(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Peder Anker specializes in Ecologyhistory, and his books often have a polemical touch, with a small dose of irony – mixed with deep commitment. In his new book about atomic bombs colonial violence, the argument is in the open, while the irony twists into a dark sarcasm, or a parade of grotesque examples: For Kubrick's pitch-black satire in Dr. Strangelove Putting a damper on the euphoria was Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb (and the model for Kubrick's main character). Moreover, much of the American establishment was on a kind of hyped-up atomic bomb trip, complete with patriotic cabarets, Miss A-bomb pageants, and cocktail party tourism at the Nevada test sites.
The documentation Anker presents is shocking and thoroughly explained. It is part of the picture that this is an American story and a criticism of the American atomic bomb culture, but we know that nuclear bomb missile systems are part of patriotic military parades in several nuclear powers. Even during the famous and peaceful "Rose Parade" where I live in Pasadena, Los Angeles, it is a highlight when the event begins with a Stealth Bomber flying at low altitude – the same aircraft that is part of the delivery system for B-83 nuclear bombs that are 80 times more powerful than Hiroshima-bomb. Really festive...
Colonial violence
Anker's approach in the historical presentation is to see the presentation and later test explosionone of atomic bombs from the perspective of indigenous peoples and local communities. But before he gets there, Anker lays his cards on the table and admits that it was Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer-film that sparked the book project: It was too smooth, too patriotic – and even Oppenheimer's own sacrifices (peace of mind, friendship, love affairs) were portrayed as patriotic and noble.
I even had friends who boycotted the movie because it barely mentions that the secret research facility Los Alamos, as well as the test sites in New Mexico, were stolen from indigenous groups. Anker's book explores such blind spots and connects them to a pattern of colonial violence from New Mexico to Nevada and Bikini Atoll.
Prophetic
The strong opening of the story starts with a prophecy from shamans Ayeh, who belonged to the Diné people in Canada. The shaman slept one night towards the end of the 1800th century on the mythical rock Sombe Ke by what the Canadians call Great Bear Lake in the Arctic Circle, and which the Diné people call Sahtú. The rocks were notorious for making people sick. In the dream, Ayeh saw strange white men digging a deep hole in the ground. They took out something they attached to a long pole, which was carried into the air by a large, noisy bird – and when it was released by the bird, everyone died from the long pole, it burned them all. “But this is not happening now, this is far in the future.” Anker’s sources for this story from the “Nostradamus of the North” do not seem entirely reliable, and I had trouble finding any dating for these oral traditions, which are so spectacular in their foresight.
After the Castle Bravo test in 1954, two inches of snow fell. radioactive waste over the settlements on the Pacific islands, and the children played in the snow for the first time – a new and festive experience in the tropics. Not long after, they lost their hair.
But the story continues on safe ground: the Sombe Ke mine, the "Eldorado", together with Congolese mines, supplied the Manhattan Project with uranium from 1941. The year after Ayeh died, and just three years after Hahn, Strassmann and Frisch had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms by bombarding them with neutrons. Uranium, and its enrichment to make it suitable for weapons, was as crucial as Oppenheimer's fatal invention, which once made can never be 'undiscovered'. And who were the workers in the mines, carrying the hazardous ore and breathing in uranium dust without protection? The Dine people. And they soon came true to another of Ayeh's dark predictions – about "a new disease". Many of the miners fell ill and died. The Dine men in the mines became the first civilian casualties of the war in North America. And the damage was not only to the workers and their families: In the outstanding documentary The Village of Widows (1998, available on YouTube) by Peter Blow, one of Anker's sources, mentions that 1,7 million tons of radioactive slag have been left in the mining area. The contamination will affect humans and other life forms in Great Bear Lake for at least 800 years. A grim prophecy. But this is made with scientific certainty, based on half-lives and radiation hazards.
Shocking failure
One of the most shocking things in the book is how the research community and scientific institutions have repeatedly failed in their civic duty and allowed themselves to be carried away by patriotic secrecy, high-risk behavior, and victim mentality. The Dine people are far from the only "victim zone" in the history of the atomic bomb. Sacrifice zones – a term that is often used condemningly by ecological critics today – carries its own irony – for the victim zones were part of the terminology of public agencies that selected areas for test explosions. The “test areas” should really be called “disaster areas”, Anker points out in his thorough review of test explosions. In reality, they were deadly open-air experiments, because the explosive power of new bombs was often loosely estimated in advance.
One of the wildest cases is Bikini Atoll, where the population was forcibly relocated to another atoll, Rongerik, before the first nuclear tests, only to end up within range of an oversized hydrogen bomb. After the Castle Bravo test in 1954, which was more than twice as powerful as planned, two inches of radioactive waste snowed over the settlements on these Pacific islands, and children played in the snow for the first time—a new and festive experience in the tropics. Not long after, their hair fell out, and panic began to spread. A Japanese fishing vessel had a similar experience. One morning, the sun suddenly rose in the west with a roar. Soon the crew suffered burns and hair loss—and the radioactivity spread all the way to their homeland, Japan. That same summer, Japanese activists collected no less than 30 million signatures to end nuclear weapons, giving momentum to the first disarmament plans and a partial test-ban agreement, signed in 1963.
Superficial victim mentality
Whether Japan, which was among the aggressors in World War II, can be seen as a victim of colonialist violence is unclear, but they were nevertheless double victims of direct and indirect violence against civilians. I met a woman this summer who was the daughter of two survivors of the Hiroshima bomb, and she told me that the bombing was completely taboo when she was growing up. By tending the few trees that survived, people could come together and remember in an indirect way. It may seem nuclear weapons is by far a taboo even in the West and USA, perhaps because the certainty of guilt and complicity runs too deep. For the Japanese, the films about the nuclear-armed mutant monster Godzilla became a popular cultural detour to talk about an overly traumatic story, Anker points out.
The bikini fashion provided the forcibly evacuated Pacific islands with a sexy association that led to an entire slang jargon of "sex bombs."
In contrast to the extreme violence and threat posed by atomic bombs, it is shocking to read about ecologists who visited the bombed Bikini Atoll in the 1950s and concluded that the damage was minimal. More hair-raising and tasteless are the accounts of a beauty pageant in occupied Nagasaki in 1946 that crowned 19-year-old schoolgirl Yamamura Yoko “Miss Atomic Bomb.” Anker follows this example with a long list of pop-cultural examples, from the bikini fashion that provided the forcibly evacuated islands with a sexy association to an entire slang jargon of “sex bombs” and other explosion and (radiation) metaphors.
Strong judgments
In between the black humor in the review of the atomic bomb in popular culture, Anker offers clear words for the money: "The bomb is not a metaphor." He emphasizes in plain language that it is high time to confront the endless suffering that both the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons brought with it, especially among indigenous groups.
"The implication that the atomic bombs were dropped on a people who had already sought peace should not be included in a document to be made public."
The book's strongest piece of information, which Anker underemphasizes, perhaps because as a historian he assumes it is already known, or because he simply wants to let it speak for itself, is a letter from General George Lincoln to future President Dwight Eisenhower in 1946: "The implication of the atomic bombs being dropped on a people who had already sought peace should not be included in a document to be made public." Peace was secured before the bombs were dropped, and people absolutely must not know about it.
The consequence is as shocking as it is universal: nuclear weapons have been surrounded from the very beginning by a deceptive rhetoric of sacrifice, arguing for a strong necessity. This deception has been covered up with superficial propaganda and a celebration of the bomb as a means of peace and just victory. And here Anker does not hesitate to pass a crushing judgment also on those who willingly allowed themselves to be deceived or carried away, as he speaks without mincing words about the "enormous joy American citizens felt at having destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Important perspective
The explosive power of the atomic bomb has seduced and dazzled politicians for over 80 years. Anker's book on the atomic bomb ideology and weapons technologyOne's hidden suffering is important as both a document and an argument, to show how wrong things can go – yes, how wrong they actually have gone. The idea of the atomic bomb as a necessary evil persists. The suffering that nuclear weapons have caused, even in peacetime, is completely underemphasized in the debate, which in any case rarely reaches the media, since it is too unpleasant and taboo.
Let me make a couple of final comments: We may not consider the atomic bomb sexy anymore, but entertainment shows like Fallout presents a superficial play with nuclear war scenarios, where life after the apocalypse is transformed into an exciting Western world full of stimulating survival battles and mutated monsters in the style of Godzilla. At the same time, the USA is arming itself, and the cowboy Trump in the White House wants to take over Inuit Greenland. The last time the USA made significant advances in this part of the world was with the classified Project Iceworm from 1955 to 1966, which was declassified in 1994. The story could have fit well into Anker's book: The facade of the project was Camp Century, but in secret the Americans planned 4000 kilometers of tunnels under the ice to place about 600 nuclear weapons without Denmark's consent. The project never came to fruition because the ice turned out to be too mobile for a permanent facility. But with climate changeFirst, the materials left behind from the failed base, 200 liters of diesel along with radioactive substances from a planned nuclear reactor, will leak into the Inuit areas around the year 000. Who controls Greenland, and what the geopolitics will look like at this time, is highly uncertain.
Extreme weather
There is an interview on YouTube with the inventor of the hydrogen bomb Edward Teller, where he is asked at the edge of a swimming pool whether it could be true that nuclear weapons tests are the cause of what we today call “extreme weather.” With a slight chuckle, he points out that there is hardly a problem that the tests are not blamed for.
In Anker's book, we get a fairly thorough review of an early phase of the debate on global warming that explains the journalist's inquisitorial questions. Here, we get the impression that the concern about nuclear weapons as a source of climate change opened up the theme we live with today – humans as a source of geophysical change. The clip from the Teller interview also ends with him talking with sustained enthusiasm about what he calls "geographical engineering interventions."
Secretly, the Americans planned 4000 kilometers of tunnels under the Greenland ice sheet to place around 600 nuclear weapons without Denmark's consent.
What can we learn from the debate about nuclear tests as a source of meteorological unrest? That the atomic bomb debate aroused an interest in man's ability to change the atmosphere, even if people drew hasty conclusions. Nuclear war and climate change, as the two greatest man-made threats to ourselves and the earth, follow each other in a shadow play that is difficult to decipher – and which is often perceived as future and apocalyptic threats. There is an apocalyptic element in Anker's book as well, not least in the predictions of the shaman Ayeh, who predicts that the world will end suddenly, in the blink of an eye. But the underlying element is a meticulous review of the damage that has already been done, which strikes unfairly through cancer and destroyed nature – and which stems from a colonialist arrogance towards natural areas and the earth's (indigenous) populations.
