Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 40 Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies Editor David Seed, University of Liverpool Editorial Board Mark Bould, University of the West of England Veronica Hollinger, Trent University Rob Latham, University of California Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading Andy Sawyer, University of Liverpool Recent titles in the series 21. Andy Sawyer and David Seed (eds) Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations 22. Inez van der Spek Alien Plots: Female Subjectivity and the Divine 23. S. T. Joshi Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction 24. Mike Ashley The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 25. Warren G. Rochelle Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin 26. S. T. Joshi A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in his Time 27. Christopher Palmer Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern 28. Charles E. Gannon Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction 29. Peter Wright Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader 30. Mike Ashley Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazine from 1950–1970 31. Joanna Russ The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews 32. Robert Philmus Visions and Revisions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction 33. Gene Wolfe (edited and introduced by Peter Wright) Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe 34. Mike Ashley Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazine from 1970–1980 35. Patricia Kerslake Science Fiction and Empire 36. Keith Williams H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies 37. Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (eds.) Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction 38. John Wyndham (eds. David Ketterer and Andy Sawyer) Plan for Chaos 39. Sherryl Vint Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds PAUL WILLIAMS LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2011 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2011 Liverpool University Press The right of Paul Williams to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-708-8 Typeset by XL Publishing Services, Tiverton Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreck more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man who ever lived. The very heart of whiteness. Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’ Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 1. Race, War and Apocalypse before 1945 25 2. Inverted Frontiers 49 3. Soft Places and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome 85 4. Fear of a Black Planet 105 5. White Rain and the Black Atlantic 147 6. Race and the Manhattan Project 180 7. ‘The Hindu Bomb’: Nuclear Nationalism in The Last Jet-Engine Laugh 202 8. Third World Wars and Third-World Wars 224 Bibliography 251 Index 270 Acknowledgments Above all, my thanks to Liverpool University Press: LUP’s guidance was invaluable in steering my research into a finished book, particularly the contributions of Anthony Cond and the reviewers who read my proposal and manuscript. The final version is richer for their constructive criticism and suggestions for extending this research into writers, texts and debates I had not considered. I continue to be grateful for the encouragement (intellectual and other- wise) of scholars working in the area of science fiction and related studies. Mark Bould, Sherryl Vint and Patrick Berton Sharp have been some of the most generous and supportive. It was necessary to consult several archives for the research that went into this book, and I would like to thank the staff at the British Library, the Science Fiction Collections at the University of Liverpool, and the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at the University of Exeter. Some individuals went out of their way to provide assistance and expertise: Andy Sawyer at the Science Fiction Collections and Phil Wickham at the Bill Douglas Centre deserve special thanks. The visits to these archives and the funding for my PhD thesis came from the Department of English at the University of Exeter, and none of this research would have been possible without that financial support. Friends and colleagues have constantly sustained this research, and their interest was one of the things that made the project worth pursuing. I am grateful to them all but I would like to single out the following: in its original stages, this work was shaped by the advice of my PhD supervisor Anthony Fothergill, as well as Steve Neale and Tim Armstrong; Jo Gill, Jane Poyner, Brian Edgar and Max Stites read parts of the manuscript and gave honest and accurate criticism; Dan North guided me in my search for difficult-to-source films; finally, this work has benefitted from the long discussions I have enjoyed with Paul Newland. I will finish by thanking my parents. They have been a constant source of love and strength and to them this book is dedicated. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix Sections of Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds were previously published as journal articles. Part of chapter 3 was first published as ‘Beyond Mad Max III: Race, Empire, and Heroism on Post-Apocalyptic Terrain’, in Science Fiction Studies 32.2 (July 2005), pp. 301–15. Part of chapter 5 was first published as ‘Physics Made Simple: The Image of Nuclear Weapons in the Writing of Langston Hughes’, in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies 6.2 (August 2008), pp. 131–41. The editors of those journals have kindly given permission for these articles to be incorporated within chapters of this book, and I would like to thank Arthur B. Evans at Science Fiction Studies and Alan P. Dobson at the Journal of Transatlantic Studies for that permission and for the advice given by their reviewers. Introduction This study will range across continents and cultural forms and more than six decades, but it is anchored by Arundhati Roy’s assertion, used as this book’s epigraph,1 that nuclear weapons2 are white weapons, and that the virtues and vices of white people and nations are condensed in the figure of nuclear weapons. Roy’s proposition is explored from a variety of crit- ical positions in Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds, from inside and outside the perception of whiteness: how have nuclear weapons been read as representative of the scientific achievement, military superiority and responsibility of white Europeans and their descendants? How have they also been interpreted as manifestations of the destructivity, racism and recklessness of white civi- lization? As part of this process, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War explores the ways nuclear representations in Anglophone literary, filmic and other cultural texts since 1945 have been pivotal sites for the articulation of racial, ethnic, national and civilizational identities. These texts are a way of making these identities coherent and legible, but the fact they must be produced means they cannot be taken for granted. Some of the nuclear representations studied in this book contest racial, ethnic, national and civilizational identities as meaningful and decisive ways of categorizing human life, and reveal them as insecure and disabling political compart- ments. In this study, nuclear representations are defined as depictions of the following subjects: (1) the invention and use of the first atomic bombs; (2) the nuclear weapon testing and stockpiling of the Cold War superpowers; and (3) nuclear war (often referred to as World War Three) and life after such a cataclysm. Nuclear technology has been the subject of narratives of racial and national belonging and exclusion undoubtedly because its emer- gence (and deployment against Japan) was read by some commentators as an act of genocidal racist violence, and by some as the apex of Western civilization’s scientific achievement. These opposing perspectives are inter- pretative poles that have been central to nuclear representations. By posing white moral and technological superiority against the destructive tech- nology it supposedly invented, cultural producers have cited nuclear weapons as evidence against white Anglo-Saxon supremacism. From this 2 RACE, ETHNICITY AND NUCLEAR WAR point of view, the scientific achievement of splitting the atom does not reveal white superiority; instead, the enormity of nuclear weapons reminds one that the technology first created by the white world imperils the whole Earth. Through a range of media, from novels to poetry, short stories to film, comics to oratory, the terms that modern European imperialism depended upon – ‘civilization’, ‘race’ and ‘nation’, in particular – often recur in nuclear representations. Some of these representations, emerging when Europe’s empires were relinquishing direct control of their colonies, share the uncertainty that beset the colonial powers following the uneven and often violent decolonizing process.