability to maintain focus on this mission.” He also said “critics or others” contribute to this when they suggest getting rid of the ICBM force entirely.

Yeah, because this should all be our primary concern with regard to nuclear weapons: that the morale of soldiers stays high. I don’t know what to say.

“Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive” in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World

Silence of Fallout Cover

Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor have edited a great collection of essays on nuclear criticism, The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World (this links to the publisher page). I have an essay in the collection, “Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive,” that any reader of this blog would probably find quite interesting. And of course there are a number of other interesting essays by accomplished scholars and nuclear critics. You can preview the table of contents, the preface, and the introduction here. And the book is now readily available for order from Amazon and of course other places. (Probably the quickest way to get it would be going directly to CSP’s site.)

I’ve included the Table of Contents below:

Preface, John Canaday

Introduction: The Silence of Fallout, Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor

Chapter One: “What Works”: Instrumentalism, Ideology, and Nostalgia in a Post-Cold War Culture, Jeff Smith

Chapter Two: Specters of Totality: The Afterlife of the Nuclear Age, Aaron Rosenberg

Chapter Three: Queer Temporalities of the Nuclear Condition, Paul K. Saint-Amour

Chapter Four: Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive, Bradley J. Fest

Chapter Five: Cut to Black: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-September 11th America, Joseph Dewey

Chapter Six: The Pixilated Apocalypse: Video Games and Nuclear Fears, 1980-2012, William Knoblauch

Chapter Seven: Depictions of Destruction: Post-Cold War Literary Representations of Storytelling and Survival in the Nuclear Era, Julie Williams

Chapter Eight: Allegories of Hiroshima: Toward a Rhetoric of Nuclear Modernism, Mark Pedretti

Chapter Nine: War as Peace: Afterlives of Nuclear War in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Jessica Hurley

Chapter Ten: The Hunger Games: Darwinism and Nuclear Apocalypse Narrative in the Post-9/11 World, Patrick B. Sharp

Chapter Eleven: Legacy of Waste: Nuclear Culture After the Cold War, Daniel Cordle

Chapter Twelve: In a dark wud: Metaphors, Narratives, and Nuclear Weapons, John Canaday