Nuclear War
"It's a motherfucker, don't you know / If they push that button, your ass gotta go" ~ Sun Ra + His Arkestra[1]
Definition
Historical
As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times). The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times).30 Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets.[2]
Speculative
We can therefore consider ourselves competent because the sophistication of the nuclear missile strategy can never do without a sophistry of belief and the rhetorical simulation of a text ... The anticipation of nuclear war (dreaded as the fantasy, or phantasm, of a remainderless destruction) installs humanity - and through all sorts of relays even defines the essence of modern humanity - in its rhetorical condition ... the hypothesis of a total nuclear war, which, as a hypothesis, or, if you prefer, as a fantasy, or phantasm, conditions every discourse and all strategies.[3]
Sources
- ↑ https://genius.com/Sun-ra-and-his-arkestra-nuclear-war-lyrics
- ↑ Masahide Kato, “Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze” in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 339-360 https://doi.org/10.1177/030437549301800304
- ↑ Jacques Derrida “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead: Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)” in the ‘Nuclear Criticism’ issue of Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 20-31.) https://doi.org/10.2307/464756