View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Desired Ground Zeroes: Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive Calum Lister Matheson A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication Studies. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: Carole Blair Ken Hillis Chris Lundberg Todd Ochoa Sarah Sharma © 2015 Calum Lister Matheson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Calum Lister Matheson: Desired Ground Zeroes: Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive (Under the direction of Chris Lundberg and Sarah Sharma) A wide variety of cultural artefacts related to nuclear warfare are examined to highlight continuity in the sublime’s mix of horror and fascination. Schemes to use nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes embody the godlike structural positions of the Bomb for Americans in the early Cold War. Efforts to mediate the Real of the Bomb include nuclear simulations used in wargames and their civilian offshoots in videogames and other media. Control over absence is examined through the spatial distribution of populations that would be sacrificed in a nuclear war and appeals to overarching rationality to justify urban inequality. Control over presence manifests in survivalism, from Cold War shelter construction to contemporary “doomsday prepping” and survivalist novels. The longstanding cultural ambivalence towards nuclear war, coupled with the manifest desire to experience the Real, has implications for nuclear activist strategies that rely on democratically-engaged publics to resist nuclear violence once the “truth” is made clear. This dissertation uses examples drawn from imaginations of nuclear warfare and its aftermath to explore how the desire for unmediated experience and its attendant mix of horror and fascination constitutes a death drive that should be a problematic for communication studies. The unprecedented power of the Bomb witnessed first at the iii Trinity test provided new urgency for ultimate questions about human existence and the failure of language. Discourse surrounding the Bomb is an effort to reestablish a sense of predictability and order threatened by the disruption of the Bomb while still maintaining the sense of contact with its overwhelming power. I relate this operation of the death drive to the tradition of the sublime in rhetoric, an effort to recapture what lies beyond mediation. Instead of a discrete style, the sublime is the aspect of a signifier that permits an affective connection as it stands in for the Real, as also evident in other forms of mediation besides language. The capacity to enjoy control over the conditions of presence and absence is central to this process. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is the result of many intellectual debts. Without Chris Lundberg, it could not have been started. Without Sarah Sharma, it could not have been completed. Without Carole Blair, Ken Hillis, and Todd Ochoa, it could not have been defended. I have benefited greatly from the influence of these scholars and from the rest of UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty and staff, especially Bill Balthrop, Sarah Dempsey, Larry Grossberg, Torin Monahan, Mike Palm, Tony Perucci, Lawrence Rosenfeld, Neal Thomas, Gabriela Valdivia, Mike Waltman, and Eric Watts. Geoff Wawro, Duke Richey, and the late General Alfred Hurley were instrumental in getting me here in the first place. I also want to thank those graduate students who provided good advice, conversation, criticism, and stellar angling. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of my family and friends. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………1 Why the Bomb? ……………………………………………………………………………………………1 The Bomb and the Mustard Pot……………………………………………………………………11 The Sublime ………………………………………………………………………………………………19 Notes on Language …………………………………………………………………………………….29 Structure …………………………………………………………………………………………………..33 CHAPTER 1: SILENCE AT ZERO ………………………………………………………………………….39 Warned of Doomsday …………………………………………………………………………………39 The Real ……………………………………………………………………………………………………45 The Uncanny ……………………………………………………………………………………………..56 Swords and Plowshares ………………………………………………………………………………61 Contingency ………………………………………………………………………………………………67 CHAPTER 2: PLAYING WARGAMES ……………………………………………………………………73 Ipsos Custodes …………………………………………………………………………………………..73 War Games………………………………………………………………………………………………..77 First Strike…………………………………………………………………………………………………90 Pascal’s Wager …………………………………………………………………………………………..99 CHAPTER 3: ZONES OF SACRIFICE………………………………………………………………….110 Wastelands……………………………………………………………………………………………….110 Desired Ground Zeroes………………………………………………………………………………115 vi Our Cities Must Fight……..………………………………………………………………………..121 Urban Sacrifice and the Wasteland Trope………………………………………………..…128 “This is not a place of honor”………………………………………………………………………133 The Logic of Sacrifice………………………………………………………………………………..139 CHAPTER 4: SURVIVAL…………………………………………………………………………………….143 When the Shit Hits the Fan………………………………………………………………………..143 The Survival Myth…………………………………………………………………………………….147 Feeling a Pulse………………………………………………………………………………………….158 We’ll All Go Together When We Go…………………………………………………………….169 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………………………177 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………………………………..195 vii INTRODUCTION The problem was simple and terrible: I enjoyed the book. I liked reading about the deaths of tens of millions of people. I liked dwelling on the destruction of great cities. …I liked to think of huge buildings toppling, of firestorms, of bridges collapsing, survivors roaming the charred countryside. Carbon 14 and strontium 90. Escalation ladder and subcrisis situation. Titan, Spartan, Poseidon…I read several chapters twice. Pleasure in the contemplation of millions dying and dead. I became fascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war. Pleasure in these words...A thrill almost sensual accompanied the reading of this book. What was wrong with me? Had I gone mad? Did others feel as I did? I became seriously depressed. Yet I went to the library and got more books on the subject…I became more fascinated, more depressed, and finally I left Coral Gables and went back home to my room and to the official team photo of the Detroit Lions. It seemed the only thing to do. My mother brought lunch upstairs. I took the dog for walks. --Don DeLillo, End Zone Why the Bomb? I attended my first debate tournament as a sophomore in high school. For two days, I argued with other kids, uncomfortable like me in ill-fitting formal clothes, our resolution pertaining to juvenile crime in the United States. When not discussing it, we performed it in clumsily conspicuous smoke breaks outside the suburban Grand Rapids public school where our competition was hosted. I had been trained to negate this resolution by highlighting its negative consequences for states’ rights and the economy. These things mattered, I was told, because the instability attending to a breakdown in federalism or dip in the economy might cause a nuclear war. A nuclear war would be so awful that it should never be risked, however improbable. I was given Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth as a resource. I did as I was told and invoked the threat of atomic 1 attack in every debate. After one round, a young debater from Detroit approached me in the cafeteria. “Are you the nuclear war guy?” he asked. I supposed that I might be. “I heard about you. You’re crazy, man. That’s awesome.” Although too young to really be a child of the Cold War, I had dim memories of Reagan-era fear. My father once presented me with a toy plastic battleship and explained that “we” had won the Falklands War. Because I am both American and Scottish, I was not certain who exactly “we” were, but I was too young to make a distinction. “We” was the West, was NATO, was the English-speaking world; and I was informed that “we” possessed the means to obliterate humanity, as did “they:” the Soviet Union. My father insisted that I watch news coverage of the Gulf War and the 1991 August Putsch. I would be glad someday that I witnessed this phase of history, he said. Besides, they might blow up the world. I had already been fascinated in school by footage of grey-clad Soviets marching through Red Square with menacing MAZ missile carriers rumbling beside them. I liked the Soviet aesthetic and wasn’t scared, but now I learned that Saddam Hussein had missiles too. Fine distinctions of range were lost on me; Circular Error Probability, the limitations of TEL reliance and the inadequacy of Iraqi GCI/EW were unknown unknowns. I worried that Saddam would kill my parents. For reassurance, I was given a glossy chart comparing Coalition and Iraqi military equipment. It didn’t really work. Soon after, I learned that there were good Russians and bad Russians. The one who rode a tank and shelled the Parliament was good. One of the bad ones hanged himself in his office, but there were always more. The apocalypse has taken on a diminished form of late. Although they would continue to interest me, nuclear issues became gradually less important in American culture more generally. As CIA Director James Woolsey said, once the “dragon” of the 2 Soviet Union was slain, the United States found itself