Nuclear Iconography in Post-Cold War Culture :: Culture War Nuclear Iconography Essays

thermonuclear Iconography in Post-Cold state of war assimilationI wish in this paper to sketch a project involving nuclear iconography and post-Cold War culture. At the heart of this project is the claim that the ongoing historical moment forms a legitimation crisis for the scientific, military, industrial, governmental, and cultural institutions whose interests are piece in the design, manufacture, deployment, and use of nuclear weapons. Within this moment, a variety of modernised and regressive movements pick up been intitiated through the production and reception of nuclear weapons rhetoric. The authority of visual iconography in nuclear hegemony has traditionally received minor heed (e.g., compared with the nukespeak of foreign policy, mass media news coverage, and literary works). Recent scholarly articles and books have attempted to correct this verbalist imbalance by examining the genres and discourses of nuclear art (e.g., painting), film and photography. Collecti vely, this work establishes that the Bomb is -- after W.J.T. Mitchell -- an imagetext in which verbal and iconic discourses interanimate to claim ways of (not) seeing and forms of (not) feeling that have historically positioned cultural subjects in relation to the technologies, policies, figures, locations, events, and institutions (in both senses as customary practices and formal organizations) which have constitute the nuclear condition . . . Now Do You See It? Post-Cold War Nuclear IconographyI am interested in the role of visual rhetoric in maintaining this war of position between military, environmental, arms-control, pacifist, industrial, scientific and federal interests in post-Cold War culture. Issues in this research include the nature of verbal and visual codes in nuclear representations (e.g., in critical disagreement over the success of nuclear landscape photography in evoking viewer knowledge of the deadly, invisible ray of light which really suffuses its depicted ob jects), the uses to which images are put in various well-disposed contexts (e.g., in museum exhibits commemorating the Japanese atomic bombings), and the consequences of images for existing power transaction between nuclear authorities and citizens (e.g., in legitimating the accelerated -- and arguably half(prenominal) -- cleanup of contaminated nuclear weapons plants by federal agencies and their contractors) . . . . . . A introductory survey of prominent nuclear weapons images suggests this new theme in this process, crotchety to the post-Cold War era . . . . . . MuseumificationThis theme describes the inter-related processes by which the partially decrepit and undynamic nuclear apparatus is being dismantled, appropriated, recycled, commodified, and memorialized in contemporary culture (e.