Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android

John Kinsella, Drew Milne, John Kinsella, Drew Milne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000348842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android investigates the threat conveyed and maintained by the nuclear cycle: mining, research, health, power generation and weaponry.

Central to this polyvalent 'report' on the infiltration of our lives and control over them exerted by the industrial-military complex, are critiques of the creation, storage and use of atomic weapons, the exploitation of Australian Aboriginal people and their lands through British atomic testing in the 1950s, and an exposé of a language of denial in the world of nuclear mining/energy/military usages. 'Nuclear' is also parenthetically investigated in its function as extended metaphor and question for poetry and poetics. Key is a consideration of the use of the language of the 'atomic' in cultural spaces, and in 'the arts'. Indigenous land-rights claims in the face of uranium mining, the semantics of waste and of the glib usage by nuclear power companies of the fact of global warming to suit their own corrosive agendas. The triumphalism of scientific and cultural discourse around 'nuclear' and the threats by nuclear fission are by association brought into question. The nuclear cycle throws the whole future of human beings into doubt, and this book seeks to assemble new resources of resistance through creative and critical mediums, including poetry and poetics.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

baden offord

BEYOND OUR NUCLEAR ENTANGLEMENT

Love, nuclear pain and the whole damn thing

How the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will – those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

Barack Obama¹

The capacity for planetary suicide, once acquired, cannot but introduce irreversible changes to the psychological, social, and ethical life.

Ashis Nandy²

It’s like the place has just been bombed into oblivion.

Julia Gillard³

Peace is not obtained by a treaty, just as love is not conquered by decree.

Raimon Panikkar⁴

You are part of a nuclear algorithm like everyone else born after the Second World War. In the year of your birth, 1958, as your eyes are opening into the world, Australia’s first nuclear research station – the High Flux Australian Reactor – begins its operation at Lucas Heights, in Sydney’s south, not far from where you will practise abseiling as a teenager, on sandstone cliffs near Woronora Weir. Later in that same year you entered the world, a nuclear plume folds off from the third Maralinga bomb. Code-named Kite, this three-kiloton bomb was dropped into the Australian outback and part of its strontium-90 cloud drifts across the landscape, southwards, to cover the city of Adelaide. The effects on the Indigenous people at Maralinga remain hidden from public knowledge. You are in a world that has precariously adopted nuclear weapons to manage its co-existence, psycho-pathologically instituting and “sustaining a culture of necrophilia.”⁵

Global historian Yuval Noah Harari has noted that the “Algorithm is arguably the single most important concept in our world,”⁶ and defines the way Homo sapiens have brought order in to their lives and domination of the planet. In our age, the toolkit of nuclear capability and technical prowess have become perverse ingredients for peace-makers and nationalist advocates alike, forged through a world war into a Cold War and then into various posturing ideological positions by a methodology of deterrence and brutish dominion over mortality through the ultimate hand of horror. A few months after your fourth birthday in 1962, the algorithm of the Cold War produces one of the moments closest to full-scale nuclear war: between the United States and the USSR. Known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, this thirteen days conjured a spectral haunting that has cast its long shadow over humanity’s future ever since and has become a template of how peace comes to be produced over a precipice of total destruction.

The collective lived experience of nuclearism per se, however, has become domesticated in human consciousness since the Second World War through a mix of imagination, myth and fantasy, amnesia and opacity. You watch the popular children’s animation series Astro Boy, for example, which appeared on Australian television from 1965 to 1971 (and later in the 1980s), mesmerising a generation into the illusion and falsehood of the nuclear promise through its hero of the same name. The lyrics openly embrace the nuclear world and its implicit ties to violence and destruction (see <http://www.metrolyrics.com/astroboy-theme-song-lyrics-sean-lennon.html> for the full lyrics):

Astro Boy bombs away,

On your mission today,

Here’s the countdown,

And the blastoff,

Everything is go Astro Boy!

[…]

Popular culture imagined the nuclear age and its pathological interest in destruction and mortality for you, turning the spread of radioactive materials into songs, like the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” released in 1966. Or Nitin Sawhney’s “Broken Skin” in 1999, which laments India’s nuclear “coming of age” (see <https://genius.com/Nitin-sawhney-broken-skin-lyrics> for the full lyrics):

[…]

Broken skin, distant fear

Shattered worlds of endless tears.⁷

Other songs include David Bowie’s “New Killer Star” in 2003. Although we have lived through the nuclear age, courtesy of an insidious techno-military-industrial concordance that has veiled nuclear reality, it has been our inability to make sense of our psycho-pathological obsession with nuclear weapons that characterises our behaviour. But more than anything, the nuclear algorithm has produced three things: a psychological paralysis or numbing; a collective amnesia about colonisation and its effects on Indigenous peoples; and an opacity to the global environmental contamination that has occurred through the spread of radioactive materials through the air, land and sea.

• • •

You are steered towards overwhelming and inexplicable pain when you consider the nuclear entanglement that the species Homo sapiens finds itself in. This is because the fact of living in the nuclear age presents an existential, aesthetic, ethical and psychological challenge that defines human consciousness. Although an immanent threat and ever-present danger to the very existence of the human species, living with the possibility of nuclear war has infiltrated the matrix of modernity so profoundly as to paralyse our mind-set to respond adequately. We have chosen to ignore the facts at the heart of the nuclear program with its dangerous algorithm; we have chosen to live with the capacity and possibility of a collective, pervasive and even planetary-scale suicide; and the techno-industrial-national powers that claim there is “no immediate danger” ad infinitum.⁸

This has led to one of the key logics of modernity’s insanity. As Harari writes: “Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, and therefore forced the most powerful nations on earth to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts.”⁹ This is the nuclear algorithm at work, a methodology of madness. In revisiting Jacques Derrida in “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),”¹⁰ who described nuclear war as a “non-event,” it is clear that the pathology of the “non-event” remains as active as ever even in the time of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un with their stichomythic nuclear posturing.

The question of our times is whether we have an equal or more compelling capacity and willingness to end this impoverished but ever-present logic of pain and uncertainty. How not simply to bring about disarmament, but to go beyond this politically charged, as well as mythological and psychological nuclear algorithm? How to find love amidst the nuclear entanglement; the antidote to this entanglement? Is it possible to end the pathology of power that exists with nuclear capacity? Sadly, the last lines of Nitin Sawhney’s “Broken Skin” underscore this entanglement:

Just 5 miles from India’s nuclear test site

Children play in the shade of the village water tank

Here in the Rajasthan desert people say

They’re proud their country showed their nuclear capability.¹¹

• • •

As an activist scholar working in the fields of human rights and cultural studies, responding to the nuclear algorithm is an imperative. Your politics, ethics and scholarship are indivisible in this cause. An acute sense of care for the world, informed by pacifist and non-violent, de-colonialist approaches to knowledge and practice, pervades your concern. You are aware that there are other ways of knowing than those you are familiar and credentialed with. You are aware that you are complicit in the prisons that you choose to live inside,¹² and that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. You use your scholarship to shake up the world from its paralysis, abjection and amnesia; to unsettle the epistemic and structural violence that is ubiquitous to neoliberalism and its machinery; to create dialogic and learning spaces for the work of critical human rights and critical justice to take place. All this, and to enable an ethics of intervention through understanding what is at the very heart of the critical human rights impulse, creating a “dialogue for being, because I am not without the other.”¹³

Furthermore, as a critical human rights advocate living in a nuclear armed world, your challenge is to reconceptualise the human community as Ashis Nandy has argued, to see how we can learn to co-exist with others in conviviality and also learn to co-survive with the non-human, even to flourish. A dialogue for being requires a leap into a human rights frame that includes a deep ecological dimension, where the planet itself is inherently involved as a participant in its future. This requires scholarship that “thinks like a mountain.”¹⁴ A critical human rights approach understands that it cannot be simply human-centric. It requires a nuanced and arresting clarity to present perspectives on co-existence and co-survival that are from human and non-human viewpoints.¹⁵

Ultimately, you realise that your struggle is not confined to declarations, treaties, legislation, and law, though they have their role. It must go further to produce “creative intellectual exchange that might release new ethical energies for mutually assured survival.”¹⁶ Taking an anti-nuclear stance and enabling a post-nuclear activism demands a revolution within the field of human rights work. Recognising the entanglement of nuclearism with the Anthropocene, for one thing, requires a profound shift in focus from the human-centric to a more-than-human co-survival. It also requires a fundamental shift in understanding our human culture, in which the very epistemic and rational acts of sundering from co-survival with the planet and environment takes place. In the end, you realise, as Raimon Panikkar has articulated, “it is not realistic to toil for peace if we do not proceed to a disarmament of the bellicose culture in which we live.”¹⁷ Or, as Geshe Lhakdor suggests, there must be “inner disarmament for external disarmament.”¹⁸ In this sense, it is within the cultural arena, our human society, where the entanglement of subjective meaning making, nature and politics occurs, that we need to disarm.

• • •

It is 1982, and you are reading Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth on a Sydney bus. Sleeping has not been easy over the past few nights as you reluctantly but compulsively read about the consequences of nuclear war. For some critics, Schell’s account is high polemic, but for you it is more like Rabindranath Tagore: it expresses the suffering we make for ourselves. What you find noteworthy is that although Schell’s scenario of widespread destruction of the planet through nuclear weaponry, of immeasurable harm to the bio-sphere through radiation, is powerfully laid out, the horror and scale of nuclear obliteration also seems surreal and far away as the bus makes its way through the suburban streets.

A few years later, you read a statement from an interview with Paul Tibbets, the pilot of “Enola Gay,” the plane that bombed Hiroshima. He says, “The morality of dropping that bomb was not my business.”¹⁹ This abstraction from moral responsibility – the denial of the implications on human life and the consequences of engagement through the machinery of war – together with the sweeping amnesia that came afterwards from thinking about the bombing of Hiroshima, are what make you become an environmental and human rights activist. You realise that what makes the nuclear algorithm work involves a politically engineered and deeply embedded insecurity-based recipe to elide the nuclear threat from everyday life. The spectre of nuclear obliteration, like the idea of human rights, can appear abstract and distant, not our everyday business. You realise that within this recipe is the creation of a moral tyranny of distance, an abnegation of myself with the other. One of modernity’s greatest and earliest achievements was the mediation of the self with the world. How this became a project assisted and shaped through the military-industrial-technological-capitalist complex is fraught and hard to untangle. But as a critical human rights scholar you have come to see through that complex, and you put energies into challenging that tyranny of distance, to activate a politics, ethics and scholarship that recognises the other as integral to yourself. Ultimately, even, to see that the other is also within.²⁰

• • •

The nuclear algorithm came about in the conjuncture of warring nation-states, the ascent of science, ideological contest, capitalism and the global impact of industrialisation. And central to how these broad and systemic changes happened was the colonial mind-set that had pervaded the world over several centuries. The project of Empire that grew out of European expansion across the globe was fashioned through an epistemic and structural violence that involved substantive pillaging and hoarding of resources alongside extreme exploitation and various forms of genocide. The destructive modes of knowledge that inform...