Nuclear Eventuality: How the Nuclear Bomb Contaminated the Present with the Future

Jungkyu Suh, Purdue University

Abstract

This project argues that the nuclear bomb has made speculation an integral part of representing the material world. The bomb’s capability to cause an unprecedented extent of destruction and the constant state of latent war between nuclear-armed countries (expressed through arms race and high alert readiness) created a reality where the disasters in the future must be constantly speculated to understand the contemporary world’s material state. The tens of thousands of nuclear warheads sleeping in silos and submarines are not just the sum of their material components, but also incredibly compressed embodiments of future disasters that may be released at a moment’s notice. Regardless of the likelihood of nuclear conflicts (with which this dissertation is not concerned), the weapon exerts its influence as one of the most catastrophic possibilities even as it remains dormant. In considering the implications of nuclear weapons, all nations and people on the planet think not of what they are, but what they can do. The weapon’s possible future states define its present significance. The inherent oxymoron of the nuclear bomb is thus that despite its staggering materiality, it is fiction as well. Any representation of the bomb that ponders its sole purpose—mass destruction—is inevitably speculative. While the degrees in which they reference empirical data vary, the narratives from which people around the world from heads of nations to common citizens learn anything at all about nuclear weaponry are forms of fiction, ranging from fantastical literary fictions to strategic fictions attempting to represent the power of the weapon that is itself fantastical. Not all representations of the weapon or nuclear war are, of course, taken seriously. Apocalyptic nuclear events are often used in popular nuclear fictions as a convenient excuse for dismantling the existing social structures and providing interesting backdrops for survivalist stories. The very fact that imaginations of hypothetical nuclear disasters have become an overused cliché all the while proliferation remains an active threat, however, also indicates that the world has been living with the horrifying prospect of nuclear disasters for decades without an actual event of the kind—that, in other words, the weapon has existed mostly as a fiction. The introduction of the nuclear bomb to the world in this sense marks a critical point in history beyond which the speculated future outcomes of the productions in the present increasingly becomes an integral part of understanding the latter. The central concept with which I articulate the relationship between the present and the future created by nuclear weaponry is “eventuality.” Eventuality is a narrativization process through which a historical event develops into an anticipated future event as the original event’s outcome. A story about a fictional World War III involving nuclear weapons, for example, is a form of eventuality. The conceptual usefulness of eventuality is that it articulates the historical trend in the post-1945 era as well as the more recent years of climate change, in which hypothetical future events are increasingly represented not just for the purpose of knowing the future itself, but also reassessing the history to date. Eventuality establishes a causal relation between an event and its hypothetical future outcome—or its “eventual” as I call it.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Duvall, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Climate Change|History|Film studies|Literature|Military history|Military studies|Political science|Public policy

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