masco survival is your business

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” complex ways. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washing- ton, D.C., on September 11, 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 article follows Walter Benjamin’s (1969:242) 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.” 4 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 Disaster Nuclear ruins are never the end of the story in the United States but, rather, 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, and duck and cover drills—was not defense in the classic sense of avoiding violence or destruction but rather a psychological reprogramming of the U.S. public for life in a nuclear age. The central project of the earlynuclearstatewastolinkU.S.institutions—military,industrial,legislative,and academic—for the production of the bomb, while calibrating public perceptions of the nuclear danger to enable that project. 5 As Blanchot (1995) suggests, this effort to think through the disaster 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 fabulation, an official fantasy designed to promote an image of nuclear war that would be, above all things, politically useful. It also installed an idea of an American community under total and unending threat, creating the terms for a new kind of nation-building that demanded an unprecedented level of militarism in everyday life as the minimum basis for “security.” After the Soviet’s first nuclear detonation in 1949, U.S. policymakers com- mitted to a new geopolitical strategy that would ultimately dominate U.S. foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century. The policy of “containment,” as 363

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 Defense intellectuals within the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, however, worried that nuclear terror could become so profound under the terms of an escalating nuclear arms race that the American public would be unwilling to support the military and geopolitical agenda of the Cold War. 7 The immediate challenge, as U.S. nuclear strategists saw it, was to avoid an apathetic public (which might just give up when faced with the destructive power of the Soviet nuclear arsenal), on the one hand, or a terrorized public (unable to function cognitively), on the other hand (Oakes 1994:34; and also George 2003). For example, an influential civil defense study from 1952, Project East River, argued that civilian response to a nuclear attack would be all-out panic and mob behavior: American society, it concluded, would not only be at war with the Soviets but also at war with itself as society violently broke down along race and class lines (Associated Universities 1952). A long “Cold War” consequently required not only a new geopolitics powered by nuclear weapons but also new forms of psychological discipline at home. One of the earliest and most profound projects of the Cold War state was thus to deploy the bomb as a mechanism for accessing and controlling the emotions of citizens. As Guy Oakes has documented (1994:47), the civil defense programs of the early Cold War were designed to “emotionally manage” U.S. citizens through nuclear fear. The formal goal of this state program was to transform “nuclear terror,” which was interpreted by U.S. officials as a paralyzing emotion, into “nuclear fear,” an affective state that would allow citizens to function in a time of crisis (see Associated Universities 1952, as well as Oakes 1994:62–63). By militarizing everyday life through nuclear fear, the Cold War state sought to both normalize and politically deploy an image of catastrophic risk. Rather than offering citizens an image of safety or of a war that could end in victory, the early Cold War state sought instead to calibrate everyday American life to the minute-to-minute possibility of nuclear warfare. In addition to turning the domestic space of the home into the front line of the Cold War, civil defense argued that citizens should be prepared every second of the day to deal with a potential nuclear attack. In doing so, the Civil Defense Program shifted responsibility for nuclear war from the state to its citizens by making public panic the enemy, not nuclear war itself. It was, in other words, up to citizens to take responsibility for their own survival in the nuclear age. As Val Peterson, the first head of the U.S. Civil Defense Administration, argued in 1953: Ninety per cent of all emergency measures after an atomic blast will depend on the prevention of panic among the survivors in the first 90 seconds. Like 366

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” FIGURE 1. Map of presumed Soviet nuclear targets in 1955 (Federal Civil Defense Administration). Soviet nuclear attack through the 1950s, listing the cities in order of population and ranking them as potential targets. In one 1955 FCDA map (see Figure 1), the top 70 Soviet targets include major population centers as well as military bases in the United States—revealing not only the vulnerability of large cities to the bomb but also the increasingly wide distribution of military industrial sites across the continental United States. As the size of U.S. and Soviet bombs, and the means of delivery, grew (from bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs]), so too did the highly publicized target lists. Thomas J. Martin and Donald C. Latham’s 1963 civil defense textbook, Strategy for Survival, for example, presented a case for 303 ground zeros in the United States in case of nuclear war. Designating 303 U.S. cities and towns that would be likely targets of nuclear attack, they concluded that: No one can predict that any one or combination of these cities would be attacked in any future war. Thus, it might appear that we are trying to know the unknowable, to predict the unpredictable, to impose a logical rationale upon war which is, itself, illogical and irrational. But such an inference is incorrect. It was shown in Chapter 5 that there are good reasons to believe that a large fraction of these cities would be attacked in a future war—but what specific cities would be included in this fraction? Because there is no precise answer to this question, civil defense planning must assume that all could 369

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 Instead we build representative units of a test city. With steel and stone and brick and mortar, with precision and skill—as though it were to last a thousand years. But it is a weird, fantastic city. A creation right out of science fiction. A city like no other on the face of the earth. Homes, neat and clean and completely furnished, that will never be occupied. Bridges, massive girders of steel spanning the empty desert. Railway tracks that lead to nowhere, for this is the end of the line. But every element of these tests is carefully planned in these tests as to its design and location in the area. A variety of materials and building techniques are often represented in a single structure. Every brick, beam, and board will have its story to tell. When pieced together these will givesomeoftheanswers,andsomeoftheinformationweneedtosurviveinthe nuclear age. A weird, fantastic city. This test city was also an idealized model of the contemporary American suburb, and by publicizing its atomic destruction the state was involved in an explicit act of psychological manipulation. As we shall see, the Nevada Test Site was the location of nuclear war “simulations” involving real nuclear explosions, and model American cities destroyed in real time for a national audience. Each ruin in these national melodramas—each element of bombed U.S. material culture—was presented as a key to solving the “problem” of nuclear warfare, a means of cracking the code for survival in nuclear conflict. But in this effort to control a specific idea of death, the civil defense strategy also forced citizens to confront the logics of the nuclear state, allowing many to reclaim and reinvest these same ruins with a counternarrative and critique. 13 Thus, real and imagined nuclear ruins became the foundation for competing ideas of national community, producing resistance to, as well as normalization of, a militarized society. But, although the early Cold War effort to produce an “atomic bomb proof” society may have failed, as we shall see, the psychosocial legacies of this moment continue to haunt and inform U.S. national culture. 14 In the remainder of this article, I offer a visual history of nuclear ruins in the United States as a means both of recovering the affective coordinates of the nuclear security state, and exploring the lasting impacts of the Cold War “emotional management” strategy on American society. “CUE FOR SURVIVAL” On May 5, 1955, 100 million Americans watched live on television a “typical” suburban community blown to bits by an atomic bomb (see FCDA 1955 and 1956). Many watched from homes and apartments that were the explicit models 372

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” FCDA was interested in whether or not food would be too contaminated in the immediate aftermath of a blast to eat, and also what kinds of techniques would be needed to feed large groups of homeless, injured, and traumatized people. Within this scheme of crisis management, food was positioned as a primary means of calming individual anxieties and establishing social authority (McEaney 2000:111). Informally, the goal was to saturate the domestic space of the home with nuclear logics and civic obligations, to militarize men, women, and children to withstand either a very long nuclear confrontation or a very short nuclear war. Food was flown in from Las Vegas, Chicago, and San Francisco for the test to document the state’s ability to move large quantities of food around the country in a time of “emergency.” The FCDA report, “Project 32.5: Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Frozen Food,” concludes that “under emergency conditions similar to this exposure, frozen foods may be used for both military and civilian feeding” (Schmitt 1956:3) but this conclusion only hints at the scale of this experiment. Frozen chicken potpies were a privileged test item and were distributed through the test homes as well as buried in bulk freezers. The pies were then exposed to nuclear blast and tested for radiation, as well as nutritional value, color, and taste. Thus, while building increasing powerful atomic and thermonuclear weapons, the security state set about demonstrating to Americans that even if the nation- state disappeared under nuclear fire, its newly developed prepared foods would still be edible (making the chicken potpie a curious emblem of modernity in the process). Like these bomb-proof potpies, all commodified aspects of American life were to be tested against nuclear blast, as the state sought to demonstrate not only that there could be a “postnuclear” moment, but that life within it could be imagined on largely familiar terms. Indeed, documenting evidence of material survival after the atomic blast was ultimately the point of Operation Cue. The mass feeding project, for example, pulled equipment from the wreckage after the test, as well as the food from refrigerators and buried canned goods, and served them to assembled participants: this emergency meal consisted of roast beef, tomato juice, baked beans, and coffee (FDCA 1955:67). The destruction of a model American community thus became the occasion of a giant picnic, with each item of food marked as having survived the atomic bomb, and each witness positioned as a postnuclear survivor. Additionally, the emergency rescue group pulled damaged mannequins from out of the rubble and practiced medical and evacuation techniques on them, eventually flying several charred and broken dummies to offsite hospitals by charter plane. The formal message of Operation Cue was that the postnuclear environment would be only as 375

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 obliterated, and comparable damage would occur out to a distance of at least 8.5 or 9 miles. They probably would be obliterated. Thus, as a scientific test of “everyday objects,” Operation Cue had less value over time, as the effects of blast and radiation in increasingly powerful weapons rendered civil defense almost immediately obsolete as a security concept. In Cold War ideology, however, the promise of nuclear ruins was deployed by the state to secure the possibility of a postnuclear remainder, and with it, the inevitable reconstitution of social order. The discourse of “obliteration” here, however, reveals the technoscientific limitations of that ideological project, as the destructive reality of thermonuclear warfare radically limits the possibility of a postnuclear United States. After the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the visual effects of the bomb were eliminated as atomic testing went underground. The elimination of aboveground tests had two immediate effects: (1) it changed the terms of the public discourse about the bomb, as the state no longer had to rationalize the constant production of mushroom clouds and the related health concerns over radioactive fallout to U.S. citizens, and (2) it locked in place the visual record of the bomb. Thus, the visual record of the 1945–63 aboveground test program, with its deep implication in manipulating public opinions and emotions, remains the visual record of the bomb to this day. As science, Operation Cue was always questionable, but as national theater it remains a much more productive enterprise: it created an idealized consumer dream space and fused it with the bomb, creating the very vocabulary for thinking about the nuclear emergency that continues to inform U.S. politics (see Figure 4). Thus, the motto of Operation Cue “Survival Is Your Business” is not an ironic moment of atomic kitch, but rather reveals the formal project of the nuclear state, underscoring the link between the production of threat, its militarized response, and the Cold War economic program. As an emotional management campaign, civil defense proved extraordinarily influential, installing within American national culture a set of ideas, images, and assumptions about nuclear weapons that continued to inform Cold War politics, and that remain powerful to this day. I turn now to two afterimages of the 1950s civil defense program, each set roughly a generation apart, to consider the lasting consequences of this era’s emotional management strategy, and to explore the psychosocial effects of deploying highly detailed depictions of the end of the nation-state as a means of establishing national community. 378

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” FIGURE 5. Soviet nuclear attack in The Day After. (alongside weather, fire, and traffic accidents), whereas The Day After questioned whether life was worth living after nuclear war. 18 The central protagonist of the story, a medical doctor played by Jason Robards, is left in the final scene dying of radiation sickness, collapsed in what might be the ruins of his former home, his wife and children dead from the attack. No triumphal narrative of survival and reinvention here. Instead, the final moment of the film issues yet another warning: The catastrophic events you have witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert the fateful day. Thus, the “realism” of The Day After is revealed in the end to be a deception—just as it was in the Operation Cue film a generation earlier—as the filmmakers are forced to admit that the horror of nuclear war is ultimately unrepresentable. The simulated realism of the film perfectly illustrates Derrida’s (1984) claim that nuclear war is “fabulously textual” because until it happens it can only be imagined and once it happens it marks the end of the human archive. As the only 381

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 “remainderless event,” nuclear war is thus in the realm of the sublime, ungraspable and subject only to displacements, compensations, and misrecognitions. Thus, by rehearsing nuclear war in the imagination or via civil defense, one does not master the event or its aftermath. Rather, one domesticates an image of a postnuclear world that “stands in” for the inevitable failure of the imagination to be able to conceive of the end. This postnuclear imagination is necessarily an arena of cultural work, as early Cold War officials immediately recognized, one that promotes an idea of order out of the sublime and often becomes a space of pure ideology. To this end, the consistency of the nuclear tropes presented in The Day After, as well as the nationalization of the televised event, document the multigenerational power of nuclear ruins in the American imaginary. For a full generation after Operation Cue, filmmakers could rehearse with startling specificity the entire 1950s program of civil defense, and provoke a national conversation about life after nuclear war. The state was no longer needed to enact this national melodrama of destruction, its terms were already installed in American culture and simply subject to citation and repositioning. The entertainment industry could now provide the firestorm and fallout as “special effects,” rehearsing the lessons of nuclear crisis that a live television audience first experienced in 1955 via a real atomic bomb. This time, however, the ruins were engineered not to “emotionally inoculate” Americans to nuclear war but, rather, to shock them into action during the nuclear emergency of the early 1980s. Putdifferently,inresponsetotheReaganadministration’sescalatingarmsrace and talk of “winnable” nuclear wars (see Sheer 1982) was a cultural return to the images and logics of Operation Cue, mobilized this time as a call to political action ratherthannormalization.Thus,althoughtheformandcontentofcinematicnuclear destruction remains unchanged from 1955 to 1983, its emotional project has been inverted from promoting the docility of the citizen–subject to mobilizing a national community before the bombs fall. The Day After reenacted the national melodrama articulatedinOperationCue28yearsearlierwithremarkableprecision;however,it didsonottoproducea“bombproof”societybut,rather,asadefactoformofnuclear critique. Similarly, activist groups (including Physicians for Social Responsibility and FREEZE) used depictions of nuclear warfare—including the targeting and blast damage maps of U.S. cities, and medical analyses of radiation injuries—to counter the escalating military budgets and nuclear tensions of the late Cold War. 19 In other words, the calibration of the emotional management project was no longer controlled solely by the government, allowing counterformulations using the same texts and images that originally enabled the Cold War cultural project. Nuclear 382

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” ruins are revealed here to be the very grammar of nuclear discourse in the United States—enabling both pronuclear and antinuclear projects—inevitably deployed to articulate the affective terms of national belonging. For despite its implicit nuclear critique, The Day After continues to mobilize a nuclear-bombed United States as a call to American community rather than as a marker of the end of sociability itself. AFTERIMAGE 2: ARMAGEDDON/DEEP IMPACT (1998) There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that could not even be privately acknowledged. —W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction Questioning the near-total silence in German literature about everyday life in the bombed-out ruins of World War II, W. G. Sebald finds an “extraordinary facultyforself-anesthesiashownbyacommunitythatseemedtohaveemergedfrom a war of annihilation without any signs of psychological impairment” (2004:11). He attributes this absence of commentary (about life in the ruins of Dresden and other German cities that were firebombed) to a collective understanding that it was Germany who pioneered mass bombing years earlier in Guernica, Warsaw, and Belgrade (Sebald 2004:104). Thus, the national repression he interrogates is doubled—that of life in the postwar ruins and that of a prior position as mass bomber—linking trauma and destruction as part of the same psychosocial legacy. I suggest that the United States—a country that did not experience mass bombing in World War II but did conduct it using both conventional and nuclear weapons— took an opposite national-cultural route in the Cold War. For although nuclear war did not occur, rather than repress the bomb, American culture proliferated its meaning and influence. The bomb became an intimate part of U.S. popular and political culture, a set of ideas, images, and institutions, installed in the 1950s that soon functioned outside the direct control of the national security state (e.g., see Brians 2006; Evans 1998; Sontag 1966). In other words, we live today in the world made by the Cold War, a global project that engineered everyday life—and life itself—around the technological means of apocalyptic destruction (see Masco 2006). 383

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 What are we to make, for example, of the Hollywood films of the 1990s—the first period in the nuclear age in which U.S. national security was not structured in relationship to a nuclear armed, external enemy—which nonetheless repeti- tively enacts the destruction of the nation on film? Although Americans no longer detonate atomic bombs on fabricated cities populated with mannequins, they do produce yearly spectacles in which U.S. cities are reduced to smoldering ruins all in the name of fun. The Hollywood blockbuster—with its fearsome life-ending asteroids, aliens, earthquakes, floods, and wars—allows Americans to rehearse destruction of their nation-state much as their parents and grandparents did in the 1950s and 1980s. These yearly technoaesthetic displays of finely rendered de- struction are a unique form of American expressive culture. Only U.S. cinema deploys the cutting edge technological achievements of computer-generated im- agery to visualize the destruction of its cities, and does so with such fetishistic glee. 20 Consider 1998, a year that the United States was cinematically attacked twice by asteroids—in Armageddon (directed by Michael Bay) and Deep Impact (directed by Mimi Leder)—the second and eighth most successful films of the year at the box office. In both cases, life on earth is threatened from outer space and only saved in the last minute by the heroics of Americans armed with nuclear weapons (see Figures 6–7). Armageddon uses the threat to the planet as a vehicle for resuscitating working-class masculinity as protectors of the nation–planet (as oil riggers are sent via the space shuttle to destroy the asteroid with atomic bombs), whereas Deep Impact is a study of civil defense and individual sacrifice right out of Operation Cue. In both cases, what is striking is that the destruction of the United States is presented as a form of entertainment and redemptive play. Part of a series of summer films in the 1990s that rehearse the destruction of the United States and demonstrate the necessity of U.S. nuclear weapons, I think we have to read this as a moment of psychic and cultural release from the Cold War arms race (cf. Rogin 1998, Davis 2001, and Mellor 2007). In the 1990s, Hollywood could work out the details of nuclear war (and various allegorized nuclear threats) with new computer generated precision—precisely because nuclear terror no longer had the meaning it had for a previous generation. In the immediate post–Cold War moment, life, in other words, did not hang so oppressively in the nuclear balance, and thus the cinematic imagination was freed to explore the end of the United States in a new way. Cold War nuclear cinema always had a moral point to make about the nuclear state of emergency: nuclear war was not only always marked as an object of distinct seriousness but the detonation of the bomb was 384

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” FIGURE 6. New York under attack in Armageddon. FIGURE 7. New York under attack in Deep Impact. marked as a political–ethical–technological failure of the Cold War system. In striking contrast, post–Cold War films have no purpose other than patriotism and pleasure; they seek to reinstall American identity through mass violence, suggesting that it is only threat and reactions to threat that can create national community. 21 Regardless of its form (asteroids, or tsunamis, or alien invaders), these apoc- alyptic spectacles function as nuclear texts because they use mass destruction as a means of mobilizing the United States as a global superpower. As allegories of nuclear war, they both reproduce the emotional language of nuclear threat (mass death as a vehicle for establishing national community) and allow a productive misrecognition of its political content. This filmic genre also inevitably reinforces through aestheticized politics the ever-present need for war, and the ubiquity of 385

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 external enemies with apocalyptic power. And in doing so, these texts relegitimize the need for nuclear weapons in the United States while offering an image of the United States as a reluctant superpower forced into global military action for the greater good. As a maelstrom of meteorites devastate New York in Armageddon, for example, a taxi driver yells to no one in particular: “We at war! Saddam Hussein is bombing us!” This scene from 1998 prefigures the Bush administration’s successful (but fabricated) effort to link the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. Naming the enemy in this way (as science fiction or state propaganda) underscores the ideological alignment between the Hollywood blockbuster and the U.S. military, which both rely on rehearsing threat as a means of stabilizing their industries. 22 Cinematic viewers, as Benjamin saw so early on (1969), experience such ideological projects in a state of distraction, allowing both the covert habituation of ideas and a broader aestheti- cizing of politics in support of increasing militarization and war (see also Sontag 1966). One afterimage of the Cold War emotional management campaign is found in this continued commitment to, and pleasure in, making nuclear ruins, and then searching the wreckage for signs about the collective future. The nuclear logics of the Cold War continue to haunt American society, informing how individuals experience acts of mass violence and how the federal government then engages the world. Nuclear cinema in the 1990s transforms anonymous mass death into a vehicle for individuals to demonstrate their moral character and for the nation to be regenerated through apocalyptic threat. Indeed, the pleasure of post–Cold War nuclear cinema is precisely in witnessing the destruction of the United States, and then walking out of the theater into the unbroken world. Unlike viewers of Operation Cue in 1955 or The Day After in 1983, the viewers of Armageddon and Deep Impact were not addressed as citizens that needed to demonstrate their civic virtue by performing nuclear fear. Rather, the emotional management strat- egy was transformed into a form of post-traumatic play, with the destruction of the nation now presented as a diversion rather than a serious threat or opportunity for political mobilization. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize the remarkable coherence of the nuclear images from 1955 to 1998 to see the long-term effects of the Cold War emotional management strategy. It is also important to interrogate the long-term national cultural effects of rehearsing mass violence in this manner, of repetitively producing images of destroyed U.S. cities to constitute both pleasure and national community. 386

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” EPILOGUE Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. President George W. Bush, address to the nation on Iraq on October 7, 2002 Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age. President Musharraf of Pakistan, reporting on a message delivered to him from the U.S. State Department immediately after 9/11 Reclaiming the emotional history of the atomic bomb is crucial today, as nuclear fear has been amplified to enable a variety of political projects at precisely the moment American memory of the bomb has become impossibly blurred. In the United States, nuclear fear has recently been used to justify preemptive war and unlimited domestic surveillance, a worldwide system of secret prisons, and the practices of rendition, torture, and assassination. But what today do Americans actually know or remember about the bomb? We live not in the ruins produced by Soviet ICBMs but, rather, in the emotional ruins of the Cold War as an intellectual and social project. The half-century-long project to install and articulate the nation through contemplating its violent end has colonized the present. The terrorist at- tacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in 2001 may have produced a political consensusthat“theColdWarisover”andaformaldeclarationofacounterterrorism project. 23 But American reactions to those attacks were structured by a multigen- erational state project to harness the fear of mass death to divergent political and military industrial agendas. By evoking the image of the mushroom cloud to enable the invasion of Iraq, Bush appealed directly to citizens’ nuclear fear, a cultural product of the very Cold War nuclear standoff he formally disavowed in inaugurating the new counterterrorist state. The mushroom-cloud imagery, as well as the totalizing im- mediacy of the threat in his presentation, worked to redeploy a cultural mem- ory of apocalyptic nuclear threat (established during the four decades of the Soviet–American nuclear arms race) as part of the new “war on terror.” The new color-coded terrorist warning system (first proposed by Project East River in 1952 to deal with Soviet bombers), as well as the more recent transformation of shampoo bottles on planes into a totalizing threat by the Homeland Security Administration, are official efforts to install and regulate fear in everyday life. 24 In this regard, the “war on terror” has been conducted largely as an emotional management campaign 387

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 in the United States, using the tropes and logics developed during the early Cold War to enable a new kind of U.S. geopolitical project. The “war on terror” redirects but also reiterates the American assumptions about mass violence and democracy I have explored in this essay. If the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., felt strangely familiar to many U.S. citizens, it was because American society has been imaginatively rehearsing the destruction of these cities for over three genera- tions: in the civil defense campaigns of the early and late Cold War, as well as the Hollywood blockbusters of the 1990s, which destroyed these cities each summer with increasing nuance and detail. The genealogy of this form of entertainment is traumatic, it goes back to the specific way in which the United States entered the nuclear age with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the specific propaganda campaigns informing nuclear threat throughout the Cold War. Indeed, the ease with which the September 11, 2001, attacks were nationalized as part of a nuclear discourse by the Bush administration has much to do with this legacy (see Kaplan 2003). Not coincidentally, the two graphic measures of nuclear blast damage most frequently used during the Cold War were the Pentagon and the New York City skyline (cf. Eden 2004). Figures 8 and 9, for example, are taken from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission campaign to document the size of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test from 1952. Fourteen true-to-scale versions of the Pentagon (identified by the AEC as the largest building in the world) are placed inside the blast crater (the former Elugelab Island) to document its size, while the New York skyline is used to demonstrate the vast horizontal and vertical scope of the detonation. The events of 9/11 were easily nationalized and transformed into a nuclear discourse precisely because our security culture has imagined and rehearsed attacks on Washington and New York for generations, and because the specificsymbolsintheattacks(thePentagonandthetallestbuildingintheNewYork skyline) were also used by the nuclear state for three generations as part of its emo- tional management strategy. The Bush administration, in other words, mobilized a well-established logic of nuclear attack to pursue its policy objectives, translating discrete, nonnuclear threats into the emotional equivalent of the Cold War nuclear crisis. For a nation that constructs itself via discourses of ruination, it should not be a surprise to see the exportation of ruins on a global scale. As President Musharraf clearly understood, the “with us or against us” logic of the Bush administration in 2001 left no ambiguity about the costs of Pakistan not aligning with the sole global superpower. The threat to reduce Pakistan to the “Stone Age” is the alternative, 388

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” FIGURE 8. Before and after images of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb explosion, with pentagons in blast crater (U.S. National Archive Photograph). international deployment of nuclear fear, constituting a U.S. promise to reduce his country to a prenational, pretechnological state. Thus, the United States enters the 21st century as a nation both fascinated and traumatized by nuclear ruins. It trans- formsrealandimaginedmassdeathintoanationalizedspace,andsupportsapolitical culture that believes bombing campaigns can produce democracy abroad. It is si- multaneously terrorized by nuclear weapons and threatens to use them. The U.S. military both wages preemptive war over nascent “WMD” programs and is prepar- ing to build a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons. 25 American society is today neither“atomicbombproof”norcapableofengagingnucleartechnologiesasaglobal 389

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 FIGURE 9. Blast radius of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb explosion set against the New York skyline (U.S. National Archive Photograph). problem of governance. Instead, U.S. citizens live today in the emotional residues of the Cold War nuclear arms race, which can only address them as fearful docile bodies. Thus, even in the 21st century, Americans remain caught between terror and fear, trapped in the psychosocial space defined by the once and future promise of nuclear ruins. ABSTRACT In this article, I interrogate the national cultural work performed by the mass circulation of images of a nuclear-bombed United States since 1945. It argues that the production of negative affect has become a central arena of nation-building in the nuclear age, and tracks the visual deployment of nuclear fear on film from the early Cold War project of civil defense through the “war on terror.” It argues that the production and management of negative affect remains a central tool of the national security state, and demonstrates the primary role the atomic bomb plays in the United States as a means of militarizing everyday life and justifying war. Keywords: ruins, affect, nuclear age, security state, war, visual culture, film NOTES Acknowledgments . Research for this article was enabled by a Research and Writing Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I am grateful to Ann Stoler for her invitation to participate in this volume, as well as for her intellectual engagement. Many thanks to Mike Fortun and Kim Fortun for their editorial care, and to Shawn Smith for her critical readings of this article. 390

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” 1. TheUnitedStatesconducted1,054nucleardetonations(inadditiontobombingHiroshimaand Nagasaki)between1945and1992,with928explosionsconductedattheNevadaTestSite.On the global health effects of this program see Miller (1986), Makhijani and colleagues (1995), Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (1996), Makhijani and Schwartz (1998), and Masco (2006). 2. See Keeney (2002), and Office of Technology Assessment (1980) for damage assessments of a potential Soviet nuclear strike on the United States. 3. My understanding of photographic “afterimages” has been developed in conversation with Shawn Michelle Smith (1999). 4. For a detailed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s approach to the politics of visual culture, see Buck-Morss (1991), as well as her reading of Soviet art in the years before the Cold War (2000). 5. On the constitution of the Cold War state, see Friedberg (2000), Leslie (1993), Schwartz (1998), and Gaddis (1982). 6. For the NSC 68 document, as well as detailed commentary, see May (1993); for critical analysis see Brands (1989); and for a review of the concept of “containment,” see Gaddis (1982). 7. For historical and cultural analysis of the U.S. civil defense programs during the Cold War, see Oakes (1994), McEnaney (2000), Garrison (2006), George (2003), Grossman (2001), Krugler (2006), and Scheiback (2003). 8. The Panel on the Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons Development (1956) imagined a Soviet attack in 1959 in which 90 major cities were destroyed and 50 million killed. It concludes: “In the event of a massive nuclear attack on the United States, of the proportions assumed above, without drastically improved preparation of the people, support of the National Government and of the war effort would be in jeopardy, and national disintegration might well result” (Panel on the Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons Development 1956:9). The human effects panel then argued that the problem was how to incorporate the possibility of a Soviet sneak attack into the “feelings” of citizens, allowing atomic warfare to be naturalized as part of the everyday world (see Vandercook 1986). One could productively compare the early Cold War studies to recent studies of nuclear attack: see Charles Meade and Roger C. Molander Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack (2006, RAND Corporation), for example, which models a 10-kiloton nuclear explosion in Los Angeles. The RAND study concludes that the effects of the blast would overwhelm all services and render a $1 trillion blow to the U.S. economy. 9. Val Peterson, the first director of the FCDA, described the media campaign for atomic civil defense as “the greatest mass educational effort” in U.S. history (Garrison 2006:36). In this regard, the civil defense program was also a laboratory for exploring how to mobilize and control a mass society. 10. See Braw (1997) and Weller (2006), and also the 2006 documentary film, White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (directed by Steven Okazaki), which details the history of censorship, and presents some of the once-prohibited film footage. 11. Grossman(2001:47)hasunderscoredhowgovernmental,media,andindustrycommunication explicitly sought to harmonize their civil defense messages, providing a reinforcing series of message across the media spectrum. This worked both to reinforce the civil defense project and to reduce the opportunities for critique; see also Keever (2004), Scheiback (2003), and Rojecki (1999). 12. See Oakes (1994), McEnaney (2000), and Davis (2002). 13. For a history of the antinuclear movement see, Rojecki (1999), Katz (1986), as well as Wittner (1993, 1997, 2003). 14. Garrison (2006) argues that the civil defense programs of the Cold War should be judged a failure because no nationwide system of shelters was ever built. I would argue that the project of civil defense was not about building a new urban infrastructure but, rather, an emotional one. To this end, the utilization of the civil defense was much more successful, installing a set of ideas and images about nuclear warfare that maintained public support for the nuclear 391

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 state through the end of the Cold War and provided a set of ideological resources that the Bush administration relied on to initiate its “war on terror.” 15. See Garrison (2006:94–96) on the Mother’s Protest against the Civil Defense Project, and Laura McEnaney’s (2000) extensive conversation about the role of women and the militarization of the home, as well as May (1990) on the domestic version of “containment,” and Scheiback (2003) on the effects of civil defense on youth culture. See Cohn (1987) for a discussion of gender in the language of Cold War defense intellectuals, and Orr (2006) for a remarkable study of “panic” in Cold War psychology and nation-building. 16. This project to test the cognitive effects of witnessing an exploding atomic bomb on citizens was a small part of a larger military project, which involved thousands of troops at the Nevada Test Site. Over a series of above ground tests, soldiers were involved in “atomic warfare” exercises. They were also tested for the cognitive effects of being exposed to the visual image of the blast. In some cases, this involved simple cognitive drills administered minutes after the explosion or timing basic military activities, like dismantling and reassembling a rifle. Thus, across a wide spectrum of public and military projects, the national security state was testing the limits of participation, and conditioning emotions and bodies to the atomic bomb. 17. On the politics of atmospheric fallout during above ground nuclear testing, see Masco (2006), Miller (1986), Hewlett and Holl (1989), Wang (1999), Kraus and colleagues (1963), Bentz and colleagues (1957), and Makhijani and Schwartz (1998). 18. Indeed, one of the most powerful voices in the renewed antinuclear movement of the 1980s was Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), which devoted its energies to publicizing the health effects of nuclear war by offering detailed descriptions of probable attacks on U.S. cities. For its public health campaign against nuclear war, PSR won the Nobel Peace Prize. PSR used, in other words, the same elements of the civil defense campaigns of the 1950s but provided more detailed information about radiation injury and casualty figures, to mobilize resistance to the renewed nuclear project of the Reagan administration, see Forrow and Sidel (1998). 19. In response to the FREEZE movement, the Reagan administration pursued a new emotional management strategy in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which promised an end to the arms race by installing a system of space-based lasers to shoot down ICBMs, see FitzGerald (2000). Although Reagan offered SDI to the public as a near-term technological fix to the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union—a way out of the nuclear danger—it was never a realistic proposal. Over 25 years and $100 billion later it has yet to hit a real world target, but it has served the emotional needs of its constituency very well—allowing an aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons technology and the militarization of space all the while praising the goal of disarmament. The Day After, the FREEZE Movement, and SDI were all in various ways emotional management campaigns that drew on the images of nuclear destruction produced during the aboveground testing regime to mobilize a response to the nuclear crisis of the 1980s. Rather than moving past Operation Cue, each of these project redeployed the strategies of the early Cold War state to enable their political projects: activists working for disarmament, and the state working to maintain support for the Cold War arms race. 20. The destruction of cities is a recurring theme in the nuclear cinema of Japan but is not mobilized as part of a militarized nation-building campaign as it is in the United States, see Broderick (1996). I would also note that there is a fundamental difference between the “disaster movie” and nuclear cinema in the United States. The disaster film uses destruction as a means of establishing drama at an individual level, whereas nuclear cinema always nationalizes its content via a friend–enemy configuration. Thus, although a disaster movie has heroic individuals, the ultimate project of nuclear cinema is to establish and mobilize a national community through mass violence. For critical analysis of nuclear cinema, see Evans (1998) and Sontag (1966); see Taylor (1997) on nuclear photography; and see Virilio (1989) on war and perception. 21. On the politics of regeneration through violence in the United States, see Slotkin (1996), as well as Rogin (1987, 1998). 392

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” 22. Armageddon, for example, was supported by NASA, as well as the Department of Defense, which allowed producer Jerry Bruckheimer to film on location in military installations in exchange for script changes that favored the Armed Services. See Robb (2004:94–95) for a discussion of the changes to the film script made in exchange for support from the Pentagon. See also Rogin (1987) for studies in Cold War cinema, and his detailed reading (1998) of the militarized gender and race politics in the 1996 film Independence Day . 23. TheBushadministrationdoctrineofpreemptivewar (UnitedStatesofAmerica 2002)formally ended the Cold War doctrines of containment and deterrence that had defined U.S. foreign policy since the 1950s, see Gaddis (1982). 24. In August 2006, after British authorities broke up a terrorist plot to smuggle explosive chemicals onto an airline, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raised the threat level to its highest point “red,” and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) banned fluids from domestic U.S. flights. The British plot was in the very early discussion phase and not a viable threat to passenger safety, yet the response from DHS and TSA was total; see the transcript of the August 10, 2006, press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, FBI director Robert Mueller, and Assistant Security for TSA Kip Hawley, available at http://www.tsa.gov/press/speeches/dhs_press_conference_08102006.shtm, accessed November 15, 2007. This total response to a fantasy threat does not make sense as a security strategy, but is an excellent illustration of the mobilization of affect, as well as the demand for public docility that support the “war on terror.” For expert security analysis of British and American reactions to the liquid explosive “plot,” see http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Sources_August_Terror_Plot_Fiction_Undersco ring_0918.html, accessed November 15, 2007; see also http://www.schneier.com/blog/ archives/2007/08/details_on_the_1.html, accessed November 15, 2007. 25. In fall 2006, under directives from the Bush administration, Los Alamos National Lab- oratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory submitted to the Department of Energy their first new nuclear weapons designs since the end of the Cold War. This is the first major step toward a return to nuclear production, and perhaps under- ground nuclear testing. For a discussion of the larger post-2001 nuclear policy changes, see the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, available in excerpted form on the Internet at http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm,accessedSeptember1, 2007. Editor’s Note: Cultural Anthropology has published many articles on U.S. culture and politics. See, for example, George Lipsitz’s 2006 article, “Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship,” and also his 1986 article “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs.” Also see Joseph Masco’s 2004 article “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post–Cold War New Mexico.” A list of Cultural Anthropology articles focused on the United States can be accessed at http://culanth.org/?q = node/27. Cultural Anthropology has also published extensively on media, culture, and politics. See, for example, Charles Brigg’s recent article “Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative and Violence” (2007), Paul Manning’s “Rose-Colored Glasses? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia” (2007), and Laura Kunreuther’s “Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu” (2006). A list of CA articles on media can be accessed at http://culanth.org/?q = node/19. Cultural Anthropology has also published prior articles relating to cultural politics. See articles like Kim Fortun’s “Cultural Critique in and of American Culture” (2006), Ritty Lukose’s “Empty Citizenship: Protesting Politics in the Era of Globalization” (2005), and Clare Ignatowski’s “Multipartyism and Nostalgia for the Unified Past: Discourses of Democracy in a Dance Association in Cameroon” (2004). 393

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