No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Dreams of atomic genocide: The bomb, racial violence, and fantasies of annihilation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
Abstract
This paper examines the influence of nuclear weapons on fantasies of racial violence. Specifically, it argues that weapons impact the emergence of social formations, producing unique patterns of thought, desire, anticipation, and identity. While the effects of nuclear power have been central to disciplinary debates in international studies, existing critical commentary has largely focused on the discriminatory nature of the global nuclear hierarchy. By focusing on the productive impact of weapons on cultural registers, this article demonstrates that nuclear power not only reinforces global structures of racism and colonialism but also creates new articulations of white supremacy. It argues that a specific fantasy of nuclear genocide, seizing nuclear power as a means for executing a global race war, is an expression germane to the nuclear age. This article concludes by arguing that this fantasy plays an important role in white supremacist approaches to politics and existing forms of racist hierarchy.
- Type
- Forum
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association.
References
1 Anna Stavrianakis, ‘Towards a postcolonial, anti-racist, anti-militarist feminist mode of weapons control’, in Soumita Basu, Paul Kirby, and Laura Shepherd (eds), New Directions in Women, Peace, and Security (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020), pp. 153–68; Catherine Eschle, ‘Gender and the subject of (anti)nuclear politics: Revisiting women’s campaigning against the bomb’, International Studies Quarterly, 57:4 (2013), pp. 713–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12019; Anne Harrington de Santana, ‘Nuclear weapons as the currency of power’, The Nonproliferation Review, 16:3 (2009), pp. 325–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/10736700903255029; Shampa Biswas, ‘“Nuclear apartheid” as political position: Race as a postcolonial resource?’, Alternatives, 26:4 (2001), pp. 485–522, https://doi.org/10.1177/030437540102600406; Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12:4 (1987), pp. 687–718, https://doi.org/10.1086/494362.
2 Shampa Biswas, Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2014); Anthony Burke, ‘Nuclear time: Temporal metaphors of the nuclear present’, Critical Studies on Security, 4:1 (2016), pp. 73–90, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2016.1162394; Anne I. Harrington, ‘Power, violence, and nuclear weapons’, Critical Studies on Security, 4:1 (2016), pp. 91–112, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2016.1177784; Ritu Mathur, ‘Sly civility and the paradox of equality/inequality in the nuclear order: A post-colonial critique’, Critical Studies on Security, 4:1 (2016), pp. 57–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1106428; Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (Chicago: Zed Books, 1998); Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2016); Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Making sense of global tensions: Dominant and subaltern conceptions of order and justice in the international system’, International Studies, 47:2–4 (2010), pp. 129–41, https://doi.org/10.1177/002088171104700405; Joseph Masco, The Theatre of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Mike Bourne, ‘Invention and uninvention in nuclear weapons politics’, Critical Studies on Security, 4:1 (2016), pp. 6–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1106427.
3 Muppidi citation.
4 Spence citation.
5 Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Nuclearism’, Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 9:2 (1980), pp. 119–24.
6 Anna M. Agathangelou, ‘On the question of time, racial capitalism, and the planetary’, Globalizations, 18:6 (2021), pp. 880–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2021.1906006; Alexander Barder, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit, ‘Racism in Foucauldian security studies: Biopolitics, liberal war, and the whitewashing of colonial and racial violence’, International Political Sociology, 13:1 (2019), pp. 2–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly031; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Errol A. Henderson, ‘Hidden in plain sight: Racism in international relations theory’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:1 (2013), pp. 71–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2012.710585; Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, amnesia, and the education of international relations’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 26:4 (2001), pp. 401–24.
7 Ingvild Bode and Hendrik Huelss, ‘Autonomous weapons systems and changing norms in international relations’, Review of International Studies, 44:3 (2018), pp. 393–413, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210517000614; Nisha Shah, ‘Gunning for war: Infantry rifles and the calibration of lethal force’, Critical Studies on Security, 5:1 (2017), pp. 81–104, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2017.1330600; L. R. Danil, ‘Weapons, desire and the making of war: A Lacanian response’, Critical Studies on Security, 6:3 (2018), pp. 330–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2018.1473670; Antoine Bousquet, Jairus Grove, and Nisha Shah, ‘Becoming weapon: An opening call to arms’, Critical Studies on Security, 5:1 (2017), pp. 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2017.1343010; Caroline Holmqvist, ‘Undoing war: War ontologies and the materiality of drone warfare’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:3 (2013), pp. 535–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829813483350; Mike Bourne, ‘Guns don’t kill people, cyborgs do: A Latourian provocation for transformatory arms control and disarmament’, Global Change, Peace & Security, 24:1 (2012), pp. 141–63; Helen M. Kinsella, The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
8 Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 24–30; Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Boston: MIT Press, 2018), pp. 17, 49.
9 Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2012), pp. 14–16.
10 Diana Coole, ‘Agentic capacities and capacious historical materialism: Thinking with new materialisms in the political sciences’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:3 (2013), pp. 451–469.
11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 406.
12 A frequent response to this line of analysis is that weapons and tools depend on the context of their use. A hammer, for instance, is a tool when building a table, but a weapon in a home invasion. This is an important rejoinder, one that requires lengthier response than I have space for in this piece. From an object-oriented perspective, weapons and tools are both modes of relation established to an object that can become either. Indeed, the classic problem of ‘dual use’ is reflective of a deep ontological ambivalence that arguably characterizes all things. This distinction is part of the reason that Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that it is the assemblage that makes things into weapons or tools, rather than static, preformed types of metaphysical conditions.
13 Davor Löffler, John McGraw, and Niels Johannsen, ‘Weapons in and as history: On the ontogenerative function of materialized preemption and intelligence in weapons technology’, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 16:1–2 (2019), pp. 68–77.
14 Ibid., p. 76.
15 Debra L. Martin and Ryan P. Harrod, ‘Bioarchaeological contributions to the study of violence’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 156:S59 (2015), pp. 116–45, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22662; Keith Otterbein, How War Began (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).
16 Cite Himadeep; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2003); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
17 For an explication of the impact of the virtual as real, see Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
18 Benjamin Meiches, ‘Weapons, desire, and the making of war’, Critical Studies on Security, 5:1 (2017), pp. 9–27.
19 Nisha Shah, ‘Death in the details: Finding dead bodies at the Canadian War Museum’, Organization, 24:4 (2017), pp. 549–69, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508417700403; Cynthia Cockburn, Antimilitarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Kinsella, The Image before the Weapon; Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
20 Derek Hook, ‘Racism and jouissance: Evaluating the “racism as (the theft of) enjoyment” hypothesis’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 23 (2018), pp. 244–66; Julie Welland, ‘Joy and war reading pleasure in wartime experiences’, Review of International Studies, 44:3 (2018), pp. 438–55; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
21 Fernández citation; see also Anna Stavrianakis, ‘Controlling weapons circulation in a postcolonial militarised world’, Review of International Studies, 45 (2018), pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0260210518000190; Anna Feigenbaum, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today (New York: Verso, 2017).
22 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, reprint ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2005), p. 8.
23 Vincent Intondi, ‘Reflections on injustice, racism, and the bomb’, Arms Control Today, 50:6 (2020), pp. 12–15; Abby J. Kinchy, ‘African Americans in the atomic age: Postwar perspectives on race and the bomb, 1945–1967’, Technology and Culture, 50:2 (2009), pp. 291–315; Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
24 Biswas, Nuclear Desire; Masco, Theatre of Operation.
25 My thanks to Martin Coward for pointing out this relationship.
26 William Chaloupka, Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
27 Ibid., pp. 7–21. Chaloupka’s work dovetails with more prominent accounts of the ambivalent ease with which nuclear discussions happen, notably Carol Cohn’s famous work.
28 Calum Matheson, Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018), pp. 10–12.
29 Muppidi citation.
30 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 4.
31 Barder, Global Race War, pp. 41–4, pp. 83–4.
32 Andrew Macdonald, The Turner Diaries (Washington, DC: National Alliance, 1980).
33 Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Michael Barkun, ‘Millenarian aspects of “white supremacist” movements’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 1:4 (1989), pp. 409–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546558908427037; Charles Goehring and George N. Dionisopoulos, ‘Identification by antithesis: The Turner Diaries as constitutive rhetoric’, Southern Communication Journal, 78:5 (2013), pp. 369–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2013.823456.
34 William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 39.
35 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Chris Turner, Stephen Conway, and Erica Carter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 200–21.
36 Lee Ann Fujii, Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).
37 Paul Williams, Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), p. 3, pp. 180–201.
38 Michael Hardt, ‘Nuclear sovereignty’, Theory & Event, 22:4 (2019), pp. 842–68; Jairus Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 11–13.
39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p, 221; Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 234.
40 Belew, Bring the War Home; Joshua Inwood, ‘White supremacy, white counter-revolutionary politics, and the rise of Donald Trump’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37:4 (2019), pp. 579–96, https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418789949.
41 Shane J. Maddock, Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
42 Todd McGowan, ‘Pilfered pleasure: On racism as “the theft of enjoyment”’, in Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 19–34.
43 Helen Ngo, ‘Critical phenomenology and the banality of white supremacy’, Philosophy Compass, 17:2 (2022), pp. 1–15; Chetan Bhatt, ‘White extinction: Metaphysical elements of contemporary Western fascism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 38:1 (2021), pp. 27–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420925523; Charles W. Mills, White Supremacy as Sociopolitical System: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2003); Belew, Bring the War Home.