Apocalypse Now: Eurocentric Fictions and Afrofuturist Reflections on Nuclear War

Home , Bill Buchanan, Cloverfield, Curtis Manning (24), Social guidance film

CHAPTER 6

APOCALYPSE NOW: EUROCENTRIC FICTIONS AND AFROFUTURIST REFLECTIONS ON NUCLEAR WAR

INTRODUCTION Given the violent and genocidal nature of white supremacy (Leonardo 2005) Critical Race Theory has frequently examined the role of apocalyptic events in racial oppression and resistance. These have been fictive, from Du Bois’ ‘The Comet’ (1999, originally published in 1920) which takes the destruction of New York as a liberation from racial oppression to Bell’s (1992) Space Traders where an apocalyptic scenario for African Americans is considered salvation for ‘white folk’, and real, for example in the case of Hurricane Katrina (Ladson-Billings 2006; Marable 2008). In this chapter I consider a, perhaps dated form of apocalypse (nuclear war) through what I call ‘Eurocentric’ fictions contrasting this with Afrofuturist and CRT reinterpretations of nuclear catastrophe. I choose nuclear war as apocalyptic event due to its supposed racial neutrality (e.g. that as there would be ‘no survivors’ that ‘race’ is of no importance). As my own racial positioning is as a ‘so-called white’ I make no attempt to pretend that my own use of Afrofuturism and CRT is not to some degree a form of ‘eating the other’. However, I indulge this mode of writing in preference to ‘regurgitating the self’ (a tendency in whiteness studies for whites to dwell self-indulgently on their own whiteness) hoping that in some way this piece, even coming from a white author, has legitimacy in identifying some problems of Eurocentrism. To begin. the development of nuclear weapons has taken place across a range of economies but all aspects of the nuclear project from design, construction, implementation, targeting, deployment, proliferation, civil defence and protest have been racialised. Fundamentally, the project of constructing nuclear weapons was also a project concerning ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ racialisations:- …the invention of the atomic bomb transformed everyday life, catching individuals within a new articulation of the global and the local, and producing social imaginaries drawn taut by the contradictory impulses of the technologically celebratory and the nationally insurgent, as well as the communally marginalized and the individually abject (Masco 2006, p.1)

The nuclear bomb was constructed as a racial project for American foreign policy but also as a racial project of American domestic policy. Intentions of using the bomb against Germany at the end of World War II were ruled out, given the

John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:24AM via free access CHAPTER 6 alleged racial and cultural similarities between Americans and Germans (Sharp 2007). The Japanese, however, were racialised as being militaristic and inhuman, a fair target for testing another American weapon of mass destruction. More recently, there is a distinct racial orientation in American foreign policy of those nations which are ‘civilised’ enough to have the bomb (America, UK, France, South Africa – a legacy of the apartheid era - Israel and, with reservations, Russia and China) and those which are not (India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran). Whilst nuclear weapons define racial boundaries overseas they also define them domestically. The Manhattan project and the construction of the bomb were conducted on native lands which have experienced radioactive pollution lasting tens of thousands of years (Masco 2006). The ethnic composition of these areas is one of the areas in the US where there are very few whites (Masco 2006, p.164). These weapons were also tested on native lands as part of the Nevada testing sites and have been designated a supra-legal status in American law (Paglen 2007). The making of supra-national territories can be seen as part of the making of American power where the protection of the law would not take place (for example, the existence of white community lynchings of African Americans, formally outside of the state). The racial fallout of the bomb pervades popular discourse and current homeland security policy. In Eurocentric (more properly Anglo-American) fictions of nuclear attack fantasies of the death and disease of the white body and the survival of a (sometimes mutated) whiteness are ‘played out’. As discussed elsewhere (Preston 2007; 2008; 2009a; 2009b) a number of British and American civil defence films of the cold war centre whiteness in their narratives. There is little difference between these social guidance films and fictional accounts of nuclear attack either in terms of global nuclear war in film or in terms of terrorist nuclear attack on television. Eurocentric cinema on the apocalyptic is inflected by the techniques of social guidance film (the correct behaviours to adopt in nuclear attack, frequently stylised representations of nuclear attack so as to mitigate against its horrors, a moral foregrounding of characters who adopt the correct behaviours). So whilst the focus in this chapter is on films which are ‘fictional’ the Cinéma-vérité style in which they are produced would make them properly ‘factional’ in that the presentation includes pedagogical lessons concerning homeland security which are little different from those contained within social guidance or public information films. The ideological orientation of the writers, producers and directors of these films is sometimes liberal and pacifist (Threads, The Day After), sometimes militaristic and nationalist (24), and often one intent hides another latent one. For example, although Threads indicates strong pacifist sentiments in terms of its portrayal of nuclear attack it betrays strong nationalist sentiments in terms of its portrayal of quintessential Britishness (the bumbling, blimpish emergency planning officers, the Coronation Street style of the script pre-attack) and somewhat militaristic in its foregrounding of statistics and imagery of devastation (albeit with the intent of shocking the viewer into pacifism).

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INTO THE WHITE: NUCLEAR WAR IN THREADS AND THE DAY AFTER

Threads (1984) and The Day After (1983), both made for television films, have been grouped together both for the similarity of their narrative arc and their political and cultural significance. There is some debate as to whether one film ‘copied’ the other, but as their production times were roughly sequential there is little evidence to support this. In each film, made from a pacifist and anti-nuclear perspective, the nuclear attack is the turning point in the disruption of the ordinary lives of the subjects (Threads cuts from mushroom clouds to the ‘faces’ of subjects agape and being blinded – similarly a little boy in The Day After looks at the mushroom cloud and is blinded). Neither film ignores inequality (particularly in terms of class). There are suggestions that civil defence and ‘reconstruction’ would be unequal acts. However, what cuts across both films is an understanding that these are ‘ordinary folk’, being white folk, whose ‘souls’ are literally (in the case of The Day After showing them turn to skeletal figures) exposed. It could therefore be said that both films are ‘about’ race in that both concern themselves with various groups of white people and the absent / present paradox of racial representation in film whereby whiteness is both visibly foregrounded and invisible (as if it represents the absence of ethnicity) (Bernadi 2008, p. 360; Nama, 2008, p. 42 – 69). In Threads this means that outside white nuclear families there are only fleeting glimpses of ‘people of colour’. A particularly vivid portrayal of this is in the scene in the centre of Sheffield when the sirens sound to announce the British ‘four minute warning’. The reaction of most people that we see is panic, but with some kind of (albeit) futile purpose behind it. For example, hurriedly removing doors to construct the fabled ‘inner refuge’ of Protect and Survive, ducking and covering’ under a lorry or running into shops for protection. Into this scene which is filmed with actors a second of stock footage is added, which shows a number of Black people on an estate running along the street. There is no ‘purposeful’ activity in this footage and its incongruity with the rest of this scene makes it particularly notable. Its purpose may have been representative during the editing of the film which given its concentration on whiteness may have been a strong possibility. A deeper conceit may be that it reflected a pedagogical purpose, that although the content ‘message’ of the film was that nothing really could help you survive a nuclear war, the latent message was that there are differences in the manifest strategies used by social groups which give some individuals greater chances of survival than others. Threads is explictly pedagogical in that frequent teletype messages appear on the screen to inform us about ‘facts’ concerning nuclear war. One of these is that after a nuclear war, children and old people would be the least likely to survive radiation poisoning. However, the post-war absence largely of people of colour is not explained in Threads. Has there been some kind of targeted policy of extermination by the authorities?. Has there been some kind of ‘race war’ with white supremacists wiping out people of colour? Does the film suppose that people of colour are spuriously less genetically likely to survive? The absence of people of colour after the exchange is not explained (maybe it does not need to be as they were not particularly represented in the film pre-exchange).

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However, one pedagogic message of Threads is that racially things would be the same before and after a nuclear exchange in that the narrative focus of the apocalypse remains with white individuals. White death is about white lives. The Day After (1983) is set in the fictional town of Lawrence Kansas, portrayed as an ‘ordinary town’ with ‘ordinary families’ (being white families). As the writer of The Day After, Edward Hume, states ‘The film is simply about you and me…it shows what would happen to ordinary Americans after a nuclear war’ (Newman 2000). The opening credits of the (made for television) film show a Strategic Air Command (SAC) aircraft flying over farmland and prairies, emphasizing the rural and frontier nature of the land in contrast to the urban site of ground zero (Kansas city). The first half of The Day After retains a soap opera feel, introducing us to various families who are either rural farmers or enlightened urbanites. The Dahlberg’s, for example, are represented as repectable white farmers, with a dash of ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ thrown in (One of the initial scenes shows the Dahlberg daughter Denise Dahlberg (Lori Lethin) and her husband to be (Jeff East) yell ‘Yee-haw’ as they roar off on their motorcycle). Another central character in the teleplay, Dr. Russell Oakes (Jason Robards), is a senior doctor at the local hospital. He is portrayed as a white middle class respectable family man who has a close working relationship with an Asian American doctor Dr. Sam Hachiya (Calvin Jung). This ‘unspoken’ in this relationship is the historical relationship between America and Japan in terms of not only the bombing of Hiroshima but the treatment of Asian Americans after World War II. ‘History’ is not part of the Day After, and the close involvement of American citizens in the cultural construction of the nuclear (racial) project is not referred to. Hiroshima or Nagasaki are not used in the stock footage of the nuclear bomb or its effects (relying on footage of American nuclear testing) and do not enter as subjects of discourse for the characters. The reaction of characters to the nuclear sublime of the bomb is that this is the first time that this has happened to ‘ordinary people’, they exist outside of historical references to the bomb. Sam Hachiya is one of the few (only) characters in the film to exhibit few effects of the nuclear exchange. Whether this is a form of cultural ‘rewenge’ by the writers for Hiroshima (that the Asian American character emerges relatively unscathed by the nuclear war to humbly treat wounded Americans) or a return to post-WWII US stereotypes of Asians as hardy and ‘relatively unaffected’ by radiation (Sharp 2007) are possible interpretations of this scene. This illustrates how the ‘Day After’ explicitly deals with race by not dealing with it. In another example, a character who has less screen time than any of the white ‘families’ in the film is Billy McCoy (William Allen Young) an African-American missile silo operator. We see McCoy with his wife before the nuclear attack but as she is close to the site of a nuclear explosion whilst McCoy is on duty some miles away we assume (as does McCoy) that she had died. McCoy is shown later ‘helping’ a ‘feral’ white man, both wrapped in a blanket but his role in the later film is extremely passive, as an observer of the apocalyptic not an ‘active’ participant in reconstruction and desexualized – not mourning the death of his partner as the white characters are shown. This passivity amongst the African American characters is also shown in other ways – a Father and daughter who cannot find their way to the fallout shelter; a woman in hospital

John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:24AM via free access APOCALYPSE NOW: EUROCENTRIC FICTIONS who cannot speak and plays the role of ‘passive patient’; a worker who questions the reconstruction and is told ‘Get back to work’ by the white ‘overseer’. In these ways ‘whiteness’ is portrayed as agentic and adult whereas ‘blackness’ is portrayed as passive and child like. Interestingly, both films are also concerned with the ‘death’ of whiteness as (some) whites are increasingly portrayed as feral, lawless and living on the fringes of urbanity. This is suggestive of a tear within whiteness in terms of ‘respectable’ whiteness and ‘feral’ white trash, highlighting the ontological status of whiteness as representative of purity.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND WHITE MORALITY IN ‘24’ AND CLOVERFIELD

The contemporary nuclear apocalyptic is seen to be asymmetric rather than systematic, the result of a terrorist act or ‘rogue’ state (one which is part of the ‘axis of evil’) rather than as an all out nuclear attack between the (normative) states of the US and Russia. The asymmetry of this threat maps onto domestic views of the ‘racialised’ other as unpredictable, asymmetric and (potentially) monstrous. The systematic nuclear attacks of The Day After and Threads described above can be contrasted with the more asymmetric attack in the television programme 24. The television series 24 also deals with the ‘ordinary’ counterpoised with the (nuclear, biological, chemical) sublime. 24 is cited as an example of ‘quality television’ (Peacock, 2007) and lends itself well to technological modes of viewing in terms of digital recording or the purchase of DVD box sets. 24 is filmed as if it were in real time (inconsistencies emerge when viewed in real time as each episode is ‘shorter’ than one hour due to the need for adverts). However, the narrative notionally exists within real time. We flick between characters through the device of split screen montages. The central character in 24 is a white special agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) who is a maverick agent working for the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) Los Angeles. Jack will kill and use torture, sometimes even against the orders of CTU, but in the interests of what he sees as ‘national security’, using quasi-utiltarian modes of decision making (the death of one, usually an Arab-American for the life of the many, usually white suburban Americans). 24 presents a juxtaposition between national security activity and ‘terrorist’ activity. The characters have intimate relationships (always heterosexual) and friendships They get angry, cry (mostly) and share (somewhat sadistic and occasional) humour. Through the series of 24 the emphasis of the series has shifted from domestic terrorism to international terrorism, with frequent reference to Islamic terrorism. In day six of 24 a terrorist cell (including a ‘sleeper’ cell) have acquired a number of suitcase nuclear weapons, made in the Soviet Union. There is a multitude of negative stereotypes concerning Arab Americans (and Chinese people) in the series but to focus on the nuclear I want to concentrate on episode four of season six, particularly the last five minutes of this episode. One of the ways in which CTU consider that they can locate the suitcase nuclear devices is to strike a deal with a notorious and influential Arab terrorist Hamri Al- Assad (Alexander Siddig) who apparently wishes to make ‘peace’ with the United States. The task of guarding the terrorist is given to an African American character, Curtis Manning (Roger Cross), who has played a major (if supporting role) in

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CTU’s missions. Late in episode four Jack learns that Curtis served in Iraq as part of Operation Desert Storm where a five of his men were killed in an ambush and two later beheaded by Assad’s men. Jack then attempts to locate Curtis, fearing that he might harm Asaad. The transcript (below) shows what happens next:- Interior of a residential house where JB (Jack Bauer) and CM (Curtis Manning) have just freed a hostage from a ‘terrorist’

JB: Where’s agent Manning?

Man: He was here just a second ago

(The Time clock shows that the time is 9:53:25 – 9:53:28 during this interaction. Low octaves of the ‘suspense’ theme are played as JB races outside where CM is taking Hamri Al-Assad to the CTU vehicle)

We now cut to Curtis and Assaad Exterior

CM: Foreman – go ahead, I’ve got it (taking over the cover of Assaad from one of his colleagues) – (To Assaad) you still don’t remember

(Curtis throws Assaad up against the vehicle by the neck and we hear the clang of his head on the metal)

CM: Special Forces battalion, thirty second support group

(Curtis draws and cocks his gun holding it up against Assaad’s forehead, Jack is now on the scene and we once again resume the scene from his perspective as he emerges from t he house)

JB: Curtis put your weapon down

CM: I can’t do that Jack

JB: By order of the president of the United States put down your weapon

(Curtis turns with Assaad, we focus briefly on his face)

CM: Stay out of this Jack

JB: I can’t – I gave him my word that we would protect him

CM: I didn’t

JB: Curtis please don’t do this

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(Curtis tightens his grip on the gun and Assaad)

JB: Please

CM: I can’t let this animal live

(Jack shoots Curtis in the neck, Assaad is spirited away by CTU as Curtis slumps to the ground. Jack approaches Curtis, wracked with pain and guilt but does not reach out to him or speak to Curtis as he dies. Curtis is unable to speak because of his wound, but they make eye contact. Mournful music plays as Jack stumbles away and is sick on the ground. He lurches against a tree for support and his cellphone rings. Jack still has the composure to answer it, even though he found that he could not speak to Curtis. It is Jack’s boss, Bill Buchanan)

JB: Yeah

BB (on phone): Jack, its Bill. Spring told me what happened – Curtis didn’t leave you any choice

JB: That’s what I keep trying to tell myself

BB: You did the right thing. We need Assaad alive. He’s on his way back, I think that you should come in too.

JB: Tell the president I’m sorry – I can’t do this any more

BB: The hell you can’t. We’re going to find that suitcase nuke because of you. Jack you’ve done great work today.

JB: Good then you don’t need me anymore

BB: I’ll send a car for you Jack, come back here we’ll talk

JB: I’m done (he hangs up)

(Jack breaks down in tears)

(We then cut between the CTU control room, the White House and a field operation of CTU to stop the suitcase nuke being used which fails and the nuclear device explodes in suburban Los Angeles. With the white flash of the nuclear explosion we cut back to Jack for the final scene of the episode) In the above, Jack suggests a lack of agency in his killing of Curtis. ‘I can’t – I gave him my word that I would protect him’ and ‘Curtis, please don’t do this’ (e.g. make me shoot you because of your ‘irrational behaviour’). Bill backs this up

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‘Curtis didn’t leave you with any choice’. All is forgotten in the nuclear sublime and the white flash of light that proceeds the mushroom cloud and Curtis’ death is the absent, at least in day 6 of 24. Here Jack’s emotions and behaviour are productive of a form of disembodied white (moral) consciousness. He ‘had no choice’ and Curtis made him do it, what Curtis made him do made him sick and because of this he could no longer do his job. Even in death, Curtis represents a burden to the task of national security. The sublime nuclear weapon acts as an erasure of ‘white terror’. Things are ‘too serious’ (as in the ‘new realities’ of the ‘War on terror’) to worry about the death of an African American in a white supremacist murder. There are white people to save (which we then see in the next episode where Jack composes himself and sprints off to rescue two white people trapped in a helicopter crash). One of the more recent films of this genre, Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008) is considered to represent a re-phrasing of the genre of the apocalyptic. In Cloverfield, a monster of indeterminate origin destroys the city of New York, drawing parallels with King Kong and the Godzilla / Mothra films. However, this stock theme is updated by a number of narrative and framing devices. Unusually, Cloverfield does not have any titles but rather appears headed as Department of Defence (DoD) film of the ‘Cloverfield’ incident from footage discovered at Central Park, New York. The rest of the film appears as digital video shot from a single handycam. At first this features a boho / professional party to celebrate one of the protagonists getting a new job, but as the monster attacks Manhattan the footage records the horrors of the ‘attack’. In cataloging this incident, the parallels with 9/11 in terms of images are striking and have been thoroughly documented in critical reviews of the film (eg paper flying in the streets, rubble and dust, collapsing buildings, twin towers collapsing, an over-riding sense of confusion and panic in the streets). The use of digital video as a personal medium is also recognizable, as is the ‘last testimony’ of those dying in the incident (reminiscent of the calls from the twin towers or of Flight 93). Cloverfield ends with the last testimony of two of the survivors who die in a (nuclear?) bombing of New York by the military in order to destroy the monster. Cloverfield represents a significant shift but a devious return to the racial phantasies of the apocalyptic. Unusually, Cloverfield presents us with a recognisably multicultural ensemble at the initial party (although the party is largely structured around the interests, desires, careers and relationships of visibly white people). A mixed race woman (Lily – the actress Jessica Lucas) is one of the central characters in Cloverfield who ostensibly survives the destruction of New York (Cloverfield 2?) and although (in a painful stereotype) the looters are African American, there is an attempt to display multiculturalism (if not to engage with race or racism). The abject (monster) has the role of breaking up the pleasant, multicultual party. Here the parallels with 9/11 and the racialisation associated with that incident become clear. The monster is inhuman (alien, spawning numerous parasites which inhabit the subways, metros and tall buildings – they are everywhere), unrecognizable and malicious (killing one of the main protagonists for no clear reason) and visiting unbelievable carnage on New York City. The monster in Cloverfield represents the attackers of 9/11 (and perhaps Islamic culture as a whole from the Eurocentric perspective) as

John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:24AM via free access APOCALYPSE NOW: EUROCENTRIC FICTIONS inhuman and visiting a ‘monstrous’ act on the city of New York (an act of terror which has never been seen or repeated). Of course, the notion of the ‘monster’ representing the racial other is a common trope in discourse on film. However, Cloverfield represents a racially unified, multicultural and hedonistic society coming being devastated by an inhuman ‘other’ unlike previous films of this type which focused on the invasion of ‘whiteness’ by this ‘other’. Cloverfield is an attack on ‘white liberal multiculturalism’.

AFROFUTURISM: FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET?

Binding together all of the above portrayals of nuclear war and weapons is their Eurocentrism. By Eurocentrism I am referring not to a discourse that has a geographical location in Europe, but one that fetishises whiteness, even when (especially when) that whiteness is different and alien (displaying the continuity of whiteness) and even when (especially when) that whiteness is dead, dying and diseased. As Newitz and Wray (1997) and Dyer (1997) state, whiteness studies often concerns itself with both the fetishising of whiteness and the death of whiteness. However, this is to privilege a Eurocentric mode of the study of whiteness an interrogation of whiteness from the inside. As an alternative discourse, Afrofuturism is clearly in opposition to Eurocentrism, but is in flight from Afrocentrism whilst clearly deriving some of its internal logic from Afrocentrist concepts, and African philosophy more generally. In short:- Afrofuturism counterposes ‘ “African American voices” with “other stories about culture, technology and things to come” (Nelson 2002, p. 9) For me, there are clear relationships between Afrofuturism and modalities of storytelling used in Critical Race Theory (CRT), particularly those which imagine techdystopian or techutopian futures of African experience (see Bell’s 1992 anthology for The Space Traders, a techdystopian account, and The Black Atlantic, a techutopian one) and techutopian or techdystopian accounts of an African past (cf The Chronicle of the Constitutional Contradiction). There is a limited academic literature on Afrofuturism, although there are many accounts which refer to Afrofuturism in art, movies and music.

(Preston 2009, p. 561) Nuclear war and asymetric nuclear attack cannot necessarily be classed as technological progress, but in Eurocentric narratives of ‘whiteness as death’ and the ‘nuclear sublime’ they represent the resolution and apex of white supremacist technology. In contrast, Afrofuturism reveals both the white supremacist orientations of apocalyptic thinking and also considers the apocalyptic as an analogy for racial transformation. For example, in Sun Ra’s, an early pioneer of Afrofuturism (see Nama 2009, p. 160 – 165) song Nuclear War (1982), the term ‘They’re’ (not ‘we’re’) talking about ‘this’ (not ‘a’) nuclear war is used, the ‘they’re’ referring to white people. The song is complex, using polyphony and overlays to build, low tempo, repetitive (Jazz with an almost cocktail jazz piano

John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:24AM via free access CHAPTER 6 riff) and varies across a range of emotions from the matter of fact to impassioned (‘goodbye, goodbye’), humour and literal truth (‘what you going to do without your ass’?). The main vocal of the song varies between Sun Ra and various members of the Arkestra illustrating polyphony but also collective experience of African Americans. Hence an African-American engagement with the topic of nuclear war is (from an Afrofuturist perspective) inevitably an engagement with the arms-racism of white supremacy. As a coda an Afrofututist lens could be applied to a recent example of how the apocalyptic can be considered to be salvation, rather than devastation (as in Du Bois’ The Comet) from the unlikely source of the BBC television series Doctor Who. In Russell T Davis’ recent redesigning of the series there has clearly been more than a passing nod to issues of diversity with BME and openly bisexual characters in the series. However, this remains within a series that is firmly within the genre of ‘white’ science fiction which, despite its nod to multicultural cosmopolitism, still makes use of Western colonial tropes (Orthia, 2010). The Doctor has always been played by a white man and has colonial powers of travel through time and space. In the Doctor Who serial The Stolen Earth (2008) the earth suffers an apocalyptic event when it is not only invaded and colonised by the brutal and inhuman Daleks but the leader of the Daleks, Davros, threatens to destroy the universe itself through the explosion of a ‘reality bomb’. This would leave the Daleks as the sole surviving species in the universe. Davros has ‘stolen’ various planets, including the earth, to fuel a massive cosmic machine that would power the reality bomb. Faced with the ultimately apocalyptic scenario (the end not only of the earth but of reality) UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Task Force) considers employing the Osterhagen key which will detonate a number of nuclear weapons around the earth destroying it. The Osterhagen device is to be used ‘when the sum of human suffering is so great that the destruction of humanity is a preferable option’. One of the (few) Black characters in the series Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) is charged with holding one of the Osterhagen keys which can be used to detonate the device. Much against the wishes of the other (white) characters Martha travels to Germany and through teleconferencing holds a meeting of the other key holders in China and Liberia. The Liberian character refuses to show their face during the teleconference as they do not wish to be known in this event. He states ‘I do not want my name on this given what we’re about to do’. Towards the end of the episode, Martha threatens to use the Osterhagen key:-

Martha: I’ve got the Osterhagen key, leave this planet and its people alone or I’ll use it

The Doctor: What? What’s an Osterhagen key?

Martha: There’s a chain of 25 nuclear warheads placed at strategic points around the earth’s crust. If I use this key they detonate and the earth gets ripped apart.

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The Doctor: Well, who invented that? Someone called Osterhagen I suppose. Martha are you insane?

Martha: The Osterhagen key is to be used if human suffering is so great, so without hope. That this becomes the final option.

The Doctor: That’s never an option! In the end, the Osterhagen key is not employed and it is a white character (Donna Noble) along with the Doctor who eventually saves the universe. There are various ways that one could interpret the ‘Osterhagen key’. Davros clearly has a eugenic purpose in devising the ‘reality bomb’ in making the Daleks the only surviving species in the universe. Whether by accident or design, the Osterhagen key sequence is extremely subversive in the genre of apocalyptic fiction. Firstly, the key holders are all non-white. BME characters hold the power to destroy the earth for a higher purpose. That is when the sum of human suffering is so great the destruction of humanity is preferable. I think that in this context, the choice of Liberia as one of the countries where the Osterhagen key is based can hardly be accidentally made. These characters represent the destruction of earth but the salvation of the universe from (racial) eugenics and tyranny. In the Doctor’s words the destruction of the ‘white planet’ (Earth) is ‘…never worth it’ but as in The Comet, it is white supremacy which is the profoundly destructive force.

REFERENCES

Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the Bottom of the Well. New York: Basic Books. Dyer, R. (1997). White. London: Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). Foreword: They’re trying to wash us away: The adolescence of critical race theory in education. In A. Dixson & C. Rousseau (Eds.), Critical Race Theory in Education. London: Routledge. Leonardo, Z. (2005). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege’. In Z. Leonardo (Ed.), Critical Pedagogy and Race. Oxford: Blackwell. Marable, M. (2008). Introduction: Seeking higher ground: Race, public policy and the Hurricane Katrina crisis. In M. Marable & K. Clarke (Eds.), Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race and Public Policy Reader. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Masco, J. (2006). The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nama, A. (2008). Black Spaces: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Newitz, A., & Wray, M. (1997). White Trash: Race and Class in America. London: Routledge. Newman, K. (1999). Apocalypse Movies. New York: St Martin’s Griffin. Orthia, L. A. (2010). Sociopathetic abscess or yawning chasm? The absent postcolonial transition in Doctor Who. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45, 207–225. Paglen, T. (2007). Groom Lake and the imperial production of nowhere. In D. Gregory & A. Pred (Eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. London: Routledge. Peacock, S. (2007). Reading 24: Television Against the Clock. New York: Palgrave. Preston, J. (2007). Whiteness and Class in Education. Dordrecht: Springer. Preston, J. (2008). Protect and survive: ‘Whiteness’ and the middle class family in civil defence pedagogies. Journal of Education Policy, 23(5), 469–482.

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Preston, J. (2009a). Preparing for emergencies: Citizenship education, whiteness and pedagogies of security. Citizenship Studies, 13(2), 187–200. Preston, J. (2009b). White apocalypse: Preparedness pedagogies as symbolic and material invocations of white supremacy. In J. Sandlin, B. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of Public Pedagogy. London: Routledge. Sharp, P. (2007). Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Music:-

Sun Ra, 1982. Nuclear War. [Recorded by Sun Ra and his Outer Space Orchestra]. On Nuclear War [Record]. Chicago, Il: Atavistic Records.

Television progammes:-

The Day After, television programme, ABC television, first broadcast November 20th 1983. Threads, television programme, BBC television, first broadcast, 23rd September 1984.. The Stolen Earth Doctor Who , television programme, BBC, first broadcast 28th June 2008 24 Day 6, Episode 4, television programe, Fox Television, first broadcast 15th January 2007.

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