Chapter 21 - War and Nuclear Criticism

Summary

The chapter looks at the devastations caused by nuclear testing, the links between environmental thinking and nuclear culture, and the twenty-first-century apocalyptic imaginary generated by climate breakdown and the post-Chernobyl and post-Fukushima nature of the second nuclear age. It reviews the Derridean moment of Nuclear Criticism at the very end of the Cold War through the lens of green Marxism by way of a meditation on the representation of nuclearized sites, deserts, islands, and wastelands, from the Cold War to the present. The chapter redefines the questions raised by Nuclear Criticism on the textuality of global war systems, on the impossibility of post-archival dreaming, through the modalities of environmental apocalypse now. The aesthetic repertoire of the chapter comprises John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, stories by J. G. Ballard and the work of Jessica Hurley on Maori author James George’s Ocean Roads, Marlo Starr on Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jaltok, Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘Second Variety,’ DeLillo’s Underworld, and the work of the Nuclear Culture Research Group.