Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T10:06:22.593Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Nuclear Sensorium: Cold War Nuclear Imperialism and Sensory Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2019

John Shiga
John Shiga*
Affiliation:
School of Professional Communication Ryerson [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound, and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium”—the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military, and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

Résumé

Cet article trace les dimensions sensorielles de l’impérialisme nucléaire en se concentrant sur les essais d’armes nucléaires de la Guerre froide qui ont été conduits par les Forces armées des États-Unis dans les îles Marshall pendant les années 1950. Les éléments clés de la création du « Sensorium nucléaire » reposaient sur les interfaces entre la vibration, la contamination sonore et la contamination radioactive. Ces interfaces ont été mobilisées par des scientifiques tels que l’océanographe Walter Munk dans le cadre du programme d’essais nucléaires américain. L’impérialisme nucléaire a non seulement projeté son pouvoir par des essais d’armes, la vaporisation des terres et l’érosion des droits des personnes qui y vivaient, mais également à travers la production d’un « Sensorium nucléaire » – une différenciation des modes de détection de la bombe à travers les discours juridiques, militaires et scientifiques ainsi que dans l’attribution de différents degrés de valeurs épistémologiques et juridiques à ces modes sensoriels.

Keywords

environmental litigationnuclear weapon testsdark ecologyCold War politicsAtomic Energy Act 1946sensory practiceslitige environnementalessais d’armes nucléairesécologie noirepolitiques de la Guerre froidela Loi sur le contrôle de l’énergie atomique de 1946pratiques sensorielles
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 34 , Special Issue 2: Vers une déstabilisation du sensorium du droit: Étude de la jurisprudence des sens / Troubling Law’s Sensorium: Explorations in Sensational Jurisprudence , August 2019 , pp. 281 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association / Association Canadienne Droit et Société 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agrawal, Arun. 2005. Environmentality: Community, intimate government, and the making of environmental subjects in Kumaon, India. Current Anthropology 46 (2): 161–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atomic Energy Act of 1946, Pub. L. No. 585, 60 Stat. 767 (1947). http://www.legisworks.org/congress/79/publaw-585.pdfGoogle Scholar
Barker, Holly M. 2015. Confronting a Trinity of Institutional Barriers: Denial, cover-up, and secrecy. Oceania 85 (3): 376–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bélanger, Pierre, and Arroyo, Alexander S.. 2016. Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies of the US Department of Defense. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brunnstrom, David. 2014. U.S. Examining Marshall Islands’ Nuclear Lawsuits, Defends Record. Reuters, April 24, 2014. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-marshalls/u-s-examining-marshall-islands-nuclear-lawsuits-defends-record-idUSBREA3O23Y20140425Google Scholar
Bruno, Laura A. 2003. The Bequest of the Nuclear Battlefield: Science, nature, and the atom during the first decade of the cold war. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (2): 237–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daw, Sarah. 2016. The “dark ecology” of the Bomb: Writing the nuclear as a part of “nature” in cold war American literature. In Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Schneider, R. J., 119–135. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
De Cauter, Lieven. 2004. The Capsular Civilization. On the City in the Age of Fear. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: NAi.Google Scholar
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2012. The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific. Cultural Geographies 20 (2): 167–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2009. Radiation ecologies and the wars of light. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 55 (3): 468–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the politics of discourse in cold war America. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2012. Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Gladeck, F. R., Hallowell, J. H., Martin, E. J., McMullan, F. W., Miller, R. H., Pozega, R., Rogers, W. E., Rowland, R. H., Shelton, C. F., and Berkhouse, L.. 1982. Operation Ivy: 1952. Santa Barbara, CA: Kaman Tempo.Google Scholar
Guyer, Ruth L. 2001. Radioactivity and Rights: Clashes at Bikini Atoll. American Journal of Public Health 91 (9): 1371–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hanqin, Xue. 2003. Transboundary Damage in International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Higuchi, Toshihiro. 2010. Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Debate on Risk Knowledge in Cold War America, 1945–1963. In Environmental Histories of the Cold War, ed. McNeill, J. R. and Unger, Corinna R., 301–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnston, Barbara Rose. 2015. Nuclear Disaster: The Marshall Islands experience and lessons for a post-Fukushima world.” In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. DeLoughrey, E., Didur, J., and Carrigan, A., 140–61. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Joint Task Force Seven. 1952. Operation Ivy: Final Report . Washington, DC: Defense Nuclear Agency. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a995443.pdfGoogle Scholar
Lefeber, Rene. 1996. Transboundary Environmental Interference and the Origin of State Liability. Boston, MA: Kluwer Law International.Google Scholar
Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal. Before the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Republic of the Marshall Islands: In the matter of the Alabs of Rongelap et al. [the “Rongelap Decision”]. April 17, 2007. http://www.moruroa.org/medias/pdf/RONGELAP_DECISION%202007.pdfGoogle Scholar
Martin, Laura J. 2018. Proving Grounds: Ecological fieldwork in the Pacific and the materialization of ecosystems. Environmental History 23 (July): 567–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masco, Joseph. 2004. Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory politics from Trinity to the virtual bomb in Los Alamos. American Ethnologist 31 (3): 349–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medovoi, Leerom. 2009. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Ecology: Sustainability as disavowal. New Formations 69 (Winter): 129–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mielke, Bob. 2005. Rhetoric and Ideology in the Nuclear Test Documentary. Film Quarterly 58 (3): 28–37. DOI: 10.1525/fq.2005.58.3.28CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mukerji, Chandra. 1989. A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Munk, Walter H. 1990. Heard Island Experiment: Inaugural Lecture, International Science Lecture Series. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Munk, Walter H., Spindel, Robert C., Baggeroer, Arthur, and Birdsall, Theodore G.. 1994. The Heard Island Feasibility Test. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 96 (4): 2330–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Gorman, Ned, and Hamilton, Kevin. 2011. At the Interface: The loaded rhetorical gestures of nuclear legitimacy and illegitimacy. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8 (1): 41–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2010.543986CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2017. Touching the World: Vision, hearing, hapticity and atmospheric perception. Proceedings of Invisible places: Sound, Urbanism and Sense of Place, Sao Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal , 7–9 April: 15–28. http://invisibleplaces.org/2017/pdf/Pallasmaa.pdfGoogle Scholar
Rainger, Ronald. 2000. Science at the crossroads: The Navy, Bikini Atoll, and American oceanography in the 1940s. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 (2): 349–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritts, Max, and Shiga, John. 2016. Military cetology. Environmental Humanities 8 (2): 196–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothschild, Rachel. 2013. Environmental Awareness in the Atomic Age: Radioecologists and nuclear technology. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 43 (4): 492–530.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rotter, Andrew J. 2011. Empire of the senses: How seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching shaped imperial encounters. Diplomatic History 35 (1): 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, Jessica A. 2012. A “Voice to Sing”: Rongelapese musical activism and the production of nuclear knowledge. Music and Politics 6 (1): 1–21.Google Scholar
Shiga, John. 2015. Sonar and the channelization of the ocean. In Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound, ed. Théberge, P., Devine, K., and Everrett, T., 85–106. New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
United Nations. (1972). Declaration of the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (5–16 June) . Stockholm, Sweden.Google Scholar
von Storch, Hans, and Hasselmann, Klaus. 2010. Seventy Years of Exploration in Oceanography: A prolonged weekend discussion with Walter Munk. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waller, Laurie, and Witjes, Nina. 2017. Sensor Publics: Report from a workshop on the politics of sensing. EASST Review 36 (2): 38–41.Google Scholar
World Wildlife Fund–Canada. 2013. Summary Report: Finding Management Solutions for Underwater Noise in Canada’s Pacific. Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Aquarium and WWF-Canada. <http://www.wwf.ca/conservation/ocean_noise_in_canada_pacific_workshop.cfm>>Google Scholar