Jelewska, Krawczak, Techno-Imaginations of a Nuclear Regime (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nuclear Technopolitics in the Soviet Union and Beyond – An Introduction
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 2018
Nuclear energy epitomises the ambiguity of high modernity like no other technology. In the history of the Soviet Union, it played an exceptionally prominent role, initially accelerating its ascent to superpower status and bolstering its visions of the future, but eventually hastening its demise in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. There can be little doubt that without nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would not have been able to consolidate its hard-won victory in World War II and to achieve superpower status. In a massive effort that combined domestic research in nuclear physics with the knowledge of captive German scientists and intelligence about the American Manhattan project and drew on the resources of the country's military-industrial complex and the Gulag system, the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb in record time and tested its first nuclear device in 1949. By 1953, it was also in possession of the hydrogen bomb and had thus achieved technological parity with the United States. 1 In fact, with the successful test of the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957, the Soviet Union had taken the lead in developing a powerful launch vehicle to deliver thermonuclear warheads across the globe. No less important-in ideological terms even more so than in economic ones-was the Soviet Union's civilian nuclear programme. Soviet atomic scientists advocated harnessing the atom's power for electricity generation as early as the late 1940s, 2 and the CPSU was quick to realise the economic and propagandistic potential of nuclear power. 3 Only one year after the detonation of their first H-bomb, and in response to Dwight D. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech, Soviet nuclear scientists connected the world's first nuclear power plant to the grid in Obninsk near Moscow. While the quantity of energy produced was negligible, the amount of publicity it generated for the Soviet state was enormous. 4 Soviet propaganda could now juxtapose the belligerent capitalist atom of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with its seemingly peaceful socialist twin, eager to serve the
Journal of International Political Theory
This Introduction presents the seven closely interlinked papers that explore the theme of this Special Issue, and one of the enduring existential questions for International Relations: the nuclear condition in the twenty-first century. The Special Issue is the second to come from two workshops sponsored by a UK Leverhulme grant, and it builds upon the first, more theoretical Special Issue, which brought Classical Realist and Critical Theory texts into dialogue. The major concern in the first Special Issue—the focus on modernity, crises, and humanity—is taken up here in more grounded practical terms, framed around the existential fears of nuclear annihilation. Each of the contributions re-assess the contemporary nuclear condition from within the theoretical frameworks provided by Classical Realism and Critical Theory. The engagement with both traditions allows the contributors to diagnose what is new, and what remains constant, in the contemporary nuclear condition.
Post-Apocalypse and the Enduring Nuclear in Post-Soviet Russian Fiction
This is a long, pre-print draft of an essay to appear in Toxic Immanence: Nuclear Legacies, Futures, and the Place of Twenty-First Century Nuclear Environmental Humanities, edited by Livia Monnet and Peter van Wyck, from McGill-Queen's University Press. The chapter explores generic and ideological contradictions in the post-catastrophist imaginary of the nuclear, using Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033 as a paradigmatic example of post-Soviet Russian speculative fiction, and examines the political implications of the transmedial refashioning of Glukovsky’s novel for mass consumption within international video game markets as a post-apocalyptic first person shooter (FPS). I will focus on the concept of the “enduring nuclear,” which indicates on one hand the long, seemingly imperceptible temporalities of radioactive decay and the “slow violence” of nuclear disaster, but which also alludes to the ways in which the post-catastrophic genre is bound up with a sense of impossible or blocked futurity, resulting in the contradiction that speculative post-Soviet fictions such as Metro 2033, while post-apocalyptic, seem incapable of imagining a transition to a post-nuclear modernity. If a central task of energy humanities critics is to ask, “Who gets to imagine energy futures?” comparative literary topographies are essential to the formulation of a nuclear energy humanities. A world-literary approach to nuclear environmental criticism should uncover not only imaginaries corresponding to British and American nuclear culture and the dominance of the US imperium, but also on the enduring nuclear futures imagined in post-Soviet Russia and other global contexts of nuclear development in the twenty-first century, such as China, India, and Iran. The globalization of the nuclear can be mapped “through the trace of militarized radiation.” Our capitalist nuclear modernity is above all a global modernity–singular, planetary, and world-historical –in which all forms of earthly life have been altered by the atmospheric effects of nuclear development
When stock is taken of the damages wrought upon humankind and the natural environment by nuclear energy, Kazakhstan invariably occupies one of the podium places in global rankings. Its most prominent claim to this dubious fame is the Semipalatinsk (Semei) polygon -the Soviet-era nuclear-weapons test site in Eastern Kazakhstan where no less than 456 nuclear test explosions took place between 1949 and 1989. 1 It seemed only consequential that upon Kazakhstan's independence, president Nursultan Nazarbaev closed the test site in one of the new government's first major decisions and that within four years of independence, Kazakhstan got rid of what had constituted the fourth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons of any country in the world upon independence in 1991. 2 Ever since, Kazakhstan has positioned itself as a champion of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, with prominent writer Olzhas Suleimenov, co-founder of the Semipalatinsk-Nevada initiative, serving as the figurehead of these initiatives and president Nursultan Nazarbaev lobbying for nuclear weapon test bans and updates to the Non-Proliferation Treaty throughout the world. 3
“A Hedge against the Future”: The Post–Cold War Rhetoric of Nuclear Weapons Modernization
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2010
Rhetoric has traditionally played an important role in constituting the nuclear future, yet that role has changed significantly since the declared end of the Cold War. Viewed from the perspectives of nuclear criticism and postmodern theories of risk and security, current rhetoric of US nuclear modernization demonstrates how contingencies of voice and persona mediate the success of official depictions of the future as a warrant for proposals to innovate nuclear weapons. In particular, two forces destabilize the virtuous persona of modernization's advocates: incongruity between the types of risk they conceptualize, and an ethic of “responsibility” that opposes their promotion of instrumental “responsiveness.” These forces create openings for challenge by a rising international movement to abolish nuclear weapons.
Arms Control and Nuclear Safety: The National and International Politics of Russia's Nuclear Arsenal
Government and Opposition, 1995
RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IS STILL IN A STATE OF FLUX. LIKE the other former republics of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation seeks to come to terms with being an independent state needing to define its national interests and foreign and security policy objectives.The principal element in the new frame of reference for Moscow is the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself. For forty years, most of the territories controlled by Moscow were adjacent to territories protected by the United States, or else to China. The Russian Federation is now virtually surrounded by former Soviet republics, all with deep political, social and economic problems, and some of which are highly unstable and subject to violent civil conflicts. The territory of the Russian Federation itself, about 75 per cent of the territory of the former USSR with about 60 per cent of its population, is still not properly defined, given that significant sections of the borders are purely notional, a...
The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of "Democracy" in Russian Political Discourse - Volume One, 2021
Director of the Academic Studies Press, first conceived the idea of collecting our studies and making them available to a new generation of Slavists and rhetorical scholars. His letter to Marilyn Young in 2019 initiated this process. Ekaterina (Kate) Yanduganova, the ASP acquisitions editor for Slavic, East European, and Central Asian studies, has shepherded the publication process for this volume tirelessly and efficiently, as have the members of her copy editing team. Michele Pedro has been indispensable on our end proofreading and formatting the elements that have made up our manuscript.
Nuclear Renaissance and Security Culture
The "nuclear renaissance" reportedly involves 65 countries, of which at least 45 have no experience of building and operating nuclear infrastructure (also known as "nuclear newcomers"). Economic, political, environmental, and other drivers vary for these countries, but only a few of the nuclear aspirants will be able to reach the desired status in the next 20-25 years. Assessment of the vulnerability of nuclear power infrastructure-both current and future-to attacks and other malicious acts reveals that the human factor, and particularly insider threats, poses a major risk. Nuclear security culture is designed to improve the performance of the human component and to make its interface with security technology and regulations more effective and smooth. As nuclear power programs expand worldwide-albeit at a much slower pace than originally expected-there is a need to develop a variety of more efficient tools for achieving sustainable nuclear security culture. These tools would be tailored to specific risks and to the prevailing national culture in individual countries, and above all in nuclear newcomers. The April 2010 Nuclear Security Summit affirmed the importance of this endeavor.