Description
This paper uses feminist approaches and insights from Future Studies to explore how the prospect of nuclear war during the Cold War west was understood to shape the present and potential everyday. Exploring artistic, visual, and material representations of the first nuclear age, the paper argues that the prospect of nuclear attack troubles the boundaries of bases, battlefields, and military encounter, asserting the totalising, everyday nature of war preparations. Read in relation to the importance of military bases in understandings of the Cold War, it explores how the objects and visuals associated with nuclear weapons explicitly produce war preparation as everyday, everywhere, emotive, and embodied, extending the boundaries of military installations and logics. It further suggests that the capacity of nuclear war to produce a slippage between military space and everyday space is laced though with sexual and racialised body politics. Focusing on artistic works depicting the consequences of atomic bombs and testing, the curation of Cold War materials in the Imperial War Museum (UK), and the US phenomenon of ‘Miss Atomic Bomb’, the paper explores how feminist readings of the spatial, material, and visual dynamics of nuclear weapons emphasize gendered notions of almost-war in everyday spaces.
