Description
This paper examines the political significance of the origin story of the US Manhattan Project and the first atomic bombs for the future of the global nuclear order. The article claims that, while there are multiple and global nuclear histories, one particular account of the development of the first nuclear weapons that the article labels as ‘the race for the Bomb’ has been repeatedly retold in western accounts, and its mythologised nuclear origin narrative articulates a particular nature and meaning for nuclear weapons that bounds our nuclear past, present and future and limits the potential to envision political change. It accomplishes this through Kenneth Burke’s concept of ‘entelechy’, which provides a means of examining how a thing’s essence can be understood by narrativising its past or future.
