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NUCLEAR TEXT

Nicholas Witheford e

B.A., Smon Fraser University, 1981 -

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

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Engiish

C Kicholas Witheford 1987 A

SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY = ,

April 1987

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NAME :

DEGREE :

. - Y

APPROVAL

Nicho las Caspar Wi the fo rd

Master o f A r t s

-TITLE OF ~HESIS: Nucl e a r i T e x t

EXAMINING COMMITTEE :

Chairman: DV; Harvey @ Roo

~ r : Chin Aaner jee , Sen ior ~ i ~ e r v i s o r . A s s o c i a t e ~ r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h

Dr. M i c h a d S t e i g Professor o f Eng l i sh

Dr. Margaret Benston A s s i s t a n t Pro fessor Computing Science/Women's Studies, SFU

Date: February 26, 1987

- - P A R T ~ A L COPYR l GHT L ICENSE

.1 -- --

.-- . -=

4 I hereby g ran t t o SlAon Fraser Un i ve rs i t y the r l g h * t o lend

my thes is , p ro jec t o r extended essay ( t h e t i t l e o f which i s shown belowd

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o r pub1 l c a t l o n o f . t h i s .work f o r f inanc la l ga ln shal l not be a] lowed

wi thout my w r i t t e n permission. 0

T I t l e of Thes 1 s / ~ r o j e c t / ~ x t ~ n d & d ' Essay . -

Author:

(s igna tu re )

Nicholas Witheford . .

( name 1

13.4.51.

(da te )

I n the late 1970s and early 1980s, the . nuclear . issue exploded into ~ o ; t h , ~ m e r i c a n and *+

British- culture. After nearly two decades of invisibility, the Bomb reappeared i\jourrialism,

\ fiction, Hnd film. This reappearance was initiated by the propaganda of nuclear states

\ \ \

anxious to justify a new accele~ation- of the arms race. But official "nukespeak" arouqcd i 'I+

d~ssent and the sudden growth of a vigorous peace movement. From 1979 t o 1984 the

discourses of y c l e a r state and anti-nuclear protest contended for a common, cultural

space, each working t o affirm its representations of the' Bomb, and t o cancel out those

d 0

of its- rival. I

7. r -

This discursive struggle was waged across the three fie[& of nuclear signs, nuclear

1 subjectivity, and nuclear speculatio . Nuclear signs u the words, metaphors and images

b), whrch we name the nuclear predicament. These signs (designate the ideqtities of writers

and readers in relation t o the Bomb, and hence define their positions, o f acquiescence or 9

revolt, as nuclear subjects. Nuclear subjects are mobilized for action according t o the

speculative narratives by which we forecast our nuclear future, or lack o f one.

lncjividuai texts can be read as interventions on this contested terrain. General Sir

John Hackett's The Third World War translates official discourse into the idiom of popular ---- fiction and develops $bipolar antagonism between "our side" a n d "the enemy" t o

legitimize the concept of. "limited" nuclear war. In' contrast, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of - - - the -- Earth exemplifies thy apocalyptic doomsaying by which the peace movement aroused

opposition to official policy in the name o f planetary human survival. The conjugation of

feminism and disarmament so powerfully demonstrated at Greenham' Common is articulatld

in several, writings bv women who connect anti-nuclear activism with critique of

phallogocentricisrn. Finally, the popular identification of President Reagan's Strategic Defence

Initiative with George ~ u c a r ' Star Wars suggests how the a -- f real-life space-weaponry

i i i

has been mediated to the Hoeh American pub16 through th igtag& oH+dtywoa- a i$ -

science-fictiqn. 9 ,P - -

- These texts' engagement in the conflict between . s ta te ,and protest I; disphyed in'

their 'contradictions--literally, contrary utterances. Such contradictions are, o n the one hand, B

, intertextual, in that the signs, subject-positions and speculations proposed by one text

\ write-out or write-off those of another. They are also intratextual, In that tertq displ,\

within themselves inconsistencies and ambiguities that betray the dilernrnas of nuclear

politics. Reading- p e s e contradictions from a .Marxist and feminist perspective we can trace

the contending forces that produce our culture's fiss~oned nuclear text . 2

- - The cohabitants of thesis Miters deserve t o have their names on the title page of

the finished document. Certainly this' is true of my non-nuclear farnily--Colleen Wood,

Adrienne Witheford and .Miranda Witheford--who have shared s o extensively and so

.* supportively in the labour of this text's 'production. My thanks also to the fellow graduate

C . .

k..

students--}eff Berg, Peter Cook, Simon Dalby, Wendy Frost and Michelle Valliquette--who

, have at various points offered criticism and encouragement, and t o Laurine ~ a r r i s b n ,

co-worker and fellow trades unioni t, who helped with nuclear' film.

For Colleen.

. . - .... A p p r d ............................................................................................... ................................... ii . -

................................ Abstract .......,........... : ....................................................................................... iii , ? ... , ',

?:.L Dedication ....................... -...... ....... . . ............................................................................................... vi

......................... .......................................... ................................ .. I . Nuclear Text .- .................. : ,...: 1

...................... .............. ................ 1. Nuclear Text : ........................................................... : 1 i C I ................................... 2. Nudear Signs ; .......................................................................... 4

.................................................................. ....................................... 3 Nuclear Subjects i'...i' 7

. . . . . . . ................................ .................... 4. Nuclear Speculations ..................... ............. 11

.................................................................................................. 5. Writing ,on the Wall? ., 15 4 - . . _ ~ .

.......... . I . Nukespeak's Novel ....... : .:.. ........................................................................... 1 8 -

.......................................................................... ................................... 1. Rurnours of War : 18

2. Official Signatures ................................................................................................................. 19

3.. The Image of the Other ............................................................................................... 21

..... ................................................................................. 4. The Unchanging Face of War 24 . i 5 . The Nucleaf Exchange .................................................................................................... 26 = . .

........................................ ,- .................................... 6: "To ~ a k e Children Behave Better" : 29

7. Deconstructing the Other 2 . ................................................................................................

I l l . Doomsaying ...: ..... 36 ................................................................................................................... . -

........... The Discourse of Doom .................................................................................... 36

Representing the Un.thinkable ........................................................................................ 37

.................. .................. Ex!ix?ion Fictions ................................................................. : 40

.......... ......................... ....................... The Planetary Subject ...................................... .- 43 -\,,

The Unspeakable In The Unthinkable ........................................................................... 46

Doom Depoliticized ....................................................................................................... 49

... .... .................. , -- -- -~ ........................................ . 7- The AppropriaLi of Apocalypse .. .+. .;. 5 2

.. 1V. Writing 56

......... ................................................................ 1. Creenham Text .................................. 56 i

h 2. NucleophaIIogocentricism ................................................................................................. 57

............................................................... 3. O n the Wire ................. : :..: ................................ 60- L=

....... 4. Breaching the Peace .I '+ ............................................................................................. 63

2 \

5. W e b Weaving ................................................................................................................... 6b- . . L

6. Creenharn Women .;. ..... : .......................... : .......................................... ...... ......... , ....... .,. ... 71

.................................................................................... 7. Common G r o u ~ d ? : 74 . ,

-. 7 ................................................................................................. \ . Naming Star Wars .............. : ., , , 4"

1. "A LO& Time -Ago, In a Galaxy Far, h r A W ~ ) ~ " ...................................................... 7: r - #

................ .......................................................................................... 2. Special Effects . . . .HO

............................................................................................................... .- ,3. The High Frontier 82

- 4. Sky Fathers : ................ 1 ......................................... i ............................................................. 84 /' I

5. , cyborgs akd Real Men .......................... ........... .............. ........................ . . . . . . . . . . 86 .

' I I I

%'- ..................... 6. f i e Force ................... ! ................................................................................ : 89

......... 7. Time-Warps ... : .......................................................................................................... : 91

- * .................................................................................................................... 8. Closing Shots 93

............................................................................................................................................... Notes OH . . .

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 128 r

viii

1. Nuclear Text ---

When the atomic bomb detonated over Hiro,shima, the flash was absorbed by a man

sitting outs id9 , the ;he Sumitomo bank, three hundredr yards from t h e t epicentre of the

explosion, and his shadow imprinted on the granite -steps and walls. This shadow, the 'e, only trace of a victim vaporized in an- agony of heat and light, is' now preservid under

d, glass Viewed by thousands of tourists, p otographed as illustrati scores of books,

reproduced world wide in the paveinent%rt, of protestors, its d shape has '

becbme an emblem of the atomic age. It has been made part of the play of symbols , Y

by which we grasp at our identities and our futures in a situation of unprecede e d r danger: nuclear text.

Thrs study concerns more recent, and m w e literal, examples of nuclear t e . It aeals a with representations of nuclear war and nuclear weapons in fiction, journalism, an?% film ,

from Britain and NO& AmericaL between 1979 and 1984. it is thus about works produced

during the recent confrontation between the NATO nuclear states and thk international

, peace movement. Artd it is in terms _of this conflict--a struggle which' had at issue global

arsenals with an accumula\ed destructive capacity equivalent t o some o n e and a half.

iliion Hiroshimas-that these texts* are discussed here:' "b It was during this period that European and American culture suddenly remembered

the Bomb For a generation. the danger of nuclear war had undergone the process

Roland Barthes terms "ex-nomination," by which the naming of disturbing,

4 of the -social order is tacitly tabooed.? After the anti-nuclear protests of the late 1950s

.. r? that lead to the Atmospheric Test-Ban Treaty, Western governments had discreetly hidden

t o question or challenge this official silence.' As a result, the Bomb enjoyed a pratracted

p e r i d - o f what Robert del Tredici terms "cultural invisibility," during which nuclear- dangers

became: P c .4

Just a swirl of abstract ideas . . . The only thing that - comes t o mind ,is a , mushroom cloud, a cooling tower, and a little pointy weapon. Sorfretimes the

deformed people from ~iroshima?TRat's about the extent of the Imagenl ' -4 i

0; as Pet-er Watkins,' the director of The *ar .Came, wrote in 1380: ' - -_- 9% -.;' , 3 'Though w e have Beard and read in the media about the possibility of nuclear

war, most of us, including those In the media who have produced the word

-7' have only a vague ension as t o what the words mean in the~r tull context. We sit, an ords slip p q t meaningless

6% In -this context, the words "buclear war" became subject t o what Barthes (dl14 A

. " "haemorrhage of meaning," as significance "lgaked out of them "'

, I

The advent of the 1980s saw shock-treatment for thrs condttron Thest. rvtvt. B

apocalyptic years, or at least, as Raymond Withams has p*rnted out, years In whrch the*

term "apocalypse" suddenly' became popular and synonymous with nuclear destructron ' Tlie

immediate cause for this crisis atmosphere was the United States' attempt to red5tcrt a

waning nuclear superiority over the Sov~et, Union From the late 19704 w c c c A ~ w e I!\ - * - .

administrations embarked on massive programs of nuclear aimament Tr~dent MX Prtsi~ir~g, ;=P v

and Cruise missiles, B-1 bombers, and neutron bombs were developed or deploypd,

. nuclear command, control and communicatron iystems renovated, clvd d y e n c e plans &

.reintroduced; arms control treaties abrogated; recalcitrant allies whipped lntu lme At the

same time, announced

a New Cold War, the

displaced by r e f e r e k e

nuclear policy underwent an o m s shift Amidst the tenstons of "iL

traditional doctnne of deterrepce was more dnd more frequenti)

t o the possibility of "wmnable " or "surv~vable," nuclear M a r

k These developments provoked

The climate is precisely captured in

+* alarm and opposltlon on both stdrs oi t h ~ Atlantrr

Sarah Kirsch's "Year's End": a i

Ths autumn the n u d e u mushrooms became k~ - c c ~ m m p l i c e 2 sight in the papers That when contempb\ing the photos

/ 4erthebc categoner k g m to form- Tt# fate el. the Mrw &net was -able T h wwd neutron bomb appeared frequenti). As dtci its brothers-;petrol pncer, weather ioreca -- I t bgcamf as even&~ as qxpeals f o r peace ''

* J* Carah-sed bt the belitperen! rhctonc ot the incomtng .Yeagr?

t ~ r i a t c = s ! dormant fa; ntari, twcntb vcan underwent an unexpected

f u r q w M . ~ P J ~ - N 9 f O plans t o insiaf! kc\\ fonvard based Amencan

I W U , c,* t~stc1ance d ~ s s e n ~ spread lo thc Unrtcd Stares rrseli and

adrninistratkn. nuciear ,

revival Slantng In

missiies provided a ./

deepened trom

of Ih-e arms race.

\tiirl.-tn' ila\t-, brcarnc ttw sltes r ~ : mass cnil drsobdlence and arrest reiusals to

1 a ~ f i t r r ; 3 a i t . ir. c n.d t ~ n c ~ planning, reierenda calling lor nuclear disarmamenr and 4 t r t - r i ~ ! a l : ~ ~ n ~ r , I nuiitas-trrc zortcs invaded im3i p o l t t ~ c ~ o n the banners and placards -- rarncr! i n thc largest pop*? demonqrat~ons ever seen in Western capitals there

redppcared onr oi Ihr masf ubiquitous oi all modern oppositional r?mbols--the inverted

I . . \ a .irnrnc.ul anti iuropcw roctch became an arena tor the opposed nuciear discourses

rnr: \tdlc+rncrrIs 11s cfaaractenstic rcrqy-ioiopres and Images. ~ t s t?pcal positron~ngs oi \

a u : i ~ w m met, audtencr ali vanvush reshaped and recoded as they were mediated through

*. .?I* ttctrntnan? drccoursr \\as ! h ~ offtcml Rnukespeak* a sc! of representations, drsseminated

P' a ~ : ~ r w ~ w ~ i \ p-mrert~~' state taeoloplcal apparatus tnscnbinp nuciear weapons iwthrn

- 1 iop: as er~!mru: 5txUnh ":' ChaIienginp it w a ~ an emergen! -dtscourse QI

if:rkt-n:' rnrtialh mu~iwlud and toniinecf to .capillan. networks oi w t ~ s t s . but increasingh

tnteqectjng itself into broader channels of communication.'! Th~s d~ssentin_g discourse \vas

extremely heterogenous. i t collated voices which wer in many w ? mcongruent-liberal, socialist. feminist, pacifist christ~an jet at the Intersection ot these

disparate perspectives appeared a set of shared figures and themes: an Idiom of urgct\c\ " -

and fear. foretelling' impending dtsaster in a world at "lour rnrnutes to midnight "

repudratrng the calculus of realpobtiL and demanding an end t o "nuclear mddnclss "

For some four or frve years nukespeal, and the discourw ot dissent c o n ~ t ~ i t ~ i

rntenseiy for a common mttural s p a c e e a c h workrng to a t h n elaborate and dmplrt\ 114

representarions of the Bomb and t~ den! o: cancel nu: thost o: i t < nval ofter, onh I O

find its eiiorts recuperated or annexed b! 11s opl)ofitw:. iiic t e a t \ t l ~ ~ u s w d . t r c z i c . ,irt>

symptoms of, and Interventtons In thrs flu* The\ are theretort. read here n.1t11. ~y)c~r,iT

regard to heir contradictions (literall\*. contra9 utterances). rntertcxtual rontradir t~or-~\-- t l~t*

\ \a \ in v.+icti \ ex ts write-out or \\rite-oif the assert~ons of thetr rtval5 a r d ~ntrdtc*xtudl

contradictions--the wa\ in which political struggle marks texts rnternall) with inconsistencies..

~ambivaiencier. and . These conflicts are traced across three supenmpored fields of

nuciear textualrt) - s of nuclear stgns nuclear subjectrv~t\ and nuclear ~spec-ula~~r)n / 2 Nuclear Signs L

At stake &tween nukespeak and'dtssent was control ot .the r~uclear slgn T t w .

nudear age has generated ne\\ words and ne\% metaphors gwtng us lor example ,

- "megaton " "overkill " "the balance n! Jerror " "nuclear ireeze " "nuclear wmter " I1 h a 4

changed the meantng oi old ones drasticalh alter~ng the seriw tn which \rre speak oi

mushroom ctouds. futuristic weaponn., peace doves and devastated cities Both rtatt. and - protest attempred ro direct this The! worked to invent nuclear st$, to fix their

> - range of reference and regulate their usage. Competing to ensure that it was their W W & ~

and their Images which mediated our conception of the nuclear condition, nukespeak and

dissent fought to "set the ternis" for a post-Hiroshima world.

Each discourse named the nuclear predicament differently, circulating rival signifiers for

- the same referent.'&-rrlSGkemrpfrt be a "&vicen of one. ten or twenty "megatons" with

"prompt hard kill 'capaciw" In tl-6 jargon of the strategists who target it, and "a dozen -

Auschwitzes" in the letters of the activist imprisoned for taking a pneumatic drill t o it. Jn

vanous governmental texts it might be identified by an acronym: "ICBM," "SLBMU-or by

the name of a god or a hero. "Pose~oon." "Pershing." Public relations officers might even

PO 50 far as to christen rt "part of the West's life insurance." But in , t h e CND pamphlet

d~stributed outside, its base, t missile was simply "the Bomb," an "it," a monstrous I.

"thing' of menace " In nukespeak, the mrssile was carefully allotted its place across an . -

oppositmn between the forces of "&fencen and "threat"; in the discourse of dissent, it

was a component in an indiscriminate "doomsday machine." Depending on which discourse

"spoke" the missile, the system which required and. supported it might be designated as . - -

"deterrent --or "extermin~sm"; the eventuality of its use might be a "nuclear

exchan it e"--or a "'holocaust"; its effects on human beings may be- described as "collateral

damagew--or illustrated with the infernal drawings of the A-bomb survivors.~'

The oiiicial signs invested nuclear weapons with an a k a of scientific rationality and . -

technological clinicism: linked. them with patriotic values and superhuman powers; emptied

them oi kibrror. The signs of protest made those same weapons connote madness, terror I

and monstrosit~ Each lex~cori wove around the arsenal a different web of associations and 6 b

distmct~ons Thus the opposed drscourses irnphed within their very language 'a different

ordering ot nuclear assurnptmns and premises. taboos and possibilities. o n e was a

sign-svstem .for thinking what the other- signified as "unthinkable."

* oreo over; as the intensity of conflict between state ,and_ prate% deepeneUudng--

t the 1980s, signs became more and more polarized. Even the previously neutral term A t

"nuclear weapon" became problematic. On the one hand, the distinction between

"nuclear'' and " c~nven t i ona l "~ weapons was subject t o an energetic official dec.onstruction in

favour o f doctrjnes of "flexible respo&e," which strategically attenuated the significance ol \ b

the atomic threshold. President Reagan ,announced that he 'considered an "enhanced

rad~ation weapon," the neutron bomb, as "conventional."" Or1 the othcr. peat rl ac tiwsts

such as lonathan Scheli declared that the prospect 01 a conf l~c t from ivhtch no nwdnlngful

victor could emerge--a massacre rather than a war--made the term nuclear "weapon" an

u t~mate misnomer. l 6 Increasingl\., t o speak \yas to .take sides

This crisis of nuclear discpurse resulted not o n l y ' i n the fission of signs Into rival

vocabularies. but also In the. fusion of multlple and contradictor). meantngs around rlgns

claimed alike by state and protest. Crucial words and images were made objectr, of

capture and recapture Seween nukespeak arid dissent. They assumed the condition of k'

"niuiltiaccentualit)." described by Volosinov, a .single signifidr becomes the crossing

place for conflicting usages determined by oriented social in"terest5 within one

- and the same sign ~ o m m u n i t y . " ~ '

Thug both nukespeak Hnd the d i s c o k e of dissent claimed to speak for "pcdce"

But the "peace" spoken by President Reagan when he relerred t o . the M X as a . -

"peacemaker" and the "peace" of the "peace movement." that of "Peace Is Our

Profession" and that of "Give peace A Chance." that of "Peace Through Strengfh" and . .

"World Peace Council," signified very different things. tach of these usages laid claim to

w a nebulous core o f commonh accepted denotated meanink--something vague11 10 do with

the absence of Mrar But the term's connotat~ons--the conditmns and lmperattves attached h

to "peace." what it is opposed to. or associated wlth. horn absolute or relattve a term ~t

is. whether it is global or particular '(did i t suggest an absence of war for Americans? for

Russians? for Afghanis? for Mcaraguans?), how it h k s amongst other, equally contested,

I tems such as "freedom" or "democracy," whether it is-a state which includes or I ,

excludes nuclear missiles--had been tom down the middle. The word became more and

more polttically polysemous, radiating multiple, partisan meanings."

Nuclear texts are semiotic chain-reactions. In their pages, nuclear signs are set in

' rnotron in the sequences of association, differentiation, substitution and displacement which

determine the meanings we give to the nuclear predicament. The readings offered here

ask how such texts consolidate, extehd or challenge the lexicons of nukespeak and

drssent What vocabularies. figures of speech and iliustrations do they develop to notate

nuclear phenomena? How, in light of the- nuclear fact, do they redefine time-honoured P

words like "war,". "peace," -'&urvival,"' "weapon"? What neologisms and unheard of

metaphors do they coin to formuiare the atomic era's awful novelty? How do texts erase rn

nuclear signs? What euphemism, circumlocution or self-censorship do they emplby? What

revealatory silenvs make it possible to glimpse the alternative signs of some suppressed - cdunter-discourse? These questions will be asked with an eye to the consequence of

nuclear signs for nuclear powers--to the connection between denotations and detonations.

3. Nuclear Subjects --

Nuclear discourses produce nuclear' subjects. The most critical nuclear signs are those

.which mark our positions-of aquiescence or revolt--as inhabitants within a weapons system

capable of exploding every human identity that falls beneath its shadow. Defining their e 1

chosen image of a nuclear world. the 'texts of state and protest simultaneously formulate -

self-~magei ior their authors and audiences. They offer constellations of identification and

opposition within which we as readers or writers, are invited to insert ourselves. They

specify who we are in relation to the Bomb.

We e n elaborate these propositions by considering the workings of 'nukespeak." - - - - - - - - -

The position typically occupied' by the enunciator of official discourse was that of nuclear

authority. The speaker or writer presented himself (for this position i s usually defined as

male) as an expert, possessing nuclear knowledge too complex for general comprehesion

He also asserted for himself a representative status: the discourse was being spoken "OII

behalf ofH the riation, democracy, the free world, or perhaps even the dtvine will Thew

claims might be made explicity or implicitly, in outright statement, ltsted credenttal esoteric -

jargons, modes o i 'condescension and disparagement, In myriad subtle and not so subtlo

codings of class power and paternalism. -Sometimes they might be expressed mere4 b) a

voice, whose bureaucratic anonymity implied a power so established, impersonal and

"natural" as to defy question. Authoring its discourse, the state thus simultaneously -3

authorized itself to pronounce unanswerably on issues of nuclear life and death.

Inseparable from this establishment of nuclear was the positioning of the I)

nuclear enemy. This required that allknuclear take place under the stgn of a

world-dividing bipolar opposition between a positive "us" and a negative "them " Author

and audience, already ranked tn a hierarchtcal relation of superiority and subordtnation, /

were also bound together in collaboration agatnst a common antagontst--a menacing - nuclear "other." We are dealing here with the mottf o f 2 Soviet threat," with a chottr

offered beween being "dead" and "red," with the globe-crunching P

out of the cover of Time - magazine, with "missile gaps," "homber

vulnerability," with an image which ~t ju id. according to the needs 8 i

modified into -a regulated condition of "detente" or a xenophobic

"empire of evil," but which unfailingly provided

legitimation.

\ . -Plotted between the vertical command of

Russian bears looming

gaps" and "windows of

of offic~al policy, be

hostility toward an

the nuclear state with its strongest .

nuclear authotjty and the hohzontal

opposition to the nuclear enemy. was the position of the nuclear citizen. This was the

place *designated for nukespeak's audience. Official discourse fabricates -- the image of a '

public which is loyal, patriotic, safe under the state-held nuclear umbrella, and yet, at the

same time, stoically self-sacrificing. Its listeners and' hearers are constantly solicited with

- these representations of themselves. his prbcess of address, o r hailing, which Althusser

terms "interpellation," produces a pattern of (mis)recognition, in which people- learn t o see

themselves in the way prescribed by the dominant discourse: as the "fellow Americans" t o

whom the President d~rec ts .his speeches, as the "we" who are assured by think-tank

pundits o f the enlightened rationality of "our" military policies, as the "general public"

who must be alerted to the enemy's propaganda campaigns, as the "yoy" named in the

the civil defence pamphlet-a "you" who will, "if deterrence fails," dutifully evacuate your

\ home and drive down the highway to your appropriate crisis relocation centre.f9

I' To the extent that individuals internalized and identified with positionings offered in

nukespeak, they were constituted as nuclear "subjects" in the notoriously ambiguous sense "

of the term. "subjected" or subo!dinated to the policies of the nuclear state, yet I

"subjectively" reconciled to this situation, accepting it voluntarily, as if it were arrived at 5

by their own independent, autonomous choice. In tfiis way official discourse integrated

people Into militav and political structures for whom they would be,$n the event of war, *r s t

totall) expendable. 2 o

The problem for the movements of nuclear dissent was t o discover alternatives to

these entrenched syndromes of authorit9 and otherness. Disaffiliation from state-stipulated \

1 \ ldentities was olorfully displaved in t h e spray of buttons and banners carried ,at

antl-nuclear dem nstrations: "Better Active Today ~ h a n Radioactive Tomorrow," reenham "7 \Yomen " "Physicians For Socia! Responsibility," "Youth Against the Monsters," I No,

i ve Won't o B w " ~ u t . the substantiafi6n of these new subject-positions demandeh a web \

t \ of symbols and texts. elaborating and amplifymg slogans into . a sustained sense of new \ social identity.

- -

Typically, t he d i s c o m e of dissent tried t o shatter the c o n i e T c F of the nuclear -- - citizen with the spectre of the nuclear victim. It confronted the populace with graptuc

stills of Hiroshima, with the whitened faces and inert bodies af symbolic die-ins, with

maps of towns superimposed by concentric circles showing the effects of blast, fire and

radiation. It replied to the official image of the nuclear, enemy with that of nuclear

humanity, invoking a supra-state species solidarity, the unity of planetar), life, or o f the \

rights of future generations. Or it skewed or inverted the state's bipolar loglc, declaring

that the real enemy was not M o s c o ~ ~ , but the Pentagon, or the patriarchy, or the Bomb

itself. And aga ins t lhe established status of the official expert d~ssen t set the volce of the .%

anti-nuclear activist, asserting different credent~als, and different communlt~es of interest,

announcing the validity of knowledges about the Bomb as varied as those claimed by

doctors , clerics, witches, renegade scientists, - o r e v e n by ;he nightmares of potential

casualties. To the extent that these counter-kg-vtities were lived out , individuals were

prepared t o write letters, march in demonstrations, .commit civil disobedience or sabotage,

and f x e fines or impriso,nment, despite the state's, accusations that these were acts of

either well-meaning , naivety or outright treachery.

Brecht wrote that "A man is an atom--he perpetually breaks up and forms anew "" --

, -- Periods of social crisis throw into crisis the normal circuits of social identity, and

accelerate this splitting and reshaping of-subject-ppsitions. In the encounter betwe_en

nuclear state and nuclear protest, women and men were traversed and played upon by

.& discourses threateiing catajtrophic dangers and appealing t o powerful symbols of

comrnunality and power in an effort to recruit the population to their cause. Trackmg the

binding and loosening of identities effected by nuclear texts, these readings ask: in whose

name d o texts purport to speak, and by righj of what knowledge? Who is the reader

that they at once address and construct? Who is the "we," the "I" and the "us" that

they identify? And against who, or what--against what "them" or "itw--are these identities

-- - - - -- - - --

F,maintained? How d o the nuclear-age identites which they propose alter o r confirm

traditional subject-positions embodied in stereotypes of gender, class and h c e ? What

utations is the Bomb brleding in these texts? b

Nuclear texts tell nuclear stories: scenarios, options, catastrophes, utopias, /

arrnageddons. Such stories are by definition speculative. Not only are they stories about

the future (or the lGk of one), they are also about the possibility (or impossibility) of an

event--nuclear war--which. is unprecedented. As Derrida puts it:

Unlike the other wars, w h ~ c h have all been preceded by wars of more or less 3

. t h e same type in human memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break In this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred itself. It is a non-event. The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war: it did noto set df a nuclear war. The terrifying reality oi the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, not the real referent (present or past) of discourse o r text . . . For the moment, today, one may say that a non-localizable nuclear war has not yet occurred: it has ex~stence only through what is said of it, only where it is talke,$ about. Some might call it a fable, then, a pure invention: in the sense in which it is said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm are inventions. It may also be called a speculation, even a fabulous specularization I ?

Yet some speculations win more crediblity than others. Certain "signified referents"

are invested with the status o f "real referents": these are the warnings, forecasts and

reassurances which actually direct the conduct of nuckar Colicy. Others are pronounced - 'c phantasmagoria-the stuff of B-movies, science-fiction or utopian vision. The most powerful

- agency in this ordering and ranking nuclear speculations is the state. In the period

under ex%mination here, the official apparatus decreed stories of limited nutlear war

plausible and those of nuclear extinction alarmist; "Star Wars" weaponry virtually

overnight from Buck Rogers fantasy t o pragmatic orthodoxy; and made it semi-respxtable

t o cite the Book of Revelations in support of armament programs. It is this narrative 7 .

/ -

controt, this power t o define the nuclear story-line- w h i d r w c c o t f ~ c t t y e ~ t ~ t to live r-

out, that dissent attempted t o seize from nukespeak. e

In the

from a long

construction, , .

early 1980s there were several "official stories" about th,e Bomb. Declining

established ascendancy was the "deterrence" story, a sophisticated, paradbxica~

in which the Bomb figures as a device which perpetually functions to defer

its dwn danger. This was the narrative of strategic equilibrium, of the balance of terror, '

and of mutually assured destruction. Assuming increasing prominence was the "war" story,

which inserted new, highly accurate nuclear weapons" into an old narrative pattern of

conflict, defeat and victory: this was the story of the nuclear-use theorists, with their

doctrines of "protracted," "theatre," or "limited" nuclear conblagrations. And appearing

a6ruptly in 1983 was the "Star \hlars" story, presenting a vision of salvation from nuclear

peril by a high-tech, "high frontier" space-shield. All these speculative narratives co-existed

uneasily within nukespeak; it was in part their inconsistency, suggesting either confusion or

@" deception, which prompted public, alarm.

Dissent told a different story. It might be setter t o call it a non-story, or an

anti-narrative. It was the vision of a nuclear "end." This declared, contra "deterrence," that

nuclear arsenals, if not abolished, would eventually be . used, and, contra "war," that their' 1

use would be terminal, putting a full" s top t o history. Here too there were variations: the

- proximity of' catastrophe (were we at eight, five, or two minutes to. midnight o n the

doomsday - - clock?); the privileged mode of destmction (would radiation, ozone depletion, or

climatic catastrophe provide the most lethai effect?); the exact degree of finality (were we \

talking of the end of "Western civilization," of the species, or of planetary life itself? ,

would there be "survivors who envy the deadW?)i-all these altered from text to text. But

the central elements remained con3tant: explosions of extermin~ting~incandescence;

all-engulfing firestorms; an ashy rain of death: numberless corpses amidst limitless ruin.

were compiled into a representation of an annihilation so absolute as to

- .

amount t.0 a zero-point of negation, a story, that is, of a catastrophe -tru+xohita~t-to

any narration; one tha t sou ld 'only b; gestured at with the signifiers "unimaginable," ,-

"unutterable," "unspeakable."

B ~ h e s e speculations dl claimed to be "realistic" projections of the future. ~ a c h '

- asserted its status as an atomic oracle. Selecting from amongst the multiple p~ss ible - unfoldjngs - of the nuclear predicament, they chose specific curves of crisis, escalation, and

closure' to impress upon our imaginations. And each deveioped gambits for rebting,

rgnoring or subsurping the alternatives articulated by their rivals. Nukespeak and, dissent

both attempted to present seamless representations of the future, in which an array of

scientific studies, historical analogies, verisimilitudinous depictions, or appeals to common

sense drove inexorably toward predetermined conclusions. Such narratives functioned as

what Fredric Jameson calls "strategies of containment," which "allow what can be thought

'to seem internally coherent in its own terms, whfle repressing the unthinkable whichT lies Q

beyond its b o u n d a r i e ~ . " ~ ~

But these narratives were constantly challenged one by another. Each strategy for \

containing the hazards, of the future was disrupted by counter-speculations foregrounding

the very eventualities which it preferred to occlude. in this contest even the hardest -

nuclear "fact" became susceptible to conflicting interpetation and enlistment. Nothing could 1

seem less speculative than the appalling testimony of the survivors of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. Yet even the witness of the hibakusha could be assimilated within completely

contradictory narratiQes of nuclear war. They became part of T.K. jones' prophecy that a

"with enough shovels everyone will make it through;" ("in about thirty days after the -

blast there were people rn there, salvaging the rubble, rebuilding the houses . . v . " ) , as

well as of Jonathan Schell's ~ a m i n g that "a full-scale ,nuclear holocaust could lead to the

- extinction of mankrnd." I'

, These rival speculations were, in the fortunate absence -- s

unverifiable, but not inconsequential. They were themselves . I

1 *

they attempted t o foretell. Tor it was throLgh speculation that nukespeak and t h e I

discourse of dissent mobiliz/d their subjects. Characteristically, nuclear speculations exhort

intervention. They define choices-bifurcating- paths: "arm--or the Russians will come";

"disarm--or the world will end"; "do so-and-so--or we are doomed." State and dlssent - *

alike both achieved today's deployments-of, missiles or mirchers--on the basrs of t&s

about tomorrow. Their prophecies might be designed, like Schell's cautio~lar). "awful

warnings," as :elf-cancelling. Or they might be intended as self-fu!filling, normalrzing and

beckoning on the events they describe: many believed this to be case with the Reagan . - administration's cavalier references to "limited" nuclear war. And they may have produced

,- .

effects quite contrary t o these in te~t ions : nuclear doomsayings 'perhaps made as man), . supporters for defence

victory certainly helped

intercept, accelerate or

spending as for protest, while official speculations about nuclear

resurrect the peace movement. But in. either case, nuclear stories

deflect the very trajectories they narrate.

Reading nuclear texts, this &udy asks how assertions of an authoritative-"realism"

about nuclear war mask or contain their own uncertainty--their unavoidably hypothet~cal

nature. In what ways d o such claims depend on fictional o r literav dev~ces--or! the

simulation of an atomic vraisemblable?

simulations? How do they promise to

nuclear stones, how d o these writings

when t h e r e are percekable wi@-~ the 1 . 1 endings? What choices d o they allege,

- ' or! the transition from text to politics.

And what is the practical valency of such

alter or confirm their own auguries? In telling their

deal with forks in the road--with the junctures

narratives the possibihty of somehow drfferenr

and w h ~ c h d o they suppress) Where d o they msist

from speculation t o actron'

5 . Writing o n the Wall?

, ' So far, this study 'has sketched out its own project as a nudear meta-text--a

commentary on nuclear texts. I t has indicated an historical context for such texts; set u p

a theoretical apparatus t o apply t o them; proposed questions wi th which t o interrogate

them. These am&& establish a distance between this writing and those it takes as its

object. And it can be seen as implying the occupation of a privileged vantage point

somehow above' or beyond their situation. *

That implication should be subverted. This is principally because of. the nature of the

nuclear situation itself--a situation which. we are all-too-apparently still in, and 'one whose

global scope denies any exemptions. It js also because of the historical proximity o f these

texts Since 1984 some aspects o f the nuclea,; scene have changed. The, peace movement,

having f~rst showed itself far stronger than anyone dared hope, ' then failed--defeated i n

Europe by the NATO governments' successful installation of Cruise ,and Pershing missiles,

and, in America, all but -swept away by the frenzy of electoral patriotism that bought

4 Reagan a second term. But how t o punctuate this episode 8f protest--whether as a

definitive triumph for the US nuclear empire ov& its domestic opposition, or as merely . . the f~rst phase of a long, rolling struggle, or as ,the last act before a final nuclear "

0 b

curtain-is at present- u a z t a i n . Meanwhile, it has become increasingly apparent that the US

administration Iactually intends the Strategic Defence Initiative "for real," thus dwarfing every P

previous military venture in .the history of the planet. The phota-opportunities - o f Geneva ,

have. fo r . a while, diplomatically veiled the accelerating pace of the arms race. But if none

o i h e catastrophes depicted in the nuclear texts, treated here have yet arrived, those

possibilities. and the political choices they demand, are still very much in play. * .

There are other reasons why i t would be false t o pretend t o o much detachment. I

conceived this text during an involvemerit, started i n the late 1970s. i n the Canadian

&armament moveme~t . kt &&ow issues from m c h the s a m e c c m t e ~ ~ - t p x t s i t

discusses. Some o f the early drafts were produced literaly alongside pamphlets and posten 8- - .

protesting the testing o f Cruise missiles. And the writing of the frnal version has tn a -

way' become part' o f the review and rev_alu&~on which necessarily follows a po l~ t~ca l 'rftt,;

t h r 6 m .back in defeat, So i t pursues internally the same conflicts it- deschbes. Insofar ,is \

it works t o unravel official nuclear texts, it intends an extension of t h e criti&.w crl

I nukespeak already powerfully d o p e d by the discourse of d i i i cn t . ~n;oiar as ~t l i o e r t1w '-3

same for certaiq texts o f the peace movement, it manifests thexont rad ic t~ons wli:( t i t -x lk :

within the discourse of dissent itself--contradictions w h ~ c h requlr*e analys~s and discuwor; I! P

J * 8 .

the. disarmament movement is t o deepen and broaden itself

For my premise is that reading is not a passive process,. in which thr prociucecs ( I !

nuclear texts unibterally impose meaning o n their audiences. Rather, the productton auci

reception of texts are linked in an active, reciptocal, and potentially pol'tttcal, prc,cc-,s

Habitual use of and exposure t o a dominant discourse--such as nukespeak-w~ll make t tw

world that discourse constructs seem obvious, natural, and inevitable Readers will tend I ~ J

accept its interpellations, and adopt the identities its texts define for them Rut readfar\

who have ,engaged with other, alternative discourses, may learn t o deconstruct and . h

reconstruct these dominant texts, and refuse the subject positions they p r o p t w O n e t d .

for anti-nuclear intellectuals is therefoge t o produce texts that encourage oppovtlondl

readings . o f nukespeak. This text .works t o construct Bomb-resisting readers '! . - .

I t i hus attempts some transgression' of the aCademic practke Edward Sa~d' hir trrrn~d

e " n ~ n i n t e r f e r e n c e . " ~ ~ "Noninterference" describes the condition by which, tn ~ o r t h America

the institutional humanities have been coiiteny to occupy a depoliticized and" s e q u ~ s l w 4 4u - .

space, filled with an increasingl! rarefied, discourse. in which the) fulfill the lul ir t~or-: o! .

Y . representing "humane marginalityw--while at the same time tactfully abstanng trom ( rttlrlsm

of the state and corporate powers whose surplus funds their ver). ex~stence .

4 5 SWC! -11 cm. t h ~ A ~ C of wagan )US made the price of this arrangement apparent. a

I ? $5- ;tmrcubr& & w w t 1n regard to nuclear weapws. A recent report by the-

C f w w d f t ~ : trimamtr PnoRtter states Itxi: the rapid increases tn US deiense funding have

m& "Amrrar*n urm-ww!tPS a5 deism$hf on fkw Pentagan for research support as they

f c t r f i - n t r ~ t t : pa:&: ~ + t t k MP no: cornpiicrrf rc the Amencan arms build-up, a5 part oi what

n~iitmzrm and c i t s i r n t - - 4 to rnletiere accordtngfy. I

Zom vrWs after the ftrrt atomtr bo the probability that nuciear weapons will

t r i t t r r i agarz: w&ri I: r a i x to susp~ct t e x t s and meta-texts alike are, oh+

- r~ircttrrg ~i ix: drctnd status l i e s irs tf!c support it ofiers to a resistance symbolized by a

r h drfrncr rnrrustries milttan ramps and nuclear bunkers across Europe and America, in '

b r;,:in tsam! at& trr c W i . the k s r rrnperatwe of all nuclear texts "No More Hiroshtmas!"

NUKESPEAK'S NOVEL

- -,

AS the 1970s passed into the 1980s, Britons and Amexicans read -the approach of a n w

&a in huclear' terror. The Goctrine of deterrence. whkh had cationalizrd ismr decadrs oi

nuclear a ~ a m e n t , was berng retrred F ~ o m the upper reaches of state power ,rssued an , -

tnnovatlve 4iscourse on "Itmited," "protracted," "survtvable " "wrnnable" nuclear war '' It

permeated through eveq ievel of culture In 1980 amidst crtslq In Iran and Afghanistan -5

the Ll'hlre House leaked to thp press port1 ns of the secret f'restdential Dtrcrttve 50 P \ outlrnrng plans ior the nuclear defence of ~ i d d l e Eastern oil In the same vear the Hrrtrsh

government published a neu. handbook-Protect and Sunfive--instructing -its population ir-3 --- < _ . .

\\.hat to d o "il deterrence fails."'@Rising nuclear academics published hawkish artlclcs

beanng >encouraging titles such as "Victor). Is Possible."" Thlnh-tank pundrts appeared o n

television talk shows to explain the superiority of NUTS ( ~ u c l e a r Use Theory and Strategy)

o v e r M4D (Mutuall! Assured Destmctronf, while publrc awareness of a st:, r r l the atomrc -- wind bvas reflected by a sudden upsurge in the popularity of the verb "to nukc."

But for man)., the first intimation of this change came, not in a presrdentral

"i press-conierence or civii deience pamphlet. but in a pap%rback picked irom ;1 drug-store

kook rack, a text with the ominous name of The Third World War.'] Published in Britain ---- in ?978, i t was to seli three million copies world -wide, occupy the Nem York Times --- bestseller list for twentysix weeks, and r e c ~ i v e the endorsem*nt of NATO heads of. state.

.- In 1982 a reqtie! appeared The Thrrd World LYar The Untold Ston " In t h e w two texts _ ------- (which I shall treat as iorrning a single. continuous whjolej nukespeak rnvades t h ~ arena of

. popular kuliure. F o r they ofier. in the form of a bestselling novel, a legittmation ,of the

emergent official ductrine of "limited" nuctear wa:. What. r want to discuss here is how

this depends on the m e w l a t i o n of an enonno& powerful irnaxe--&at of the nuclear , ,__

enemy.

2. Offic~al Signatures --

\ The Third World War is an example of tontemporary "faction," a genre that hybridizes -7-7

"fact" and "fiction."" Indeed, its entire strategy of persuasion depends upon a systematic

erosion *of the boundary between these categories. The text purports t o b e an account . by senior NATO commanders of a global conflict between the ~ a ; s a w Pact and NATO

which breaks out or: August the fourth 1985 and ends three weeks later, composed two

years after the event. Appearing in 7978, such a stor) would seem obvio,usly fictitious. > What compl~cates this designation, however, is that ---- The Third World War is written by

real NATO commat-$ers. The title page announces it as the work of "General. Sir John

Hackett and Other Top-Ranking Generals and NATO Advisors.". Hackett was already in 7978

a minor British militar) celebrity, wounded at Amhem, Aide-de-camp t o the Q u ~ e n , former * ~-

Commander-in-Chief of NATO's Northern Army Croup and of the British A m y on the

Rh~ne. His co-authors inc luded-a retired Air Marshal, a rdaju General, a ~ i c m m i r a l , a 1

British diplomatic representative to NATO, and an editor of the E c o n o m i ~ t . ~ ~ An Afterword

to the text ackn~wledges the collaboration of several senior serving officers, and thanks

boih the Ministry of b e i e n s e and NATO's European headquarters for Yinvaluahle advice."'" < \

The flct~onal, "1987" narrator thus appears as a v e v thinly veiled projection of the actual;

"1978" authors.

Moreover. The Third World War uses 'the "real-life" expertise of its authors t o invest - ---- --,

i t s iantan with 'an authoritative verisimilitude. It imitates *official history. The narrator's

imposing militan. v ~ i c e unioldr the grand sweep of events, punctuating its account with

frequent citations from imaginary generals' memoirs, political memoranda, interviews .and

regimental diaries. Statistics, maps, tables, and detailed data o n the minutiae of armaments

and military organization, clearly drawing on intimate knowledge of actu&lrontempcstag - armies, bristle from every page. There is even a visual supplement, "The Third World War

In Pictures," presenting photographs of NATO and Warsaw Pact manoeuvres

recontextualized as "the real thing." Diegetic and extra-diegetic ceality, authorial identity and

narrative personae, fiction and fact, slide in and ' out of o n e 'another in a calculated *

Z confusion.

This effect was heightened by two exceptional, and well publicized, moments In the

text's reception. 17 1979, British Prime Minister Caliaghan took the occasion oi a state

v~sit to the USA to formall! present Presrdent Carter w ~ t h a cop\ The dust-tacker of

subsequent ed i t~ons ostentat~ouily crtes a Newsweek report thet Carter kept the b o d I " I

the Oval Office, "under th.e Hal?, Bible."" Four years later. President Reagan, asked by , '

the New York Times to specify the -most important books. he had read for work and --- pieaure , named The Third World War, indicating that it fell in the categor), of texts ---- significant for his "work."" These endorsem*nts reinfor/ced the impression that Hackett's

fiction \in fact inscribed an ascendant official realism.

The implications were frightening. What was ostensibly a chronicie wrrtten from the

vantage point of 1987 about a war that has already happened, read from the position o f

1978 as prophecy of a war that was going to occur. Simulated post-nuclear retrospection

reversed irself t o appear as authentic pre-nuclear prospectus. And while the authors

diplomatically disclaimed avy view that war was inevitable, the dustjacket was franker,

promising "a dramatic account of the coming global conflict."3P ---- The Thjrd world War is,

-=-aT as Hackett put it, a "scenano"--an extensron of the war-games, defence exerclses and

computer drills of the Nest 's militan establrshment 'I It 1s a rehearsal that sets the scene

- and scripts the roles tor the enactment of "theat;eW nuclear war.

3. The Image of the Other -- ---

- E All. wars demano otherness--antagonistic difference." The Third World War's fiction ----

hinges on the division of "our side" from "the enemy." Although its narrative is indeed s

global in scope, mapping "future history" from the Horn of Africa to Cambodia, the

)

entire world of The Third World War Is structured around a binary opposition which ---- 9 -.

poses "the W@L" -- against "the Soviet empire."" And the venom with which it draws the

distinction between these geopolitical entities provides a classic instance of what' George

Kennan has aptly termed the "demonization" of the Soviet Union. 4'

For the text's dualism is nothing short of Manichean. Where one side is positive,

vital and pacific, the other ir negative, moribund and malevolent. %he West is a "politically \ 4

attractive" and "open society," representing democracy and f r e e d ~ m . ' ~ Its opponent is

"brutal," "implacable," "savage," a "grim totalitarian system" founded on the "murderous

overthrow of a \democratic elected government by a fanatical authoritaria minority," ii

"land of privilege and hate and police Ztate cruelty."45 The West is the norm, the Soviet

Union a nightmarish deviation, ruled 'by "dialectical materialist usurpers" who impose pn

their subjects "a gigantic and cruel swindle."46 Although these Soviet leaders possess a

vast capacity for "maladroitness and miscalculation" and "ineffective muddling," they are

imbued with an iron determination to gain their "uncompromising" goal of a globally

"dominant position." They plan their "ultimate triumphw--the destruction of capitalist .

democracy." The West, by contrast, is passive and benign, ruled by a "perennially

dove-like establishhent," its diplomacy directed merely toward ensuring "security" and \ "stability." and to "managing" and "containing" crises--crises invariably produced by the y "powertul restless baletul, expansive, intractably dogmatic imperialism of the Soviet

U n i ~ n . " ~ ' NATO is "the defensive alliance": the Warsaw Pact is constituted by forces of

"enormous offensive ~apac i ty . " '~ And while the Soviet' Union believes it can "fight, win

. *

- - -- --

and survive a nuclear war," the West has merely "relied o n its continuing technological

superiority t o check any Soviet confidence that this was possible."s0

The Soviet Union is thus produced for the Western reader as alien, opaque and

monstrously menacing. I t figures as the o p p nent whose iniquities and barbarism at once

define "our" culture's virti~es and excuse it / minor failings. It is the aberration that

disturbs the otherwise tiarquil s ~ r f a c e of the plahet. ~ b o v e all, it'is "the Soviet threat,"

defined almost exclusively in terms , - of its capacity to subvert or attack the etI;,cal and

economic plenitude represented by capitalism. This holds. despite the fact that in The - Untold Stor), a significant portion of the narratrve IS recounted from the position ol a

fictive Soviet lieutenant, o n e "Andrei Nekrassov." For Nekrassov 1s merely a c~pher , set u'p

t o confirm the iniquities and incompetence of socialism. Dazzled by the technological and

moral superiority of his Western opponents, hounded by the KGB, his troops ignorant and

disaffected, he is eventually expediently killed-off, having performed a role analogous to -- those female characters in p*rnography fabricated solely t o corroborate male fantasy. In

' the NATO generals' fiction, "Russia" is an entity endowed with existence only to be

destroyed.

"Our side" is defined primarily by shared opposition to the Other. The British state

and the Western alliance are depicted as the proper objects ~f collective allegiance. This

allegiance, however, entails the acceptance of a hierarchy. To be on -"our" side, as ~t is -- -represented in The Third World War, is t o be part of a ~ a s t , pyramidal structure of state ---- power, devoted primarily t o organizing defence against the Other. The chain of command

runs irom the head of state--benign but remote figures--to the senior staff of the military

establishment, down through the junior oificers in the field and the police and civil

defence authorities at home, t o the anorivmous m d expendable non-military masses. 1

4. . . -

R - 0

- - - --- -

The text's most vicious invective is in fact reserved for those who t o an? degree '

dissent f r ~ m this structure. It is levelled against trades unionists, the British Labour Party,

, and the European left. But above all, it is bestowed upon those who question the reality

of the 'soviet threat. In the world of ---- The Third World war, these people could only be

fools or traitors. They figure as, at best, hopelessly naive--"infantile," "hysterical," "far out

philosophers" inhabiting a world of "total make believe."" At wo-rst, they are agents of

the enemy--lenin'sl "useful fools," part of the "so-called peace hovement," "unobtrkively

\ orthestrated and largely paid for by the USSR."52 For the story is told from the position

of NATO genera;:, (at once its authors, narrators and heroes), who pose themselves as '

, protectors from the menace of the Other, and it is on the credibility of that menace

r i /

that their claim to speak in "our" name as defenders of a community imperilled by awful

danger rests.

The readers of The Third World War thus fmd themselves addressed or "hailed' in ---- a position at once unified it'h and subordinated t o the military voice that narrates the '

4r , , text: united in opposition t o the Otherness of the foe; subordinated in acknowledgment

o f the narrator's authority and expertis as guardian of the common good. proposing a I. planet irrevocablj, divided between two hdstile camps, the text works t o construct an ideal

reader who identifies with the official spokesmen for "our" side, and suppresses doubt o r

dissent as tantamount t o tre&on. Submission to authority,

and self-sacrifice are portrayed as essential for preservation

the enemy. In this way, bestsel!er readers find themselves

discipline, obedience, stoicism

against the menacing designs of

interpellated as subjects of the

nucjear state.'

4: The Unchanging Face of War -- --- -

The consummation of t h e oppojition between "us" and "themn is, of course, war. The -

'4 Third World War hypothesizes that the Soviet Union, pursuing its goal of global --- domination, determines t o seek diplomatic and military victories over a US ddministration

newly elected in 1984. After a series of superpower skirmishes in the Middle East and

Africa, Russian armies invade Yugoslavia. The US sends in the marines. hostilities escalate,

and the Warsaw Pact launches, a full scale tank offensive into Europe--and "the war that

everyone had said could never happen had begun."s3 It is to the representation of "war," t

and its vindication as an admirable and, inielligent human activity, that the text is centrally

devoted.

The Third World War's war is waged in the language of generals, the jargon ol ---- d

I ,

milit'ary professionalism. "Units;" "formations," and " t r o ~ ~ p concentrationk" engage in

diagrammatic move and countermove according t o "options," "plans;" and "operational" A

s i t ~ , ~ t i ~ c z . ~ ~ "Weapons systzms"--vast arrays of tanks, - aircraft, 'ships, missiles and electronic 1

equipment--are scrupulously catalogued, named and numbered ,in their full range of lethal I

competer~cies .~ ' An arsenal of acronyms (some o n e hundred and forty of them listed in a

glossar).) s t i p s away all emotive connotation with deadening economy Battle i s plotted as . %

the intersection of impersonal kinetic vectors, a contest between "armour and firepower"

--. or "firepower and c o ~ n t e r m e a s u r e s . " ~ ~ High explosive, napalm and nerve gas are notated

as "neutralizing," "attenuating," "degrading," "removing" o r "taking out" the capacities of \

reified structures of military power from which every human feature has been effaced." ' \

Mass death is abstracted and quantified for swift manipulation. In this terminology, "war"

cannot b e absurd, qrotesque, futile or chaotic. Rather, it appears as a field for expert

decisions and control, an arena where "neces- are c a r e m balanced against

, "assets" in pursuit of a goal whose rationality is never subpct t o question--"victory."" ~. ,'

' overview, culled from imaginary

American Cavalry At War, Micks - - -

mote lurid episodes, t h e tactical scene-thidhe-strategic-

memoks @anted titles such as Black Horse, Red Star:

in ~ c t i o n : With .the Irish Guards in ~ & e r Saxony o r The ---Ae--- -

Veld Aflame: South Africa's Fight for Survival. These passages are written in a style which ---- -- draws simultaneously on authentic war memoirs and popular war fictions (genres which are

already deeply and mutually indebted to each other). Here there are portrayals of extreme

violence, bloody wounds agd the confusion of the battlefield. But these horrors are - -

eclipsed by an overriding emphasis on - t h e va l~ur- camaraderie, skill and excitement of 1

combat. Courageous NATO infantrymen stand firm or - g o down fighting against t h e . Russian

hordes; gallant officers die at their posts; exuberant RAF pilots skim 1

across ~ u i s i a n a~rfields; lonely generals make momentous .decisions;

amongst a barrage -of plucky smiles, nonchalant thumbshp' signs, and "one down and

three hundred and . = 'two to go"isms that relentlessly occlude all thought of terror, madness - or bereavement. 5 9

But the most appareni feature of The Third World War's war is its nostalgia. For it ---- # '.

is quickly evident that World War I l l is, as the very name implies, a reppiition. It is - World War I I with the Soviet Union substituting for Nazi Germany. Here is t h e ' humiliating

I prelude of "appbasem*nt." Here is the Battle 'of Britain r e f o 3 h t by supersor(ic jets. Here - is a chapter entitled "The Battle of the Atlantic." Here are British' and American tanks

disembarking for a second Liberation of Europe. And at the end of it all: with the

destruction of the USSR. the world will have "come out of a bad dream, just as it did t

out of the Nazi nightmare."60 The tex! thus reassembles and projects into the -future the

image of a past episode of Western triumph already carefully mythologized in. official ,

archives and popular culture. Despite all its futuristic detail of nuclear, electronic, and

chemical weaponry, the premise of The Third World War is that the next war will be a ---- &

re-run.

i E

Indeed, the text's fundamental assertion is encapsulated in the _ c a p t i o ~ ~ o ~ m ~ a t

the photo-supplement which accompanies the the text: "War's Unchanging Face: A Young -

Soviet Infayyman 'Evacuated After Fierce Fighting Near D ~ i s b e r g . " ~ ~ The black and white

picture shows a (quite cheerful) young man being carried on a stretcher with his head *

bandaged. Nominally, the photo and caption acknowledge war as regrettable suffering; in . *

practice, they attenuate and dismiss that thought. This is partially because their 'pathos is

immediately cancelled by the breathless excitement o f the "action shots" in the rest ,of

the sequence: "'Shovel this is six! O h my Cod!' The war begins. Soviet T-72's ir;

unopposed water crossing west of Munchen"; "Target! Soviet 1-80 explodes in flames

under fire from NATO armour"; "Dogfight!"; "The scramble for the seas"; "The

Counter-Offensive rolls on."62 But the photo does not merely rrivialize suffermg: il

eternalizes it. it insists that nothing can, or should, b e done about war. War, it

announces in a message underlined by the whole text, is unchanging and unchangeable..

----World War I l l will be much like World \'tlar I I , and, in essence, much like Waterloo or

Agincourt-a matter of generalship and vatour. And this despite the fact that the.

penultimate photograph of the series shows an intercontinental ballistic missile arcing a trail -- of white vapour through the sk)., and the final one a Poseidon submarine bursting from

the surface of the ocean to launch its rockets: the unchanging face of war, gone nuclear. *

% .

3. The Nuclear Exchange ---

In hi Third World War the dropping of the Bomb is not the end of the world --- > -

The novel inccrporates nuclear weapons withm a traditional war story, assimilating 'their use

as merely one, albeit climactic, episode in an epic of battle, victory and defeat. It can in

be seen as an attempt to undo the enduring influence of a long lineage o l ;

'ddoornsdav" films g d fictions, such as --- On The Beach, Level-Seven, The --- War Came, or

Dr. Strangelove, which established itielf *thin popular culture in the late 1950s and early -

- - 1 9 6 0 ~ . ' ~ Against these ap&dyptic visions, which represent nuclear war as universaldeath, - -

total mayhem, or suicidal absurdity, ---- The Third World War asserts a counter-image: that of

the Bomb as a winning weapon. In its flat, acronyrnic prose, doomsday is circ*mscribed - -

by the terse initials which ,signify local civil defence preparations: BREMCO, BREMPIAN.

Nuclear weapons--the "SS-17," the Cruise missile, which "with its astonishingly accurate I I

&dance and relative cheapness caught the imagination both for its theatre conventional

role and as a potential nuclear weapons carrier," and the "SSBN (Submarine, Strategic,

Nuclear)" are divested of any special horror, incorporated amongst a repertoire of 6

conventional military devices, nominated as suitable for "selective strikes," "flexible /

response" and "Hiroshima-qpe demonstration^."^' And in the climax of The --- Third World I

War, these weapons are made the agency of the West's triumph over its Soviet enemy. - c

The text is careful to place th; onus for its speculative nuclear e;change on the

enemy. T.Q do so, it has. to evade N A T O ' ? ~ ~ I I . known policy of dependence on a

first-use of nuclear weapons to stop any Soviet attack on Europe. It therefore proposes

that, although NATO forces suffer heavy casualties from the Soviet tank offensive, they

are, because of an eleventh-hour rearmament program conducted in the early 1980s, able

to stall the invasion and even mount a counter-attack. Thereupon, the Soviet leaders, to a

demonstrate the eamestness of their intentims, obliterate Birmingham with a single nuclear

warhead. 'Nuclear war is begun by the Russians, confirming the contrast between an / - .. _ aggressive "them" and a defensive "us." & - -. -a\- _- / /'. I .

But what ,this event also siknifies is the west's capacity to survive nuclear atfack.

The obliteration of ~ i r m i n ~ t b is narrated from the perspective, not of the victims, but of

the militan and civic authorities. Terse descriptions of the "extraordinary destruction" are -- - - --

., firrnl) bracketed between scenes affirming the immoveable solidity of the British state.65 P

The city's demise is ,prefaced with images of imperturbable radar officers "well used to

cdrnlng the~r efficiently tracking the incoming missile ("It sure is going to .- I

\ 4,

27 5

a B

-- - --

be hot in Birmingham, England," remarks an American major)." V-ast and gruesome

casualtie; are stern& acknowledged, but the emphasis is on the problem confronting the

civil defence and police as they struggle, with eventual success, to regain control of the

situation in the devastated area. The episode culminates in the Prime Minister's Churchillian - -

rallying. of the populace with the broadcast news that "the enemy has been struck by

nuclear attack, 'with even greater *force than that used on Birmingham" and the reassurance

that "Her Majesty the Queen with her family . . . would remain In London, and she, the

Prime Minister would of course do the same."61

The West's retaliator) destruction of the Soviet city of Minsk, launched " i f only ' t o

avoid a catastrophic decline in civilian and military morale," is not described at length in

The Third World War.6' Whatever sense of, nuclear terror is conveyed by the account of ---- Birmingham's end appears as an atrocity "they" inflict on "us": what "we" do to ''them"

in return i s quickly glossed over. But the sequel, The -- Untold %, imploves on thts

strategy. Here, Minsk's annihilation is actively celebrated, in almost epiphanic terms. Four

nuclear warheads explode over the Russian city with "dreadful majesty," creating a "beacon-

of light" 'and a> "pillar of fire":69

The epicentre of the attack, above which the missiles had been set to det-onate, was the grandiose building oi the Central committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia, built in the late 1930s in the style then current to emphasize the power, extent and modernity of socialism. In front of i t ,

stood a full size statue of Lenin. Within a few seconds of the first detonation, this immense structure was no more than a great pile of rubble. Somewhere in there the statue -of Lenin, the principal architect of all this disorder, lay pounded into dustlk

,The dehumanization of the enemy, who is literally "objectified" in the crude architectural

symbolism and the image of Lenin's statue, permits an uninhibited expression of

enthus srn at the $aginar?.. immolat~on of fifty thousand Russians. Moreover, the eflects of > this ictionaf explosion exceed merely the destruction of a Sovre! city. i t gives the West

decisive victory. Minsk's incineration destabilizes the entire Soviet system: -Eastern Europe

bursts into revolt; the Ukraine and Urals d&lare themselves autonomous; the Politburo is

overthrown by a popular uprising in the streets of Moscow, a gbtWm-Ainericana IS

established, and the world is saved--by the Bomb.

The Third Wodd War thus makes a remarkable attempt to vindicate the concept of ---- "limited" nuclear conflict, which is depicted as following the same logic that informs t

conventional war: the side mustering the greatest strength emerges as the victor. I

Leadership, patriotism and discipline are the key 'factors: "we" win because when the

~"ssians atomize Birmingham, no one panics, while when NATO vapor& Minsk, the . .

Soviet Empire collapses in mutiny. With adequate civil defence preparation and public 1 .

diicipline. The ~hi;d ~ d r l d War p~or&es, Britain can endure nuclear attack, just as it - - -.- endured the Blitz. Losses--even in the scores of thousands--are a necessary and acceptable

prrce for triumph. The, nuclear exchange measures "our" worth against that of the enemy, . establishing one side in conclusive dominance over the other.

6 . "To Make Children Behave nBe'rter" --- --

In an article in The Times, ~ e n e r a l Hackett disclosed that his novel's first draft had in -- fact ended with the defeat of NATO. This conclusion had been abandoned on the advice

of American military colleagues, who felt it would merely inspire despondency amongst the

2 Western public. As the General explained, "If it is to make children behave better, it is a lr

mistake to pitch it s'o strongly that it only makes them wet their pants."'l And it is as a

text designed to "make children behave betterw--that is, as a cautionary tale told by a

paternalist authority to coerce the populace into compliance with its wishes--that -- The Third

' , World War needs to be understood. -- -

? %

For the traces oi Hackett's original draft remain clearly, and purposefully, ,visible - -

within the final version. The text insists on keeping on its surface the possibility that - "things might have turned out very differently," reiterating that the West's victory "was a

$ 2 F d o s e tun thing."" It persistently stresses &a€ if NATO had not czedttct&th&litar=-

preparations whicwi t imagines being undertaken in the early 1980s, the alliance would

have gone down to. defeat before the Soviet assault. And in The Untold ,Stor), the -- %

spectre of defeak is given even greater prominence in an appendia which sketches an \

r > ~ 2

"altemative,ending."" Here, the authors "change the a s s u m p t i o ~ " of their stor).: t h ~ 1

peace movement forces the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Western tcrrope .I$ d

result, when War breaks out the West IS militarily ovenvhelmed Germany. trarir t. ,wd

Britain become Soviet satellites, and the Royal Family has to flee to the ex-colonit-\ I l r t +

f narrator closes this portrait of national humiliation on a note of grave exhonatron

My outline of an alrernative ending will end here. It fllls me. as i t stands with alarm and sadness and I can bnIy hope and pray that t h ~ s md) turn out t o be no more than a bad dream. But i t may take m p e than a 51mple flrch of a TV channel change switch to prevent this from becomlng real I t ma) want more than that, a very great deal' more Let us hope i t car) ,be donc 1 1 1

time. ''

The prescription 'for what is t o be done i; given in t h e deprctlon 01 events - -

preceding the onset of war. In the US, one "Governor Thompson, a conservative '

Republican who had-campaigned energetically against the soft-centred international liberalism *3

of the Democratic candidate" is elected President l6 In Britain, a "sudden awaktnlny: of *

public opinion" results in a "return to comparative prosperit):' and a consematlve

government" headed by 2 certain "Mrs. Plumber."" Under these regimes, milltar). budgets 0

ar?: mcreased. The West builds up both its conventional and nucledr forces "Kcdl~st~c

discreet and thorough planning" for war gets under way: civil defence and evacuation are

prepared, military reserves augmented, and a variety of emergency powers approved." The

US "comes out of its post-Viet Nam tranct," reintroduces the draft. and firmly asserts its

leading position in NATO, where "the initiative and example of the United States began \. r

ai last to be f o l l ~ w e d . " ' ~ I

tr,xri pnk-3-s" a 4 a " g m n l reflanrc upon stat? yr~mdeci \veifarefi are replaced by "mare

irrfimgs: t t w w "me?) .c.: twsipht and g w d sense " and see thtrr novel as a agenq

p ~ m o : m p fhr "rhangc tn public attitudes" w.hkh it lortells.

trd-bfr na;at u: 'ht:s Pfumbi-r' m thr BntisA general electron of 1979 and, more

ctzrimih c): 'C,o\ww: Thompson" in .-erica in 7980. Under the regimes of Thatcher

rxf Rcagu- !xdtctr$ ierommtncScd r t ~ The Third tV&d War proceeded apace. The ---- ; ~ d x p m r r rxp~nww ~i milrtan budgets at the expense of' social programs. the renewed

,' and Nicaragua were to rapidly demonstrite how consonant The Third w~orid~ar'smilitarist ---- fantaier were wi th the realities of neoconservative power. The question that hangs over

this era is preusety that of the limits of Hackett's prophetic ,self-fulfillment. 'He himsell ,

tried to discount the accusation. that his text was pre-war propaganda by insisting that his

prediction was "only an imaginar). concept . . .. the investigation ot a possibilit!. in - the

hope of contnbuttng t o i!r p r e y i d o n "" k e t it ir all too easy to see 11 as an q ~ r e r c t r r e - not in prevention. but preparation-a text that beckons on .the ven. conflict i t name\. .

7 . Deconstructing the Other A --

Because of ths danger, i t is peculiarlv crilica!-'to question the tabr~c ul dssumptlom ttia! - - e

informs The Third World War's "faction." Indeed, instead o i reading the text -as a drsplay , ---- . - of authoritatiw realism (as it seems intended to be received). I! rnighr b~ better to

reverse' the operation and ask whether its claims to realism d o not betray ,somc of the'

fantastically fictive elements in ofiiclal scourse. In attempting this exercise, I want to

f a u s upon the text's production oi .the Other-its image of the Soviet threat. This image - - b-

is. o i course, a I)nchpin of of right-wing- ideolog). and one which in the 1980s enjoyed

an extraordinan revwal In eve? genre of drrcourse. trom Reagan's presrdenlidl speeches to

thesfilm Red Dawn and the televison s h o ~ Arnerila," And as we haw reen, i l 15 the -- pivot on which the whole oi Hacketf's \ \ar s lon turns.u

Ye! The ihwd World War's portralt of the West's terrifying adversar) IS drsturbed by ---- *

curious contradiarons W h a t at once tends to subvert the text s difterentiation between

"them" and "us" 13 the srmilanty between 11s own iogrc and that which rt ascribes to. thr

enem) For The Thrrd World War assert> that the USSR eiigaaged o n a vase arms / ----

program and n ~ o r o u s h repressmg all domes t~c d!ssen!, belreves i t can .fight and, w n d *

nuclear war agaris! the West h r c h wili estabirstt the global dominat~on of communism

But it sirnultaneousl) purports ro demonstrate that if NATO engages on an equally vast

arms program, and squashes the left, the trades unions and t h e peace movement, then it - -

can win a nuclear war which will establish the global dominion of capitalism. All the

symptoms The Third World War imputes t o the enemy as signs of aggressive intent--denial . ---- of the legitimacy of opposed ideologies, support for covert destabilization of hostile

powers, speculation on the feasibility of limited nuclear war, planning for the establishment "

of a col--tprehensive w Id h q e m o n y , belligerent propaganda-are unblushingly displayed T wlthin rts own pages.

This uncanny resemblance between the designs The Third World War perceives as ---- "theirs" and those which it reveals as "ours" undermines the rigid binary opposition o n

dhich its story turns. Indeed, it is hard t o avoid the thought that one is witnessing a

classic exhibition of projection, whereb), violent intentions are ascribed t o an intended

vicilm of attack. Hackett's fable is, after all, a prophecy of Western victory. Behind all the e

general's cautionary tremblings appears the perennial right-wing fantasy of a triumphant \

nuclear roll-back of communism. .*

=-u - This is not t o suggest merely a simplistic sign-reversal, reading "us" as malign, and

"them" as virtuous. To switch terms between competing propaganda systems, substituting

positwe for negatlve In a constantly implausible world-historical melodrama, is not enough. k Rather, the Manichean dualisms of Otherness demand deconstruction in favour of greater

complex it)^. Subverting General Hackett's myth requires a descriptioL of the dyadic

interactions of nuclear superpowers in unsettiing, recursive categories such as "mutual -. ,I

s~mulatlon" and "self-fulfilling a n i m ~ s i t y . " ~ ~ This would open the possibility of a reading of

The Third World War in which, rather than o n e of the opponents being seen as ---- :ntnnslcall\ aggressive and the other innatell pacific, both might be perceived as engaged

In a buarre process of reciprocal mirroring. O n e has only tb speculate how Hackett's text

could be interpreted in the Kremlin as conclusive verification of West's aggressive intents

to see the NGTO general's war prediction feeding into a perceptual spiral, in which the ,

pugnacious gestures and rhetoric of one side return inexorabb r d L e c k c L i n t h o s d i i t S -

enemy.

The potential consequences of such a process are, however, far worse even than 2

those represented in The ---- Third World, War. The eventuality which it imperturbably -

inscribes--the nuclear destruction of two cities, as well as innumerable "conventional"

casualties--are appalling enough: the text exercises ever), resource of euphemism and 1

abstraction to avoid recognition of their enormity. But in order to mamtain even th ls 1 f

image of limited nuclear war, The Third World War has t o impose an Iron limlt on ~ t s ---- own speculation. R has to debar from its fictional future the chance of global nuclear

catastrophe. In order t o propose that the enemy c i h be defeated (or in Cold \\a jargon

"contained") by the use of nuclear weapons, and that nuclear war itself can be controlled 1

(or "contained"), the stor) has to be organized to exclude that eventuahty--a feat whlrh.

\ in itself.. constitutes an intricate, literary "strategy of containment "

This stra\egy necessitates that The -Third World War truncate the nuclear battle i t ---- imagines as quickly as possible. It h a s 2 cut short the chain or retaliation and

counterretaliation set in motion by the tit-tor-tat of Birmingham and Minsk As the Times - Literary' Supplement put it, "To duck discussion of . . . the theoretical inevitability of . escalation, is a grave defect in a . serious ~ o r k . " ' ~ What allows this "ducking" is of course

the deus ex machina of popular revolt in the streets of MOSCOW. I t rs vital that the the '

Soviet Union be presented as collapsing, lite_rally overnight, upon the nuclear destruction of

one of its cities. Otherwise.

"exchanges," ending only in

conironted.

the

Seen from this perspective,

possibilih of an accelerating sequence of nuclear

mutual oblitera!ion? would have to be squarely

the log ic of the text uhdergoer a strange rever5al cause

changing place with effect. Rather than limited nuclear conflict berng required to t p n g

about the collapse of the USSR, as ---- The Third Wortid War appexrrto--argweytcollapse

sf the USSR stands revealed as necessary to preserve the hypothesis of limited nuclear . - -

conflict. But this means that the figure of The Third World War's monstrous "enemy" ---- 1

must unite in itself two contradictory ashcts. It must be at once enormously

strong--capable of launching a global and nearly triumphant asault on the West, and

confident enough rto initiate nuclear war--and, simultaneously, enormously weak--vanishing

away at the first atomic shot. This ambigous image of the Soviet threat as at once

prodigously powerhl and pathetically fragile, appears as a device to allow the assimilation

of the Bomb into a traditional narrative of war. The alleged strength of the foe motivates

the start of the story; his purported weakness permit: its conclusion. With this

inconsistency, the image of the Other unravels-a 'badly cobbled-together support fo; The -

Third World War's program of massive military expenditure. And once this is perceived, ." --- there can be seen the possibility of a different nuclear narrative, an anti-war story in

which, as Peter Bruck has put it, "the real opposition i s . . . not between the. enemies

who' fight the war but between the the war-makers and the war-~ictims."'~ But this 'is

what nukespeak has to suppress at all costs.

- To accomplish this suppression, The Third World War has to hold its hand over the ----

prospect of nuclear extermination. It acknowledges that an "unrestricted nuclear exchange': - would be unfortunate-.-"disastrous." a "nightmare," a "catastrophic futur2"--but, as we have

seen, it does all it can to prevent sustained thought about the prosbe~t.'~ For such an

event would &$ode the text's -uar narrative. It would "empt). the concept of rerqlution B

of all meaning."" erase the division beween "our side" and "theirs," and cancel the all

' . important distinction between "victor," and "defeat," leaving friend and foe alike miqled

In radioactive ash. It is to a representation of this apocalyptic end, whose possibility The -- Third World War works so hard to deny, that we now turn. ---

CHAPTER IIC - - - - - -

DOOMSAYING

\ 1. The Discourse of Doom -- --

Nukespeak's war-fighting rhetoric catalysed a counter-discourse of catastrophe. As texts like

The Third World War stirred alami across Europe and America, there spread from the ----- -

. leaflets and speeches of protestors . into the mass media an image that for two decades

had been uneasily repressed, excluded from the public sphere and driven inward to the

netherworld of private anxiety--an image of the world's, nuclear end. Texts such as, Nkel

Calder's Nuclear Nightmares and Louis Rene Beres' Apocalypse, Helen Caldicott's Nuclear

Madness an6 her impassioned documentary. ----- I f You Love This Planet, medical and scientific.

reports ranging from the Physicians for Social Responsibility's video The -- Last Epidemic to

Carl Sagan's studies of the "nuclear Y

winter" eifect, films like Testament, The Atomic -- and War -- Games, and, eventually, the hugely pub!?ized television programs Threads (in

Britain) and The - Day After (in North America) saturated culture with nuclear horrors.v0 - Mushroom clouds, incandescent fireballs and astronomical statistics of mass death exploded

ofi the screen of every home entertainment centre and from the page of every Sunday

supplement. - I

These images were crucial to the growth of the peace movement. chilling city

maps, showing zones of destruction stretching from ground zero downtown to the outer 1.

suburbs, made protestors f r ~ m millions of pre<iously loyal citizens. Fear built the massive

peace marches in Londpn, Amsterdam, Bonn, Athens and Barcelona. On 1 2 june 1982,

New York saw over. half-a-million rally in the United States' largest-ever pc!%al

demonstration. As doctors, clergymen and lawyers flocked to the cause of disarmament, Ih

bringing it an overnight respectabiiit)., it brief+, seemed as if dread ot wclear hellfire - might rock the national security state. And yet within a few years this apocalyptic :.load,

and the pubtic mobfization it b

diminution of nuclear danger.

i t . is iri this dontext that

doomsayings, Jonathan ~che l l ' s

inspired, e b b e d a n d s u b s i d e d - w i f h o u t w apparent

I want to discuss what is probably t he mostA=elebrated of

The Fate of the Earth.91 No single text has more eloquently L

announced an atomic es&atology, or been more closely identified with the peace

pavement. Its appearance during February of ,1982 in three consecutive issues of the - New

- - Yorker-a magazine that, as one reviewer remarked, "comes close t o being a national - arbiter of public respectabilityw--was a clear sign that the wave of nuclear anxiety begun in

Europe several years earlier,had crossed the Atlantic, and that the Bomb was moving from

periphery to centre as, an issue in American politic^.^' A few months after The Fate of --- the Earth's publication, the ~ul le t in of the Atomic Scientist was writing that, "For better or -- ---- worse, both admirers and critics have tended t o treat it as the voice of the movemen t .

I also want t o suggest th? such description can i t s e8beco rnes a site of mystification,

against the nu5lear arms race."93

My reading of this exemplary

nuclear catastrophe opposes official

peace movement text examines how its description of

euphemism and challenges authoritative mythology. But

and paralyse the very protest it seems t o invoke. I treat he Fate of the Earth as an

instance of how these conflicting tendencies cohabit within a single text--a demonstration

oi the doubleness o i doomsaying.

9. Representing the Unthinkable - -

The Fate ol the Earth begins at the end of everything, with a depiction of the very -- I possibility The Third World War seeks to deny--full-scale nuclear war. In fact. Schell says, ---- to call such an event "war" is simpl), a misnomer that could only "mislead and confuse ' .

It would be a "ttolocaust." in which human life and civilization would be consumed

as if they were "nothing more than a mold or a lichen that appears in certain crevices *

of the landscape and can be burned off with relative ease by nuclear firew9! The rest of . ..

'the text arghes backward from this terminal disaster: the nuclear closure of human life is

the point of departure,. the visceral and logical foundation, for all The Fate of the Earth's - - --- subsequent reflections ,on the nuclear predicament. It thus bids everything o" the

representation of an event which it has become conventional to term "unthinkable." As J- Schell acknowledges, nuclear holocaust i s not only an event we have never experie~~ced,

. I

but one whose magnitude seems to exceed the capacity of imagination. Its contemplation

numbs the mind, and evokes every resource of psychological deniaL9& To overcome t h ~

"unthinkability," his text resorts to a synthesis of devastating scientific data and harrowing

historical ' memories.

Not the' least remarkable of The Fate of the Earth's achievements i s its popular~zation - - --- It of nuclear science. ~t appropriates ;he language of the weapons-experts: familiarizes i t s

readers with "fission," "fusion," "rems," "yield," "ground bursts," "air bursts,"

"overpressures," and "megatons"; categorises the main effects of nuclear explosions,

/- &

"radiation," "thermal pulse," "blast," "radiation," and "electromagnetic pulse"; discriminates

" between the "p;irnary" ahd "secondav" results of detonations, and explains theUir "local"

and "global" manifestations. The sources for this work are six receq scientific studies on

the effects of nuclear weapons by organizations such as the National Academy, of Science,

the US Office of Technological Assessment, and the US Department of Defense,

supplemented by numerous interviews with prominent physicists, biologists and ecologists.

From these texts, Schell takes .his information about how many would live and how many

would die and how far the the collapse of the environment would go.

Yet he also insists that scientific studies are inadequate to convey the "human truth"

of nuclear Technicisms and data 'alone may, he warns,. simply desensitize us further.

To prevent this, The -FLte of the Earth juxtaposes with its scientific evidence the testament - - - - - 0 e

of the hihkrr;rba--the survivors of Hiroshima Nagasaki--the ~hfypeopt~with-exp~rience-u

of nuclear attack. It cites john Hersey's Hiroshima (itself a piece of New Yorker -- %

journalism, and a notable forerunner of The - ---- Fate of the Earth), Robert tihdn's -- Death in

tife, and also the hibakusha's own writ ings--thuthology Unforgettable Fire, and Michihiko - - Hachiya's Hiroshima Dlary.9' Here, the effects of the Bomb appear, not as statistical

calculus, but as a monstrous theatre of agonies: a child repeatedly offering water to its

dead mother; another with a head "like a boiled octopus"; people buried and abandoned,

b %+

screaming with formal politeness "Help, if you please," as the firestorm advances toward .

them; figures whose skin hangs in tattered veils around them as they" walk like ghosts

out of the devastated- city; a man standing by his burning house, holding his eye in the

palm of his hand.99 The Fate of the Earth reviews this literature of mutilations, burns, - ---- haemorrhage, diarrhoea, thirst, bomiting, leukemia, cataracts, abortions,. deformbtions,

hadness and death: then i t reminds us that Hiroshima represents only' one-millionth of the e

current power of world nuclear arsenals.

Fusing the discourse of the hibakusha with that of the atomic physicists, The Fate -- of the Earth names the nightmare nukespeak' occludes. Schell sho'ws us what "collateral - - - damage" means; debunks. civil defence; rewrites official abstraction with graphic depiction

and precise calibration; speaks doom and makes it signify. In sentences whose careful

measure underlines the horror of their content, his text maps eves-expanding vistas of

,-imaginaty devastation, examining the effects of holocaust on each of it

"the individual life, human society and the natural env i r~nment . "~~~ It

multiple ways one person might die: incineration, crushing, irradiation,

w . . epidemic. It creates surreal visions of the ann~h~lation of great, cities:

bums under the dazzling white light of a nuclear fireball, skyscrapers

three le;.iels--those of

t. - anatomizes the

starvation, cold, or

Manhattan melts and J

collapse into the

streets below., the skyline falls "from south to north" under a four-hundred-mile-an-hour

wind, while overhead a vast mushroom cloud twelv: miles in diameter "blocks out the

\ a

\ - s@ and turns day t o night."' From there the text pregfesses &&at i t - e m s i d e ~ t h t -

most serious danger of multiple nuclear explosions, a disintegration of the planet's

ecological fabric which would "devastate the natural environment on a scale unknown

since geological time^."'^' In particular, The Fate of the Earth dwells on the possible . - - - -- !

partial destruction of the earth's p z o n e layer, leading to a an influx of blinding, -

carcinogenic ultra-violet radiation. Having discussed all these tehors, and many more

besides, Schell makes his ultimate, apocalyptic, announcement:

Bearing in mind that the pos$ible consequences of the detonations of , . thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives include the blind~ng of insects,

birds a d beasts all over the world; the extinction of many ocean specles, among L t some at the base of the food ,chain; the temporary or permanent alteration of the climate of the globe, with the outside chance of "dramatic" and "major" alterations in the structure of the atmosphere, the pollution of the whole ecosphere with oxides of nitrogen; the incapacitat~on In ten minutes of unprotected people who g o out into the sunlrght; the b l ~ n d ~ n g of people who g o ou t into the sunlight; a significant decrease In photosynthesis in plants around the world, but especially In the targeted zones, and the attendant risk of global epidemics; the possible po~soning of all vertebrates by sharply increased levels of Vitamin D in t h e ~ r skin as a result of increased levels of ultraviolet light' and the outright slaugfster on all targeted contine of most human beings and other living things by the initial nuclear radiation, th fireballs, the thermal pulses, the blast waves, the mass fires, and the fallout 7 fro the explosions; and considering that these consequences will all interact with o n e another in unguessabte ways and, furthermore, are in all likelihood an .incomplete list, which will be added to as our knowledge of the earth inceases, o n e must conclude that a full scale nuclear holocaust could lead to the extinction of mankind.lo3

3. Extinction Fictions -

Extinction, Schell observes, presents at once too much and . t oo little t o comprehend. In ' -

its "boundlessness, its blankness, its removal beyond experience," i t is a concept with a

"ten to baffle human thought and feeling."104 It exhausts language: 3 he words "blankness" and "emptiness" are too expressive--too laden with human response--because, inevitably. they connote the experience o f blankness and emptiness, whereas extrnct~on 1s the end of human experience.l0'

It is a zero-point beyond which there is no mitre story to tell, a catastrophe that

collapses narrative-for what narratorial point-of-view is adequate to recount the death of all

spectatok? Nevertheless, -- he- ate & the Earth strives t o o_vercorne__this- semantjc -- t o an attempt to "think meaningfully about Its entire second chapter is devoted

e ~ t i n c t i o n . " ' ~ ~ To do so; Schell

death of everyone alive, but a

argues, we have to conceive of it not .merely as the

"second death," that of everyolie not yet bom.lo7 Grasping

t o . convey the enormity' of this concept, he now turns for historical analogies, not t o

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but t o Auschwitz and Treblinka, then switches from nuclear

physics t o metaphysics. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Kant and Hegel, h e screws his

language to higher and higher pitches of rarefication, defining and redefining extinction as ..

the ,"foreclosure of life," the "loss of birth," the "death of death," an act which

"destroys mankin'd, as the source of all possible subjects," as if the sheer multiplication of

synonyms might somehow permit I

. . . an apparently extreme effort of imagination which seems t o require one first to summon before the mind's eye the countless people of future , generations and then to assign those incorporeal multitudes t o 'a more profound nothingness. lo' ,

The text moves from incandescence, firestorms and blazing ultra-violet rays t o still, chill

and eternal darkness.

The thesis that nuclear war could end all human life is crucial t o The Fate of the ---- D

Earth's entire argument, and was to prove violently controversial. In its extremity, Schell's - prediction exceeded .even those of other disarmament. activists, who generally limited

themselves to warning tha t , nuclear war might destroy life in the Northein Hemisphere, -or

merely wipe out Western civilization. And it was anathema to the Reagan. administration. .

Vice-president Bush had asserted his belief .in. t h e survivability of full-scale nuclear war; Q

officials o f the the Federal Emergency Management Agency were busily engaged in /-

per suad i4 recalicitrant American townsh ips t o partizipate in civil-defence prebarations;.

FEMA's director, General Luis Giufreda, had opined that, yhile "nuke war" would be a

should not prove " ~ n m a n a g e a b l e . " ~ ~ ~ Deciding whether The Fate of the "terrible mess," i t * Earth's speculation - was a matter of fact or fiction was therefore a matter of some

Scheit himself

t o the imagination

- tries t o clearly differentiate his text from works of fiction that "assign

the work that investigation is unable 'to do.""O Yet at the same time,

h e concedes it is inescapably speculative. Given the unprecedented nature of global

nuclear war, the complexity of computing its cmsequences, and the changing data on

nuclear effects, the precise consequences of holocaust are, he admits, fundarn&tally

undecidable: "To say that human extinction is a certainty would be a misrepresentat~on."' '~

There is an irreducably fictive element in all inscription of the unthinkable.

Y& in an adroit, manoeuvre, The Fate of the Earth capitalizes on this very fictiv~ty. ----- b

. and the uncertainty of all nuclear prediction, t o invest its own forecast with the practical

status of fact. For, allowing that that nuclear ,arsenals may never be used, and that their

f , use need not inevitably escalate to the level of full scale holocaust, and that holocaust

might not necessarily produce ecological collapse, Schell nevertheless gives the image of b

species death the weight of unarguable verity because:

. . . although the risk of ext inc t io~ may be fractional, the stake, humanly speaking, is infinite, and a fraction 'of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we, nor anyone else, .will ,ever get another chqnce.l12

\ The Fate of the Earth therefore proposes a nuclear version, or inversion, of Pascal's -----

famous wager on the existence of Cod, and concludes that "we have no choice but to

address the issue of nuclear weapons a;: though we know for a certainty that their use

would put an end to our species.""' In this way, The Fate of the Earth achieves a - - - - - 6

diametric reversal of the strategy of containment practised in The Third World War: where ---- Hackett's war-narrative works to exclude nuclear escalation, ~ ~ h e l l ' ; apocalypse disqualifies

an) outcome short of absolute disaster, and enstates exmction as the central and

overriding reality of his nuclear story.

4. The Phnetary S u b W --

It is on this vision of total nuclear destruction that The ----- Fate of the Earth predicates its .

appeal for total nuclear disarmament, an appeal issued in the name of a universal

subject--"mankind as a whole," "the h u m h enterprise" or "common hurnanity."ll' The '

narratorid "we1! with which the 'text enfolds its audience is global and all-embracing. It .is

imminent doom that sanctions such. an address:

For nothing und4sCores our common humanity as strongly as the peril of extinction does: in fact, on a practical and political plane it establishes that common humanity. 115

The Fate of the Earth thus interpellates its audience, not as patriotic citizens and soldiers ----- but a,s terrestrials bound together by common nuclear danger.

This ecumenical humanism contrasts sharpry with the bipolar, adversarial logic of

nukespeak: in place of The Third World War's epic of Otherness, The Fate of the Earth ---- ----- proposes a s a g a o<-sameness. The difference is strikingly illustrated by the way each

rnterprets the image of the planet photographed from outer space. The Third World War ---- perceives "the military application of this extended area of man's domination over his

environment":

Especially dramatic w& the space photography of such high resolution that soldiers marching on earth could be counted in their columns. In the event of war, the Russians would be particularly interested in seeing what was going on in the Atlantic m d the Eastern seaboard of the United state^."^

B In The Fate of the Earth, such extra-terrestrial photography provides a metaphor for "our - - - - - - two roles In the nuclear predicament":

These pictures iltustrate, on the one hand our mastery over naturk, which has enabled us to take up a position in the heavens and look back on the earth as though i t were just one more celestial body, and, on the other, our weakness and frailty in the iace of that mastery, which we cannot help feeling when we see the smallness, solitude and delicate beauty of our planetary home. Looking at the earth, as it is caught inp the lens of the camera, reduced to the size of a golf ball, we gain a new se$e of scale, and are made aware of a new relation between ourselvesi and the earth: we can almost imagine that we might hold the earth between the giant thu'mb and forefinger of one hand. Similarly, as the posseskors of nuclear m s we stand

outside nature, holding the instruments of r mif power with which \vee(Tarr- I

blot life out, while it is at the same time w remain embedded in nature and Ba depend on it for our survival."'

,For o n e text, the view from outer space signifies improved battlefield sutveillance: for the

other, it gives a glimpse of "the oneness of mankind with the oneness o i nature.""'

Indeed, as its title suggests, Schell's text narrates a destiny larger even than that of ' f

- -

the human species. " ~ a k h " is a term that moves through ' t he book from cowr t o tmal

sentence, accumulating a deepening play of resonances. It signifies, in its srmplt.st sense.

the planet itself, a "celestial body."Il9 But Schell's earth is an animate body at once the

progenitor of life, its "fnother" or "parent." its habitat, a "support s\,stern" or "hourc. 0 1

unimaginable intricacy," and, ultimately, a unified, organic entlt);-a "smile Iivmg being ""',

This inscription of the globe as a living entity is, in one aspect, a scieniific thew, that

Schell substantiztes with research into the the ecosphere's "interconnected web" of lile . -

But it is also, as he observes, an idea "that has only recently proceeded from poctrc C

metaphor to actual scientific i n v e s t i g a t i ~ n . " ~ ~ ~ His celebratron of the living planet IS

suffused with a romantic lyricism and underwritten as strongly with citations from Rilkg's

Duino elegies as with environmental data. At moments, i t even assumes a quasi-relilgous

aura as a "compound mystery" *that is at once "unique" and "sacred," synonymous wth

"God o r nature or whatever o n e chooses to call the universai dust fhat made. o r becdmc

us.'* 113 Humanist belief in the brotherhood of man, environmentalist concern with the

. \ - stewardship of the planet, and a theological concept of nuclear war as an ofier~se against . - p

divine order, are all bound together in the symbol of "the earth."

Indeed, the position voiced by The Fate of the Ezrth can be summed up by one ----- oi the most venerable of all anti-nuclear slogans: "One World or None " I t tc the. threat - -

of nuclear extinction that compels recognit~on of the unrty of the earth The solur~on ro - . \ -

that threat is the creation of a new global order that glves pol~trcal expressron to t h ~ s

unity. For Schell defines the basic "problem of the nuclear era as nothing less than the ,

nudear-armed gowsmknls. To avert doam, The Fate of the Earth demands the world-wide ----- alidttmn of thcr very rnsrilution cekbrated biAThe Third Wodd War-the security state: ----

On the one wk stands human iiie and the tenend s a t i o n , . on the S

other wdc stands a particub urgpniation of human life, the qrrem of ndepwknt rovtlretgn states

. - Itt tts p f a ~ f 11 rwmz.. the "world gu~emment* answer to the Bomb iavoured b) some

B. Arrt*wrdri lrhtrhh 11% the atiermath of H~rofitrna"'

L Y f a eueryanc rs n o u called on to do ts to sr ail the shtpp and also C 0

ground all the planes, and ftll In dl the missiie SI 0s . and drsmantle aH the warheads The second am whtch alone can prowde a sure foundation for the ftrfr 15 t c ~ creae a poltiical means b \ %.htch the world can a m e at the cfrrtriotw thc sovereign stale< prewously amed at by war

- zr:c rnc-narc* ai nuciear catastrophe is proposed as a Iever for the transfiguration of the

p k n r ~ the I&&. kheli writes i s "nothtng less than to reinvent politics- lo reinvent the

w < d d *;:'

Judged ~r: ftw terms set by nukespeak, this i s the +mate in unrealistic proposals: -

khr-l: wcauifi undaubredl> sland as a prototypical example o i the "5ar out philoqophers"

r m =-twrn The Thrrd WoridxMar heaps scorn. But The Fate of the Earth uses doom to ---- --- - - wtsveft thr ofirci'al appropriation of "realism." This appropriation, Schell argues, depends on

a suppwwng iwareness oi the danger o i extincl~on. Advocates oi "limited" nuclear war have

t~ noiti ~ t w r hand over the chance oi ho loca~s~. Deterrence theory, with its aura of

balance and rattonah), sustalns itself only by irrationally blindmg itself tb the possibility of -

i lr own failure Once t h ~ s 15 recogniseci, the Auclear state's claim to represent "realismw

a ~ a n 5 1 !he ^delusionsn of nuclear dtsarmament abruptk .reverses itself.

In this timid. crippled thinking. "realism" is the title given 4 0 beliefs- whose - rnctst notable charactenstic i s their failure to recognize the chief reality o f the %e- the pit into which our species threatens to jump; "utopiann i s the term m scorn ior am- ptan that shows a serious promise of enabling the species. to keep from killing itieli ( i t i r i s "u!opiann to warlt to survive, then it must be 'realtstk" to be dead!; and the political arrangements 'that keep us on the brink of annihhtion are deemed moderate and found to be 7respectable," whereas ww arrangements. which might enable us to draw back a few feet

trom the brink. d e d "extremecor "radicat" With ~ t i t t e i o u g h t - - ~ stopping epithets as these. the upholders of the status quo defend the anachronistic structure of their thinking, and seek t o block the revolution in

& thought and action which is necessary if mankind is t o ' go o n living 12'

- 5. The Unspeakable In The Unthinkable . - - --

It is thus by looking into the nuclear abyss and confronting the very worst, the ultimate

horror, that The Fate of the Earth challenges nukespeah. And in an era when the full ----- resources of official discourse were devoted to a most sinister trivialization of nuclear war.

nothing should detract trom the impor t anc~ of this project But i t rs also crit~cal to ask /

whether The Fate of the Earth itself, in turn, shows an), traces of nuclear repression Is - - - -- its representation of holocaust itself constructed only at the expense of ceitain denta l~ and

avoidances! Does its project r ~ i demystification implicate itself, in a reciprocal mystifica~icm!

Is there, in Neil Schmitz's inimitable phrase, "an Unspeakable that lurks within Schell's

Unthinkable"? 12'

In her general criticism of nuclear doomsaying, Cayatari Spivak has pointed to

precisely such a possibility:

One of the strongest appeals of the anti-nuclear movement is that in the face of the nuclear threat we are all equal. This would no doubt be true In the event of a nuclear war. But while the resistance mobilizes, -this appeal allows the liberal humanists often politically committed to the social (not t o say psycho-sexual) relations o i s&iety, t o 'forget that some o f us are perpetrators and others victims. 12"

Extinction seems t o mandate a universalization of the nuclear predicament. But this elides I

the very distinct pow& exercised in this predicament by - different actors. It conflates the

roles of, say, a Caspar Weinberger (who directs, justifies and profits from nuclear

deployments), an unemployed Detroit bus-driver (who rarel), .thinks abo l~ t the Bomb), and a

Central ~rnerican ' or Middle EZstern peasant (who has barely heard of it, but every day

feels the historical effects o i nuclear hegemons).""he legitimate observation that nuclear , -

war might kill us all easily slides into a facile "we're-all-in-the-same-nuclear-boat'ism."

NU&= doomsaying os&des nudeaf dominat ion In this way+ocalypseitseltbecomesa

site of obfuscation.

The Fate of the Earth demonstrates precisely such a slippage, from description of ----- global consequences t o ascript' n of global responsibility. For, having given his shattering / 1 " . portrayal of holocaust, Schell . then asserts that "all of mankind threatens all of mankind."131 " .

In order t o maintain its gtabal perspective, his narrative scrupulously avoids identifying the a

parts played by particular empires, classes, and elites in creating the nuclear threat. Rather,

it take the magnitude and generality of extinction 'as a licence t o vault over such details.

Although the "specia! responsibilih" of the "twin superpowers" is parenthetically noted, the

The Fate of the Earth's basic assumption is that the species as a whole is not only the - - - - - potential "victim" but also the "author" of nuclear It tells the tale of a suicide

attempt by hom*o sapiens against itself. Annihilation always finally figures as .something

"we," the species, c o l l e M l y , inflict upon ourselves, a construction that complacently

masks the p&cuiar interests propelling the arms

nuclear predicament is emptied of, significance by

Moreover, The Fate o f the Earth represents - - - - - menace ourselves with unconsciously and virtually

race. Each specific contribution t o the

the general sign of global death.

nuclear destruction as something "we"

unintentionally-by omission rather than

commission. The. preparation o f doom is described as a "kind of inadvertence," a

consequence o f '"numbness," "inertia" or "indifference," a "mistake," the act of .

"sleepwalkers" or. at worst, "mass insanity.""' These metaphors are, again, familiar within

peace movement discourse: hardly an anti-nuclear speech omits mention of "the insanity of

the arms race," or "nuclear madness." And no one reading Schell's first chapter could

doubt that full-scale nuclear ivar would be an irrationality. Yet these phrases, sanc tgned by

the enonnlr\ of doom actually disgu~se the full monstrosity of the situation. For t o speak

\ ~i the arms race as a psvchopathology, amnesia or mistake is t o overlook how rational

tin a narr i~ w* and immediate sense) it is from the point of view of certain corporate 'a

imperial interests--how consciously and calculatingly it is plcauedAt~uppessesthc+~erial

causes of our predicament. Such figures of speech can, as we will see, become a 'i

support for the eral hope that, if only everyone were adequately ,informed, knew . *

the facts, and g r e n u d u s ~ ~ thought the unthinkable, the wielders of the Bomb k o u l d . L

, spontaneously ' "awaken" and stop nuclear war. 13'

W e can see better what is being obscured in The Fate o f the Earth by - - - - - considering

the place o f the United States in its narrative. This is a strategic point for cr$ical inciston

because, despite (it .is so tempting to write "because of") The Fate of the Earth's claim - - - - - to speak "on behalf of the earth and mankind " ~t 1s a manifesth Amerrcan text written

by an American author, publrshed In a prestigous American magazine. and angled In

numerous ways towards' reception by an American audience. New York is, alter all. the

city selected t o illustrate the nuclear ending of civilization, and the chapter depicting

planetaty devastation i s entitled, in a specifically American allusion, "A Republic of Insects

and Crass."

Yet it is precisely the role of the United States and its military-industrial complex in

the nuclear predicament that Schell avoids naming. In one of the only critical reviews in

the American left pres*, Schmitz nailed this point, and advanced the counter-narrative - The

Fate - of the Earth tries t o evade:. , 0 - - - /

Sceptical readers will perceive within the culpable system of independent, sovereign nation states, the basic problem as Schell sees it, the preeminent nuclear power in that system, a bristling imperial nation state, the one that has determined the nuclear arms race from the beginning: and they will ,

wonder about the reluctance to designate in this text. . . . The iate o f the 6 '

earth, after all, is still pretty much in certain American hands.lJ5

To the extent that The Fate o i the Earth fails even to acknowledge this particular . - - - - - . -%d

interpretation of t h e world's nuclear problems, Schmitz went -on. i t i s "paroch~al in ~ t s

vision, no t at all disinterested, even seli-senfing."'lt His analysis is unjust, but only

minimally so. In fact, those "American handsn are represented in the text: global nuclear

empire is too bulky to hide completely. The Manhattan Project -- and Hiroshima, John Foster 4

Dulles and the strategy of ,massive retaliatior, Hermann Kahn and the RAND Corporation, . .

Admiral Rickover and his nuclear submarines, NATO and i ts policy of nuclear 'first-use,

President Carter and the nuclear defence of Middle Eastern oil all, briefly, appear. But

they appear only to be taken away again. No sooner is America's unique historical

contribution to the nuclear predicament identified, than it is reabsorbed as mere example

of a common condition, an illustration of universal guilt. It flickers in and out of view, at

once present in the text and absent from it, always threatening to disrupt the generalized

"human" narrative and yet constantly recuperated. Now you see it, now you don't: the

planet hides the Pentagon.

6. Doom . Depoliticized --

The consequenfes of this repression become painfully apparent when - - - - The Fate of the . Earth attempts to articulate a program of action. "Extinction," Schell asserts "is not P - something to contemplate, it is something to rebel against."13' Like The Third World War, ---- The Fate of the Earth points its readers toward a bifurcating future. The options it offers, - - --- however, are very different--not "victor)," or "defeat," but "survival" or "extinction." unlike

Hackett's self-fulfilling prophecy, Schell's aims at self-cancellation, and steps for calling-off 1

doom are outlined in the text's third chapter, appropriately entitled "The Choice."

Unfortunately, it is at this point, that the- narrative disintegrates.

For, having urged the reinvention of the world, Schell abruptly signs off:

h -this book I have not sought to del'inr a political solution to the nuclear predicament . . . I have left to others the awesome, the urgent task, which, imposed on us by histor),, constitutes the political work of our age.13' -

- It is no accident that this resignation occurrs at the very point the text conf;onts "the

political work of our age." The Fate of the ~ a i h ' s strategy of universalization demands - - - - - that it speak from a position above or outside politip. It is in the name of a cause

B allegedly beyond politics that it appeals for disarmament. Whenever politics appears

Schells text, it is subsumed by something higher: "the point is not to make life a scene

of political prot&st: life is the point": pohtics, along with the world, has td b e '

"reinvented."13' What mandates this lofty position is, precisely, doom:

For while t he events that might trigger a holocaust would probably be political,' the consequences would be deeper than any political aims, bringing ruin to the hopes and plans of capitalists and socialists, rightists and leftists, conservatives- and liberals alike. 140

This is a position reiterated in Schell's later writings, where he attempts to disavow even

'4 the. term "peace movement," "because the word 'movement' ;uggests sbmething of a

political character." ''I

- - Yet this claim t o escape politics undoes even as i t is uttered. Merely in. naming

doom, Schell ~ifferent iates him~elf from and opposes himself t o the speakers of

nukespeak. "rhe presence of these formidable political oppanents is in fact detectable . - within The Fate of the Earth: they are the "upholders of the status quo" against whom -----

the text speaks. What is notable, however, is that these figures are never precisely

identified. They' are visible only in *abstract, generalized way: Schell shadow boxes. For

to name the actual executants of the arms race would ' c o m p d ~ h ' e Fate of the Earth 1.0 1

- - - - - discover itself caught up in the very clash of "capitalists and socialists, rightists and

leftists, liberals and 'conservatives" it purports t o transcend, not situated above the fiay,

looking down from an extra-terrestrial -perspectrve, but' rrretrievably ~mpltcated rn a held of

implacably political contention. The cost of this "pretended tianscendence, however, is t o .,

forgo the possibility of action, with the elegant gesture of "leaving to others" what ha5

\ I '

t o be done. 4

, .

The abdication is not quite total. he - - - - - ate *of the Eadh ij neither straightfowardl!

politicat, nor totally depoliticize -: it wobbles. Having resigned politics t o others, it the11

immediately , fdllows , 1% 4 t h a 'synoptic, six-page prospectus for a global moverntv:'

i t urges "a phone call to a friend, a meeting in the community."142 From the the level

of the individual--as a "first, immediate step, each person make known, visibly and

unmistakably, his desire that the species survivew-:it skids abruptly to the global--"world . governm6n~,"14~ stopping on the way only long enough' to support, q an intermediate

step, the idea of a a nuclear freeze.

In the .context of the American press's long quiescence on the nucle%rissue, even

P this cafl to action is remarkable. Yet, given the severity of Schell's nuclear prognosis, his

prescription is astoundingly mild. The movement he wants will be non-partisan, for

everyone, and against no one. It will not "bend the rules" of "decent political life."14b

And i t will have "no enemiesw--"For who," Schell asks blandly, "would be the enemy?

Certainly not the worlds political leaders, who, though they menace the earth with nuclear

weapons, d o so only with our permission and at our bidding.""' Moreover,' its program is

marked by a number of telling absences. The Fate of the Earth's willingness to ----- contemplate the end of all things is matched by its unwillingness to consider interference

.with the political ?economy of the United States. It suggests no specific changes to the

military-industrial complex, the global empire that demands nuclear defence, nor the ,

anti-communist ideology that has always fuelled the arms race. Such questioning of a

American policies and attitudes would presu ably transgress the text's non-partisan

stance. Schmitz's "sceptical readeru-who earlier notickd the virtual invisibility of ~ m e r k a in

Schell's narrative--might begin to suspect that deferring disarmament until the advent of .

world govem'ment is a tactic to recoup protest within the safe boundaries of liberal

thought, and that its injunction ta "Atlas-like . . . take the world on our shoulders" .

figures as a surrogate for shouldering change closer to home.lb6

. The Fate of the Earth doses with an inspiring peroration: ----- One day--it is hard to believe that .i t will not be soon-:we will -Gike our choice. Either we will sink into the final coma and end it all r, ks I trust 9

I and believe, we will awaken t o the truth of our peril, a truth as great as life itself, and, like a person tttho has ' w i t o w e d a leth-at poison but m k e s off his stupor at the last moment and vomits the ,poison up we will break through the layers of our denials, put aside our faint hearted excuses, and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapon^.^"

Stirring as this is; it cannot hide a serious void in the t e d . The major weakness of The - Fate of the Earth lies in the disproportion between the length, detail, .and systematic ---- intensity of , t he depiction of the world's end, and the c,ursory, vague, and gestural quality

of the plans for preventing it; two hundred pages on how to think about extinction, six

on what t o d o about it. Indeed, the imbalance threatens to completely invert The Fate of - - - the Earth's intended cautionary effect. For the reader finds the position of nuclear victim -- inscribed with immeasurably greater credibility than that of anti-nuclear activist: one worid

seems s o much less plausible than none. As several writers have recently argued, the

unintended consequence of such doom discourse may well be to paralyse, rather than to

mobilize, scaring people stiff rather than scaring them into action.'"' What is less

acknowledged is that this is the psychological consequence of depoliticizing doom.

7. The Appropriation of Apocalypse -- - .-

The Fate of the Earth's doomsaying works in two, contrary, directions. O n the one hand, ----- it surfaces and exposes the horrors of nuclear war. On t h e other, it submerges the

identities of the actors and agencies who push us t ward those horrors. I t names doom, S I but--in 'Barthes' term--"exnominates" the doommakers; speaks against nukespeak, but. is

silent about nukespeak's speakers. Its mesmerizing focus on the image of uncontained

catastrophe thus actually serves t o carefully circ*mscribe its narration of the nuclear

predicament. This narrative implodes, however, when !he text's avoidance of politics

frustrates its attempt to articulate a credible solution to an inescapably political dilemma.

These contradictions are, as I have already suggested, not peculiar t o Schell. That a

text such as The Fate of the Earth should win acceptance as t he ;voicen of contemporafy -----

disarmament activism is a symptom of the dilemmas confrontkg the American peace

movement in the 1980s. This movement was populist and diverse. But its most influential

recruits were white, affluerit, professionals--the very members of Schell's New Yorker

audience. To oppose the Bomb while ostensibly standing "beyond politics" accurately '

expressed the self-interest this group, keen to avoid nuclear war, not anxious to \ radically change America. Reinf a rcing this desire not to be overtly *"political" was the

- L. massive force of anti-communisf'ideology, and the deep-rooted fear of accusation as

"un-American." The Reagan administration's, attempts ,lo incite red-baiting witch-hunts against

disarmament activists shows that such fears were well-f~unded."~ But the net effect was

to produce a movement which, albeit with numerous courageous exceptions, won a A

iimited respectability to the very deg;ee that 4 forfeited challenge to fuhdamental

institutions of American society. e-

. Insofar =-the movement did coalesce politically, it was around the the concept of

a nuclear freeze-an eminently moderate, balanced, "middle-of-the-road" proposal. Under the

influence of an incrZasingly conservative leadership, the priority of this measure was

regularly invoked to exclude from the agenda any "radical" content, such as campaigns of

civil disobedience, criticism of specific weapons systems, or denunciation of American

foreign intervention. As one commentator wrote:

Seeking to rise above politics, the freeze tiied to annul politics, shutting off debate on matters that had prediously, been of ,grear concern to the coalition that makes up the freeze movement.lS0 -

The same witer sardonically termed the discourse & this campaign "free(ze)speech8': -

"Everyone can subscribe to the idea, without necessarily having to to take some

demanding political decision .or initiative. Its like saying you are for free speech. . . ."lS1

The nadir in this process was actually reached on what most observers took to be the

peace movement's hour of triumph, the lune 1 2 rally in New York. As the Israeli army,

armed and encouraged by the United States, smashed into Lebanon, attacked Syria and

precipitated crisis in the nuclear powder-keg of the EW organizers agreed t o

censor all mention of the attack from the podium, lest the demonstration appeat too

-- partisan. lS2 ' -. - . 9

Depolititired doomsayings such & The Fafe of the 9, or its teievisual - counterpart, The - Day - After, were the natural centrepiece of this "free(ze)speech." But the

inadequacy of such cautionary warnings were demonstrated by 'the speed with which they

were co-opted by the authors of nukespeak. Talk of "prevailing" m 'nuclear war was

generally discredited--but only in public. The Reagan administration swiftly fell silent about

its actual nuclear plans, and learned to ritually intone that nuclear war was unacdptable.

The President himself developed an uncanny knack of imitating Schell, even as he solicited

, extra funds for first-strike missiles: _- Carl Sandburg ; . . in his own beautiful wa)' quoted the Mother Prairie, saying, "Have you seen a red sunset dip over o n e of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?" What an idyllic scene that paints in our mind--and what a nightmarish prospect that a huge mushroom cloud might someday destroy such beauty.ls'

% The ultimate example of this co-option was to come with the announcement of the 0

Strategic, Defense initiative. For the President's concept o f an invulnerable "peace .shieldw J

against nuclear attack actually capitalized on the dread stimulated. by the peace movement.

"Star Wars" was, indeed, explicitly described by o n e of its publicists as an attempt to

"take over Jonathan S ~ h e I l . " l ~ ~ And while SDl's promise of nuclear safety was techrlically

k t undelivera e, its ideological effect was devastating. Peace activists watched in di$nay' as

their t rubp card--fear of holocaust--was played back against them by the President. By t h e ,

election of 1984, the nuclear freeze campaign had been virtually swept away

Since 1982, nothing has invalidated The Fate of the claim that nuclear war - - - - might mean human extinction. Indeed, recent studies of winter" effect make

Schell's wager on species death seem; a substantially safer one than its author could h a y

I k n o w n at the time of writing.15s Nor is it even necessary to accept the terms of this bet

to oppose nuclear war: the p s p e c t tkat a majo~ m f l i e t might, as Reagar+-&ilrfefence

experts assert, cause "only" twenty to forty million deaths hardly makes it a palatable

prospect. But those wtio share Sahell's aspiration for a nuclear-free earth must go beyond

the universalizing appeal of doomsaying. To. take up the "political work" of ' the atomic w

age is to unravel the differentiated structures of nuclear domination--to subvert the

hierarchies of gender, class and race that uphold, and are upheld by, the Bomb. We

have to speak, not just of the end..of the world, but of the end of much, much more

besides. 2"

CHAPTER I V

WRITING GREENHAM

1. Greenham Text , R . . , -

To write about "Greenham" is t o write about a

anti-nuclear revolt, and about e v e n t that already

place that

constitute

original Greenham text are the-tzanners carried by "Women

120 mile march from Cardiff t o Britain's first Cruise missile

pictures, photographs and letters expressing fears of nuclear

decorated the base's perimeter fence; the webs they wove

has become an emblem of

a text. The signifiers in this

For Life On Earth" on ,their

base outside Newbury; the \

war with which they

around its gates; the peace 91 . .

signs they painted across its control towers, silos and spy planes in their nightly

trespasses; and the scores of sentences handed down to them by magistrates of the a

. nuclear state for the ironic offence of "breaching the peace." It is a text written by i

thousands of women's acts of symbolic protest.

Yet these acts only won global attention through a series of re-textualizations. The

Peace Camp at Greenham Common attained its celebrity through the mediation of

'joumalism, television news, films, and books. And it is through such images that the

''Greenham Women" were constructed as objects of public admiration or hatred. This .

chapter examines four accounts of .Greenham produced by these women themselves. - On

the ,Perimeter is the work of a journalist commissioned by an American magazine to write - a story about "the defeat of the Women's British Peace Movement," whose narrative in

fact records her growing sympathy for, and virtual recruitment by, the protestors.'"

Greenharn Women Everywhere and Greenham Common:, ~ o r A e n At thei Wlre are 7 ---

collections of anecdotes and statements b) numerous women describrng the Peace Camp's d

growth and explaining its philosophy.lJ' Keeping the Peace attempts a similar project from

a wider-angled perspective: .it is an anthology of ~ n t e m a t i o ~ a l pieces about feminist

anti-nuclear protest in 19C10s.edited and inlroduced by a l o n g t i m e -Greenhmac tb j s t .E9- -

thus situates the camp at Newbury within the broader discourse of the women's-peace

movement. I also ' r ek r to certain pamphlets and articles by women and women's groups

associated -with Greenham. For convenience, I call all t h e e works collectively "Greenham

texts." i "

One of them opens with the statement "putting this book togethkr has not -been

easy. lt ' has been an action to which many women have given much."159 The word

"action" has, in this context a special connotation: it was the omnibus term used by the

Greenham women for -their &tounding variety of symbolic protests, ranging from mass 5.

blockades to individual trespass. It is as an "action," a literary extension of feminist

insurgency, that the Greenham texts are read here.

\ Q L

7. Nucleophallogocentricisrn - /

For the Greenharn women, nuclear weapons are symptoms of patriarchy:

Patriarchy literally means father rule--and once you spot it it never goes away:

L the percentage of men who are involved in the military, the government, positions of power: and, of course, there is God the Father--supposed creator of all life--the life force itsel< given masculine gender, I think that it is very important--the language that 'we have, the labels we use, they permeate our thinking.

Patriarchy and militarism are seen as systemically related. Soldiers are tr;aditionally expected I

t o personify approved "manly" qualities--toughness, discipline, agg~ess io . In their -b

h commanders, these are coupled with the more cerebral but equally conventionally virile

attributes of authoritative control, cold logic, and abstract ratiqnality. Perceived by g

nuclear holocaust figures as the catastrophic outcome of a destructive "mentalityw--the

. catastrophic product of "male dominated society, male dominated institutions, and

stereotypic male values. " 16' Many of the Greenham texts see patriarchal violence

institutionalized not only in war but also in the technocratic domination of nature, and '

F the indlstrial despoliation of the environment. All find it~paradigmatic e*pressi&n-the-

male exercise of power over women through economic exploitation, p*rnographic

qbjectification, domestic subjection, battev and ppe. One cites Robin Morgan:

The violation of the individual woman is the metaphor for man's forcing himself on whole nations (rape as the crux of war): on non-human creatures (fape as the lust behind hunting and related carnage): and on the planet ~tselt lb:

From this perspective, the missiles at Greenham are, as On the Perimeter bluntl~* puts ~t -- a "great phallic and it becomes appropriate that the name "Crurse," w l ~ ~ c h at

first seems so disarmingly innocuous, at second glance betrays a revealing assocratron wtt11

9 predatory male sexual behaviour--"cruising.".16'

Patriarchy cannot be understood solely in terms of brute coercive torce I t rs dso \

involves a symbolic system--"the language that we have, the labels that we use " km~nlst

critics have named this symbolic system "phaikgocentri~ism."~~~ Like other peace movement

\ discourses, Greenham texts contest* the propaganda of the nuclear state. But- the), r e d i t

as an extreme expression of phallogocentricism. Since, as one nuclear critic pas put 11,

"ugly things need ugly names," the order they protest can"be termed

. nucleophallogocentricism: the cultural order of nuclear patriarchy. 166

he' Creenham texts cite numerous examples of nucleophallogocentrrcrsm But for , illustration, I will apply their critique to a text we have already read, and glance back

quickly at The ---- Third World War, Its powdkbul authors are, of course, all male, 'provrdrng a

striking illustration of "the percentage of men who are involved in the militaq, the

government, positions of power." And what i s immediately notable about the nuclear

future that they portray is that it is almost exclusively masculine. Women presumably

constitute half or more of the atomized victims of- Birmingham and Minsk. and of the

bombed, rocketed and nerve-gassed cities oi Western Europe described in Hackett's fictron

But their fate i s unnoticed. On a stage crammed with eminent and heroic men. there are

only two named women. One i s Margaret Thatcher's avatar, "Mrs. Plumber": we will return

to her case, and the anomaly it presents from the perspective of Greenham, later. he

other is *t;LnegU "janetU--"a tall, good looking brunetteN-is the wife of an American

,,military astronaut. k i lkd in the first moments of Hackett's hypothetical war by a Soviet

thsv attack."' She 6s dutifufty caring for the children at hdme when she receives new; of .

- h e r hurband's death:

Suddenly a wail came from deep within her, as from a dying animal. "I hate you all." she shouted, and then in floods of tears snatched her children to her and held them close.'" fl

And that i s all we hear of "janet." The Third World War's representative woman, isolated ---- itlthrfi the basom of the nuclear family, condescendingly stigmatized as less than fully

ra~tandl. her rwpress~on'-limited to what Nancy Houston has t e q e d "non-language,

inartt~ulatt~ cries . .. . defbrrned4 and discarded echoes of the fait-accomplis by men." 16'

Nucleophallagocentricism appears not only in war-stories but also in anti-war stories.

\%'ha! made Greenham especially scandalous was that while challenging nuclear militarism,' -

tile protestors also identifled patterns of patriarchal exclusion within 'the 'mainstream peace

movement. Far illustratiop, we need only turn back to The Fate of the Earth. Schell - - - T -

nsnares the nuclear destiny o f the species as the s tov of "mankind." The practical

tmplicrlattuns oi this patriarchal peacespeak are graphically described by a Creenham

n protestor iiriting of the dilemmas facing women who decide to - become -'politically active:

hUyt>c. she thinks wl'll go aloilg .tc my local CND ,meetingm--that's if they . .

k n w one exists. They firi tha: ;i is a very bureaucratic set up, basically run blokes. There's a table at the top o f the room and rows of seats. We all

sit down and we are informed and find .ourselves talking to the backs of each others heads. In that atmosphere, i f you're a woman with no background, to !he peace movement, no political background at all, you go in and you sit at the bad;. You -think. what I'm feeling i s fear, panic, terrible distress. I want 'to express whit! f'm feeling. but there's n o place for me to d o i t here. What are those blokes gihg to say? 4 can't s t anddp and cry. I can't stand up and scream. I can't -even ask what I can do."#

it is irom a context o f such experience that the Creenham texts are produced. One

ui tiw adrtw of At the Wire writes: - - - 1

If is c!!daf that wornea speak as loudly and as often as we can. we must create our own actions an& shape our own hentoly t o shape the identities that we ourselves desire.171

Outside the gates of Newbury's missile base, "Janet" was transformed into anti-nuclear %

activist. Creenham women wailed, not in private anguish, but in massive defiant choruses - . - as police arrested them by the hundreds. The Peace Camp became a site of symbols,

signs and stones repudiating the "language and labels" of patriarchy, contesting the

constructir?~ of history as what one Greenham text pithily terms "a series of men-only

demonstration^."^'^ The spirit of inventive audacity that characterized this challenge is

caught in a famous poster made from a photograph of one of Creenham's "act~ons." I t -

shows two women practicing civil disobedience. They are lying on the ground festooned

\- with a strange web-like entanglement they have woven over themselves Four uniformed

police officers survey them, utterly ,dumbfounded. Over this image are printed the words

from Virginia Wool!% ~ h i e e - Guineas: .

We can best help you prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.'"

3. On the Wire - - - -

The new words and new methods of Creenharn disrupted nucleophallogoceo~ric narrative

by asserting the nuclear, significance of gender. Rejecting both the official duallsms of -

Hackett and the undifferentiated liberal humanism of Scheli, they proposed a r

counter-difference, the difference between patriarchy and feminism. On Creenham's symbolic

terrain, this differentiation w+ .marked out hy the "menacing grey of the steel perimeter

fence with its nine mile circumfrence and its concentration-camp-coils of barbed. wire.""'

The wire formed a border' behoeen militarized masculinity and feminist pacifism.. Keeprng

the Peace displays on its cover a photograph of -- barbed loops: it

Perimeter opens

i s immediately designated in the

by citing the dictionary definition

three women huddled beneath its huge

titit. of Women At the W~re; O n the L -

of a "perimeter": T h e boundary o f a

fortified position: t he outer edge ef my Along this frontier--arosewha--On-the -- Perimeter terms:

ThC curious situation . . . where British men and women spent night after night so very clos each other and yet remained on such different ideological sides o fence that although-bath sexes saw themselves as defending their c o they feared and despised each other as destroyers and traitors.

The "herstory" of Creenham was thus shaped as a" encounter between "Two

opposing value systems right next t o one another but on opposite sides of the fencew--a

struggle of powerful "insiders" against marginalized "outsiders."177 The insiders are -

predominantly male: British soldrers, American airmen, Mipistr) of Defense officials, police.

The outsiders are- female: professional women, punk women, mothers,. grandmothers, - - -

housewives, doctors, lesbian feminists, socialist feminists, witches. lnside is the domain' of

war, housing missile each equil%iknt in lethality t o fifteen Hiroshimas. Outside is the zone /4- of pacifists and /disarmers dedicated to non-violence. lnside is hierarchy--command, rank,

discipline and uniforms. Outside is anarchy--protestors with no-leaders and no-spokespeople, , <

purple hair- and strange clothing, chaotic comings and goirigs, dispersals, regroupings, and

- spontaneous "actions." lnside is technology-an installation of concrete and steel,

blast-proofed nuclear silos and hardened aircraft hangers, control towers, barracks, and a

vast panalopjl of military hardware. Outside is nature--where the protestors camp amongst

woods and gorse in frail shelters immersed in mud, open to the weather, short of even - the most elementary ameniiles, learning a "gypsy knowledge" to endure.lla The inside is,

. in the protestors" narrative, a place of alienated ratiocination--the world of megadeath -- .;2

C ~ J C U I U S , where "'reason' and 'science' are glorified and slavishly followed at the expense I

of feeling. intuition and spiritual i n~ igh t . " "~ The outside is the sanctuaty of vital emotion: /

a place o f laughter, tears, dreams, rituals, and anger. To the insiders, the outsiders seem .

subversive, irrational, or hysterical. But in the eyes, of the outsiders, the insiders are

oppressoh, expropriatop, and destroyers. 7'

- The perimeter fence thus- became a siie of perpetual c o n t c o n t a t i o n i - - G r e e n h a ~

Women Everywhere cites the definition of "confrontation" to indicate the spirit of

non-violent protest:

To meet face to face; standing facing; be opposite to; face in hostility or defiance; bring face to face with accusers.lS0

This ,face t o face encounter was' the core o f the events called "Greenham." O n the one A

hand were the attempts by the male insiders to remove and silence the accusatoy female

outsiders, whose very existence constituted an increasing embarrassment to them, by an

escalating series of evictions, arrests, prosecut~ons, harrassment and violent attacks. On the L

other were the amazing sequence of raids, demonstrations pranks and ntuais b\ which

the outsiders repeatedly defied the authority of the insiders and iorced the,, missile5 t l q ,

guarded to 'the world's attention.

These actions tncluded envelopments of the fence, such as the "embrace the base"

demonstration of December 12, 1 9 8 6 n n which thirty thousand. women linked arms around

the entire nine mile circumfrence of the base, as i f t o show that the power of war and

men was exceeded by. or existed .in an unacknowledged dependdhce on. the resources

of peace and women. There were trbnsformations of the fence, in wh~ch women hung it

~ i t h pictures, photgraphs, poems and letters expressing fear o f .war and hope for peace,

aiming to %ansfom the fence from a negative, destructive purpose into a gallery 04 0

women's work . . . to show. what was stake for all of us threatened by nuclear /' War." "1 There were acts of trespass, such as the famous incursion of. New vears Eve,

\ 1983 in which forty women scaled the fence and danced on the missile silos, acts

immediately intended to demonstrate the incom'petence of the base's segurity 'system, but I

also symbolising the failure o i the entire ideology of "ationat securit),": 4

What we learnt, by going inside the base. IS about crossing art~f~cral barr~ers By overcoming our fear of the authority the fence represents, the fence itself- becomes useless as a form o f securit$."' I

There was also deconstruction o f the 'fence On Halidween, 1983, two thousand women

took wire-cutters to four miles of the base's perimeter, - - and thereafter sections of the wire

were regularly removed in mass actions or nightly raids. At the Wire punningly describes - -- this tactic as "De-fencingn--"the removal of barriers that divide us and thereby

accommodate ~onflict."~" Taking down the fence thus became a figure for the dismantling

of defence ideology, and -a metaphor for the overcoming of feminine marginalization.

0 .

4. Breaching the Peace - --

These disruptions of nucleophallogocentric boundaries were pursued with an energy that 0

was carnivalesque. "Carnival" is the term, coined by the Soviet critic Michael Bakhtin. for . .

that form of popular symbolism which overturns all the pretensions of official, authorised 6

culture, a discourse of:

Changing, playful, undefined forms . . . symbols, 01 renewal . . . a continued shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and *

travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. 18'

Terry Eagleton describes it as a semiotic process in which "power structures are estranged

through grotesque parody, 'necessity' thrown into satidcal question and objects displaced

or negated into their opposite^.""^ The Creenham was carnival 'in that it irreverently set 4

out to overturn the "bas~c assumptions" of nucleophallogocentricism, as one protestor's

poem makes clear:

Let us assume that the ,basic assumptions are wrong

the assumptions that our leaders .a

, and politicians are right,

' and we are wrong

/ that we are many that they are good and Grown Up and Wise and we. are bad and Stupid Children needing to be

Let us assume that This is not so

and let us turn those assumptions

on their heads

--- 2 _

ti1 they rattle and groan 1- -and beg for mercy

and for our forgiveness and let us remind ourselves

who often go unheard

who join' hands -------, who sing songs-

w h o _ _ w r i t e t h ~ \ h l ~ ~ ~ ' put down - -

put right who play the must~ and shown who sunmi'iil the barracks How t o Behave who clown with children

who weave coloured ribbons between the barbed wire.'" -

The symbolic protests of "Women For Life of Earth" were, precisely, charac$rized by "a

continued shifting from top t o bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and

travesties,." designed t o disconcert masculine authority. Creenham women demonstrated thew

rejection of militarism by, literally, turning their backs on the army during the "Women

Turn Their Backs on War Action" at the ~Falkland 4victor)l para e . They reversed patnarchical 1 wisdom about penis-envy with slogans such as "War is Menstruation Envy", mocked

military pride with signs saying "Take The Toys 'Away From The Boys"; and beside the

- sign reading "Welcome RAF Grgenham Cornmon: 501st Tactical Missile Wing. Commander:

/ Col. Robert M. Thompson.' Poised to Deter: Quick To React," they posted a counter-sign:

"Welcome: Women's Peace Camp Greenham Common. ' N o Commanders: Poised With the

' Truth. Quick To Stop Pretending."

" What makes the term "carnival" peculiarly appropriate is that many of the Creenham

actions were very funny. As a protestor wrote:

There is a ludicrous side to rit too: it is hard to take seriously a top secur~ty ,

base in which women hijack buses, sit inside nuclear missile launcher c a h , . rollerskate down runways and cycle inside the perimeter fence. It's not

surprising they pretend w e don't exist. It's one way of hoping the embarrassment will g o away. l a ' -

Playful subversions of nuclear authority sometimes approached the level of high comedy;. q

some entries in At the Wire's diar), of the camp read: "7 'Feb. Over 100 Women enter - - - base as snakes"; "1 April. 200 women enter the base disguised as furry animals to have "

a picnic?", "27 April. Citadel locks action: all gates padlocked by women ""' Thrs last enty

perhaps has to be seen as it is recorded 2 the documentar) film Carr)l Creenham - Home

to be fully a b p r e ~ i a t e d . " ~ A small group of women shut Greenham's mam gate from the

outside f a n unbreakable nCitadelq' padlock, imprisoning the military within their ow" /

fortificztions. After initially good-humoured attempts to remove' the lock with successively

larger pain of bolt cutters, increasingly irate security ,forces determine to, resolve the issue

by toforce majeure. A dozen. policemen hurl themselves against the gate in a running

charge. The lock holds--but the entire gate falls off its hinges, leaving Britain's most

thickly defended security installation open to the world: a moment, not just of carnival,

but of pure Keystone Cops. d

Yet this carnivalesque protest was staged by women motivated by dread of an

appalling holocaust. And against any tendency to romanticize the Camp's utopian ve3e has

to be tallied the sheer hardship of life on the wire: inadequate shelter, wet, cold, lack of

privacy, excruciating boredom, physical and, verb41 attacks from soldiers and local youths,

hit-and-run tactics by army drivers, "zapping" by sickening and disorienting low-level

microelectronic beams, and constsnt legal prosecution.190 Indeed, what sharply distinguishes

Greenham's protest from Bakhtir:'~ carkivd is that it was punishable. Carnival is. licensed

disorder--what Eagleton terms "a permissible rupture of hegemony."191 Greenham was rank /

revolt. Nucleophallogocentricisrn ultimately protected itself with the rigour of the law, and 1 -

the women' who defied it faced confiscation of the~r personal property, fines, restraining

orders, and jail sentences.

Paradoxically, it was this legal punishment that allowed .the protestors to stage their .

most effectwe subversions. In trial) after tri$, women continued their flamboyant

contestation of patriarchal logic at the very moment they, and the British /public, were

meant to-be most impressed by the gravity of their crimes. Greenham protestors

I produced 'a series of courtroom scenes that repeated the drama played out at the base.

Women refused to iake the oath, saying that they would swear only "by the Goddess." I

Some read poems aloud:

What do you du the animal called flies screaming in

with someone like me human who, all gut, intestines: wings, the. face of official logic

unrepententantly and happily dissident t o join her frierrds w h o were occupying that sentry bux -

- at the entrance t o this monster that all my life has breached my peace. What d o ycil do when I admit that I did -nothi wrong and tell you that after two men got hold of me

. and dragged me back t o the gate, I ran to the side gate laughing

, "\ slid the latch and ran right in again and' that t he only way I can b e stopped is t o silence me by death for I am the carly warning system because I've seen t o o much. What d o you d a with a revolutionary who carries no gun and admits t o having fun.19*

Some of these irruptions of carnival atmosphere into the courts (such as the repeated

trials of o n e "Bridget Evans," whose name was adopted by many otherwise anonymous

Greenham women) simply spoofed the legal system. But at other moments, the trials gave

the protestors a forum i!$- announce the the deadly seriousness which underlay all

the ingenious clowning. Charges of "breaching the peace" and sentences that had women

"bound over to keep the peace" provided a rich opportunity for semiotic reversal. As one

Greenham woman asked her judge:

What are you doing t o keep the peace? The power you are using is supporting nuclear weapons. It supports binding women's voices, binding our minds and bodies in prison so,our voices cannot be heard. So -our warning of death is being repressed. But w e cannot be silenced. And I cannot be bound over. I am asking you t o keep the peace. We are not on tr~al you are.193

5. Web Weaving --

~ h e ' feminist order Greenham opposed to nucleophallogocentricism was symbolized by the

spider-web. Greenham Women Everywhere carries at each of its chapter-headings a small

black-and-white graphic of an web, and states that "The symbol most closely asjociated , ' 0

with the women's peace movemen: is the weaving of web^."'^' Photographs of the peace

camps show webs made from wool and twine festooned everywhere: trailing from the

t r w s and gorse near the shelters; woven into the mesh of the wire fence and across the @

gates of the base; carried overhead in demonstr;ations; cast GeFpolie and s o l d i T d u r i n g a -

acts of civil disobedience; and flown above the base attached t o helium balloons. These -- --

webs, which in their frailty, organicism, complexity, and colourfulness s tood in such

contrast to the stee!-grey, rigid linearity of "the wire," assumed a radiating mutiplicity of

meanings, then~selves becoming the focus for a dense* "web" of associations invoking both

the means and the ends of the Greenham protest. . -

This symbolism was strange and disconcerting even t o some Greenham sbpporters.

On the Perimeter records how: 7 -

At Green gaie, I saw my first web. It was tiny and made of blue wool and . attached t o the branch of a tree: This was what the young girls apparently loved. It had been very cleverly woven, but it still seemed a bad peace ,

t simbol. Many people have a terrible fear of spiders. Webs are sticky, and you . get caught i- Once caught in a web, metaphorically, you die. The peace women saw the web as a symbol of strength. Although composedl of feeble strands, each added strand adds strength to the web. The explanation was all right, but as SQ few people knew it, the web seemed a -very B

unfortunate peace symbol. 195 R

Such criticism ignores the depth of feminist tradition drawn together in th'e web symbol.

Aracnophobia is closely connected with mysogny: in a phallogocentric culture; fear and

loathing of spiders and fear and loathing of women have gone hand in hand. Mary Daly's

GyntEcology traces the mythic roots of this i den t i f i~a t i0n . l~~ Arachne, Daly observes, was

transformed into a spider by Athene (the archetypal man-made woman, born from the

head of Zeus) for weaving tapestries which showed the errors, rather than the triumphs,

of the patriarchal Olympians. She points out that within numerous Amerindian .mythologies

the "Cosmic Mother" takes the form of a spider. The association between femininity and

spiders is reinforced zooologically, by the mating behaviour of female arachnids, and

sociallb, by the -status of spinning and weaving as traditionally female occupation, with

"gpinster" onginally serving as a generic term for all unmarried women. The "terrible fears" I

< - about spider-webs which allegedly make them a "bad peace sign" thus appear as a

displaced version of men's "terrible fears" about women, uncannily echoing the the

"k \ -traditional l R m y of mysogynist accusations: sticw, mMmppTng, d ~ l j K ~ S ~ ~ F I ~ t , the : t .

reclamation and revaluation of spiderliness is an appropriate metaphor for the revaluation -

* - I

'and redefinition of gender roles attempted by the Greenham womtn.

,. - . ,

, - The webs' represent an alternative to the divisive, fence-like barriers of patriarchy. - At

the Wire cites the words of two women peace activists from Hartford. Connecticut, who _i-

wove a web around the headqu&ers of the largest US defence contractor and, when

police cut the wire with knives and arrested them, made this statement:

"Women have traditionally made connections, and men have consistently torn , and destroyed them. We hope they will learn to make connections.19'

web weaving became a metaphor for numerous different, but overlapping kinds feminist

. connection-making.

One level of this connection-making was organizational. The web symbolized a

strategy for subverting nuclear arms by linking together multiple points of opposition. The

authors gf Greenham Women Everywhere write:

Each link in a web is fragile, but woven together creates a strong an6 coherent whole. A web with few lin,ks 1s weak and can be broken, but the

- more threads it is composed of, the greater its strength. It makes a very good analogy for the way in which wolnen have rejuvenated the peace movement. By connections made through many diverse channels, a wrdespread network has grown up bf women committed to work~ng for peace. Creenham Common's women's peace camp has been one thread in the formation of this netwbrk'. . . . 1 9 8

, The process of polltical "networkrng," repudrating h~erarch~cal, top-down organrzatlon in

favour of lateral ties between autonomous groups, was to become a hallmark of

Greenham and the entire women's peace movement. It was realised at the base itself,

where the protest coordinated itself without formal leadership, and extended from Newbury

nationally and internationally. Metaphoric web-weaving (the multiplying of lines of support

and com~unication) also multiplied literal (wool and twine) web-weavmg as nuclear bases

all over America and Europ-e found themselves decorated with the spidery insignia of

feminist pacificism. At Comiso, NATO's Cruise missile site in Sicily, Creenham activists 'w

-. joined with Idian w m e n to weave a huge multi-colmseci woolen -wetfhat--tho-

1 G over the Carabanieri guarding the base. 199 And Greenham's own webs were partial u 2

inspired by the Wornens Pentagon of 1982, during which members of SONG

(Spinsters Opposed to Nuclear Genocide) succeeded in weaving shut the doon of the

United States' Department of Defense. In this way the, webs hanging on the wire at

~reenkam Common both derived from and were copied in a proliferation 3 women's

peace actions, and themselves became the strands in a much larger planetary ,web-weaving I

exercise.

At another level, web-making represented not only strategy but tactics. Alluding to

the example of the Women's Pentagon Action, Greenham Women Everywhere suggests that - t ke \web is important emblem, k

I . . . partly because it sets up such d clear opposition. Police . . . are trained ' to deal with force and aggression, not to extricate themsehes from woolen

webs. %us the confrontation that develops is very direct yet non-violent and on women's terms. Images of gates shut with wool rather than iron bolts, and women being lifted out of webs are graphic expressions of polarized

\ philosophies: those planning nbclear destruction, a"d those determined \ pursue life.':

/ -- - --

The soft resilience of spider thieads signliies the practice of civil disobedience pitting \ - pacificism, flexibility and patience against coercive force.

* t

. At yet another level, the web signifies the reconstruction of a fragmented social

Aorder. Anti-nuclear iemin~sm Ges together issues which are conventionally separated-rape,

'the economic exploitation of women, ecological despoliation, nucleai" rniitarism-into an .-

overall critique of patrarchy.'O1 It insists that "the personal is ,political." The web can thus

be taken as signifying a. radical' conviction that it 'is the whole system of phallocratic

domination, rather than merely isolated aspects of it, which has to be undone. Conversely,

the web also stands for the integrated and healed culture which the Greenham protestors

hope feminism tan produce. One Greenham protestor associates herself with the

Amerindian "Cosmic Mother" that Paly writes of:

We are all interdependent, we are all res-e for each a h - how-$elite- -d the strands, how strong the web. The ancient spider goddess weaving tirelessly

the web of life, again and again, as often as it is needed. Never stopping, never hesitating, working to tirelessly to build again what was broken or tom

, or destroyed . . . . We will remuve whatever lies of force or violence have got caught, we will unravel

202

Many of the Greenham ,protestors

i.n her poem "Natural Resources".:

This is what I am: watching rebuild--"patently," h e y say

But I recognize in her impatience my own--

and weave again whatever holes were tom in it. .

.-+. '

evidently share the identification Adrienne Rich proposes C"

a the spider

. . the passibn tb make and make again +

where such unmaking reignszo3 L

Daly

- weave, as

patriarchal

Creenham

points ou! that the. word "text" finds it>_ origins in the Latin "texere," to

,/ does "textile," and comments on. the* "irony in this split of meaning" "In

tradition, sewing and spinning are for girls: books are for boys."'O' The

texts defy this split. On the one hand, they record the radicalizition of sewing

and spinning, and their transfonnation from domestic handicraft to gesture of political

'revolt. On -the other, by publicizing these acts of insurgent weaving in writings, films,

posters they intervene in the patriarchal world of "books," interrupting the male hegemony

of nuclear discourse. There is, moreover, a neatly recursive quality to Greenham Women

Everywhere's or - - - At the Wire's reporting of Greenham's web-symbolism, for these iexts can

\ themselves be seen metaphorically as part of the web-weaving process. It is In these texts

- that the intellectual and intuit+e "connections" and "links" of the feminist anti-nuclear

synthesis are inscribed; their publication is part of the "networking" process by which the

protestors contact sympathisers and supporters; to narrate Creenham is to "spin a yam,"

or as At the W~re puts ~ t , "an attempt at captLrlng moments of women's expertence. - - - during an open-ended story, with the voices of individual women woven together into the

continual fabric that is Creenham."20s Creenham writings constitute a,meta-web of words

about webs.

6. Greenham women -

The most .powerful symbols produced by thex protest at Newbury were, h o ever, not the Y1 +wire, nor the webs, but the inhabitants of the peace camps themselves: the "Greenham

women." Photographs in & % and Creenham Women ~ ie rywhere show them,

densely swathed in and anoraks, "made up" only with the peace signs painted

across their faces, keeping vigil outside t h e gates, clambering over wire fences, dancing on ,

silos, dragged by police to waiting vans--figures of a double transgression, simultaneously i

defying the codes of both "femininity" and "citizenship." Individually, these protestors

"were 'just 'women' and they shared %- terrpr of 'nukes' and tha t . was all they had t o

unify them."Io6 ColIe~t ;~e ly , t h y . were to attain global stature as emblems of one of the . .

.e - most significant political alliances of the 7980s--the conjugation of feminism and

disarmament. ' .

At the Wire concisely. states the position with which - - - be generally identified: "Which comes first, disarmament or

bne or the other--prioritising. We say you can't have one

the Greenham protest was t o

feminism? It always had t o be

without the other."207 This

assertion proved zontroversial. From within the peace movement, there were numerous

accusations that Greenham's feminism was divisive or superfluous--"more anti-men than

anti-missile." In the women's movement, voices were raised .warning that the sudden

topicality of nuclear disarmament diverted energies from more specifically feminist

issues--abortion, lesbian rights ~iole$e against women--and amounted t o cooption."'

Greenham women thus found themselves "criticized for being too feminist and for not

' being feminist e n ~ u g h . " ' ~ ? On. what grounds can it be said of peace and feminism that

"you can't have one , withoA the other?"

Two major, and very different, answers t o this question are h e a r d i~ -€heGreer tha&

texts. The first proposes women are inhetently more pacific than men. In one version,

this pqsition assumes that mothering and childraising -are natural female activities: such -.

procreative, nurturing functions, i t is argued, makes violence instinctually *abhorrant t o

women. Additionally--or alternatively--the case for innate ietiia!e pacificism is sometimes

given a metaphysical aspect, and rooted in:

. . . a basic spiritual faith in the ~ e a t i v e . 4 W w w i n g power o f women, In women's energy together as a counterspell t o the deadly enchantments of the patriarchy210

This feminist spirituality, which was t o provide some ,of Creenham's most vivid

iconography, invokes "the Goddess" in oppositon t o the patriarchal God, revives traditions

of witchcraft, and cultivates an interest in in allegedly pacific prehistoric matriarchal \

i societies. In this vein can also be included writings that resort t o Jui gian theories of

"anima" and "animus" t o account for what is seen .as an archetypal affinity between . women and peace. Whether iri. its biological or mystical version, this line of thought

essentialises gender identity: i t posits a natural, primordial differentiatior! o f male and - .

s' female attitudes t o violence and aggression.

: -

The alternative position connects ,,women and peace not on the bas~s of b~ology,

but of socialization: ,

Women are not inherently non-violent: they are traditionally oppressed and, a>. -

an op'pressed group, have often turned their anger and violence in ,upon . , . .

.themselves. NO; are men inherently violent: they are institutionally and structurally dominant, and retain that dominance through ',the cultivation of I

toughness and violence. Women are not "Earth Mothers" who will save the planet from the deadly games o fve the boys--this too is part o f the support and % .

nurture" role that women are given in the worldn1

Women, it is argued, tend t o be less violent than men because they have been . I

6 systemically excluded from positrons of power and dominatron, and asslgned tasks ihar

place a premium o n the development of empathy, compassion, and eooperat~on Th~s

exclusion is the basis of patriarchal power--but also of the femrnist challenge to rts ,

have l e s s to lose by their dimtkment. and a better capacity to envisage i

than rhr m n who b e e r t conditioned within them. The basis of the women's peace ,

rnorcmccf 15 defrned, nor as an tntrinsirr femaleness, but as a constructed femininity, not v

n~fwal!y p e n , but clrffura& wrrtfen '" T h i s is an of anti-nuclear feminism that has an

wit-nuciear xnse ( z i gender--in thal i d rejects belief in ' a fixed core or essence to

-w%.-*rl~ns and fernrntne

Most at ?he texts f e d here contain statements representative of

Greenham rexts i s polyphonic: they are either

both positions. For .

anthologies. or

knit together a

srrir-% t t t ~ ~ C C ~ O W S . a n a l y s ~ ~ or poems by many others Such texts emphasize the striking . <

cinrrvt! ai ternale attttudes and belteis within the Peace Camp:

s ?iottmgharn mtncr's d e told me. while we were irnking arms in front of a Itnr OI pohcr at Greenham. that' she was "led up with webs, mysticism and rnenrtrulttmn " I told her that yelltrig ."Maggit Thatcher's boo! boys" at the - p&rcr ddn'r make them any eater to deai with. t

f%rpfa*np' this di . \~rr i t ) . ' Cr~nfiam lexrs carefulfy avoid resotving i t by asserting a "correct

f r r w * .f%m inwxht not "C,reenfi;un Woman" but "~reGnharn Women." Thrs refusal to C

rmpmt- av Itamopt~nmn~, authori:atwe penpect~ve on the protest reflects the poiit~cal

ci~nwrt~crrt that a pot~;vocal, decentred srganization. ci,:;pable of tolerating internal difference

$5 c iwactcr~~: tea lh fernallst a t d constitutes an escrttia! aspect of opposition to the rigid \ I

hrmarzhrrs ni p)s$k#ratrr cufture kiormver, it &sty embodies a choice to affi& a

ccxnnwn prwnd a srsrcrhord rather than concentrating on dws~ons between women -

1 ~ : clrtrctcn? thcirnes ~i gender idcntih t-me p~ofcund implications lor both' f<etninirts

patriarchy's tendency to represent war a the anahmieal destinyof- men, -arr&thr

preservation of life as the biological fate of women. Greenham certainly set out to reverse

the values attached t o this distinction, assbrting the superiori& of. peaceful women over

warlike men. But latent within its symbolism and iconography was the danger of reitying < the gender distinctions marked ou t by "the wirew--menhuarlscience on o n e side, women/

peace1 nature o n the other--and ratifying t'hese opposWms as organic and ~mmutable.

Representation of worhen as eternal nurturers and peacemakers, and the identif~cation ot .,

' femininity with -"n,aIure." leaves us, at source, iwth a fundamental stasrs of ongrnal

, difference. and a bioiogism that has always been used against social change

In contrast. a posttron whrch sees gender attrtudrs to pcact* and u.,ir ds tult~rmllt

inscribed recognizes that rnese oppositions G a y be re-written. This is a pctsi!~on cxpr+t.d

in many (probably the majority) of Greenharn texts It rnvolve\ d double, mc>vernpnt .+ simultaneous assertion and deconstructron of the d~fieren'ce between men and women

. I

Gender roles are defined as historically determined, yet utimately mobile and changeable,

susceptible t o change and reconstruction. This on the o n e hand involves ackno~:ledgement

of a hazard For i t implies that, since women are not intrinsicall) p~acciul the nurltaar

state may rn fact rnilttartze femrntnit) a poss~brltty htghlrghted b) recent det)atc o v t ~ the

allocatron of women to combat roles tn NATO arrnrrs : I 4 But rt also rytognrm\ *

opportunrq 1-81 that I! holds out hope rnascullne attrtudcs tw \*a ma\ tw trms!orrncd

7: Common Ground? -

The view of gender identity as written. not natural, ailo ow^ a better recognltlon of the

compkwt> actual!\ rn the Creenhatn t t * k t s For a\ !he\ thrimselvfbs d>iw.

tnscnplron of one "the \vrre" as male and the other as ternalp rocild c ~ r h be

ar-proximate Mascutme and fernrnrne attit-udes 'to rnilttarrsm alivavs appedr rornpkcated d r d

cross-witten by codes oi dass a n h a c c . There was a sharp troy that thd' Creenharn

women's arch o p e p e n t was Britain's "Iran Lady"; many of the police a f f i c e ~ n d - g u a r d s *

?..

who arrested protestors were themselves women; and the Peace Camp received support

both from individual men, and anti-nuclear organizations, such as CND and EMD, which '

could fairly be described as male-dominated. The schematic opposition, "men and war"

versus "women and peace" thus constantly became frayed and tangled, as many Greenham

women acknowledged. -- O n the Perimeter describes 8ne protestor's perception:

She felt that at he'art, most men worshipped weapons, force and power, and i t was difficult for them to understand w h y many women loathed and feared these particular manifestations of masculinity. She accepted that many women also supported the male ethic and were even more weapon-worshipping than their fathers and husbands. Such women would obviously loathe the whole ~dea of, the camp She realized there were also many men who were In complete sympathy with the peace women, and would fit in very well at Creenham, but i t had seemed impossible to make an exclusive selection."' a -. --. --*

.. 1Ge identification o f femininity and p ce stands "men worshipped weapons,' force and f=

IYI"'. " Yet at the same time, i t i s ~ G V J P I . " "women loathed and feared these rnanifesta -

subject to qualification: "many men *. . . were in compieie sympathy with the peace '

camp.y while "man); women also supported the male ethic." It i s not 'unassailable

fact--one cannot ignore Thatcher. But nor is .it fiction--for one' cannot deny the .

ovenvhdm~ng masculinity cf the nuclear establishment,. nor the astounding power of the I

, feminist anti-militarism demonstrated at Newbury.

This present wntrng IS itself implicated in these complex~tigs For a text that -c

celebrates the Greenham protest and carrtes a masculme signature inscribes itself w~thrn an

obv~ous double-bind I t places rtself. metaphoncally. on "the other side of the fence'' i rom

the Bnt~sh paratroopers who nightly shouted abuse at the Creenham Peace Camp. This is ,

, P

the veq side trom which men, and masculine discourse, were specifically excluded when

the Camp byas declared ior "wornen only" some six months after its first establishment 1

Amongst the arguments advanced ior. this move were the fact that women have always

been silenced bv male authority: that i t is vital for women to have spaces in which to

organize autonomously: . . that men tend to have ' less tolerance for non-hierarchical 1

organization; and, finally and simply, that there were lots of other nuclear _ b a s e _ F L t ~ ~ r n i

to protest at if women wanted to be on their own at Greenham. And to this writer,

such reasons seem good ones. To aff~rrn that gender differences are cultl~rally constructed

i s not to pretend that they are insubstantial: "at this point in histor) there are difference5 1

Setween men and women that no amount o f wanting. to be 'people first' will &ash

Moreover. some of these arguments need onl) be sl~ghtl\, rrphrdsed 'to cortstttuti- d '' - critique, not only o f male presence at Greenham, but of male wrrtmg about Greenham

For there- is a real danger in ;a masculine voice, however sympathetic and anti-riuckar. ', .

seeking, again. to "speak for" wbmen, represent the~r c-onctw5, approprldtc the11

activities--and hence subtly reimposec> the boundarie-s of n~deo~ha l l o~occn t r i c i sm In wrtt~ng -

a critical tribute to the Creenham protest, awareness of- this, problem has m d e i t

peculiarly easy for me to identib, with the male supporters oi the Cmcnham women

&scribed in in - - O n the Perimeter, who when they arnved at the Peace Camp wlth vanous

gifts;

kept a d~stance, looking embarrassed and clutching sets of pla;tlc' spoctns and polythene as i f ,they beheved that there was an ~ n v i s i b l ~ and rndg~cal nng sunoundidg the Cyenham women which no hale could pass wtth ~ m ~ b n ~ t ~ "'

Yet there i s a sense in ~ l h i c h such deferential speechlessness i s merely the .obverse al , ,

the paratroopers' sexist, insults. I t risks lapsing into the exaggerated and ir~smcertt reverence I

that has always been -the traditional complement of a dominant mysugnyhe i the r of these

stereotypical attitudes seem an appropriate response to a protest which so deeply- J

~ h a l t e n ~ e s established models o f mas;ulinity. -A better option, for the men of the peace

movement i s to Isten to, speak to, and learn from their antmuclear sisters, as allies in

.struggles that are at once necessaril) d~st~nct. and cruciall, commori

CHAPTER V

NAMING STAR W ~ R S 4

1. "A Long l Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, 2 Away" - - --

In February ,of 1986, a Washington District Court passed judgement o n a suit fqr

infrlngement of copyright brought by Lucasfilms Iqc. against five organizations that had .

used the name "star-'Wars" in television commercials supporting and opposing the Strategic * . - -

~ e l e n i e lnitlatlve. Judge Cerhard Cessel dismissed the case. "~ in& lonathm Swift's time,"

he noted. "crel~tors of flctlonal worlds have seen thelr vocabular). for fantas). appropriated - to describe real i~\*."~" ' There can be few more thoroughgoing instances of .such I

I ,

approprration than the identification o f the Reagan administration's plans for space based

anfl-nuclear defence wi th . George Lucas' films. Indeed. the epic science-fiction cycle--Star - M'ars itselfc and its sequel: .The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, along

SF-. - i -- ----- , . w t h I ~ S many Imitations, and the closely' associated craze for space-war video games--can a

be said to constitute the nucleai text (in this case, a cinematic 1*4ext'') through which

popular culture has mediated the advent of space weaponry to the North ~mer i can ' i

public : I c

I I

Th~s mediatron has 'been a complex process. Star Wars, released in 1'977, actually -- predates SDI and the -whole upsurge o f nuclear concern charted ~n <earlier *hapters.""t

can thus be claimed that when SDI was announced in 1983, the new discourse on space - -

weaponry captured, asd i t were. the pre'-existir)g imagery of Star Wass and. turned it to -- - - 'unexpected use. But equally, -- Star Wars can be seen as an anticipation !of SDI. For the

fi lm is. 'as I wi21 argue, a cultural produci oi the very tendencies--the thrust toward a

C domesttc conservat~sm, post-Vietnam militarist revival, nostalgic desire ior" a lost era of

global American supremacy-that o n a poliiical plane brought to power - the Reaganite

repime whose nuclear programs culminate in ~ b l . * ~ l What I. want t o plot here is how this

double process of anticipation and appropriation establishes a multiple set of affinities

connecting *Star -- Wars with SDI, and sets up what Edward Said would term a relationship .

of "affiliationw--"a network of %implicit cultural associations"-hetween film and weapony.'",- - - e

At first glance, the relation appears to be one between- a fiction and a reality: Star - Wars is airy escapism, a fantasy of 'war in space, mere imagination--SDI a matter of - massive material investment, involving momentous decisions and millions of Itves'. yet' In d

8 Star Wars'and SDI are both fictions. For the latter is, in the Presid'ent's word\, a / way1 - -

"vision*' and a ,"dream," its promise of an infallible space defence against the Bomb a

.hypotKesis 'whose real~zation depends upon not just one but a whole serler 01 rctentif~c . .,

breakthroughs and as yet unattained (perhaps unattarnable)

is a prbdigous speculation, a gamble on the feasibil~t), of weapons that were until1 . recently, as one advocate admitted, only "the tuff of science ftct~on.""~ It 1s a utopia-or .

e 0 .

' a chimera. And i t i s precisely tks lictive aspect of SQI that ~ t s cr~trcs meant (6 hrghltght d x

when they first dubbed the project "Staryars," .In a derogatory designatbn intended to ,

implausibil~ty, the un-reality, of the scheme i

point to the fantastic

But the allusion

is no? less, but more

backfired badly. For there 1s a sense In which

real than SDI, the detente plan The pervasrve

Star War\, tht. film, --

films on ,American culture, -where they h$e h id what jay Gouldrng *terms an , s o

"ovenvhelm~ngly anaphmrc effect"' on toy .stores, televlsmn programs, cart0011 slr~ps, vldeO*

games, popular music and breakfast cereals, has made them suih. a ubiquitous, quotidren

component of popular co~sciousnesS- that the;, have actually attamed a familrarity and*

tangibility far surpasssing that achieved bjr the. remote calculations of nuclear, phys~crsts.~~'

1 -' I ,

Because oi th~s, .the desigAation of- SDI a5 "Star War;" carrter w~th i t connotations quite I

contrary to tho& intended by i t s oppon;&, and most welcome to the Presrdent, tor it

bestows on the as-yet-unachieved Pentagon plan all the substantiality and factrcity of Lucas*

cinematically "realiz&dn . fantas)..

And indeed, the title "Star Wars" was swiftly accepted by-advocates of SDI, and

assimilated into their propaganda. Even before the official adoption of the scheme, internal

US' Defense Department pubkations had boasted of the coming laser technologies in e

articles entitled "May The Force Be With You":

Once you marveled at fictional space-age heroes and their Amazing Ray Guns. Soon i t 'may turnabout-with 'Buck, Kirk and Luke smacking their lips at the prospect of lpoking atbyour tech (sic) manuals.236 \

Once SDI had beco*ke "Star Wars" lames lonson, its scientific director, said of the name,

0 . c "Origmally, we thought it was unfortunate: now we like it. It's almost a cult OW.""^

Asked what he thought of the term, Lieutenant General James A. Abrahamson, the -r \ -

project's military commander, i s reported as answering, "You know,' its all the wrong

connotation for the program": then-breaking 'into a grin--"Except thai the good guys won ,

and (hk force is with us.*"22' And in 1985 Reagan himself was too conclude a speech on * , *

SD! td the National Space Club with the words ". . . in this struggle, i f you'll pardon

my '~ealing a film line, 'The force i S with ? d

This last allusjon is of *especial interest, for "Star Wars" has b'een, in an

exceptionally intimate way, President Reagan's own project. And the President embodies the - .

conflation of the cinematic and h e political in North American culture, his charismatic

personalit) a ,tissue of celluloid allusions and identities now played back "for real" to an

adoring audience. It i s hardly surprising, therefore, that in Reagan's first, televised .

announcement of SDI it yas pxsible ,to detect traces of an earlier, I f more, obscure,

performance, in whrch, as the star of Warner Brothers' 1940 melodrama Murder in the Air, p a - - -

, . . the speaker had figured as "Brass Banford," a young' American officer entrusted with the '

&. ,

secret of "the mertia projectw--a "super weapon" whose mysteiious 'electronic rays ,

Not only makes the United States invincible in war, but in doing so promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered, which is the LI

hope and prayer of all thinking people. . . . the greatest war weapon ever ~hynted, which, b!. the way, is the exclusive property of Uncle Sam.". - .

< F i f h years later. "Brass Banford" had retu-ned to play in a new, Pentagon-sponsored saga - 2

- * of laser-weaponry, which was 'in turn t o take its name from a-box-office hit--thus neat!!!

' completing kn uncanny circuit between Hollywood and the militayindustrial compleh. "

2: Special Effects . - - ~. *a i o

-"Let me share with you a. vision of the .4uture which offers hope," said the President: ,-

. Let us turn t o the very strengths in techndogy that ha\& spawned our great '

industiial base and tY-11 have given us the qual~ty of jife we- enjoy today. . - I call o n the scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons to' turn their

great. tal-thy cause of mankind andn world peace 40 give 'us the means 9

of rendering these' nudear weapon4 impotent and obselete "' w

a *

N o more striking illystration t ~ u l d be asked tor Ernest Mandel's thesis ghat '%+ef in thy 9

3 B

" a

omnipotence o f technology is the specific form of bourgeoi; ideobg). i n , late

capitalism."232 And while SDI offers space weapons as a technological fix *for the

threat, Star Wars creates an aesthetics for that fechnology, the aesthetics, of "special -- effects."

I a .

.h . .

' I .

\. The very opening shot of the film,- in which the vast bulk of an lmper~al

3 -/' d

space-cruiser slowly looms over the audience. gradually engulfing the entire screen as ~t

advance; from right t o - left, establishes its spectacular celebration of futuristic rniiitar). - technology. The relation with SDI here is, at one level, immepiate and obv~ous the

. b

spqce-cryisers, star-figh~ers and death-beams of -- Star Wars are displaced and extrapblated K I

v&sions 'of a ' real-life Pentagon wizardy of space-shuttles, hunter-k~ller satellites, pop-up

submarine-launkhed interceptor weapons, infrared aerosol sprays,' orbital relay mirrors and % I

nuclear pumped 'x-ray lasers. Indeed, it is likely that the animated graph~cs with whkh. the

US Defense Department asstduously supplikd television news networks, showmg lasets . '= effodessly ohooting b o w ~ l h o ! e fleets of sov~et &issiks, appeared to many in thqr .

, '

'audience as merely- crude versions o i scenarios already ,brought t o them by Lucasfilrns. a

* i

0 1

I ' a I

B~t .~ the affinity extends deeper than this.' As Robin wood has argued, the

experievdi of viewing Star Wars invites simultaneous awareness of two levels of ,

/' technology-the technology on-screen, and the technology qff-screen, "tbe diegetic wonders / *

. /' , within the narrative, and the extradiegetic wonders of Hollywood's special effects

l j j j i department.""' The on-screen technology is military: the off-screen technology cinematic.

/ But the two are not unrelated. he latter, an elaborate studio deployment of I

computerization,' miniaturizationto laser-beams and electronic imaging devices, is itself largely I

derivative from high-tech military research, a "spin-off" of the real-life .armaments programs

- d

of which the on-screen technology provides an imaginative repre~entation.~~' Star Wars -- . 1

connection with SDI is thus not merely thematic, but formal, the means of production 0 .

employed in ~u;asfilms special effects department and Lawrence Liwrrnorq's

weapons-laboratories not all that far apart. 8 6 . ..

What the off-screen te~hnology of special effects produces on-screen is a militarized 9 0

"machine' ambience."7J5 A whole range of deyices-the 70mm film, the overwhelming $8. .'

volume of Dolby quadraphonic sound, the illusions of extreme speed, abrupt accelt;ation, ' , a

g~gantic size, dazzling rght, and planet-consuking explosions-dl Goik to impose dn the

spectator the sense of being situated within the contpl rooms of ipace-shjps and , L Y

' death-stars, positioned inside an environment of interstellar war, d6ey qeate, as Don Rubey . L

puts it.

. . . an illusion of and control, of the ability to escape the limitdions of our bodies . . . to take' on the nature of our machines. and share &ejr power and relative invulnerability. . . . Star. Wars. is the first, movie of an age -- of electronic combat, a prediction of what war will feel like for combatants

completely encapsulated in technology, like the soldiers of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

" Writing in 1978. Rubey correctly related this *depiction to the historically recent

.episode oi, air warfare over Vietnam, and the experiences of omnipotent

control gbwingly , -

described by the pilots who devastated South East Asia from the safety *

of their electronic co*ckpits. But the advent of SDI obliges us t o update this reference, - --

and acknowledge the direct relevance of -- Star Wan' outer-space setting to contemporary ,

militarism. For what SDI offers is, on a grahd scale, the very sense of technological

power and invuverability simulated by Star Wars' special- effects. It is a scheme by which

not merely individual pilots, but entire populations will be encapsulated within the shield

of automated defense systems. In 'this light, -- Star Wars can be read as offering a

metaphoric representation of the humanly inexperiencable event of nuclear combat in

space, romanticized by the anachronistic addition o f single-combats and chivalric adventure.

Even the expense of Lucaiilms' special effects, the s w e of reckless. prod~gal extravagance

f l

which is, as Wood notes, essential t o the spectacular appeal of -- Star Wars. underlines the

connection?with SDI: if 'North America can afford $30 million io simulate srpdce war, and

$350 million to watch it, surely' we will pay $300 billion for the real thing!"'

3. The Hlgh Fronfier --

An early version of SDI bore the name "High Frontier," and although the plan Itself was .

rejected for a more sophisticated variant, the metaphor has remained central to the

discourse of space-weapons. Tu inscribe space as the West's new "frontier" is to -'project

onto it one of the most potent images in North Americzn culture, designating i t ac

territory availablemefor violent appropriat~on and colonization, as an .arena for martral and

heroic deeds, and as a line of defence. It at once associates the' rnterstellar vacuum w~th $

. c the Indian Frontier o f the Old West, and etches across it the EastMlest polarization o f

the New Cold War. The new frontier is "high" because it is lofty and distant, because its

exploitation req ires the development of "highw--that IS, advanced--technology. and also J 3 because it constitutes the "hrgh ground" that must be controlled to ensure milltar),

command of the planet. A set of resonances are thus establtshed between nukespeak, 0

W e s t i r n L and space-opera. The Sovret enemy whose nuclear attack must b i beaten back

\ - C

from the astral ramparts of Fortress America cohnotatively assumes the attributes of both

Red Indian and alien: the Nuclear Other," whom w e encountered in ---- The Third World War,

reappears wearing the composite ~fea tures of commie, savage, and bug-eyed monster.,

Star Wars can be seen as the culture industry's technicolour amplification o n the -7

official metaphor of space as "frontier." As Lucas himself writes, his film's genealogy,

"Came all the way down through the W e ~ t e r n . " ~ ' ~ In its fictional world, outer space

appears, as Goulding puts it, "not much different from the wild, unconquered Western US

of the 1800's." complete with saloons, shoot-outs, strange aboriginals, and intergalactic

bounty hunters."' And, hs s o many reviews attest, the plot requires little more summar),

than that that conveyed in ' t he time-honoured phrase "white hats versus' b l q k hats." But

superimposed' on this "Western" 'narrative are lightly encrypted allusions to contemporary ,

geopolitics. The grey uniforms of the evil Empire's commanders invoke Soviet military ,

styles; Darth Vader draws heavily on the conventional holly wood^ depiction of the ruthless

KGB commissar; and Hans Solo and Luke Skywalker--capitalist individualism -and liberal

idealism personified--are quintessentially American. The tidiness of the Cold War analogy at

fir-t s e e F s disrupted by the film's celebration of guerilla warfare: the heroes are "Rebels",

and their jungle base resembles Managua o r $he Mekong more than Washington. But

Lucas presents a fictional anticipation not only of SDI, but also of the Reaganite doctrine

of Low-lntekity-Conflict as applied in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan. It appropriates ,

the glariour and efficacy of irregular warfare for use against the symbolic representatives

0 ' o'f the Soviet Empire. Solo and Skywalker may be "freedom-fighters," but they are

intergalactic contras, not space-age Sandin i~ tas . "~

In a dazzling sequerce of ideological gymnastics -- Star Wars thus recasts superpower , .

conflict in the idiom of frontier adventure, displaces .it into outer 'space, projects America's

identity' as a repressive imperial power entirely o n t o - its opponent , and represents "our

side" as the plucky, outgunned underdog struggling against a gigantic enemy Behemoth.

The affinity with official anti-Soviet discourse ,was not lost on ' t h e White .House: even

before the film gave it3 name to SDI, Reagan's aides had reportedly nicknamed the .

notorious address in which t h e President denounced the USSR as. the "focus of 'evil in

the modem world" as the "Darth Vader speech."''l As David Trend has observed, - Narrowing the gap between futuristic fantasies and complex world events permits the reduction of complex intertxational issues to a realm of simplistic figuration: Manichean battles of light against daikness, tales o f wilderness conquest and Manifest Destiny."' ,,

What highlights Star Wars' link with SDI, however, is its undcrlymg stram of nuclear 0 -- i . J

anxiety. For the whole plot revolves around the annihilator)., metaphorically nuclear, medace m

' of the Empire's Death Star. "I thought I heard a millior, voices cr). out in apon),." muses

, Obi-Wan-Ken-Obi as the Millenium Falcon hurtles through the debris of the atomized '

planet Alderaan. Yet at the same iime as the film obliquely articulates the terror of

planetary extinction, its melodramatic,-' upbeat narrative denies and dissipates these fears.

Like the advocates of "high. frontier" weaponry, Star !A& assures its audience that the

extermination issue can be brought t o a happy ending, not t& negotiation, but by nimble

extraterrestrial warriors prepared. for 'a showdown ,in outer space:

4. Sky Fathers -

The high frontier is patriarch heaven. SDI discourse is quintessentially nucleophallogocentric,

generated by a masculine military apparatus whose hierarchy descends from the patrtarchal

figure of the President through successive bureaucratic spokesmen to the scientists of the

space-weapons laboratories, amongst whose ranks women are almost completely absent."'

It is, m'oreover, a discourse that elaborates the image of the nuclear state as a fatherly

authority whose omnipotent might can be exercised to protect its ctvil~an "children" from

the menace of the Bomb. This patmalisrr, IS quite exphcit in a owidely broadcast television

commercial supporting SDI: over a crayoned picture showing nuclear missiles harmlessly

repulsed by rainbow-like laser-rays, a child's voice says: * . *

'a. I: asked my daddy what this Star W ff is all about.. He said that right now we can't protect oursetves from nuclear weapons; and f iat5 wTy IFF President wants to build ,the peace shield. It would stop missiles in outer space so they couldn't hurt our house. Then nobody could win a war. And if nobody could w in a war thereo would be no reason to s531-t one. My daddy's

lb'

smart. Support the peace shield. 14' *

One might apply to this .propagaoda for "Star Wars," the weapons prpject,' precisely

the same words Robin Wood.-has written about Star Wars, the film: ,- -- The project of -- Star Wars films and related works is to put everyone back in his or her place; reconstitute us as dependent children, and reassure us that i t will all come right in the *end."-'

P ? For. in Star Wars, the association of space-weaponry and patriarchy appears in, its most 7-

atav is ik form. The film's twenty-first century futurism coexists with a self-consciously~

"mythical" stoty of the restoration ot the Father. The whole epic cycle revolves around ,

Skywalker's attempt to inherit the rightful status of his lost "Jedi Knight" father. His rites

of passage into th6 stellar patriarchy take the form of a conventionally heroic series of,

single combats, dragon slayings, a6d martial training, revolving around the mastery of the

light saber, an unmistakably phallic weapon (as Rubey puts it, "You carry it in y w r

'pocket until you need it, then you push a button and its three feet long and glows in

the dark") that neatly -combines the sword--traditional symbol of warrior prowess--with the

latest Pentagon high-tech.Ia6 These adventures are enacted in a universe whose primary

value is manly comra&ship and c_on'ducted under the tutelage of a series of kindly father P surrogates--Obi-Wan-KenlObi. 'oda, and, irltimately, in a sentimental resolution of Oedipal

hostilities,' Darth L'ader himself, the evil, corrupt patriarch' whose paternal affections

suddenly reassert themselves to save Skywalker at the climax of the cycle. The ~ e t u m of --- the jedi culminates in what Wood terms: --

A ventable Foyrth o: July of Fathencity: d grandigse fireworks display to celebrate Luke's coming through, as he-stands backed by the ghostly figures of Obi-Wan-ken-Obi: Darth and Yoda, all smiling benevolently.""' ,

A l l , this asserts the naturalness, benignity and importance of pztriarchal authority, while at

the same time affirming its traditional connection to military leadership and O -

weapons-mastery. $ .

This holds even though 'star Wars ieems to test a new feminine identity--that of -- space-amazon, or futuristic warrior princess. Superficially, the inclusion of Princess Leia as a

"sirongu female character might seem to give the film a progressive, even feminisr, aspect.

, The fallacy of this proposition does not only lie in the fact that Leia, 'despite occasional

tokenis& bursts df action, occupies a predominantly passive and sub or din at^ role as .

damsel-in-distress and object of masculine desire. More subtly, i t is undercut because even

at- her most energetic moments she embodies the premise that women* want to be what

men are in Star Wars--militarized zappers, zoomers and blasters. This IS Pentagon -- Leia's initial appearance in the Star Wars cycle predates the malor upsurge of the -- women's peace movement. But Hollywood's subsequent elaborations on the role of lemdle

space warrior (as' in Signoctrny Weaver's performance as "Ripley," heroine of the

super-militarized Aliens) might pla~lsibly be seen as an attempt to coopt for thr nuclear

state the revolutionar), energies revealed at Greenham, and integrate them

hierarchies of patriarchal militarism affirmed by both SDI and -- Star Wars."'

into the famihar

5. Cyborgs and Real Men - ---

Within these hierarchies there appears, however, ohe innovative feature: some of the most , .

important figures, .perhaps even those that exen ultimate command, are inhuman--artillcia1

- entihes, rnen/mkhines, cyborgs. For space weaponry demands a quantum leap in the ,

automation that has always marked nuclear systems. It is generally admitted that the

realization of SDI turns on speculative breakthrough's in the field of "fifth-generation"

computing or artificial intelligence. A , space defence system would be an autorlornous

weapons-complex, conducting vast and intricate rchemes of electronrc battle-mdnagement t

speeds precluding human intervention.' In such a system, conventional d&narcatlons

between inert tool and reasonrng operator. human and machine processes. weapon and

2 . . *' wanjor. blur and fade.='' Ira their enthusiastic encomiums on the technological spin-offs of

SDI, its ruppdrt6rs promise that these will at last allow us to develop robots as ' '

u "surrogate servants, laborers and bodyguard^."''^ O n a grander scale, they blithely inform

us that, as h r as the overall control o f SD1 goes, "a computer has to be in charge.""'

Writing of the Pentagon research that culminates In SDI. Paul Edwards notes that,

in an- age of artificial ints!!lgence, we are already confronting--in scienc: fiction and military fantasy, if ..not (vet) in fact--the profound qupstions of our ultimate reducability as biological machines, o f the implications of our seemingl~z .. .

imp!acable drive to reproduce ourselves in artificial form. . . . Personhood may no longer exclude those without a cortex. and a housing of skin, just as weapons may no longer be constructed orily as inanimate object^,^".

\ *

Lucas' film famil~arlzes us with artific~al entitles as central actors tn spate war 611);! and

CP-30 are robots. 'c'ader. with h ~ s sybilant synthet~c whisper inhumar~ md\L and f,i~clc\\ d .=

1mpen;al Storm Troopers, is coded no t ' only as commissar but also a\ cvtmrg Itww drt- , - in tact, the "characters" on whom the film lawshes ~ t s greatest Ingenuity and who have

claimed the most mesmenzed iascmation f r om i t s audience. And the) are forerunners of a \

whole species of militarized.tobots that colonized the popular ctllturc. of thc 19hOs, with

Tws fomers , Cobots a n d Robotechs crowding 'out GI Joe's frctrn ro)-srr,re sl~elvc.\ I r k

intip-ate reflection -?of actual advances in Pentagon planning. q .. These artiiicial figures complicate. but do not coniound, Star M'ars' I --

nucieophallogoc&t~c~sm In thts context. the formula "men/machines" denotes more than r

lust conventional sexrsm Edwards wntes of the Pentagon's rohots tha~ the\ art.

"gendered"

mascultne In the full tdeolopcal sense of the word w h ~ r h inrludes tntegrail~, the sold~er~ng and wolence lor whose sake mcn haw had I ( , gtve

. up so much o! theu inrultlve and einotional capacitb :"

In pan. this analysis i s confirmed in -- Star M'ars' cinematic cyborgs- thr). are male. andx

us~& warriors--whether commanders like Vader. expendable i n i an t~men lib the Irnpenal

P ' Stom Troopers, or synthetic, copHets -(o her&--spa= aces, a s 4 2 D U ~ o - S k y ~ a l k e ~ k t

# - the film also illuminates an obverse side t o Edwards' thesis: for if its machines are male,'

- A - its men are mechanized. Skywalker and Solo are armaments operators, pilots and gunners, . .

indivisible frbm the starfighters and lasers they "man." And when the human ideal is 1 I

measured piredaminantly in terms of proficien~y as a highLtCch machine handler--cool, . . efficient, accurate, nervelessly destructive--the border between man and machine is

pre-emptrvely compromrsed. The machme-warrior is metaphorically latent within the b

'-%= militarized masculinity of the organic protagonists. Indeed, this is s o to such an extent

L.;. hd that, paradoxically, the cyborgs sometimes -appear more -animated than the "real men"; in

the robotically "effeminate"

trait; of sexual ambivalence

male heroes. - i

-_ -- There are. of course,

RZD?, and evil antagonists,

Vader might even be read

personality of CP-30 there are allowed to surface thewhuman ,

and cowardice rigidly

good robots. and bad

like Vader. Star' wars' -- as a s t o q of conflict

* .

suppressed by -- Star War's itereotypically

9 -

robot-I servants, like k ~ - 3 0 and '

ongoing duel between Skywalker and

between human and cyborg, expressing

our collective fears of malign artificial intelligences. But this apparent opposition barely .

roriceals the profound confusion between the identies of the antagonists. Vader, the .. .

/ n4mrg-like villain, is revealed as human (indeed, as Skywalker's father), while Luke. the L tn~man hero acquires a prosthetic hand in The Empire Strikes Back--thus himself becoming - -- . . a semi-artificial entit),. Conflict masks exchange; attribute; circulate from instmmentalized

men to humanoid instrument, and back again. Masculine robots and mechanized"men are . - each forms of cyborg warrior. entities physically or ideologically engineered {or the

unutterabh dehumanized war-environment of the future. ' ~ e s ~ i t e their occasionally dramatic

cfashes the!. are ultimatel?. on the same side. Both are good soldiers of the space-age

nuclear state.

6. The or& ,

--- F -. * G'

In the propaganda of SDl, 'technological fetishism -A rises to mystical heihtr. The speeches -

of Reagan and ,~brah&sofi brim with' "visions," *dreams,," and "faith"; acronyms and . -

code-words evocative of the supematural--"MlKACLW for chemical lasers, "Excalibur" for s

.' X-Ray lasers--abound; the chairman of a cornpin? involved in SDI contracting wrote that

"The idea took on a life of its own, with almost spiritual overtone5 ''2'4 This

starry-eyed tone is in part shrewdly calculated: marketing plans for sell~ng space .weapons

advise advocates to fqcus on "high road themes," "recapturing . - . deal~stic Images and

language" from the peace movement b) using "an eth~cal approach with a heavy

overlay of theology."255 But i t would be wrong to dismiss i t as s~mpl) ~ n s l n t a ~ , The , d

would-be of "heavenly" weapons find it all too easy to assume, even rn their

own eyes, an almost deific authority, and to pose as ~elestial guardians of trrrestr~al

order. One right-wing lobby-group's proposal for an orbiting weapons-system bears the

name "THOR. . . . for it would literally give the United States the power to call down

lightning from heaven upon its. enemies."256 Cynical manipulation and apocalyptic hubris

combine to surround SDI with an aura of nebulous- but potent religiosity.

This finds cinematic expression in "The Force," the ineffable cosmic -power that - - -

sustains the exploits of -- Star Wars' warriors. Lucas fusipn of hocus-pocus sorcey with

high-tech weaponry is a classic demonstration of what Mandel terms "the irratrondirsrn,

regression to supematuralisrn, mysticism and misanthropy which attends the alleged victory

of technological rationalism in late ~;~italisrn "'J- Indeed, at first sigGY~he Force actually

seems to contradict the thesis that Star Wars idolizes military technolog),. Access to i t s 7 - -

magical power i s primad, signified in terms r . . moral rectitude and spl'iituai d~srrpl~ne. Its

rarefied energies oppose and destroy the brutal machinery oi !he Death Star. And hecau~e

gf this aRparent exaltation of thG- myst~cal or intuitwe ovn technocraq some A .

peace-activ~sts have even suggested that -- Star Wars be interpreted as an anti-nuclear film "'

and its nuclear machinery. The farmer is marked with the stamp of the latter, even as it

seems to oppdse it. The ~o rce is not so much the antithesis of technology, ps '

' technology sublimated and apotheosized. To read -- Star Wars as an anti-nuclear film is :to -

suppress the fact that the 'effect of ~kbalker 's initiation to the Force is simply to

transform him into a superior space warrior. -Trusting the Force, he. i s able to sight his

weapons with' greater accura& than by usink rItechanical aids: he becomes a sup&-eificient Z

batfie computer. Throughout Wars, or ct least until some belated qualms in -- Return of

/' the led!, skywalker's use gf the Force is, as Robin Wood notes, "consistently martial, . --

A vtolent, and destructive."2s9 Gwen this, The force may be seen as representing, not so .-

. much an alternative, to military technology, but as a more advanced form of that %

technology. Its lightening quick, ethereal, machine-destroying power is metaphoric for the *

all-but ~nvisible, disembodied, incorporal technology of micro-chips, miniatiurimation, and ' -- -

\ .particle beam; with which the Pentagon hopes to oppose the blunt and massive pay-load

of intercontinental ballistic

The Force fall neatly into

satori, is made in Japan: ?

clearly an alien from the '>

missilery. In this light, the Oriental, vaguely Zen-like, aspects of

place: contemporary American myth has it that technology, like

Yoda, 'Skywalker's diminuitive, inscrutable martial arts instructor, i s

planet Mi!subishi. e SDI slogan id "Defense a t the Speed of / Light": -- Star Wars gives us "Defense at the Speed of Light," expediently coded as .

-. Certainly the Defense Departmkpt has been happy to capitalise on The Force and

on i t s ambiguous signification. Addressing Mitre -Co_cporation, one of Ameiica's leading

hlgh-technologv weapons companies, General Abrahamson told the ass&bled military and + -

lndustnal leaders_- -

There are some good things abbut Star Wars. And the .thing is to ensure that -- everybod\ understands we're not on, the Dark Side. This is not Darth Vader here, I hope I hope it IS Luka Skywalker. ,And I hope that what we're talking about here 1s the morality of what we'le about, and that w e a l l y do have

' 4'

the Force with us. And t thiflk w e deNQ -- -

Here, The Force is interpreted as signifying virtue--"the morality of what we're about." But

a few months later, speaking at the ,opening of Martin Marietta's "Rapid Retargeting and

Precision Pointing Facility," tbe general -put it a little differently

And I know it's- just awful that its called R2P2, eh, and you k n o k that, that has gotta be the ultimate relation t o the movie that we don't like to talk

- -7 about and relate our program to, -- Star Wars. But the one good thing, and I've said this and maybe some of you have heard me say it the one real relationship t o not only that movle, but perhaps others. IS that the good guys won. And the good guys .won because of the Lorce that was with them Well you see here today, amongst the people that are working o n thls facility and - have created technica! marvels before that, the force that IS going t o make this more safe, thls secure world really possible 16'

r , - -

NOW, the Force is of scientific expertise, the abilrh, t~ ach~eve "technlcdl ' 6'

m&els " Neither of Abrahamson's readings o f -- Star Wars i s wrong Rather the arnb~gurt) ,

foregrounds the film's strategic conflation of "marvels" and "morahty " Like the auricular

Obi-Wanfenobi addressing Luke Sywalker, SDI advocates tell Amer~cans to "trust th r . Force." And, as they mask their own first-strike strategies behlnd, a pious rhetorrc o l

peace and goodwill, they are, like ~ucasfilms, happy to conflate right and m~gh t , spiritual r force and armed force.

7. Tme-Warps - n

7 \

The vocabulary of SDI IS a jargon of Innovation, of "breakthroughs," of o l "the lendrng

edge," of "the twenty-first century," professing a -euphoric confidence, In scrent~f~c expertrse,

corporate organization and industrial production, full of - t he speed and sheen of high

technology. the hypnotic allure of electronic screens, and the romance of lab-coats Yet at b

the same time, this propaganda is part of an ultra-conservative, reactionary dmourse that

plass- upon hankerings for "sirnpier times." when America kvas "standing tall" abroad, and

at home m e n were men and traditional moral~ty was unshaken In the folksy homil~es of

the President, proposals for space weapon9 are sllnked wlth calls for a renewal of patliotlc

resurgence of the- most primitive forms of fundamentalism. E.P. Thpmpson has observed

- that:

Star Nars is a populist dream. Like much in American populism it ushers 'in a common stream of of rhetoric upon which, there float and jostle incompatible elements. . . . It evokes a nostalgic utopian past, before the ~ o m b (bejore the machine got into the garden) at the same time as it appeals ,to . gene;ations brought up on sci-fic and computerized space war games. . . . 1 6 2

On the one hand, the discourse-.gf SDI inscribes a yearning for regression to a heavily - -

mythicized vision of Americas past. On the other, it expresses a devout faith in progress

toward an equally mythicized vision of a high-tech tomorrow.

This contradiction i s central to -- Star Wars itself. It is displayed not only in the blend

of archatsm and futu.rism--cyborgs and chivalry. hyperspace and. Jedi knights, lasers and

sabers--that we have already \noted, but also in the elaborate 5ystem of ;rllusion that is

integral to the film For, despite its spaceage setting, Lucas' epic is, as Fredric Jameson b - -

has put it, a "nostalgia film."'6' It reinvents, "in the form of a pastiche,"

. . . one of the, most important cultural experiences of the generations that grew up from the '30s to the '50's . . . the Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Rogers type--alien villains: trqe American heroes, heroi es in distress, the C death ray or the doomsday box, and the cliffhanger, at the end whose miraculous resolution was to be witnessed next Saturday aftern~on.'~'

The film's reliance on these familiar piots,- its plagiarism of old comic books, its

transparent indebtedness not only to - Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon but to televison -- shows of the 1950s such as Commander Video, Space Patrol, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet

-- - -- - w and Commander Cody are, Jameson claims, not a matter 'of parody of these long-dead 6

forms. Rather, Star tl'ars. -- . . . satisfies a t eep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: i t i s a complex object, in&, which on some first level children and adolescents can take. their adventures straight, while- the adult pu6~ic is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to the older 1

'period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts through once again: The film is thus metonymically a historical or nostalgia film , . . by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an olderperiod (the serials), it seeks to reawaken a sense of past associated with those

Indeed, according to Lucas' biograPh&, the fitrnmakePrememberecf howpmte-

he had felt growing up in the coccoonlike cultl~re of the 1950s, a feeling be wanted to t 1 conirnunicate in Star W & S . " ' ~ ~ It is n o accident tha t alongside its rediscoven/ of

' , '

scien~e-fiction, ~ o l l ~ o o d has produced a flurry- of films whose prqtagonists magtcally . .

revisit their 1950s childhood: both genres take us "back t o the future." And the

hom*ology@etween-these tendencies in popular culture and the development of SDI 15

$ s t r a ~ g t h t f o m t d . for it IS precisely the feellng of "coccoon-lrke" 'potectron of retreat 1 0

- . iB the shielded era of nuclear monopoly and global hegemony. that Reagan dfiers ro

- Americans in his space-weapons program. But there are some computerized spectal-'effects . . L

that cannot be accomplished off-screen, nor in realtime.

8. C!osing Shots - -

There are, moreover, ingredients in Star Wars' obsessive recvcllng o f old Images and old -- scripts that o p e y t h e film t o readin s more disquieting than Lucas might welcome. Ar B several critics have noted, the final scene, in which Skywalker and Solo walk between

- -

I s e r r q ranks of rigid, machige-like soldiers to receive their medals from 'Princess Lera, ,

. ,

clearly echoes the march of Hitler, Himmler, and Lutze to the Nuremburg mernorral In

Leni' Riefensthal'sgclassic Nazi propaganda film, The - Triumph of the Revrewers - - - sympathetic t o Lucas have been quick t o write this off as stmply a film buff's

f ~ n d in Star Wars, the grins the warrior-heroes exchange with Leia d o seem meant to -- reassure us that these three, at least, are not taking the military pomp all that seriously. ,

But the visual reference t o ~ i e f e n i t h d ' s film is double-edged. As Rubey puts i t

Since the scene and its totalitarian, fascist overtones grow s o naturally out of the rest of the fantasies and images in the film, i t seems fair to ask whether the grins reall), undercut this image, or simply allow it to function for us rn the same wa) Rieiensthal's o r i g e image functioned."'

. .Indeed, this smiliqg moment epitomizes much of what is so troubling about -- Star Wars

For there is n o doubt that the film is; throughout, playful--almos~ ostentatiously so. Lucas'

a + depiction of the triumph of The Force so eagedy'solicits tke retpo~se-t6a&kisisi~ju~tt

fun" or "just entertainment" that it fends-off in adkance as curmudgeonly or over-serious t

any analysis of the film's own "dark side.""O Yet this emphatic playfulness is concocted * .

from a systematic 'glorification of war, an exaltation of p%triarchal.authority, and a

- n . fascinat~on with exterminatory technology, all blended with a strain of mystical, martial

~rrationalism. One could say .that the film's assertion of its own status as "just a

myth"-that is, m%re b fantasy--is exactly what at once disguises and enhances its efficacy as

"myth" i n . the Barthesian sense--that is, as a surreptitious vehicle for- ideology.371 The

sophisticated assurance -- Star Wars' offers its audience that "you can see through all this"

backhkdedly obscuresehow the spectator is nevertheless made tacitly complicit with its *f' . -

rnilitasist values, propelled to vicariously identify with its starfighter heroes, and made to

take pleasure in thinly-disguised scenes of space-age nuclear combat.

, Given this, one might take Lucas' efensthal's work as a licence for a.

counter-allusion, and recall the critique of militarized aesthetics offered by one of the early

victims of the fbrces celebrated in Triumph of the Will. On the eve of world war, Walter - - - - - Benjamin wrote:

I f the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the .property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of enerzy will press for unnatural utilization, and this is found in war . . . . The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization In the process bf production--in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets . . . . Instead of draining rivers, society -directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, its drops incendiav bombs over cities . . . . 1 7 2

These words seem ominously appropriate today, as the Reagan administration, propelled" by

the desire to revamp a declining ~mer i can economy through prodigous injections of

militar) expenditures and militav technology. presses for multi-billion dollar SDI budgets, "

oblivious to domestic poverty or the total immiserization of the Third World. In ,such a

situation. Benjamin observed. the tendency of imperialism is to aestheticize war--as in t fe

- - 4

works o f the ttatian Futurists, whose manifestos p r o c h e d : -- --

War is beautiful b e c q s e i t establishes mans dominion over subjugated machinery by means o f gas masks, ten megaphones, flame-throwers and small Ydnks. War is beautiful because the dreamt-of metallization of

2'3 the human body . . . .

And i t is this tendency t o aestheticize war, albeit in a smoother, more totally FL - c -

' * . commodified form, that is at work in the affiliation of Star Wars 'with SDI. On the one -- hand, the military project is named after the cinematic spectacle o n the other, 'the

director of SDI research at Lawrence 'Livermore laboratories remarks that, from his point of C

view the decision betwen n u c l ~ a r and non-nuclear space weaponv is a matter of "political

and aesthetic consideration^."^^' "Mankind." Benjawin v o t e : "whict i In Homer's time was

an object of contemplation f o r t h q Gods, now is one for itself. I t self-alienation has

t reached such a degree that it .can experience its own self-destruction as an aesthetit

pleasure of the first

Against the aestheticization of politics, Benjamin

the emergence o f the peace movement in the 1980s

o f a politicized and anti-nuclear art. One might think

del Tredici; quietly defamiliarizing the North American% / ,

omnipresent nuclear infrastructure of b u n k e x reactors,

posed the politicization of art. And

has be,en accompnied by

here of Che Photography

landscape by exposing 3n

and and missile silos, o f

hilariously subversive montage of o ld propaganda footage in Pierce Rafferty and

glimpses

of Robert

the , '

layne ' *

Loaders The Atomic Cafe; of Raymond Briggs' cartoon satire o n c~v i l defence, When The I

--- --

Wmd Blows, of the ant~-nuclear speeches, o n the cusp between poetry and activ~st -- I

oratory, by Denise Levertov and Alice Walker; of the feminist science fiction imagery

- brilliantly developed b \ Donna Haraway in in her polysemic polemic, "A Manifesto for

: Cyborgs"; of protest posters plastered o n walls from Budapest t o San Francisco; o f t b t

poems, songs and weavings of Greenham.l16 But the example with which I want t o

contrast -- Star Wars is that of Peter oWatkins' The Nuclear War Film. I have chosen this

example partly because i t t o o is cinematic; partly because its conception shows the

-1

influence, if not of Benjamin, certainly ef Benjamiff's eemfade, Bwxht+-but- p~i~cipally I'

beause it does not exist-OF rather. exists only as work -in progress, a film under

construction, begun in 1983, currently still incomplete, its content k i nod oply from

# - Watkins' dccasionai bulletins on i ts ongoing development.271 Yet it seems- fitting t o end

with a npte on this film *precisety because its incomplete status can be taken as . . D

1 . -- metaphdric fo"r the condition of the anti-nuclear m6vement as a whole--a movement whose

project, taken up. by millions of the people in the early 1980s, is today still unfinished,

itself a work-in-progress which ,may fail catastrophically, or fulfill its promise, a project of 'I

which i t can be truly said that we do not know how it will all turn' cut. . .

Moreover, this metaphor is supported by the "veqf way in which \Vatkinst film is

being produced. For unlike -- Star Wars, i t i s made without high-tech studios or multi-million

budgets. Denied corporate or State sponsorship for any anti-nuclear film since his notorious P

--/ The War Cime was banned by the BBC in 1965, Watkins' new project is funded from --- I

international peace and community groups. And these groups have beeh not only financial

donors, but active participants in the consthction of the film. For rather than writing a -

predetermined script, Watkiris has allowed his discussions with' dozens of families and - -

ind~viduals and groups to affect and change the growth bf the project, making the film's

pioduction ah exchange of criticism and revision which i s itself part of the politicizing

process essential to the a'nti-nuclear movement.

- . . 6

Unlike Star Wars, The Nuclear War Film will be set, anot in an intergalactic ------ , time-warp, but on earth. Its qharacters will not be synthetic humanoids and all-American

intersteilar heroes, but the members of ten family groupings, representing the global scope f

f: 3

, of the nuclear predicament and drawn not only from the United States, the Soviet Union

i - - s

and Europe but also from '~olpesia. Latin America, Africa. Despite its title, the Olm will

not show the horrors of nuclear war, for Watkins believes that- these have now been I

depicted sufficently often, and that their repetition--particularly at the hands of -

. question ,is h o w t o maintain life without such, a war."'ll The Nuclear War Film will. . - - -

therifore, have n o pyrotechnic special effects or arbunding simulated explosions. Instead,

it intends t o -portray the build-up t o war during a period of international tension: the

, aintensification of rival imperialist intervention in countries reduced to cnsis by p w r t y and

. domestic repression; the manipulation o f the mass media for propaganda purposes, the - - evacuation of cities, institution o f emergency laws, and enforced civil detence preparations, -

the arest of "subversives." But when' it comes t o the actual moment of ntlclear - I

detonation, Watkins writes, "the. film will, in effect, sayw

Stop, ,let us consider where we are now. We are at a critical juncture WF have ahead o f us h v o roads. One leads further along the route of the nuclcar w&qpons state, to almost inevitable nuclear war The other route, jess easy to take . . . .leads us away from our increasing dependency on high consumer societies, away from ceatralized technocracies, towards societies that will take the first steps towards sharing the world's dwindling resourc6s

- At this point, it will introduce what Watkins' ter_ms_ "disentanglement sequencesm--sequences

L- . c *

devised by the groups supporting the film, demonstrating "how t o work towards

P . b

disentangling society from the matrix of mil i tar izat i~n.""~ These sequences "will occur more

and more frequently as the fi lm proceeds, and will entirely dominate at the conclusion,"

a n d are intended t o show the possibilities for movement and actron that can "challenge -

the very social system: that spawned nuclear weapons.""' 4 I *

. - 8

The conclusion o f the larger, ofi-screzri, atomic sequence, the, sequence w h ~ c t ~ ha\ ,

' been relentlessly proceeding since Hiroshima,. and in which vie are all inescapably . '

participmh,cannot be so confidentfy, fortold. But i t is as a "disentanglement" from its I

apocalyptic shooting-script, and as a contribution to the production of a different collec!tve

narrative--socialist. feminist, and non-nuclear-that tHis text has been wntten.

Although I apply the terrii "nuclear text" to works dealing with nuclear weapans,:

this should not be interpreted as any disparagement of th6 vital movement against

commercial, so -cam civil, nuclear pow&. The two struggles are, properl~, indivisibly " +

connected. See Rosalie Bertell, No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive - lr-

Earth (Toronto: Women's Educational Press, 1985)e - *

Roland ' Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 19831, P. 138. . .

See Paul Boyer, "From Activism to Apathy: America and the Nuclear Issue 7963-80," B Q

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 40, No. 7 '(1984), 14-24. ----

Robert Karl Manoff, "Covering the Bomb: The "Nuclear Story and the News," Working I --7

Papers, 10,. No. 3 ( I 983), 18-27; Richard Pollack, "Covering the Unthinkable: The UN /

Disarmament Conference and the Press," ati ion, 1 May 1982, pp. 516-523; Ian M. - Angus and Peter Cook, The Media, Cold War and the Disarmament Movement

Z ------

(Waterloo: Project Ploughshares, 19841.

Robert del Tredici, cited in Gail, Fisher ,Taylor, "At Wcrk in the Fields of the Bomb:

An Interview With Robert Del Tredici," Photo Communique (Spring 19841, p. 31. -

Peter .Watkins, "Media Repression:. A Personal Statement,'' -- Cine Tracts, 3, No. 1

-r 7 . Barthes, p. 138.

Raymond Williams, "The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament," in Exterminism, and Cold -- War. - ed. New Left Review (London: Verso, 1982), p. 85. ---

The best analysis of the political dimensions "of the crisis is Fred Halliday, The -

- - - - .v; 3

Makin Of The Second Cold War - -- -, - - Verso, 1983).

%+ 1 5- 1 *

Sarah Kirsch, "Year's End," END:, journal of European Nuckac Disarmammt+ Nn- 8 --- -:

C19841, p. 26. ' Y

\ oi

"Discourse" is one o f the. most ubiquitous terms in contemporaq l~terary theor) The

use o f it here draws heavily, o f course, o n Michel Foucault espgciali\* "Pn l~ t~c \ and , .. the Study of isc course:" Ideology 5 ~ohsciousn&s, No. 3 f l ' t i l i ) . ,,p . -2tr d t d cm

ldward Said's appropriation and critique *of ~oucaul t in " ~ h k Problem oi rc -x t td~tv-

'TWO ~ x e r n ~ l a r y , Positions," Critical Inquiq, 4. No. 4 (1978). 63-714:qt i s also - -c- . b

influenced by the work o f Michel Pecheux and C Fuchq,- "La~guage i d w l ~ ~ p .mcj

, C

Discourse Analysis: An Overview," - Prdw NO 6 (1 987) pp,_3-N b\'" John f r o t + 'i

L "Discourse and Power," Economy and Society 14, f4o 2 (136b, 1 9 2 , 2 1 3 . and tw

- -- Frank Burfon and Pa? Carlen, Official Discourse: - O n D~scourse An&sts Covernmcnt

Publications, Ideology - - - D and the State (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979) A

collection of essays applying discourse-theory t o the nuclear predicamen! i s Language

and the Nucleaf Arms Debate Nukespeak Today, ed. Paul Chiltan (London. Franc14 * ---- 1

Pinter, 1985). Three other important applications are Peter A ' Bruik. "lht. Mdl;\ . L

-- -

Prociuction of Disamament Discourse," Annud Meeting of the Canadian

Communications Asstxiation, V a n c o u v ~ J u n e 1983; Robert Luckham, "Of Arms b

Culture," Current Research -- O n Peace And Violence, No. 1 (19&4), pp 1-64 K U.1 -7 .

Walker, 'Culture, Discourse, Insecurity." d~ternatives: Social Transformation - and Humane . *

/ - . J

C~vernan~ce, 14, No . 4 (1986): 485-504. 1 am (heavily tndebted to these last thrrr

works.

For other accounts of nukespeak see Pa-ul Chilton. "Nukespeak h ~ r c l r d r ldngudgr &- L

. Culture and Propaganda," in Nukespeak: The ----- Media And The Bomb, ed Cnsprn

Aubrey (London. Comedia, 1983, pp. 94-112; and Stephen Hilgartner R~chard C

-L

(HaYmondswcrrth Pengurn. 19831; Daniel L. Tins,- "Nus.espeak," Kentucky English"

~ul lntn: 34 No 2 tt9WJS) ib-04. ~ i n i has a urelh bibliography of i;nher nadhgr. - Thc tern "nukcspeak* is, of course, adapted from Orwell's* "newspeak." l . -

The (~hrarr "dacou-sc of disrentm is taken from RB.1 ~'alke; , n~bnternponry

hiiust oih t h r r . terms are too rommon to heed reierenctng. but a iw are__ * . '

ncttewurth\ Thr desrpnatlon " a dozen Aushwues" ts adapted from a letter oi Lam .

i t ! trturt .c&t ro .eighteen years rmprtspnmen! inr enrenng a militar) base near - I

t l98i) 5 ihc phrase "pari of the West's Me insurance" is from the front page of

!?rtt!sh MtnFJr) or Delt?nc~'s brochure on CNIW missiles rrred in Chilton, 108 "4 . . C

rtmg rnrtl,+r~" IS from €.P Thompson "Nste,s On Ext~rrn~nisrn The last Stage

Cw o h f dtwussrons 01 !he d~rputed_meanings of "pace" ,see Catherine Belsey,

Literature ~bnfererice, I 1983' (Colchester: University

and ^ Bruck,

For "inteipeltation" see Aithusser, "Ideology And /

of Esser, 19841 pp. 27-38.

. Ideolr>gical State Apparatuses

(Notes ~ o w a r d An ~nves t t~a t ion l "- in his -- Lenin And Philosophl (New l o r k Monthly 0

re vie^ Press lf371). pp 121-189 1 am using the concept in the rnanncr 4suggrstr*d > '

by Ernerto ~aclau .? PulrI~cs $& ldeolokl In Matwst Theor, ( i ondon \crw 1 0 Y i --- For useful discuss~ons of mterpellation see Rosaltnd Coward and John t l l~s Languagt.

\ - And ~ a i e n a t i s m (London Routledge h e g a r Paul "37) and Kaid Stlvermann Tht. - -

Subject Oi jerntotics. -- Oxiord Universit).

: y . Press

See Luckham. pp 3-5

Brecht Oh Theatre - Tbe Development of an 4estht.tic ed a n d trms john M1lllrtt -- - - (London. Methuen, 1964) p. 1s'

' a p p .

Jacques Demda. "No Apocalypse Not Now (full speed ahead. reven rnrrsile\ swcbn

Frednc lameson, The Poltt~caf Unconsc~ous Narrative 2 4 Soctdlly Synib~lic -- (IJhaca: Comell Universit!. )Press. 1981 I . 1) 3 3 .

Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan. Bush And Nuclear Lh'ar l N e ~ York ---- Uandom House, 1987) p 21. Schell pi 126

" , L

Mt debt to Iudith Fetterlev. The Uesistrng Reader A Fem~n~s t ~ p p r o d r h tc ) ~ r n t = r i ~ i l h - /J

- -- - B

Fiction (Bioomrngton Ind~ana. 1978) tr apparent For an f~xcellent d ts russ~or~ of t h t .

the05 of interpellatioti tha! takes into accsunt the reader's actwe role see l)avc2

Mode), "Texts, readers. subjects." In Culture, Media. Language Work~np Papers rr,

Cultural - Studies 1972-79, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul

v , 5 ., reception-theory to rwtear discourse; Gunther Kress, "Discourses, texts, readerr, and

the pro-nuclear argument," in Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak , ---- 4 Today, ed. Paul Chilton (London: Francis Piriter, 1985), pp. 65-67.

Edward Said. "Opponents. Audiences, Constituencies and- Community." Critical Inquiv,

9, No. 1 (1982). 27

Satd. "Opponents." 23.

"Linrversrties' Reliance On Support By Pentagon Is Probed In Report," Chronicle of' - Higher Education, 3 Feb. 1986. p. 23.

-3 For graph~c accounts of this change in nuclear discourse, see Knellman and Scheer.

Protect and Survive (london: -HMSO, 1980), n. pag. ---

Collin S Grey and Keith Pawe "Victon is P-ossible," Foreign Policy. No. 39 (1980).

General Sir john Hackett and Others, The Th~rd World War: A Future History ------ I

(London: Sidgewicir & Jackson. 1978).%0ies here are fromi the US edition, entitled

The Third World War: August 1385 (New York: Berkely, 1980). ---- -

33 Hackett The Third World War: The Untold % (New York: Bantam, 1982). - - - - -

34 For a dlscurs~oh sf the importance of "faction" in contemporary representations of

\car see Luckharn. p. 41. This author's reflections on the production of mi l i t a~ *

scenarios have also been important to me. I t is important to note that The Third -- World War's historical line oi descent runs from a genre of sensationalist British --

fictions about future wars' that stretches back to i h e nineteenth-century The Battle of --- -

Dorking -and William Le Queux's The Great Invasion of Nineteen-Ten. The seminal -- - account of this genre is !.F. Clarke, A b c e s Prophesying M'ar 7763--1984 (London: - Oxford Univetsity Press, 1 9 6 6 ~ .

World War and The Battle of -- --- July 1978. pp. 22-23.

35. Hackett, "Wh), the General is

10.

For a discussion of affinities between The Third -- Dorking. see Martin Walker. "I 985." New, Statesman, 7 -

Cited on the dustjacket of Hackett

~ e f i ~ h t i n g , World -War I l l . " Times, 1q l u n ~ l0li;l. 1,

"The President's Favounte Reading."

Dugan, and "Reagan C h o o ~ e s W\\'

Hackett, dustjacket. ,

H a c ~ e t t , Untold S ton . p: 452 --

Carter denied this repon-see ondid l)ugdr~, B Nation, 27 0 c i . 108-1. pp. 41.3-416

'f P - -

I l l , " Nuclear Times, 3. N O 4 (19&4), 4 --

See Simon ' ~ a l b ) , "The Soviei Threat and Peace F d u c a t i o y in - - lssuu5 in t d u ~ . a t i o ~ ~

4 and Culture. No. 2 (1986). pp 33-34. 1 am ~ndeb ted o Simon . t o r swcrdl -- J

thought-provoking discussions on this topic

Hackett. title. 1978 ed

i Nuclear \liar " New Fork Revie\\ 06 Books 21 jan 1987. p 10 Alti~ough ca%t - - - - in the ponderous tones ot establishment admon\tior! Kennan's remark< c , r l tliG

Reagan admrnlstrat~on's Sowet d~s'tourse are worth quotmg at length

This endless sene o i distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leadership of another great countq : this routine

exaggeration of Moscow's military capabilities and the supposed iniquity o f Soviet intentions; this monotonous misrepresentation of the.nature and - ---

the attitudes of another great people--and along suffering people at that, soreiy tried by the vicissitudes o f this past century . . . these, believe me, are not the marks of maturity and discrimination one expects f ~ o m the diplomacy of a great power; they are the .marks of an intellectual . primitivism and naivete unljardonable in a great government.

44 Hackett, p. 356.

45 See Hackett, p. 229, Untold Stor)., p. 28, p. 438, Untold Story, p. xii. F. 402,

\ \.. B Untold Stor)., p 411 ,

46 See Hackett, Untold Stor) p. 26 Untold Stor), p. 11

47 5ee Hackett, p.' 175, p. 114.

48 See Hackett. Untold w, p. 224, p. 30, p. 402.

49. See. Hackett, p. 163, p. 172.

50. Hackett, p. 33.

I See Hackett. Untold Stor), p. 17. Untold %, p. 71. p. 167. p. 472.

57 Hackett. Untold Stor). p. 19.

53. Hackett, p. 15. C

54 See Hackett. p 196. p 208.

. - - - 3 Hackett p. 138.

- - *

st See Hachett p 197 p 202

5 : See Hackett p. 201 p 196 p. 191, p. 245, p. 201.

See Hackett, pp. 118-215. / d \.

Hackett, p. 234.

Hackett, p. 402.

dackett, photo-supplement.

Hackett, photo-supplement.

Nevi1 Shute, O n The Beach (New York: Morrow, 1957); Mordecai Roshwald. - - -- Level-Seven (New, York: McGraw. Hill, 1959); Stanley Kubrick. dir

Hawke, 1962; Peter Watkins, dir. The LZ'ar Came, BBC, 1965. ---

See ~ a c k e t t , p. 374, p. 150, p. xiii. p. 367.. p. 148. p. 36;

Hackett, p. 37; 4

Hackett, p. 371.

Hackett, p. 393. I/

Hackett, Untold Stqr)., p. 3 9 2 ,

-- n Hackett, un to id w, p. 393.

Hackett. "Why the General is Refighting World War Ill." p. 10 4- -. -

See Hackett. p. 313. p. 1.-

Hackett, p. Untold Stor), p. 449.

Hackett, Untold stor).> p. 449.

76. Hackett, p. 22.

77. . See Hackett. p. 223, p. 89, p. 128. ' ,

79. See X c k e t t , ;p. 403. p. 55

7- 80. r Hackett, p. 56.

81. Hackett, pp. 47-49.

82. Hackett, p. 2.

83. In a television debate with Bruce Kent, Chairperson of the Committee for Nuclear

Disarmament. See Kent's letter, "Hackett and Deterrence," Peace News, 3 Feb. 1,984, -- p. 21.

84. john Milius, dir., Red Dawn, United ArtistsNalkyrie, 1984; Amerika, dir. Donald Wrye, . . -- ABC, 15-19 Feb. 1987. _

85 For attempts t o develop such, concepts, s ee E. P. Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism,

The Last Stage of Civilisation," New Left Review, 121 (1980), pp. 3-32, the --- subsequent discussion in the collection Exterminism and Cold War, ed . New Left --- -- Review (London: Verso, 19821, and Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War (New -- York: Semiotexte. 1983).

. - 86 Shelford Bidwell, "Fighting Talk," review of The Untold Story, Times Literay --

- Suppiement, 3 Sept. 1982. p. 948.

Bruck, p. 8.

Hackett, p. 313.

Hackett, p. 313. I

* *

Nigel Calder, Nuclear Nightmares (London: Penguin. 1981); Louis Rene Beres,

Apocalypse: Kuclear Catastrophe in Wor ld Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press --- 1980); Helen Caidicott, Nuclear Madness (New York: Bantam,. 1978); Paul Ehrl~ch Carl

sagan, '&. al., The Cold and the Dark (New York: Norton, 1985); Eric Thiermann, ----- prod., The Last Epidemic. Impact Productions, 1983; Tern Nash, dir.. If You Love -- ---

* This Planet, Nat~onal Film Board of Ca~ada, 1981, Kevrn Ralferty, P i e r ~ e Raflerty, and -- jayne Loader, dirs., The --- Atomic Cafe, 1982; John Badham, War Games, -- Goldberg/Shenvood, 1983; Lynne Littman, dir., Testament, Entertainment Events. 1084,

- -

The - Day - After, dir. Nicholas Meyer, ABC fO Nov. 1983; Threads, BBC, 1 3 Sept

1984.

Jonathan Scheil, The Fate. of the ----

Samuel. H. Day, "Reinventing the

14 April 1982, p. 13.

"The Fate . o f the Book," Bulletin

Schell, p. 191.

Schell. p. 65.

Schell, p. 8. For a discussion of

Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982) -

World," rev. of The Fate --

of the Atomic Scientists, - --

the problems involved in

holocaust, see Peter Schwenger. "Writing the &thinkable,"

(7986). 33-48.

of' the Earth, Progressive, - - - -

36, No. 8 (19821, ~ 6 3 .

depicting nuQear

Critical Inquiry. 13, No. 1 .

.- Schell, p. 36.

John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1946); Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima a, trans. Warner Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1955); Japanese

Broadcasting Corporation, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn BJ Atomic Bomb 1 --- --

~ u r v i v o d (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Robert Jay Lifton, Death & Survivors - of

Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967).

See Schell, pp. 39, 41, 42.

Schell, p. 29.

Schell, p. 48-49

102.- Schell, P. 23.

Schell, p. 93.

See Schell, p. 184, p. 172.

Schell, p., 138.

Sehell. p. 139.

Schell, p . w

See Schell, p. 144, p. 137, p. 128, p. 144, p. 117. 4

~ i t e d ( i n Edward Zuckerrnan, The - Day After World Wa Three (New York: Viking,. - 3 - 19841, p. 3 Zuckerrnan gives an excellent o v e r h of the complex and (so far)

irresolvable debate on the consequences of global nuclear war. For an example of

an attack on Schell by a% eminent practitioner of nukespeak, s ee Herrnann Kahn,,

"Apocalyptic Panic is No Help," in The - Apocalyptic Premise, ed. Ernest Lefever and a -- ---

E. Stephen Hurt (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Centre, 19821, pp. 235-242. '

Schell, p. 25. "i

Schell, p. 94.

Schell, p. 95.

Schell, pp. 108, 226, 110.

Schell, pp. 225-226.

Hackett, p. 256.

Schell, p. 153.

Schell, p. 185. .

Schell, p. 154.

See Scheli, p. 77, p. 23, p. 97.

3 See >Sckl l , p. 83, p. 172, p. 77.

Schell, p. 93. -

See

One -

ell, p. 73, p. 178. f I '

the famous anthology of the first atomic scientists' opposition to the Bomb, Y

World or None (New York: Books for Libraries Press. 1972, repr. 1946 ed.), --- J ed. Dexter Masters and Katherine Way.

kkH, pp. 220-221. - -- --

. -

Schefl, p. 226. 1

Schell, pp. 161-162.

Neil Schmitz, "Anxiety and its Displacement,'' rev. of - f The Fate of the Earth, Nation

1 May 1982, p. ,531. " .

Cited in Angela McRobbie, "Strategies of Vigilance: An Interview With Gayatan

Chakravorti Spival.:," Bloc. No. 10 (1985), p. 9. -

of nuclear force t o secure its To be precise: the United States has employed threats

interests, or those of its client states, on the following >

occasions (amongst others):

Uruguay, 1947; Guatemala; 1954; Cuba, i962; Lebanon, 1958: Middle East, 1973:

Persian Gulf, 1980, The majoFity of cases of overt American threat have involved

crises in the- Third World. See Daniel Ellsberg, "Call T o Mutiny," in Protest and -- Survive, ed . E.P. Thompson and DWP Smith, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981)

pp.. i-xxviii, and Noam Chomsky, "Strategic Arms, the Cold War and the Third c-

World," in Exterminism and co ld War, ed. New Left Review (London: Verso, 1982) --- ---

Schell, p. 107.

133. See Schell, p. 181, p. 143, p. 317

134.' ~ c h e l l , p. 231.

135. Schmitz. p. 531. * .

Schell, p. 184.

Schell, p. 219.

Schell, p. 227.

Schell, p. 229.

Schell, - The Abolition (New York: Knopf, 1984). p. 8. In this text, a sequel to The - -- Fate of the Earth, the bankruptcy of Schell's apolitical approach is &~lly demonstrated - - - - Admitting that "the world government" proposal advanced in The Fate of the Earth - - - - - is impractical, he retreats to a muted version of deterrence theory In whch fear of ,

weapons--without their actual presence--is proposed as sufflclent to preserve world

peace. Again, no changes in the social and econornlc structure of the nuclear

superpowers is suggested. .

Schell, p. 227.

See Schell, p. 327, p. 221

Schell, p. 229. 7

Schell, p. 186.

Schell, p. 231.

See Paul Boyer. "A Historical- View of Scare Tactics," - - -- Bulletin of the Atomic

Scientists, 42, No. 1 (1985). 17-19, and Peter Sandman and jo Ann ~a len t i , "Scared 4

Stiff-or Scared Into Action?" Bulletin o f the Atomic Scientists, 42, No. 1 (1985), * ----

- - -ri

See Alexander co*ckbum and James Ridgeway, "The Freeze Movement Versus - --

Reagan," New Left Review, 137 (1983), pp. 5-22: ---

Alexander co*ckbum and japes Rudgeway, "After @The day After:' Why t h e Freeze

Has -Failed,, ,or What Next For the Peace Movement?" Village Voice, 6 Dec. 1983,: p.

19. These writers are unusual in having foreseen the consequences 'of the .freeze

movement's lack of a political agenda. In an article written shortly after the --

appearance of The Fate o f the Earth, "Bomb ~ o m and the Apocalypse: Will the - - - -- Freeze Movement Be More Than a Fad?". Village Voice, 13 April 1982, pp. 6-8, they

4 .

noted that "on the surface" the swell of anti-nuclear sentiment was impressive, but

then observed:

Those with memories o f the Ban the Bomb campaign in Britain in the late 1950s or who took part in the efforts toward the 1963 nuclear test ,

ban treaty know well h o w quickly such swells can subside, their moral fervour finally extinguished by quotidien political reality and expendency. A lack o f politics, o r of clear political objectives beyond the rhetoric of hellfire laid them low.

' The future of the peace movement, they suggeste& would t u m o n its ability t o

move beyond the "interminable vapourings" and "diffuse moralizing" o f Schell, and

Caldicott's "hysterical and demobilizing preachments" t o engage the economic and

po l i t i a l underpinnings of the US nuclear state. O n this would depend whether "a

broad movement 'against the nuclear arms rate can have much more fuel than a -

somewhat faddish preoccupation with global catastrophe." For other analyses o f the

conservatism of the "freeze" campaign, see Thomas Fergusson and Joel Rogers, "Big

Business Backs The 19 july 1986, p p 43-47, and Noam &omsky, 4

Turning Tide:-fie US and Latin ~ r n e n c r ( ~ o n t & : Black Rose, 1986). pp. -----

i. See Chornsky, Turning the Tide, p. 176. --

> ?

Speech, Eureka College, Illinois, 9 M a y 1982. Reprinted

Day, 48 (19821, 484.

in Vital Speeches of the - - -

John. Bosma, "A Proposed Plan for Project on Ballestic M~ssile Uc.lrnscx , I I ~ 4itw.

Control," cited in Henry Epstein, "Freeze Folk: The High .Fronjlcr' )hfiint< t'oil "

Nuclear Times 3, No. 6 (1985). 12. --

See

the

The

Ehrlich. Summing up the conclusions ol the ~ntermt~onal sc~cwt~i~i c o r l t t * r t ~ r r c c = t r r l

"nuclear winter" studies reported in .The Cold and the Dark iw \vrttt*\ ----- We did not feel that we could exclude the possibilrt! that twrnan~t\ - would gradually decline to extinction foll~wing such an pvenl (1) 1 %:)

Soviet scientist, Nicolai Bochov, concurs: U

We should not b e afraid to reach the cohclus~on that the cond~trons that would prevail would not allow the survival of human be~ngs as d sperm C

(p. 142). i'

Caroline Blackwood, On the Perimeter (London: Heinemann, 1983) p 1 --

Alice

From - Sarah

Press,

Cook and Gwyrt Kirk, ~ r e e n h ~ m Women ~ve~where : Dreams, --- Idear and Arttons

the Women's Peace Movement (Boston. South End.. 1983). fhrbdrd ~Ltrtord drld - Hopkins, eds., Creenham Common: Women At the Wtre (London Wornm's

-7-

Lynne Jones, ed., Keeping the Peace (London: Women's Press. 1'183t

At the Wire, - - -

At the Wire, p. 2. - - - i

1% * p - - -

f w d tn Bemy

ht;~ (#uttingh;cm: Peace NmrlMtt~hrcmn b k ~ , 1983), P. 17. -

%re Ihmna C. Stanton "hnguagc and Revoliittor! The Franco-Amencan .-

Ifwunrrc+rkrnM rt l Heqlcr tisenstem and 4lrce lardme, eds . fhe Future of Difference ---

Women's opprrsrion. o r more precisely our repression, does not merely c ~ i s l !n 1t)w concrete organization of economic. political or social rtructuws. 11 1s embedded in the very foundations :I the Logos, in the subrtc finguistrc and logicat processes through which meaning itself is produced. \I\'hrt we prcejve as the real . . . is but a manifestation of rha s-fmhiic order as it has k e n constituted by man. Thus, only by erparing phallogucentricism . . . can we hope to transform the !-eat' in ariy fundamental wa,.

. . Ir:m- Zasiow Edrto~f . issues in Education and Culture, No. 2 (7986). p. 4. Apart -- -- fri~rn tlw tcxtr discussed here. there i s an extensive body of literature on the

ailrrsnne Rtch Ttetnam and Sexual Vtolence," in her O n Lies. Secrets and Silence: ----- kkctet i Prose 196G-1918 (Kern Yo&. Norton 19793, pp 108-1 '16: Pam ~ c A t l ~ s t e r , - F C ~ - Rm--in - the - Web - oi ,, iiie: Feminism and Nonviolence i ~ h i l a d e l ~ h i i : New - k c e h I%2! C h a r h e Spreianak, "Naming the Cultural Forces That Push Us >

ii,\zards \%a? " !n h t ~ c / t a t Stra teu and the Code of the Wamor: Faces of Mars and -. - - - - - ---- 5hn.a in the Cnsis of Human Sunrival ed. Richard Grossinger an ---I----

fkn; ., Nonh ~timitr BoOliJ 1984). pp 43-53: Brian Easlea. Fathering The -

Unthinkable: Masculinity, Science and the Bomb (London: Pluto, 1983). - - ---- - -- - -

Hackett, The Third World War, p. 283. ----

Nancy Houston, "Tales of M'ar and Tears of Women," Women's Studies International

Forum, jk No. 34 (1982). 776. -

Greenham Women E v e v h e r e , p 83 > *

At the wire: coverpage - - -

Greenham M'omen Eveyrhere , p. 86

Vtrgma Wooli, Three Culneas (Ne\% York Harbmger 1963) 1) 143 l or d dtscuis lo~~ 1 J

of the relevance of bl'oolf's fern~ntst paciftc~sm to the contemporar) unlvrrstt) W P

Lynne Henley, "Her Story of War: De-Militarizing Literature and Literav Studies."

Radical America 20

O n the Perimeter, --

On the -- Perimeter. coverpage. .

O n the Perimeter, --

Creenham Women

At the Wire, p. 5 - - -

Greenham Women

Everywhere p 65 -. . Creenham M'omen

181. At the Wire, p. 89. - - - \

182. ~t the Wire, 6. 159. A. famous Greenham poster, headed simply "Life Against --7

Death," shows this action. In the foreground stands the fence, with its tight mesh

and spiked defences: twd police cars parked beside it. O n the silo rising behind it

is a ring of dark silhouttes, dancing under the floodlights abruptly trained upon

them Fence and the dancers stand like two circlesJ o n e inscribed within the other, C -

9 the former connoting power, exclusion , and d e M y rigidity, the latter signifying

subversion, linkage, and mobile vitality.

183. At the Wir,e, p. 159. - - - %

184. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabeiais --- and His Worfd. trans. Helene Inuolsky (B!oomington: Indiana .-..

University Press, 19841, p. 11. TWG essays that develop the concept of carnival in

relation to anti-nuclear protest are Roger Fowler and Tim Marshall, "~h/var against

peacemongering: language and ideology," and Bob Hodge and Alan Mansfield, . .

"'Nothing left t o laugh at : . . ': humour as a tactic of resistance," both in

Lan ua e and the Nuclear Arms Debate: 'Nukespeak Today, ed. Paul Chilton (London: gg---

Frances Pinter, 1985). pp. 3-22 and 197-211.

-- 1 8 5 Terr) Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, - or ~ ~ L a r d s a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New --

Left Books, '1981), p. 145. &

186 Creenham Women E v e w h e r e , p. 78 .$

18' Lynne Jones "A Doctor Writes. . . ," END: Journal of European Nuclear -- - - D~sarma ent. No. 16 1: (1983) . 'p. 33. -+-

/ 188. At the, Wire. "Datefine." np - - -

189 Produced by Beebarn Kidron and Amanda Richardson. Women Make Movies Inc.,

- C

190. For information on the military's use of electronic weapons at Greenham see K ~ r n

Besiey, "Electronic Warfare," Peace News, 7 March, 1986. p. 1: --

191. Eagleton, p. 145.

192. At the Wire, p. 80. ' - - -

193. At the Wire, p. 82. ---

194. Greenham Women Everyvhere, p. 126

195. On the Perimeter, p. 21. --

196. Mary Daly. CvnlEcology: The Metaeth~cs of Radical Feminlsm (Rostnn Hearcwc~7111 . - --

197. At the Wire, p. 150. - - -

198. Greenham &'omen ~ v e y w h e r i , p. 126. --

199 Th~s demonstration was an important moment In the growth of the ltdlian it.mrnrrt

anti-nuclear organization "La RagnalellaW--"the spiderweb " See Elisabetta Addis and

N~coletta Tiliacos. "Conflict, Fear a n d - ~ e c u r r t ~ In the ~ u c l e a r Age- The Challenge of

the Feminist Peace Movement in Italy," Radical America, 20, N o 1 (1986), 7-17.

100. Greenham- Women Evenv.%ere, p 126

201 Irl this context i: is mterestlng to consrder words v e q similar to those In many '

Creenham texts. wi t ten b\. Adrienne Rich during the time of her ~nvchement in the

anti-Vletnam war movement:

Paalpectby the sense that there exists a mesh of relationships--e.g. -2 --

between my anger at the -children, my sensual life,% pacifism, sex (I mean in its broadest sense, not merely sexual desireban interconnectedness which,' i f I could see it, make it valid, would give me Aack myself, make it possible to function lucidly and passionately. Yet I grope in and out amongst these dark webs. - -

1 \ 1

From "khen We Dead Awake: Writing as Re-Vision," ih Adrienne - Rich's poetv, eds. -

Barbara Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 96-97. fl

202. At the Wire, p. 91. - - -

203. Rich, "Natural Resources," in her - The - Dream -- of a Common Language: poem's

1974-77 (New York: Norton. 19781, p. 64.

205. At the Wire, p. 6. - < - - -

206 On the Perimeter, p. 27. --

207. A t . the Wire, p. 4. , - - - a

208 E.P. Thompson, the dean of Britisti disarmers, while expressing a general admiration

for the activities of the Women's Peace Camp, regretted the "biological

reductionism" that found a "simple cause for war in male structures and male aggro.

(SIC)" E.P. Thompson. The Heavy Dancers (London: Merlin, 1985), pp. 189-190. For \

\ the position that there exists "an unthought out 'gap' getween feminism and the

i nuclear issue in exactly the place I would have expected to find a whole 'web' of

connections," see the proceedings of the conference "How Dare You Presume I - /

Went to Creenham." and in particular Sara ~cot t , "Support These Women For Their .

Children's Sake Direct Emotional Action at Creenham Common: A Critjcal

Perspective," in Breaching the Peace (London: Onlywomen, 19831, p. 26. --

209. Greenham Women Everywhere, p. 90.

210. Hilary Llewellyn Williams, our Hours at Creenharn," -- Peace News,

12. 1

7 211. Str ge, p. 7-7.

L 25 Nov 1983, p.

212. For the' distinction. between "femaleness" and "femininity." see Toril Moi

Sexual.7extual -Politics (London: Methuen, 19851, p. 65.

213. Lynne )one<, "A Doctor Writes . . ." END: lournal of ~ u r @ e a n Nuclear ---

Disarmament. No.

214. For an excellent discussion of women in the armed forces, see Cynth~a Enloe, Does . d - Khaki Become You?: The Militarkation of Womenis Lives (London: South End, 1083) - -- - - She concludes that:

In each country military strategists, need women. ~ h k ~ need women who will act and think as patriarchy expects women to act and think. And they- need women whose ,use can b e disguised s o that the military'can -, . .

remain the quintessentially 'masculine' institution, the bastion of 'manliness' (p. 220).

See also the film Soldier Girls, dir. Nicholas Broomfield 'and Joan Churchill, USA:1981, -- --

about the training of black, female recruits for the 82nd Airborne Division.

215. O n the Perimeter, p. 17 -- - 216. Diana Shelley, "Greenham: the Women-Only Debate," -- Peace News, 4 Feb 1983, p.

217. -- O n the Perir,e!c-r, p. 81

218. "Star .wars: No Sequel," Nuclear Times, 4, t ;o . 3 (191161, 3 --a

3 219. -- Star Wars, prod, Gary Kurtz., dir. George Lucas, 20th Century FoJ;1977; -- Star Wars: -

"" -

The Empire Strikes Back, prod. George Lucas, dir. hwin Kershner, 20th Century Fox, -- - -- 1980; Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, prod. George Lucas, dir. Irwin Kershner, -------

. .

20th Century Fox, 1983. Derivative productions include Battlestar Galactica, dir. Glen - - -

Larson, Universal, 1978; -- The Last Starfighter, prod. Gary Adelson and Edward 0 .

Denault, dir. Nick Castle, Universal, 1984; Star +ek: The Motion Picture,' prod.' Gene ----- Rodenbeny, dir. Robert Wise, Paramount, 1 9 7 9 ' - - - - - - - - Star Trek I I : The Wrath ofTKhan,

prod. Harve Bennett, dir. Nicholas Meyer, Paramount, 1982; Star Trek Ill:. The Search ----- for Spock, prod. Harve h en nett, dir. ~ e o n a r d Nimoy, Paramount, 1982. For an - examination o i the- nuclear implications of video-games, s e e Ariel Dorfman, "Evil Otto

and Other Nucleat Disasters," Village Voice, 1 5 June 1982, pp. 43-45.

220 I t is, however, interesting t o note that 20th Century Fox's other major release in-. J

. 6

1977 was Damnation Alley, dir. Jack Smight, one of the first of what was within a

few years to become a spate of postrnuclear holocaust films.

221. Paul Boyer has also noted that the rising swell of official interest in space weapons e'

long p r e ~ e d e d ~ t h e actual announcement of SDI, and that it is not unreasonable to / suggest hints of this filtered into the realm of the entertainment industry. He 1 , records that as early as 1962, General Curtis LeMay spoke publically of "directed / energy weapons" that would "strike with the speed of light" t o destroy incoming

missiles, and comments:

Mass culture fantasies and government weapons programs . . . appear t o /

be interwoven in complex ways. Th'e fantasies lay the psychic groundwork for the weapons programs; the weapons programs in turn stimulate new -

fantasies. As SDI progresses, we should have ample -opportunity t o observe this p h e b q e n o n at work.

"How SDI Will Cha5):e Culture," Nation, 10 Jan. 1987, p. 17.

>L 322. Edward Said, "Americar 'Left' Literary Criticism,!' in his The World, The Text and the ------

Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 174. Said's full definition of the -

term reads:

What I have called affiliation . . . (is) %at implicit network of peculiarly cultural associations between forms, statements, and other aesthetic elaborations on the o n e hand, and, on the other, institutfons, agencies.

classes, and amorphous social forces.

223. "Peace and National Securit).." Speech televised from White House, Washington DC

23 March 1982. In - Vital Speeches - - of the Day, 49 (1983). 390.

, , - -

224. George Keyworth, cited in ----- Visions of Star Wars: A NovaIFrontline Special Report _.-

(Boston: WGBH Transcripts, 1986). Transcript of a program originally broadcast on

PBS 22 April 1986. p. 39.

225. Jay Coulding, Empire, Aliens -- %nd Conquest (Toronto: Sisyphus, 19853. p. 77

226. SSAM (Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine), No. 16 (1980). cited in Peter Moss, "Rhetoric

of defense in the United States: language, mych and ideology," In Language -- and the

Nuclear Arms Debate, p. 34. ---

227, John Adams, "What's In A Name: 'SDI' or 'Star Wars'?," Spectrum, 22, y o . 9

228. Adams, 46.

229. Cited in Visions of Star Wars. p. 44. ---- *

2j0 . Cited in "Reel Security," Nuclear Times, 4, No. 5 (1986), 11. See also Boyer, "How -- SDI Will Change Our Culture," p. 17.

131. "Peace and ~ a t i o n a l Securit!.," p. 389.

* 232. Ernest blandel, - Late Capitalism, trans. Jons De Bres (London: New Left Books, 1975),

, p. 501. 0

Robin Wood, Hollywood - From Vietnam, - t o Reagan (New York: Columbia, 1986):~.

For a description of this technology, s e e the following articles in ~ m e h c a n

Cinematographer, 58, No. - 6 (1977): "Behind the Scenes of Star Wars," 698-702;

"Miniature and Mechanical Special Effects for Star Wars," 702-706; "Composite Optical

and Photographic Effects fdr Star Wars," 706-704.

Don Rubey, "Not So Far Away," )ump - Cut, No. 18 (1978); p. 9.

Rubey, p. 10. Starship Troopers (New York: Berkeley, 1959) is a celebration of t

interstellar imperialism in which atomic-armed soldiers clad in fully automated combat

suits rocket onto alien planets in grotesque extrapolation of American Third World

search-and-destroy operations. For an important analysis of the contribution of such

"hard-core" science-fiction texts t o the ideology of SDI, see Thomas Disch, *'The

Road to Heaven: Science Fiction A-

1986, pp; 650-656, and also H. - -

Countdown to Midnight, ed. H. -

and the Militarization of Space," Nation, 10 May

Bruce Franklin, "Nuclear War and Science Fiction,"

Bruce Franklin (New York: Daw, 1984), pp. 11-28.

Wood, p. 166.

George Lucas, Star Wars: From the Adventures of. Luke Skywalker (New York: - -- - - -- Ballantine, 1977), p. 101.

Coulding, p. 69.

Even before the Reagan administration's major funding of reactionary. insurgency,

Rubey observed that Star Wars' portrayal of the Rebels "reflects some of the -7

fund ental contradictions in contemporav foreign policy" For the Rebels are actually e- loyalists, trying to ;upport an old order that has somehow-been turned into an

Empire by a revolutionary force: they can thus -be represented as, at - once, -- - - -

supporters o f republiian democracy and of a traditional, hierarchical order. This is, as

Rubey remarks, "a nice way t o have your authoritarian cake and eat it tooH: \ .

The American theoretical fondness for underdogs . . . stemming from our own revolutionary history, dictates that the good guys be rebels. However, the film's support of traditional ideas of hierarchy and obedience demands the bad guys be rebels. The same confusion is

, reflected in the contradiction between America's theoretical support of freedom and independence in the world and its actual support of oppressive and dictatorial regimes.

see Rubey, p. 11. 4

241. See Dan Smith, "Star Wars: The President Strikes Back," END: Journal of Europeah --- Nuclear Disarmament, No. 4. (1983), 29-30.

242. David Trend, "Birds of Prey," Afterimage, 14, No. 4 (1986). 6.

243. For an interesting view o f the almost wholly masculine environment of Lawrence , - Livermore, see William Broad, Star Warriors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). -

244. Cited in Visions of Star Wars, p. 4. ---- - -

245. Wood, p. 174.

246. Rubey, p. 10.

247. Wood, p. 174.

248. In Aliens, (prod Gale Hurd, dir. lames Cameron. 20th Centur). Fox, 19861, "Ripley"

doer indeeh dominate the story as a tough, tender, emancipated, space heroine

' whoce ultimate, and diegeticaliy correct, wisdom on dealing with unfriendly

extraterrestrials is "Let's get off the planet and nuke 'em .from orbit." Her +

assimilation into the patriarchal-militan complex attains its symbolic consummation as

she advances to d o final battle with the "queen" alien. Fully encased in

c- semi-automatic arm ur, a female Gobot, Ripley lets fly .at her horrendous' foe- the

ultimate insult: "You bitch!" For a provocative study of the sexism in Hollywood

"sci-fi," and its nuclear implications, s ee Zoe Sofia, "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion,

Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialisrn," Diacritics, 14, No. 2

Sir Solly Zuckerman writes of SDI:

What is critically important is that there could be no human "interface" in any part of the system. There would be no time for human judgement, ,no time for "no go" decisions.' Once the surveillance sattellites'had registered a launching, the system would b e automatically tnggered to execute its single option--to destroy.

Cited in E. P. Thompson, and en Thompson, Star Wars: Self Destruct Incorporated --- (London: Merlin, 1985) p. 1. For a useful summary of SDl's. reliance o i on artificial

intelligence, see Jonathan Jacky, "The 'Star Wars' Defense Won't Compute," Atlantic,

June 1985. pp. 18-30.

~ a l c o l m W. Browne, "The Star Wars Spinoff," New York Times Magazine, 24 August . --- \

1986, cited in Paul Boyers, "How SDI Will Change Our Cvlture," p. 20.

George Keyworth, cited in Visions of Star Wars, p. 48. ---- I

Paul N. Edwards, "Border Wars: The Science and Politics of Artificial Intelligence,"

Radical America, 19, No. 6 (1986) 39-50. -- -

Cited ir: Fred Reed, "The Star Wars Swindle," Harper's; May 1986, p. 41.

John Bosma. "A Proposed Plan for Project on BMD and Arms Control." c i ted in

Henry Epstein, "Freeze Folk: The High Frontier Wants You," -- Nuclear Times 3, N o . 6

citizens" Advisory ~oun;i l

ed. Jerry Pournelle (New

d s e in SDI discourse, is

on National Space Policy, "THoR," in There Will Be War, ---- ~ o r k : Tom Doherty, 1983), p. 208. This passage, like much

symptomatic of the phenomenon Robert I . Lifton terms

"nuclearism," by which the apocalyptic power of the Bomb results in an u_nconscious

tendency t o sacralize nuclear weapons as awesome destructive derniurge. ~ e c a u s e of

their close &iociation with t h e j u c l e a r systems which they are allegedly tapable of '

defending us against, space weapons participate in this apotheosis, with the Bomb's ?% \

image as "Dew Irae" mixing with more benign visions of divine protection. See

Robert j. Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible ~ e a ' p o ~ s : The Politicat' and --- Psvchological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 87-70 -

Mandel, p. 504.

See Strat Caldicott and Leonie Caldicott, letter, "Return of the ,jedi," --- END: Journal of

European ~ u d x a r Disarmament, No. 6 (1983), p. 29.

Wood, p . , 169.

Cited in Adams, p. 46. . ,

Visions of Star Wars, pp. 38-39. ----

E. P. Thoimpson and Ben Thompson, Star Wars: Self-Destruct Incorporated (London -- Merlin, 19851, p. 65.

Fredric jameson, "Postmodemism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays - on Post-Modem Culture, ed . Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983) p 1 I 6 -

lameson, "Postmademism," p. 176.

lameson, "Postmodernism," pp. 116-117. For details of the 1950s serials and their

connections to Cold War politics,

Entertainment in Fifties Television,"

see 1. Fred MacDonald,

journal of Popular Film -- -

Poilock, p. 144.

See Arthur Lubow, "The 'Star Wars' War--a Space 'Illiad',"

and Television , 7, No. 1 -

Film Comment, No. 13 - (1977), pp. 20-21, and Vincent Canby, "Not Since 'Flash Gordon Conqueis the

Universe'," New York Times, 5 June 1977, Sec. 2, p. 15. I ---

For example, R. G. Collins, "'Star Wars': The Pastiche of Myth and the Yearning For

a Past Future," journal of Popular Culture, 11, No. 1 (1977). 1110. For a contrary -- view, see Wood, p. 170, who writes of -- Star Wars and related films that "while it

would be neither fair nor accurate" t o describe them as fascist films, "y'et they are

precisely the kinds of entertainment that a Fascist culture would be expected t o - *

produce and enjoy . . . ." It is 'worth noting that The - Triumph - - - of the Will is a

film of intense fascination to contemporary Hollywood: the maniacally militarist and

anti-communist Red Dawn opens with a visual allusion to Riefensthal's work. --

a \ Rubey, p. 11.

O n this point, I follow the e~ce l l en t discussion by Wood, p. 165.

See Barthes.

Walter Benjamin, "me Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in his t

Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 19691, p.

'< Matinetti, in a manifesto o n Mussolini's Ethiopian war, cited in gamin, p. 241.'

40. * .

274. Lowell Wood, cited in Visions of Star Wars, p. 36. ---- - -

275. Benjamin, p. 240.

276. For an account o f Tredici's work, which appears regularly in Nuclear rimes. see -- Taylor; Raymond Briggs, - - When The Wind Blows (Landon: Hamish Hamilton, 1982).

Denise Levertov, "A Speech For Antidraft Rally, D.C.. March 27. 1980," In her

Candles - in Babylon - (New York: New Directions, 1382). pp 92-')5. Ahce Walker

"Only justice Can Stop A Curse," in her In Search Of Our Mother's C;arden (Nctv ---- York: Harcourt, Brace 6i jovanovitch, 1983). pp. 338~343; Donna Harawak ''A

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/' Socialist Review, 15, No. 21 (1985). 65-107.

277. In from the pamphlet The Nuclear War Film: A Catalyst lo ,fJublic nt&k ----- --- (Canada: np, nd).

278. The Nuclear War Film, ' p. 2. ----

279. The Nuclear War Film, p. 1. ----

280. The Nuclear War Film,' p. 3. - - - . -

281. The ' ~ u t l ~ r War Film, p. 3. ---- - 6 . e

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>'.

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References

(PDF) Summit | SFU&#039;s Institutional Repositorysummit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/5428/b15029566.pdf · 2021. 7. 10. · has been mediated to the Hoeh American pub16 through th igtag& oH+dtywoa- - DOKUMEN.TIPS (2024)

References

(PDF) Summit | SFU's Institutional Repositorysummit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/5428/b15029566.pdf · 2021. 7. 10. · has been mediated to the Hoeh American pub16 through th igtag& oH+dtywoa- - DOKUMEN.TIPS (2024)