Concerning Consequences
STUDIES IN ART, DESTRUCTION, AND TRAUMA
Kristine Stiles
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London KRISTINE STILES is the France Family Professor of Art, Art Ftistory, and Visual Studies at Duke University.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Kristine Stiles All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 12345
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77451-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77453-4 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30440-3 (e-book)
DOL: 10.7208/chicago/9780226304403.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Stiles, Kristine, author. Concerning consequences : studies in art, destruction, and trauma / Kristine Stiles, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-77451-0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-77453-4 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-30440-3 (e-book) 1. An, Modern —20th century. 2. Psychic trauma in art. 3. Violence in art. I. Title. N6490.S767 2016 709.04075 —dc23
2015025618
© This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
In conversation with Susan Swenson, Kim Jones explained that ihe drawing on the cover of this book depicts directional forces in "an X-man, dot-man war game." The rectangles represent tanks and fortresses, and the lines are for tank movement, combat, and containment: "They're symbols. They're erased to show movement. III draw a tank, or I'll draw an X, and erase it, then re-draw it in a different position.... But when they're killed they're erased and that leaves a ghos, image. So the erasing is a very imponan, elemen, of the war drawings.... The important thing is that it's always
2005^7 vTr™0"'"C°nVmati°" with Wm Jones: April 25, W 0r '0051 4| T in Kim Jones: War Paint [Brooklyn, NY: Pierogi, 2005], 4), Two years earlier, Jones described his "war drawings" as
images oTa war that never ends" in TmMngaDead „
Dav d Sch d7 KmJ°n3 vi«eo codirected by David Schmidlapp and Steve Staso (2003). Remembering Invisibility: Documentary Photography of the Nuclear Age (1998)'
We knew every feature of the terrain over which we would be flying. And now the Japa nese landscape was unfolding below us just as the pictures had promised Our I.P. [initial point], an easily identifiable landmark that stood out in the aerial photos, was 15 1/2 miles east of the point in the heart of the city which was to be our target. PAUL w. TIBBETS, JR. The Tibbets Story2
INTRODUCTION
Paul W. Tibbets flew the plane with a payload aimed at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The aerial photographs had been precise, and his target was as visible as the bomb was lethal. The explosion vaporized two hundred thousand people. The flash from the blast lasted one fifteen-millionth of a second, long enough for the light to tattoo the warp and woof of woven kimono fabric onto flesh. It also bleached the stairs around someone sitting at the entrance to the Sumi tomo Bank 250 meters from the epicenter, leaving only a shadow of the atom ized body on the pavement.3 When Yoshito Matsushige, a thirty-two-year-old cameraman for the Hiroshima Chugoku newspaper, attempted to photograph the melee on Miyuku Bridge a few hours after the bomb was dropped, radiation speckled his film. Matsushige remembered the light of the bomb:
I had finished breakfast and was getting ready to go to the newspaper when it happened. There was a flash from the indoor wires as if lightening had struck. I didn't hear any sound, how shall I say, the world around me turned bright white. And I was momentarily blinded as if a magnesium light had lit up in front of my eyes. Immediately after that, the blast came.4
Similarly, radiation burned the emulsion on Berlyn Brixners film when, three weeks earlier, standing in the North Shelter some ten thousand feet from the ex plosion, he photographed Trinity, the first atomic test, detonated July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico. The imprints of radiant energy certified a technological act, punctuated a turning point for humanity, and constituted undeniable evidence of the unprece dented capacity to annihilate life, a lethal power that would soon be augmented by the risks of nuclear energy and expanded weapons production. The imprints of the bomb's light resemble the heliographic "sun prints" first identified and explored by British potter Thomas Wedgwood just before 1800. In fact, the term "photography," coined by astronomer Sir John F. W. Herschel, came from the idea of "writing with light," the heliographic process that anticipated photog raphy, ominously forecasting the atomic and nuclear technology that enabled the bomb to inscribe the index of war indelibly on Japanese bodies and cities. Photography was also crucial to the precise targeting of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki —such that paradoxically, photography of the nuclear age is equally indispensable to addressing the violent threat of living in the nuclear age. I contend that photography can play a vital role in the survival of the planet by enabling the visual knowledge necessary for remembrance, the prerequisite for agency. Photography can represent the micro and macro con ditions of the nuclear age, depict the hidden places and conditions of nuclear weapons manufacture and storage, and display nuclear energy industries, as well as record humans, animals, and the environment damaged by radiation and fallout. Vet, despite the wide range of photographs that depict the nuclear age, the unfathomable power and awesome beauty of the billowing mushroom cloud remains the icon of the age. A photograph, taken by an anonymous US government photographer, of shot Mike, a thermonuclear test conducted at Enewetak Atoll on November 1,1952, is paradigmatic of the image that is indel ibly imprinted in the minds and identities of billions of people on the planet. Yet, while the nuclear age and its images are a part of the psychological struc ture of populations throughout the world, and while its production, protection, and potential use shape global policies, the concomitant reality of its eff ects are
• ^ k if^ 'n de^ense mecbanisms of denial and disavowal. These dissocia- aviors only increase the imperceptibility of the nuclear age, resulting in psychic numbing and forgetfulness.
heSe PreCedemed conditions laJ 7 *"<1 unequaled images need a new vocabu- nuclear COncrete and bring tbe impact and threat of the mto the f reground f 1 nrr ° ° ^"-0" -d poi^.. nuce- documenta™ "npara"e'Cd Visual traces °f 'he bomb's light, nucleography for
of thKnudear agc'and"for that war that nucleography are th H ** ™ process of becoming. The abstract prints of nuclear ave Thev & V'SUal rCCOrds of the '"visibility of radiation in the bombs fall and liFhUsT I^ !7°^ 3S 3" eW kind of war in which of everyday life The ^ °n 3 batt,efie,d but 'n the circumstances ^-lyuay me. The overt aeerescinn A civilian populations has no. hp* droppmg such weapons directly on shima and Nagasaki at l ° PCrpetrated a8ain s»nce the bombing of Hiro- said about nuc eo^hi CaSt ^^ S ° then' wba< -ore is to be
C S? W0U d 3rgUe th3t the made bombs' ,ight a r o ruT ' ' "V 'he -cords sltuatlng nucleogIaphy as a ^Qf docuJ
1 remem " bering invisibil,TY figure 8. © James Lerager, Chernobyl Sarcophagus, 1991. All Rights Reserved. Cour tesy of the artist. photography, to whose illustrious and troubled history I shall return. Documen tary photographs of the nuclear age constitute a category of photographs that require special attention and need to be distinguished from other kinds of evi dentiary images. For documentary photographs of the nuclear age bear visual witness to a new kind of continuous war, born on July 16, 1945, and named "Trinity," cynically evoking the Christian doctrine that defines God as the hypos tasis of three states: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If the atomic bomb gave birth to "Trinity," its progeny is nuclcocide. The term nucleocide names the unabated nuclear assault on the planet. Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen described the psychological response to the nuclear age as "genocidal mentality.'"' Drawing on and amplifying the con cept of genocide to include the destruction of the entire planet, 1 propose the term "nucleocide" to describe the defense and energy practices of advanced industrial nations around the global that produce nuclear weapons. While "genocide" refers to wars of race and national identity, "nucleocide refers to war against life: human, animal, and plant. James Lerager's photograph Chernobyl Sarcophagus (1991) is a visual record of the site of the worst nuclear accident to date. A reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then part ot the Soviet Union, suffered a cata strophic increase in power that led to explosions in its core on April 26, 1986 (figure 8). The hulk of the partially destroyed plant at Chernobyl depicted in Lerager's photograph is a monument to the immediate death ot thirty-one indi viduals; the acute radiation sickness of more than two hundred people in the accident's immediate aftermath; the widespread pollution of lakes, rivers, reser voirs, and ground water that contaminated the food chain; the animals that
69 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY died or stopped reproducing after the accident (for example, the horses that were abandoned on an island in the Pripyat River four miles from the power plant, and which died when their thyroid glands were destroyed by radiation); the four square kilometers of pine forest directly downwind of the reactor, now called the "Red Forest," which turned reddish-brown and died; and the global radiation patterns and the spread of radioactive contaminants into the atmo sphere, which were extremely high in countries bordering on Ukraine, such as Poland and northern Romania. The contaminants reached as far north as Scan dinavia; as far west as Greenland, Iceland, and northern Canada; as far south as Turkey and parts of the Middle East; and far into the east, where Soviet and Chi nese records have not been released as of this writing (1998). The aftereffects of Chernobyl were expected to persist for one hundred years but decline over time. All this is to say nothing about the future cancers and genetic effects on humans as well as fauna and flora, and the enormous economical costs of the accident. This is the legacy of nucleocide, and the invisibility of radiation that the nucelo- graphic photograph assists us in remembering. What follows is a deliberation on how such photographs visualize this new kind of war and its nucleocide; how they contribute to common knowledge of the nuclear age; how they may engage viewers in becoming more responsible in the nuclear age; how they may help humanity to understand its own unity under radiation; and how the nuclear age renders all discussions of difference in a postmodern world merely academic, as radiation and fallout do not discriminate, but transform us all into a global "we." The effects of the arms race did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The violence of the Cold War only went underground, be coming more dangerous not only in terms of nuclear contraband and the poten tial for dim bombs and terrorism, but also because the threat of the nuclear age continually recedes in public memory as the standoff between the United States d the former Soviet Union has ostensibly concluded. For example, think only e unfortunately titled Peacekeeper W87/Mk-21 reentry vehicle, armed with warheads, which Paul Shambroom photographed at Warren Air Force • . . ^ SUC^ weaPons are stored in remote places that are inaccessible canToT^ n publlc' where they are kePt ready to deliver their deadly War areTT Y ° ^ hnhCT maskinS the danger of the end of the Cold use of both SeC.Ured locallons where the production, storage, and potential Policy of mum WCaPOnS nuclear enerSy occur- Indeed, the Cold War nologies nrocId destructlon (MAD) remains as descriptive of the tech- ..r„rr.X'r---«•—..«
PURE WAR
Before the end of the Cold War PaulViHi- ^ cussionwith literary critic SvlvL , descr'bed "pure war" in a 1982 dis- otnnger, a conversation that resulted in the
70 "EMEMBERING INVISIB,L,TV bookPwre War, published by Semiotext(e) in 1983. Pure war, Virilio explained, is "military space... having its own characteristics,"6 is a war of "chrono-politics,"- and is an "a-national logistical revolution" that follows what Virilio describes as "a statement by the Pentagon from around 1945-50 which is extraordinary: 'Logistics is the procedure following which a nation's potential is transferred to its armed forces, in times of peace as in times of war.'"8 Pure war is the war machine that invades all aspects of everyday life. In pure war, episodes of actual war are not as significant as are the tendencies to produce war. Such tendencies infiltrate all ordinary ways of seeing and contrive a global vision based in the logistics of military perception. Pure war is "the doctrine of production [that] has replaced the doctrine of use on the battlefield," and in which "the computer already has the last word."9 Pure war is the war in which "the use of weapons is no longer taught . . . because the time for decision is now insufficient."10 Pure war is the
suicide State [that] no longer needs men, and that's why it's pure. It doesn't need the human war-machine, mobilized human forces. ... We are facing a cult. . . . Pure War is the absolute idol [in which] the scientific progress of nuclear energy is bringing idolatry in place of ideologies. Because nuclear war is an idolatry. Pure War is a situation which is entirely comparable to that of the idol in ancient societies. We have come back to the supreme idol."
Television viewers witnessed just such a war eight years after Virilio and Lotringer's book was published, when they watched "smart bombs during the 1991 Gulf War. Such is also the war in which electromagnetic waves are being developed and deployed by the US Department of Defense, in its so-called "non- lethal weapons" program.12 Pure war has advanced tor fifty years, and it presents an unprecedented, unparalleled form of aggression on noncombatant civilian populations throughout the world by the "military-industrial-congressional- complex" about which former President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address from the White House Oval Office on January 17,1961.u Eisen hower's cautionary words come to life in Robert Del Tredici's aerial image Roc ky Flats (1983), which depicts a daunting and vast complex in Colorado, a site that handles more plutonium than any plant in the Western world. So, too, does Paul Shambroom's camera bear witness to the invisible reality of the nuclear age as seen in his image of the Poseidon Submarine Control Room, USS Calhoun, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, GA (1993). Such photographs behold the otherwise inaccessible (and therefore relatively invisible) yet concrete sites at the intersec tion of defense and industry about which Eisenhower warned:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms in dustry is new in the American experience.The total influence —economic, po litical, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office in the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development.
71 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
Pure war is also about the invisibility of terrorism and the sudden surprise of terrorist acts—a first incident of which, Virilio argued, was the capture of Bei rut Airport by Israeli paratroopers in 1982. These ever-increasing incidences of terrorism represent "the art of deterrence [and] acts of war without war [Virilio's emphasis]."14 Pure war is also about the disappearance of what Lotringer de scribed as "place and individual," to which Virilio added:
There we have a modernity, a refusal of citizenship, of rights, of habeas corpus ... spreading all over the world. It's easier to make people disappear... than to shut millions up into camps, as they did in Nazi Germany. Even if Gulags and concentration camps still exist—and they do, alas —disappearance is our future."15
Pure War is about a "perspective of the end,"16 and its very means are invisible, subsumed in the absolute speed of nuclear weapons and their absolute destruc tion. With this development in the human capacity for destruction, the planet has arrived at a "mega-interruption":
Individual death founded all of religious, mystical and magic thought. From the recognition of the death of tribes, of the group, they then arrived at the idea that civilizations, too, are mortal. With nuclear weapons, the species is now ecognizing the possibility of its own death. Nuclear holocaust reintroduces the 9 of God no longer on the scale of the individual or of a chosen race, but of the species. It reinterprets man's role."
IwnwrH0011" C°nC,UdeS' tme enCm-V is ,ess external ^an internal: our own society"" ^^ SC1Cntlfic might which in fact promote the end of our
and technolori ^ Cnable a grasp of the global conditions of the social
sssarssr'r—•*—•m a d -»- 1 1 ...lysis .»d naming ,, "™ " " I*"" *" "" that runs the risk of rend* r so denotes an abstract concept age. The term "nucleocide" dem "mVIS,ble the materiality of the nuclear result in which massivedeath onlnhLTh?'''?" ^ ^ foundation for nueleoHH^ ••». l result. World War II established the War amplified nucleocide to the * ^ ™ ^ PerPetrator- The Co,d uitous result that promise* H- °F nuclear weapons. Pure war is the ubiq- nuclear countries to ^^ C °ntinUal attempts ** n0n* hand, the threat of aging nuclear ^ ^ m3SS,Ve increase in nuclear contra- promotion of the nuclear inda plants' and the sudden and surprising nucleocide is increasingly possible^ * (iC°rge W' Bush and Richard Cheney,
72 I REMEMBER,NG INVISIBILITY NUCLEOGRAPHY
The denotative banality of nuclear age photography belies its source in the con- notative symbols, icons, and foundations of pure war, and in its narration of human and environmental tragedy. This is because nuclear age photographs are of the ordinary invisibly transformed into the extraordinary. They are genre pictures in which the memento mori foretell a future of suffering and death. Documentary photographs of the nuclear age witness a new kind of militaristic circumstance: war with no conventional troops or battlefields, just common place human beings, animals, and the environment left invisibly damaged. Four aspects of nuclear age photographs stand out. First, pictures of the nuclear age require extensive description as they cannot visualize radiation, and the sites of production and storage are so remote and protected that they remain unseen bv the public. Second, some of these photographs record the otherwise uncom mon fact that the nuclear age is about civilian conditions of war, a concept that eludes citizens and about which most people dissociate throughout the world. Third, and most elusive, many of these nuclear age photographs, or war images, are primarily pictures of ordinary people, places, and things: portraits, land scapes, and genre pictures that belie the violent content of warfare. Fourth and finally, some of the images show visually repugnant and emotionally horrific scenes, environments, and events that have the power to elicit very direct emo tional response and which are therefore avoided. The photographs of Robert Del Tredici, a Canadian artist and photographer, are exemplary of the educational value of nucleography. In 1989 Del Iredici founded the Atomic Photographer's Guild, a loose association ot photogra phers concentrating on nuclear age subjects.19 Two years earlier he had pub lished At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (1987), a comprehensive visual study of the varied sites of the nuclear age. Five of the photographs in this book capture the power of nucleography. Drawing attention to the microscopic aspects ot the nuclear age in the photograph Particle of Plutonium in Lung I issue (1982), Del Tredici pictured the cancerous effects ot plutonium-239 deposited in the lung tissue of an ape and magnified five hundred times over a period of forty-eight hours.20 Plutonium-239 is the transuranic element used for nuclear weapons and energy; it has a half-life of 24,400 years.21 Taken at the Lawrence Radi ation Laboratory in Berkeley, California, on September 20, 1982, Del Tredici s photograph shows tracks made by the alpha rays emitted from a particle of Plutonium. Furthermore, his photograph of Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (November 2, 1984) pictures an aerial view of what Del Tredici captions as the "Naval Submarine Base Bangor, Hood Canal, Puget Sound. I he image includes two types of strategic weapons bunkers in the facility: sixty-four closely spaced bunkers, which store propellant for Trident missiles, and twenty-one bunkers spaced farther apart, which store Trident warheads.2- Together with his field notes, Del Tredici's photography brings the vast, inaccessible space of nuclear- age technology into a human range, and condenses the incomprehensible com plexity of the nuclear weapons site into a compact image that nevertheless re
73 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY mains abstract in its implications about the effect of the site on human life and on the planet. In an entirely different context, on August 25,1986, Del Tredici took a picture entitled Stanrock Tailings Wall. It depicts a barren landscape of dead trees and a wall of white sand comprised of radioactive mill wastes from uranium mining in the region of Elliot Lake, Ontario.23 This example of nucleography bears witness to the millions of tons of tailings that have been deposited directly into the en vironment and carried by the Serpent River System into the Great Lakes, where they will remain unmarked and hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. Such destruction of the environment extends to animal life and the food chain. In Swedish Lapland, Del Tredici photographed The Becquerel Reindeer (Decem ber 3, 1986), which depicts reindeer carcasses in a slaughterhouse freezer at Harads Same-Produktor.24 The animals had eaten lichen contaminated with cesium-137, material carried in the wind from the Chernobyl meltdown. Cesiurn- 137 can be introduced into the environment either by nuclear bomb explosions or by leakage from a nuclear power plant. Since the first nuclear weapon tests released cesium-137 and other radioactive nuclides into the environment, those materials have been absorbed into leaves and roots that serve as reservoirs for them. Such a process became especially vivid in Sweden, where "the maximum radiation allowed in meat [was] 300 becquerels per kilo [and the reindeer mea sured] as high as 16,000 becquerels per kilo."25 Workers there named the radio active carcasses the becquerel reindeer." Ciguatera poisoning in the food chain, especially among fish, has also been reported in the Pacific Marshall Islands, where the United States tested at least sixty-six atomic and hydrogen bombs be tween 1946 and 1958, and in French Polynesia, where the French tested nuclear weapons. Del Iredicis photograph Marshallese in Washington, D.C. (April 23, 1987) shows a delegation from the Marshall Islands "that sued the U.S. govern- ment for $5 billion in radiation damages. U.S. Court of Claims, Washington D.C."" Two Marshall atolls-Bikini and Rongeiap-remain uninhabitable. ese photographs picture what cannot be seen.The second aspect of nucle- g p . s how it necessitates verbal description. As theorists of photography f Pointed out, without discursive anchoring, the meaning and subject with th ^ °t0^ra^'c 'ma?es are unstable. Couple the invisibility of radiation mandi ^ US'Ve^ontent of Pictures, and it becomes possible to imagine thede-
Yucca Pa 35 I V'SUa"y narrating the nuclear age. Such otherness is vivid in ranherwn k cT^*" *** NeVada' made bva" anonymous photog- w«un7th^lK "i Departmentof ^ergy. Few citizens out^de the South- of the most fr' "i^ """ Y"CCa PaSS 'S the gateway to Yucca Flat, one graphSi-' U rd;eaP°nS tCSt Si«" g X,C nV,r0nment hc d b Ca„d s "b0l and° f: ' ^ ' ™ '< admonition-the imperceptible dangers "hat mgSeparates the viewer, hiker, or visitor from the dotted with such signs s' "h"-" °"g " penmeter that is not and cannot be the '"'"national symbol is no, universally known, 74 1 SEMEM »»n NUCLEOCIDE Nucleocide is the subtext of all photographs of the nuclear age. James Lera- ger's Children's Home in Western Ukraine (1991) pictures youngsters genetically damaged by fallout from the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. Lerager s Kazakh Herder (1990) shows a man in a Soviet hospital ward being treated for cancer, another victim of the nuclear arms race ravaged by radiation. These pictures, which Lerager considers examples of "engaged photography," have a targeted emotional plea, rallying activism by appealing simultaneously to viewers tears, fascination, and repulsion. Similarly, in 2-Headed Calf( 1989), HiroToyosaki de picts an animal born nine miles from and seven years after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which occurred on March 28,1979. Like Lerager'sCyclops (1992), a photograph of a fetus preserved as a medical specimen in a jar at a hospital in Kazakhstan, such images bring the often indiscernible, emotionally disturbing, and therefore repressed effects of the environmental contamination of nucleocide vividly to the fore. Some photographs of the nuclear age, such as Dorothea Langes News paper Stand in St. George, Utah (1953), record this war more clearly than others. Lange's image depicts huge headlines on a daily newspaper in a newspaper box at the small town of St. George, Utah. The headlines announce the first test of a hydrogen bomb, or H-Bomb, by the former Soviet Union. The picture also draws attention to St. George, the epicenter of fallout from the Nevada testing grounds. In this way, the photograph of a newspaper stand in a small American town is 75 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY a picture of war, illustrating another historical moment in which the arms race, as well as pure war, threatens a civilian population by exposing it to radioactive contaminants. The photograph raises the question: Which superpower is the villain of St. George? Pure war and nucleocide are as much embedded in Main Streets throughout the world as they are in St. George, and as much as they ever were in a battlefield. Lange's photograph belongs to what I am calling the nuclear age category of "ordinary images": simple portraits, landscapes, and genre pictures. They are prosaic pictures whose mundane appearance makes them so threatening. Lange's Corner of Main Street {1953) and St. George Boule vard in St. George. Utah also qualify as pictures of the commonplace incidents of war that were made in her effort to signify irradiated land and an irradiated town in the United States merely bv picturing its everyday life. Similarly, Lera- ger s Kazakhs Herding Sheep (1990) was taken near the former Scmipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the site where the former Soviet Union tested the greatest number of nuclear weapons, and where a pastoral people and their animals now con tinue to live and graze, irradiated. In addition to these genre or landscape pictures, there are portraits like Led ger's Reason and Lois Warehime (1985), which portrays an apparently ordinary man and his wife. But Warehime is an "atomic veteran," one of the American military personnel exposed to nuclear fallout in Japan and later in Nevada. Ware hime joined the Marines at age sixteen in 1943, fought in Saipan, and landed in agasaki^shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped. "Bulldozers [ran] most of me, he said. It was dry, dusty— lots of dust—we were sleeping in bags on the ground in pup tents. Nobody mentioned radiation. We stayed two weeks." 1 a ater,Warebime was assigned to Nevada and participated as a platoon 2 snn a °r ,a ttft.v"kilot°n bomb). He estimates that his platoon was closer r°m the eXPlosion' and tbat e'ght officers were five hundred yards st^aieht uneerUr b°neS'y°Ur Wh°le b°dy was comPressed. The fireball wa to you wh ^ b,g'The dust was so thick you couldn't see the guy nex 11122 d rd l° 50 yaFdS ^ m°Ved in Ski"-h lines to our objec jeep with two saf ^ 3"d over us» destroyed all our *Sh °WerS' ^ later they sent me back to Fort K d,arrhea SOmethinS awful" ^ day out. Mv hair fell our m n°X My teetb came loose. I had to have ther 1 ,c" °ut, then grew back TK;, U been tired ever since 29 * ruined my military career. 1'v ample of pure war. Moreover ^7™ SOberm& and infuriating, an enraging e) nucleography portraits evad« C mV1Slbllity of the effects of radiation in sue even Roland Barthes' concept of the punctur, REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY the term he used to theorize how viewers respond to some photographs that "prick" their consciousness and emotions long after they have been seen.30 Viewers may find their own individual punctums in nucleographic images, but the invisible pathologies embedded in the bodies, environments, buildings, fauna, and flora, which are indexed by such photographs, elude even the prick of a punctum, and must be imagined and conceptualized by the viewer. Noth ing prepares a viewer to know, for example, that the people swimming in the foreground of Kenji Higuchi's photograph Mihama Reactor {1982), in Japan, are being contaminated by water that contains the deadly substances cobalt-60 and manganese-54. Viewers cannot know that the mother in J. Fat Carter's portrait Mother and Child (1979) is in an evacuation center after the Three Mile Island disaster in March of 1979. These nucleographic photographs signify the absent sign of nucleocide and its hidden markers of death and destruction. The ability to visualize the ever- present haunting of the nuclear age is the punctum of nucleographic photo graphs. "To live in the nuclear age is to be a part of and within the threat of 'the Real,"' John Whittier Treat writes in his extraordinary book on Japanese nuclear age literary criticism and poetry, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Litera ture and the Atomic Bomb, adding that this "Real" is "historical, political, and lived."31 Nucleography contributes to making the "Real... lived" conditions of the nuclear age visible to be witnessed, despite some significant critics' defer rals. Treat points out that Jean Baudrillard, "in his highly influential 1981 work Simulations, declares that 'the nuclear is the apotheosis of simulation a per formative feigning' (58)";32 Jacques Derrida described nuclear war as the "im possible real," further suggesting that "the nuclear age has always been with us" and that there is "no radical new predicate in the situation known as the nuclear age."33 But, as Treat insists, Derrida was able to make such a claim only by failing to mention the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.34 The Austrian philoso pher Karl Popper's 1982 observation is worth recalling here, as he pointed out that "any argument against realism which is based on modern atomic theory— on quantum mechanics —ought to be silenced by the memory of the reality of the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."3, Treat expands on this comment, noting that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki altered the history of the world forever, and "split human history into halves ... the first [dedicated to] our survival as a species [which] had nothing to do with our will to survive; the second in which survival is all it has to do with." 3'' The unseen real is what John Hooton evinces in his photograph Minuteman Missile Silo (1989), which depicts an intercontinental missile silo in Montana, one of the many such silos that dot the American West. 1 he real is also what Del Tredici photographed in Minuteman II Missileers Lieutenants Lamb 8c Goetz (November 21,1984), a picture of two of the men who keep watch as part of the US Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile launch crew at Ellsworth Air Force Base, Rapid City, South Dakota. Del Tredici quotes a Lieutenant Goetz, who ex plained the procedure for launching a group of missiles: 77 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY It takes two launch votes. One is transmitted by two men from this capsule, and another control center does the same thing. So there are quite a few safeguards that we have to go through before we can launch a sortie.37 The "real" of nucleocide is what N.R. Farbman depicted in Technicians Putting on Protective Suits, shot at the Hanford Atomic energy plant in 1954; it is the war tested repeatedly in the desert of Nevada, where Richard Misrach photo graphed Aerial View of a School Bus (1987), which depicts a vehicle used for bombing practice; it is the B-2 'Stealth' Bomber (1993) that Paul Shambroom photographed at Whiteman Air Force Base in Montana; it is the airspace re served for military use alone in Nevada; and it is "the areas of the continental United States crossed by more than one nuclear cloud from aboveground deto nations" that nuclear age photographer Carole Gallagher pictures in a diagram on the page facing the table of contents in her book American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (1994). This new invisible war may also be scrutinized from the vantage point of what Carol Cohn, a feminist political analyst, has theorized as the "techno- strategic languages" that defense intellectuals use to make the language of war invisible. Cohn cites such phrases as "friendly fire," for firing on one's own troops, and collateral damage," for the killing or harming of citizens. "Techno- strategic discourse," she writes, creates "a conceptual system . . . that enables weapons of mass destruction to be translated into power . . . legitimating the ver\ existence and proliferation of nuclear weapons themselves, as well as the entire regime of nuclear-armed organized peacelessness built around them."38 But the abstract terms of technostrategic discourse linguistically reshape de scriptions of mayhem as benign and increasingly imperceptible.39 Alfred Eisen- staedt s 1954 photograph of the first Atomic Energy Commission, with commis sioners Sumner T. Pike, Lewis Strauss, Robert F. Bacher, William W. Waymack Da id E. Lilienthal, reveals a site and the individuals responsible for the strategic language of command, control, communication, and computer information. Id War was, and pure war remains, fundamentally covert. Govern- men's from Washington to Moscow, London, Paris, New Delhi, Jerusalem, Pre- tona and Be,jing continuously wage such wars on their own and other civilian populous: the b, lions who comprise the brigades witnessed by nucleography classifieddocumemthatGan^rh"^'6 °f S'mP'C ^ monstrous reality iS 3 secret'AFr TAL c ' ^ ercluotcs in her magnificent book: "In one 'top of the Nevada T "a^ C°mmiss,onl memo, the people living downwind hwwuse segment m ^ ^P1*™ - — bribed as 'a the fact thaUn our p0pulation-"-,° This government document attests to Photograph working ,n the Southwest were a segment of that population consid- 78 1 REMEMBER,NG ,NV,s,a,L,TV ered by their government to be "low-use." Benally, a uranium miner, now lives with lung cancer on Red Rock Navajo Reservation. When Del Tredici asked him whether he knew "what they use the uranium for," Benally responded: "All 1 know is that they used it for something like a gun."41 The former Soviet Union also clearly discriminated against certain minority and tribal populations, espe cially in Kazakhstan, as two photographs by Lerager of Kazakhs exposed to radi ation (1990) suggest. Such political policies typify the global scope of pure war with regard to the use and abuse of citizens worldwide. Moreover, the effects of pure war do not end with the first generation ex posed to radiation, for genetic damage is passed on to future generations. Gal lagher's photograph Robert Carter (October 1988) shows Carter holding across his chest a large photograph of the platoon of soldiers with whom he served. The photograph depicts the moments before they witnessed shot Hood, the largest atmospheric shot ever tested in Nevada, detonated on July 5,1957. In the photo graph, dozens of soldiers are seated on the ground facing the massive explo sion, with nothing to protect them but their hands, which, to a man, they hold up to cover their eyes, as if this futile gesture could protect them. The image is tragic. Gallagher's field notes tell the reader that Robert Carter was seventeen when he saw shot Hood. At forty-nine, his spine had already deteriorated and he had experienced debilitating muscle weakness for years. Carter's two sons also have genetic problems, as do many of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the children and grandchildren of atomic veterans. Who knows how many citizens all over the world, over whom contaminated winds from nuclear testing have deposited "hot spots" on the earth, have cancer and will die from fallout? Dale Beaman, pictured by Lerager in Dale and Doris Beaman, son Doug, is another atomic veteran. Beaman participated in Operation Crossroads on the Bikini Atoll in 1946. He was eighteen years old. He has "colon cancer . . . mi gratory muscle spasms, and musculoskeletal deterioration"; he has had kidney surgery and "suffers from diabetes and hypertensive heart disease"; his "son Doug, 18, has severe musculoskeletal and connective tissue abnormalities, [re sulting in] numerous operations especially to his legs and knees," and is "men tally retarded"; and "Dale's daughters have congenital joint abnormalities."42 The cruelest effect of nucleocide is its genetic toll on multiple generations, and the near impossibility of tracing disease to its source. As if the impact of all these conditions is not relentless enough, after the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom (all signatories to the treaty) simply moved their tests underground, which made testing more forgettable. Almost overnight the nuclear fear seemed todisintegrate, giving way to the illusion of increased safety while radiation continued to be vented into the atmosphere. Yet unsanctioned photographs such as Del Tredici's Minor Scale Unofficial Portrait (June 27,1985), taken from a press bus just four minutes after the test blast at White Sands Mis sile Range in New Mexico, reveal a different story of how underground tests 79 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY "vented" into the atmosphere. While some countries went underground in 1963, France continued atmospheric tests until 1974, and China continued them until 1980. Neither country has yet made public this information about fallout, hot spots, or irradiation from its atmospheric nuclear weapons testing programs. France continued testing in the oceans into the late 1990s, and both India and Pakistan conducted tests in 1998. Moreover, in December 1993, US Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O'Leary unveiled some 204 previously unreported nuclear tests undertaken by the United States. No one knows the actual statistics on Israeli testing—or, for that matter, on testing by the former Soviet Union and China. When Benjamin A.Goldman and Kate Millpointer published Deadly Deceit: Low- Level Radiation High Level Cover-Up in 1990, they pointed out that since 1945 fallout globally had been "equivalent to 40,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs."43 Although the bomb has not been used as an overt weapon since August 1945, such overt and covert military testing has continued worldwide ever since. Del Tredici's 1987 photograph of the Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Character ization System (PARCS) shows an early warning attack facility headquartered in Colorado Springs, established in 1985 to oversee military use of space. Further more, under the auspices of nuclear energy, the use of plutonium in weapons manufacture has continued throughout the world. Nuclear waste from nuclear energy plants has polluted the environment, fouled water sources, seeped into and fallen on crops, and been ingested by animals whose milk and by-products are consumed by human beings. Containment and management of nuclear waste is perhaps the central issue of the nuclear energy industry. At Hanford alone, Alexander Wilson writes, "at least 800 billion liters of liquid wastes have been dumped ... over the years, most of them directly into the soil—with few records kept."" Dan Budniks photograph Rusting Barrels of Radiated Mill Tail ings, taken in the Colorado River tributary area of the state of New Mexico, bears witness to the domesticity of death in the environment, just as Hiro Toyosaki's photograph Radiation Cleanup attests to a project undertaken in September 19/8 at Eniwetok Atoll, where the United States tested bombs in the Pacific be en 1954 and 1955. A photograph by the US Department of Energy shows an un ined trench for nuclear waste created at Hanford in the 1950s. The photo graph depicts cardboard boxes filled with transuranic waste, a substance with an atomic number greater than that of uranium. When the cardboard deterio- ed the waste contaminated the soil and leached into the groundwater. becoming <>f PUa W3r 'S always in the processes of being waged and of potential' fa inherent' dormant, suspended, and Tthe 1 T'" f3'"" tHe d0meS"C SphCre'andenvironment. One ItoLleTrT't COnditi0nS 0f pure war have been the disman- soviet Union in 1991P The '"""J"?"8 'he economic and political demise of the by-products aswpll ^ Cha°S haS made Plutonium and uranium ro"t comraband T T' ^ 3 COmm°"P'-e thriving business in ter- U dma en 0ftCn b s Robett L G ; a" * °™< nuclear experts among others.* a"UCC1' 3 Speclal aPP0'nted by the US Department of State to 80 REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY deal with weapons of mass destruction, confirmed this fact in a talk he gave at Duke University in 1998. He put the gravity and extent of the problem very bluntly: "We are like a drunk looking for his keys under a streetlight because that's the only place he can see."46 Even the United States —putatively believed to have the most secure control of any country over the weapons-grade material in its nuclear stockpile —has admitted that there arc unaccountable losses in its inventory. For example, the director of the weapons security evaluations office of the US Department of Energy observed that there are "security lapses involving] quantities of plutonium greater than 4% pounds, enough to build a nuclear bomb."47 Caches of unprotected highly radioactive materials turn up regularly through out the world, as this 1992 report in the New Scientist confirmed: On 9 October [1992], Frankfurt police found lead containers filled with caesium 137 and strontium 90 [components from which nuclear weapons can be con structed] in a luggage locker in Frankfurt's main railway station, and in the boot of a car with Polish license plates.48 To make this threat even more comprehensible, The Economist reported in 1993 that "the world probably contains about 250 tons of... [weapons-grade] pluto nium and 1,500 tons of the uranium. To lose one bomb's worth from the stock is the equivalent of losing a single word from one of three copies of The Economist." At the time of this writing, more recent estimates suggest that in the former Soviet Union alone, there are one thousand tons of highly enriched uranium and two hundred tons of plutonium, enough to create between three and six thousand nuclear weapons.49 These estimates are from declassified reports. One can only imagine what the real numbers might be; and if the thriving business in plutonium and uranium contraband is not chilling enough, we do well to remember the accidental launch of nuclear weapons that nearly occurred on January 25, 1995, in northern Russia, as was reported in the Scientific American in November 1997.50 CONCLUSION Paul Shambroom's photograph Joint Chiefs of Staff Room, the Pentagon, Wash ington. D.C. (1993) is an image of death deferred, the result of what is known as "command, control, and communication (C3)," an information strategic and tactical system employed within a military organization. Shambroom's photo graph embodies the vacant harbinger of death that Siegfried Kracauer identified in 1927 as the structure, effect, and reception of photographs in general: That the world devours [photographs] is a sign of the fear of death. What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory-image.51 81 |REMEMBERING INVISIBILITY Kracauer's view of photography as conveying something gone, a moment van ished, and time elapsed has been elaborated continuously ever since. Barthes explored the theme of death in the "having-been-there" of the photograph; Susan Sontag popularized this notion in the early 1970s; and Thierry de Duve argued in 1978: "Seen as live evidence, the photograph cannot fail to designate, outside of itself, the death of the referent, the accomplished past, the suspen sion of time."52 A decade later in 1988, John Tagg insisted that "the unconscious signified (of the photograph) must always be the presence of death."53 If Kracauerand his followers are correct, as I think they are, then death must be acknowledged and understood as the defining latent content of every photo graph. As such, the photograph's inherent morbidity bears a symbiotic connec tion to the actual deaths perpetrated in conventional war, the potential deaths by nucleocide, and the psychic numbing (death) and denial of the fear of the nuclear age and pure war. Only a photograph is equipped to record the nuclear age: twice over, as an object and as a subject. In this symbiotic function, the capture of death in nucleography may equally exercise a form of reversal, be coming a form for retrieval and remembering. Remembering invisibility is the key to altering the fate of the "we." It is the beginning of a confrontation with the trauma of daily existence in a terrain of ever-threatening death that immobilizes and deadens individual response and produces psychic numbing, as a result of our incapacity to feel that we can resist and our subsequent refusal to know. Remembering, then, is the initial step in altering such psychological responses. Only through recuperation of memory can healing, agency, and eventual em- po erment begin. Healing requires a witness; it cannot take place in a vacuum, o witness does not mean to provide evidence, as to document; to witness is to ledge and empathize. The importance of the photograph is its role as th C°nc*ition nuc'eocideand its effect of psychic numbing. I write