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C A “SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS”: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America JOSEPH MASCO University of Chicago Has any nation-state invested as profoundly in ruins as Cold War America? Although many societies have experienced moments of self-doubt about the future, perhaps even contemplating the ruins that might be left behind as testament to their existence, it took American ingenuity to transform ruination into a form of nation-building. In this regard, the invention of the atomic bomb proved to be utterly transformative for the United States: it not only provided the inspiration for a new U.S. geopolitical strategy—one that quickly enveloped the earth in advanced military technology and colonized everyday life with the minute-to- minute possibility of nuclear war. The bomb also provided officials with a new means of engaging and disciplining citizens in everyday life. For U.S. policymakers, the Cold War arms race transformed the apocalypse into a technoscientific project and a geopolitical paradigm, but also a powerful new domestic political resource. Put differently, a new kind of social contract was formed in the first decade of the nuclear age in the United States, one based not on the protection and improve- ment of everyday life but, rather, on the national contemplation of ruins. Known initially as “civil defense,” the project of building the bomb and communicating its power to the world, turned engineering ruins into a form of (inter)national the- ater. Nuclear explosions matched with large-scale emergency response exercises became a means of developing the bomb as well as imagining nuclear warfare (e.g., see Glasstone and Dolan 1977; Kahn 1960; Vanderbilt 2002). This “test program” would ultimately transform the United States into the most nuclear-bombed coun- try on earth, distributing its environmental, economic, and health effects to each and every U.S. citizen. 1 By the mid-1950s it was no longer a perverse exercise CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 361–398. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1525/can.2008.23.2.361.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 to imagine one’s own home and city devastated, on fire, and in ruins; it was a formidable public ritual—a core act of governance, technoscientific practice, and democratic participation. Indeed, in the early Cold War United States, it became a civic obligation to collectively imagine, and at times theatrically enact through “civil defense,” the physical destruction of the nation-state. 2 It is this specific nationalization of death that I wish to explore in this article, assessing not only the first collective formulations of nuclear fear in the United States but also the residues and legacies of that project for contemporary American society.Fortoday,weliveinaworldpopulatedwithnewlycharredlandscapesanda productionofruinsthatspeaksdirectlytothisfoundationalmomentinU.S.national culture (see Stoler with Bond 2006). The notions of preemption and emergency response that inform the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror” derive meaning from the promises and institutions built by the Cold War security state. Indeed, the logics of nuclear fear informing that multigenerational state and nation- building enterprise exist now as a largely inchoate, but deeply embedded, set of assumptions about power and threat. How Americans have come to understand mass death at home and abroad, I argue, has much to do with the legacies of the Cold War nuclear project, and the peculiar psychosocial consequences of attempting to build the nation through the contemplation of nuclear ruins. What follows is largely a study of visual culture, and specifically, of the do- mestic deployment of images of a ruined United States for ideological effect. I argue that key aspects of U.S. security culture have been formed in relation to images of nuclear devastation: the constitution of the modern security state in the aftermath of World War II mobilized the atomic bomb as the basis for U.S. geopolitical power, but it also created a new citizen–state relationship mediated by nuclear fear. In this article, I consider the lasting effects of nation-building through nuclear fear by tracking the production and ongoing circulation of nuclear ruins from the Cold War’s “balance of terror” through the current “war on terror.” It is not an exercise in viewer response but, rather, charts the development and circulation of a specific set of ideas and images about nuclear war. I begin with a discussion of the early Cold War project known as “civil defense” and then track how the specific images created for domestic consumption as part of that campaign continued to circulate as afterimages in the popular films of the 1980s and 1990s and inform contemporary security culture. 3 I show that the early Cold War state sought explicitly to militarize U.S. citizens through contemplating the end of the nation-state, creating in the process a specific set of ideas and images of collective danger that continue to inform American society in powerful and increasingly 362

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” complex ways. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washing- ton, D.C., on September 11, 2001, the affective coordinates of the Cold War arms race provided specific ideological resources to the state, which once again mobilized the image of a United States in nuclear ruins to enable war. Ultimately, this article follows Walter Benjamin’s (1969:242) call to interrogate the aestheticized politics that enable increasing militarization and that allow citizens to experience their own destruction as an “aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” 4 BE AFRAID BUT DON’T PANIC! The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. . . . To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it. —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster Nuclear ruins are never the end of the story in the United States but, rather, always offer a new beginning. In the early Cold War period, ruins become the markers of a new kind of social intimacy grounded in highly detailed renderings of theatrically rehearsed mass violence. The intent of these public spectacles— nuclear detonations, city evacuations, and duck and cover drills—was not defense in the classic sense of avoiding violence or destruction but rather a psychological reprogramming of the U.S. public for life in a nuclear age. The central project of the earlynuclearstatewastolinkU.S.institutions—military,industrial,legislative,and academic—for the production of the bomb, while calibrating public perceptions of the nuclear danger to enable that project. 5 As Blanchot (1995) suggests, this effort to think through the disaster colonized everyday life as well as the future, while fundamentally missing the actual disaster. The scripting of disaster in the imagination has profound social effects: it defines the conditions of insecurity, renders other threats invisible, and articulates the terms of both value and loss. In the United States, civil defense was always a willful act of fabulation, an official fantasy designed to promote an image of nuclear war that would be, above all things, politically useful. It also installed an idea of an American community under total and unending threat, creating the terms for a new kind of nation-building that demanded an unprecedented level of militarism in everyday life as the minimum basis for “security.” After the Soviet’s first nuclear detonation in 1949, U.S. policymakers com- mitted to a new geopolitical strategy that would ultimately dominate U.S. foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century. The policy of “containment,” as 363

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 formalized in National Security Council 68 (known as NSC 68 ), proposed, in re- sponse to the Soviet bomb, a total mobilization of American society based on the experience of WWII. 6 NSC 68 articulates the terms of a permanent wartime pos- ture funded by an ever-expanding domestic economy, transforming consumerism into the engine of a new kind of militarized geopolitics. NSC 68 identifies internal dissent as perhaps the greatest threat to the project of “Cold War” and calls for a new campaign to discipline citizens for life under the constant shadow of nuclear war. Thus, in Washington, D.C., nuclear fear was immediately understood not only to be the basis of U.S. military power, but also a means of installing a new normative reality within the United States, one that could consolidate political power at the federal level. The nuclear danger became a complex new political ideology, both mobilizing the global project of Cold War (fought increasingly on covert terms) and installing a powerful means of controlling domestic political debates over the terms of security. By focusing Americans on an imminent end of the nation-state, federal authorities mobilized the bomb to create the “Cold War consensus” of anticommunism, capitalism, and military expansion. NSC 68 is a classified policy document written in 1950 by the National Security Council for President Harry S. Truman, which articulates the policy of Soviet “containment” as well as the domestic terms of fighting a “Cold War”: On the Soviet Threat : The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of total war . . . . No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power . . . . In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership. On containment : As for the policy of “containment,” it is one which seeks by all means short of war to (1) block further expansion of Soviet power, (2) expose the falsities of Soviet pretensions, 364

“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS” (3) induce a retraction of the Kremlin’s control and influence and (4) in general, so foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system that the Kremlin is brought at least to the point of modifying its behavior to conform to generally accepted international standards. It was and continues to be cardinal in this policy that we possess superior overall power in ourselves or in dependable combination with other like-minded nations. One of the most important ingredients of power is military strength. . . . Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of “containment”—which is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion—is no more than a policy of bluff. On the problem of internal dissent : The democratic way is harder than the authoritarian way because, in seeking to protect and fulfill the individual, it demands of him understanding, judgment and positive participation in the increasingly complex and exacting problems of the modern world. It demands that he exercise discrimination; that while pursuing through free inquiry the search for truth he knows when he should commit an act of faith; that he distinguish between the necessity for tolerance and the necessity for just suppression. A free society is vulnerable in that it is easy for people to lapse into excesses—the excess of a permanently open mind wishfully waiting for evidence that evil design may become noble purpose, the excess of faith becoming prejudice, the excess of tolerance degenerating into indulgence of conspiracy and the excess of resorting to suppression when more moderate measures are not only more appropriate but more effective. On economic military expansion : One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living. . . . This provides an opportunity for the United States, in cooperation with other free countries, to launch a build-up of strength which will support a firm policy directed to the frustration of the Kremlin design. On the project of Cold War : In summary, we must, by means of a rapid and sustained build-up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world, and by means of an affirmative program intended to wrest the initiative from the Soviet Union, confront it with convincing evidence of the determination and ability of the free world to frustrate the Kremlin design of a world dominated by its will. Such evidence is the only means short of war which eventually may force the Kremlin to abandon its present course of action and to negotiate acceptable agreements on issues of major importance. The whole success of the proposed program hangs ultimately on recognition by this Government, the American people, and all free peoples, that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake. (The full original text is available at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/korea/large/week2/nsc68_ 55.htm, accessed November 15, 2007.) 365

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2 Defense intellectuals within the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, however, worried that nuclear terror could become so profound under the terms of an escalating nuclear arms race that the American public would be unwilling to support the military and geopolitical agenda of the Cold War. 7 The immediate challenge, as U.S. nuclear strategists saw it, was to avoid an apathetic public (which might just give up when faced with the destructive power of the Soviet nuclear arsenal), on the one hand, or a terrorized public (unable to function cognitively), on the other hand (Oakes 1994:34; and also George 2003). For example, an influential civil defense study from 1952, Project East River, argued that civilian response to a nuclear attack would be all-out panic and mob behavior: American society, it concluded, would not only be at war with the Soviets but also at war with itself as society violently broke down along race and class lines (Associated Universities 1952). A long “Cold War” consequently required not only a new geopolitics powered by nuclear weapons but also new forms of psychological discipline at home. One of the earliest and most profound projects of the Cold War state was thus to deploy the bomb as a mechanism for accessing and controlling the emotions of citizens. As Guy Oakes has documented (1994:47), the civil defense programs of the early Cold War were designed to “emotionally manage” U.S. citizens through nuclear fear. The formal goal of this state program was to transform “nuclear terror,” which was interpreted by U.S. officials as a paralyzing emotion, into “nuclear fear,” an affective state that would allow citizens to function in a time of crisis (see Associated Universities 1952, as well as Oakes 1994:62–63). By militarizing everyday life through nuclear fear, the Cold War state sought to both normalize and politically deploy an image of catastrophic risk. Rather than offering citizens an image of safety or of a war that could end in victory, the early Cold War state sought instead to calibrate everyday American life to the minute-to-minute possibility of nuclear warfare. In addition to turning the domestic space of the home into the front line of the Cold War, civil defense argued that citizens should be prepared every second of the day to deal with a potential nuclear attack. In doing so, the Civil Defense Program shifted responsibility for nuclear war from the state to its citizens by making public panic the enemy, not nuclear war itself. It was, in other words, up to citizens to take responsibility for their own survival in the nuclear age. As Val Peterson, the first head of the U.S. Civil Defense Administration, argued in 1953: Ninety per cent of all emergency measures after an atomic blast will depend on the prevention of panic among the survivors in the first 90 seconds. Like 366

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