Bad Weather

Abstract

How, and when, does it become possible to conceptualize a truly planetary crisis? The Cold War nuclear arms race installed one powerful concept of planetary crisis in American culture. The science enabling the US nuclear arsenal, however, also produced unintended byproducts: notably, a radical new investment in the earth sciences. Cold War nuclear science ultimately produced not only bombs, but also a new understanding of the earth as biosphere. Thus, the image of planetary crisis in the US was increasingly doubled during the Cold War -the immediacy of nuclear threat matched by concerns about rapid environmental change and the cumulative effects of industrial civilization on a fragile biosphere. This paper examines the evolution of (and competition between) two ideas of planetary crisis since 1945: nuclear war and climate change. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative history of the nuclear age and considers the US national security implications of a shift in the definition of planetary crisis from warring states to a warming biosphere.

Allegories of the Anthropocene

“…122 This recognition by geologists is belated because the language of climate change has long been formulated in relation to narratives of nuclear annihilation, as Spencer R. Weart and many others have demonstrated. 123 To list just a few examples-the nasa physicist James Hansen's warnings since the 1980s of what was then called the "green house effect" were published in terms of a "climatic bomb" and, later, a "time bomb, " drawing from the discourse of nuclear threat. 124 Similarly, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ' "Doomsday Clock, " launched in 1947 to signal the worldwide threat of nuclear weapons, added climate change to its apocalyptic countdown in 2007.…”

“…no existing borders-whether national, cultural, ideological and political-can ensure immunity." 123 The military irradiation of the earth is more than a symptom of globalization and the Anthropocene; George's novel helps us recognize the signs of planetarity, an apprehension that refuses to naturalize the military transmutation of light.…”

Prognosis: visions of environmental futures

“…Sometimes, the biographies of particular futures affect their reception for an extended period of time. The credibility of futures of abundant and cheap nuclear energy, for example, was powerfully affected by the emergence of atomic energy in association with military research and the Cold War state (Jasanoff & Kim ), even as the Cold War also provided the material and ideological basis for studying global environmental change (Masco ). It is important, therefore, to look at who produces particular predictions about the future, and the historical contexts and institutional ecologies in which these futures emerged.…”

Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the Mars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change

“…2 One of the first articulations of climate change as a national security threat was Al Gore's (1989) address to the Forum on Global Climate and Our Common Future, which met in Washington, DC, on May 1, 1989. For more on the history of climate change as a national security threat, see Edwards (2006) and Masco (2010). 3 For more on preparedness as a national security paradigm, see Anderson (2010a), de Goede and Randalls (2009), Lakoff (2007), and Lakoff and Collier (2010).…”