Angry Planet - The Return of Nuclear Anxiety

Episode Date: March 26, 2018

Everything old is new again, including living with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. North Korea is a nuclear power. The President of the United States has said he’d meet any aggression with fire and fury. Russia is manufacturing tactical nuclear weapons. It’s the Cold War all over again, but this time leaders can snipe at each other via Twitter.This week on War College, PhD student and upcoming nuclear anthropologist Martin Pfeiffer walks us through how culture’s shifting views on nuclear weapons tells us a lot about culture.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The way that we organize the world and power in it is dependent upon a doomsday machine, basically. And eventually, our luck is going to run out. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields.

Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. The bomb. More than 70 years ago, a detonation in New Mexico changed the world. The U.S. had created a nuclear weapon and ushered in the era of the atom. The bomb was such an incredible and powerful weapon that it has created a culture and mythology all its own. From duck and cover to the irradiated wastes of New Vegas, what society says about the bomb says a lot about

society. Martin Pfeiffer is a Ph.D. student at the University of New Mexico, who studies the anthropology of nukes. His research, quote, focuses on how we create and circulate beliefs and values about nuclear weapons. This week on War College, we're going to explore those beliefs and how they've changed over the years. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Okay, so off the top, I want to ask what do you think defines the current era of nuclear discussion? That's a big question. I don't know that it can really be encapsulated necessarily in a sentence.

Certainly, until recently, I would have said neglect. Despite, you know, the Cold War ended, and despite the continued existence in thousands of nuclear weapons, ready to launch, you know, da-da-da-da-da. We really kind of stopped talking about them a lot after 9-11, although there was a very brief moment where we were beginning to discuss issues of nuclear deterrence with regards to terrorism and the potential inapplicability of nuclear weapons and older concepts of nuclear deterrence to the current security moment.

But we seem to have swung away from that, certainly back into what the 2018 nuclear posture review referred to as, right, this era of conceptualizing of it as great power competition. So, you know, I guess the 80s and the 70s and the 60s were so much fun. We decided to do them again or something. It's everything old is new again. Yeah, it's really maddening, actually. You know, discussing some of these things. It's like, okay, I thought we covered this in the 60s or the 70s or in the 80s,

but here we are again. Certainly. So things like Vladimir Putin's big address were he... Sorry, yes. That's the kind of thing you're talking about? Right. I never would have imagined in my life that we were going to be back in a situation where a country was talking about deploying a nuclear propelled cruise missile. Project Pluto, which was the U.S.'s Cold War version of that, was a ramjet driven by a nuclear engine, the supersonic low altitude missile that was supposed to carry multiple megaton class nuclear weapons.

it would have been a screaming hypersonic machine of irradiating death as a doomsday weapon. And, you know, to hear Russia talking about, oh, we've supposedly tested something similar, or the cobalt, salted, autonomous, nuclear-powered torpedo. I mean, it's like a Bond movie. What does your work look like day to day? What kind of artifacts do you uncover?

Where are you looking right now, as you're trying to understand what's going? on? I spend way too much time on Twitter, certainly. One of the nice things about the current political moment and the current historical moment is that people are being very explicit in their discussions of nuclear weapons. So there's a lot of chatter about them, you know, as terrifying or upsetting as it can be, right? You know, when was the last time Vladimir Putin or the president of Russia decided to have a nice video show about the new nuclear weapons in these supposed new systems? So in some ways, social media and sort of the larger cultural discourse and products that come out of it are a fundamental data point for me.

Historically, I've done things like go through every issue of physics today and Scientific American 1950 to 1964 and looked for defense industry and nuclear weapons, laboratory advertisements. Currently, I still kind of keep an eye on some of the cultural products that are coming in, you know, Newsweek, and it's had a cover about uranium and dirty bombs, for instance. And then, of course, I'm at the University of New Mexico, so I spend a hefty amount of my time looking at heritage sites. So this will probably end up becoming my focus, at least from my dissertation work, is looking at nuclear weapon museums and nuclear weapon memorial sites or sites associated with nuclear weapons production complex and looking at how people are, I mean, A, obviously the physical

setup of the site itself and its artifacts, but how people are interacting with those and interacting with each other and with the volunteers of the museum to create, you know, or to circulate beliefs and values about nuclear weapons. So I'm really interested in tracing these movements and these flows of discourse across space and time. So you mean Los Alamos, which is where they developed the first atom bomb and happens to be in your lovely state of New Mexico, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so Los Alamos has the Bradbury Museum. There's also the Los Alamos Historical Society, which has a great little museum. There's the National Park Service. Los Alamos is part of its Manhattan Project National Park. But also there's Trinity Site, which is open twice a year, and that's where the first weapon was,

or the first device nuclear weapon was tested. There's also the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, which has a fabulous and unique collection of weapons casings, permissive action link equipment, etc., here in Albuquerque, and of course New Mexico was home right to White Sands Missile Rain, which is also where the Trinity site is. So there's a lot here, and New Mexico, as time goes on, is going to remain the heart of the modern nuclear weapons complex. Why is that?

Los Alamos is here. Sandia is here, and we've been shaking it. So after the Cold War, when we started reducing the complex under this model of being agile and responsive, we shut down a lot of facilities that it ended up getting concentrated mostly here, really. I mean, Sandia and Los Alamos, and then you have Lawrence Livermore in California, Oak Ridge, and Tennessee, and there are a couple of other places that are still involved, but it really has come to be concentrated here. And I would argue that the heart of the weapons complex has generally been here as well. most of the weapons in the stockpile were designed at Los Alamos, and all of them, starting

aflo, really right after World War II, and all of them have certainly gone through Sandia as well in terms of their ordinance design. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how ignorant most of us are about all of this stuff works. And I'm wondering, as you've been going through and researching this, how much of the documentation and, you know, the stuff that you're looking at all. government sources, is it mostly, especially in the past, were we learning about these things just based on what we were being told? The Soviet Union always had much better information about the American nuclear arsenal than the American people did.

Again, with the end of the Cold War and the openness campaign of the Department of Energy, a lot of stuff got declassified. Not everybody was super happy about that. as a scholar, I'm overjoyed, reaping the benefits of it. So this last break, and certainly over the summer I tend to go back, I spent a hefty amount of time in the UNM's National Nuclear Security Agency reading rooms. So we get their Freedom of Information Act stuff, and also they have to deposit certain documents there.

The access to that material is amazing, and it's something that just did not exist. So in the 1950s, when I was going through issues of scientific American and physics today, I mean, they had to declassify. It was all atomic information was basically born secret. And they were declassifying in the 40s, late 40s, early 50s, like stuff that's just very basic. Like here's the, you know, capture cross section for a neutron of U-235 and U-238. I'm not sure if that really answers your question. But in general, you know, the American people have generally had to rely either on

what the government was telling them or what they could piece together from news reports, freedom of information acts, etc. But like the Albuquerque broken arrow here, which happened in 1957, when a B-36 dropped 13.5 megaton Mark 17 through the Bombay doors, wasn't reported until 1987, I think, 1980-something, early 80s in the New York Times. So it literally kept secret 20, 30 years. What do you think all that secrecy is done to the culture and the way we talk about these weapons? That is an outstanding question.

I regard secrecy less, or I've come to regard secrecy less as an issue of information being hidden and more as a productive form of governance, in a sense. So the choice of what information to confirm, to release, to deny, to neither confirm nor deny, I think in at least many cases have been to varying degrees, thought through or not thought through. Certainly, I would not say that the level of secrecy

or information withhold that has been involved has not benefited us, right? What does it matter if we declassify the yield of a weapon system that has been out of the stockpile for the last 30 years? Do I need to know the material of fog-bang? No.

But the public knowing that Deuterium-trium boost gas is used for a primary and a thermonuclear device actually has some public policy importance, right? How many reactors do we need to build? What sort of tritium production capacity do we need, et cetera? And back in the day, as I recall, that was information that, like, the Reagan administration was not real keen on giving out. And even the basic, the actual number of weapons in the American stockpile has usually been. then a classified number. And I don't see how that contributes to public information or public participation in policymaking. And in terms of a cultural thing, right? I mean, you get to just let your imagination run wild in the absence of definitive guiding information and even in the presence

of it sometimes. It feels like we're still letting our imagination run wild these days. Yeah. I mean, as Derry Dahl said, nuclear war is fabulously textual in that we haven't well, we haven't really had one in which both sides were firing. And when we do, that'll kind of probably be the end of most things. So in the meantime, right, you get to make up kind of whatever you want. And certainly saw that in the 50s and 60s with the plethora of cultural products in which exposure to nuclear radiation produce superpowers and villains. You know, it's kind of a deussex atomica.

Right. I think of the 50s and 60s is kind of the golden era of nuclear. or pop culture. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you could describe that time to the audience and what kind of artifacts and things you're seeing from that era. Yeah. You know, I would argue that nuclear energy, wide or atomic energy, as the phrase was more

often then, widely conceptualized, fit into this sort of larger American neeliorist enlightenment philosophy of progress through technological control of nature. and in the 40s, you know, it appeared to many that the dropping of the atomic bombs had ended the war in Japan, and there was lots of discussion about the supposed technological marvels that would occur and their impacts on society. So advertisements of the 50s and 60s that I've seen, certainly it started pulling back a little bit. In the 50s, oftentimes discussions in the early 50s, especially, at least that I've seen, discussions of atomic energy, were oftentimes articulated to like military products. You know, we helped build this for deterrence.

And certainly as the 50s advanced, you began, or I began seeing more advertisements about the potential of civilian nuclear energy, the use of nuclear energy and industrial design and processes. And then by the late 50s to early 60s, I'd say I started seeing more like, you know, nuclear space propulsion will take us to the stars. Or, you know, here's how we're using nuclear power for SpaceX, And by, you know, the 80s or 90s, certainly I think that atomic energy was probably replaced more with like discussions of genetic technologies, kind of came to take some of the place that atomic energy had. But certainly after the 62, you know, the golden age started going away.

And part of that's related to the loss of Cold War consensus and other stuff. Well, but there was always a positive and a negative side, right, that was out there. simultaneously because you talked about mutants, you talked about atomic-powered spaceships. So, I mean, we never quite agreed as to whether nukes were an entirely good or a bad thing, I guess. Yes, and yes, and that wasn't necessarily reflected in some of the cultural products, that certainly Greg Hercan, in his discussion of the winning weapon, points to a large amount of non-homogeneity or heterogeneous, heterogeneous opinions about nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy. The ads that I've seen, especially in the 50s, like, it blows my mind that there seem to be

very little separation made between the military and the civilian aspects of it. So, you would see people advertising things involving atomic energy, but using a mushroom cloud as this sort of indexical or iconic symbol, which to me is really weird, right? Like, why would you be advertising nuclear power with a mushroom cloud? That's discordant to me. And it's, Yeah, it doesn't make me feel better about proliferation potential of, you know, heavy water reactors being sold it, right? So it's really, it's really odd to me that that happened. But certainly I think by the late 50s, at least in the ads that I've seen late 50s, early 60s, the separation between the military and the commercial stuff was a little bit more formed, at least in those products. But yeah, as you point out, the public was always, it seems a bit more mixed.

Well, it seems to me, in my cursory understanding of all this stuff, that somewhere in the 70s, 80s, the balance shifted in that there was mostly fear. Was there any one thing? Was there anything that you can pinpoint that really brought us there? Probably the human missile crisis and then the collapse of day topped. And the failure of things like massive civilian nuclear power and certain other technological stuff to come into being. So, you know, there was a lot of discussion that just, it didn't happen. You know, we weren't doing electricity so cheap to monitor. We weren't selling vacuums with nuclear power, which was always bizarre to me.

That was even a thing somebody thought of, but, you know, we didn't have cars powered by many reactors. But I think also definitely, right, the experience of 1962 scared the hell out of a lot of people. And again, you had the collapse of this sort of Cold War consensus in the late 50s, early 1960s. You know, living under the threat of a constant world-ending nuclear arm again takes a toll as we are rediscovering. Do you think we need these weapons? In the long term, no is the simple answer. You know, do we need them now? Need is a weird word.

I'm a, you know, I'm a disarmament guy. I'm a multilateral disarmament person. I wouldn't feel comfortable with the U.S. just being like, you know what, we're out of this. You know, I think that there are other ways of arranging security such that, now granted, it would require very large changes in terms of how we organize the world. But I think that there are safer ways of doing it than relying on the constant threat of mass destruction like this. How big do you think the role of North Korea's nuclearization is in the current resurgence of nuclear discussion? Important, honestly, Trump has been at least as equally important, at least as equally important. at least in my own experience, I have never had so many discussions about U.S. nuclear command and control,

as I did after he won the nomination for the Republican nomination, and then in the months after he came into office, I have argued on my blog that part of why Americans have reacted the way that they are to North Korea is partly because we are having to confront our own discomfort with nuclear. deterrence and its assumption of rationality in the form of a commander-in-chief who often acts in a manner that is irrational or impulsive. So I think it's kind of a one-two thing there. And also, I don't think that we can just articulate the pace of North Koreans' commitment to nuclearization at this point from certain policies that the United States has really been doing lately in the ways in which our National Command Authority has been talking about.

North Korea and U.S. diplomacy. Of course, now, you know, we're supposed to have a summit in May, and Kthu only knows what'll happen. You know, it's, I mean, that's the thing, right? We're all really uncertain. And where does that uncertainty come from, right? And certainly, the Hawaii thing is very exemplary in some ways of the current sociocultural moment.

Hawaii started redoing its civil defense sirens because of the progress that North Korea was seen to be making. And then you had a false alarm. And I would argue that people respond to those alarms, at least as I read the history of the Cold War, to the degree to which they think, you know, a nuclear attack is actually possible. And clearly quite a few people on Hawaii thought it was possible.

And I don't think the reaction would have been quite the same if this happened two years ago. And in fact, it couldn't have happened two years ago because the system only got damped up again, you know, in the last year. That speaks to another thing that I've been thinking about lately, is the, if, do you think these weapons are so unthinkable and so frightening that some of us shut down? Yeah, no, you can hit it, right? It's the nuclear sublime.

And this is part of, you know, test footage, too, right? You watch test footage and there's that you're confronted with something that cognitively, you can't necessarily process, and there are all sorts of ways we deal with that. And this goes back to very explicit discussions of civil defense in America from the beginning, this desire to instill to, through psychological management, instill a productive sense of anxiety, but not have it go into terror and fear leading people to shut down. And certainly the United States, at least in its official civil defense efforts, never seemed to find that perfect balance, partly, you know,

because it was never funded at the level where it would have really made a difference. And also partly because not everybody was going to buy into it and people are coming at it from different perspectives. And it's a tough task. But yeah, I think you nail it. Like a lot of times it's, you know, what can I do? How can I change things? And it's just, it feels too big for an individual. What do you think people need to know?

What should we be talking about? That the United States has, you know, 720 to 800-ish nuclear weapons ready to fly 24-7-365. one person has launched authority and that our entire, the way that we organize the world and power in it is dependent upon a doomsday machine, basically. And eventually, our luck is going to run out. And that individuals can impact U.S. and other nuclear policies, right? In the 80s, you saw mass protests, the largest protest in history, American history at that time over the nuclear freeze around the deployment of cruise missiles. and such didn't have a direct in the sense that like Reagan saw that and said, oh, I'm going to change nuclear policy today. But it absolutely impacted the limits of what was politically feasible and

enabled shifts in policy. And, you know, mass action against nuclear risk, I think is more necessary now than at any time since the Cold War ended. And there are always local groups you can join or you can start one. But there are things to do or just call your Congress critter every week and say, hey, look, I don't want to die in a nuclear apocalypse. Deal with this. Because if they don't hear from you, you know, they don't know that it's an issue. But before people start taking action, they need to get educated, right? So how do you educate people in an era of social media? You know, I have this large black cat, Jupiter, and he is my nuclear mean cat, right? In my, I'm half kidding, but in my experience, right, terrible truths expressed by adorable fluffy

cats are better handled. So I have this whole series of cat news. But, you know, one of my commitments is to making my research materials and what I have found available. So I post on my Twitter. I post on my blog. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to be invited to chat with great folk like y'all. You know, and we can also talk about what level of education is really considered necessary to be able to have a cogent opinion on nuclear weapons. Do you need to know each warhead design and their delivery vehicle to be able to say, you know what, I don't want to die in a thermonuclear holocaust? probably not.

So I'm not, that's a weird question. You know, what level of information is necessary? And also, I don't think that the conflicts over nuclear weapons are so much driven by information deficits. So, you know, you can talk with someone who has access to the same historical and technical information that you do, and you can both come to very different conclusions about what the role of nuclear weapons has been in history and will continue to be in history. And I'm not quite sure how to deal with that yet. My first impulse is to say, you know what,

a lot of the time when we're talking about nuclear weapons, we are probably actually talking about deeper-seated beliefs about violence and its role in power and its importance for the organization of human societies. As an anthropologist, I would point out that inter- and intra-group violence has differed widely in form, content, and meaning across both time and space. So for me, appeals to human nature are inherently problematic, but I feel like oftentimes that's the sort of conversation we're not having, but we are having through this language of nuclear weapons, if that makes sense somewhat. No, it does.

I mean, the nuclear weapons are so big and so frightening and so powerful that they almost become totally. And certainly, right? Right. My nuclear button is bigger than your nuclear button. I mean, I lost it when that, oh, God. I literally lost it in my apartment. The cats went running. I had to go get some pie.

Speaking as an anthropologist, if you study societies and groups of human beings, holding everything from bones to sticks to rocks and beating ourselves and each other over the head with them, Do you think it's sustainable for a bunch of, well, adapted, overly adapted guerrillas to have something like nuclear weapons and not use them? I'm uncomfortable with the, I mean, we're closely related. So humans, gorillas, and shumps had a split couple of about three years ago. Yeah, no, I'm sorry. The old bio-a-a-cubs up. No, okay, yes, we are not.

Okay, but I think the history of the Cold War is very clear that we have come very close to accidentally killing hundreds of millions to billions of people. As the current administration is demonstrating somewhat, right, the assumption of rationality in nuclear deterrence is not necessarily always true in the real world. The assumptions of unitary actor are not always true in the world, right? I mean, the theoretical basis upon which we justify these things is really shaky. But just from a historical perspective of the Cold War, you know, in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, I mean, there are three or four things that happened that easily had things gone slightly differently could have led to the global thermonuclear war. And then the same thing in 1983 with the Able Archer exercises.

But even in 95 with the Black Brant missile alert accident, you know, or as I like to say, luck is not an acceptable strategy in the paramedic their age. From my perspective, at least the way that we deploy them now, if we continue this, it is not long-term sustainable. The longer that we have them and that we're ready to use them, sooner or later they're going to get used. That's the kind of depressing note that we usually like to end the show on. Oh, good. Yes. Right? Pet cats, eat pie. Embrace the void. or do what makes you happy.

And also be sure to follow Martin Pfeiffer's work on his Twitter account at Nuclear Anthro. And also check out his Patreon at patreon.com forward slash nuclear anthro. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for listening to this week's War College. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we do. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Jason, Jason Fields. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes and leave us a call.

comment. We love hearing from you, and we might just read your comment on the show. You can also reach us on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash war college podcast or on Twitter at war underscore college. Our website is almost ready. In the weeks ahead, you'll hear an unconventional history of the Marine Corps, learn why the French military took such a licking in World War II, and find out if you have what it takes to make it as a battlefield medic. Until then, stay safe. It's a dangerous world. Thank you.