Destroyer of Worlds: War and Apocalypse in the Nuclear Epoch

264 Pages·2015·2.48 MB·English

UC Santa Cruz
UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Destroyer of Worlds: War and Apocalypse in the Nuclear Epoch
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pc1d3h6
Author
Sivak, Andrew Mark
Publication Date
2015

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ
DESTROYER OF WORLDS:
WAR AND APOCALYPSE IN THE NUCLEAR EPOCH
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
with an emphasis in POLITICS
by
Andrew Mark Sivak
June 2015
The Dissertation of Andrew Mark Sivak
is approved:
__________________________
Professor Robert Meister, chair
__________________________
Professor David Marriott
__________________________
Joseph Natoli, Ph.D.
__________________________
Tyrus Miller
Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies
Copyright © by
Andrew Mark Sivak
2015
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v
INTRODUCTION. Why War? 1
CHAPTER ONE. Burn, and Make Me New 30
The Battered Heart of J. Robert Oppenheimer 31
Der Bund—“The Snare that Would Someday Catch the Sun” 49
A Sun Rising in the West 67
The Chicago Reformation 79
When Manhattan Appears 95
CHAPTER TWO. The Infernal Return 104
“A Jap Burns” 105
Stark and Dreadful and Inescapable 116
The Apocalypse Is Disappointing 131
How Shall We Burn? 147
Endless End Time, or At the Horizons Where We Succumb 156
CHAPTER THREE. Still Remains 162
The Opera of Hiroshima 163
A Place that Death Preserved 171
The Architect 187
The Actress 202
Flash Burns in 1959 210
CONCLUSION. The Jonah Paradox 225
Bibliography 249
iii
ABSTRACT
Andrew Mark Sivak
Destroyer of Worlds: War and Apocalypse in the Nuclear Epoch
Destroyer of Worlds is an interdisciplinary study of the nuclear epoch,
emphasizing its theological and philosophical origins and implications. Its core
argument is that the purpose of the Manhattan Project was to end war in general, not
hasten the end of a particular war. The scientists and politicians who collaborated on
the atomic bomb's creation believed that its war-time detonation would be a form of
revelatory annihilation, triggering a miraculous chain-reaction which would convert
humanity to pacifism. Though they successfully invented and deployed the new
superweapon, they failed to engineer their miracle. The dissertation goes on to ask
why, examining how the world and humanity were forever changed by the burning of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also the ways in which they remained the same by closely
reading primary historical documents, philosophical and political commentaries, and an
array of art objects, both literary and visual.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee members: Joseph
Natoli, David Marriott, and Robert Meister. This dissertation reflects each of them and
in so many ways would not be possible without their excessively generous intellectual
and existential support. I suspect that from time to time they will see themselves (or a
version warped by my mind) in these pages and cringe. My apologies, gentlemen—
perhaps you taught me too well. For my students in Santa Cruz, at universities both
visible and invisible, who were such noble companions in the great adventure of
thought lo these seven years, I also offer my deepest gratitude. Finally, I wish to thank
Norman O. Brown, or his wild spirit, which visited me often as I wrote this in a library
made of concrete and glass, a building swarmed by groves of the giant redwood trees he
loved, full of the books he still haunts with adoration.
v
Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
vi
Introduction: Why War?
The plain truth is that people want war. They want it anyhow: for itself, and apart from
each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life's fireworks. The born
soldier wants it hot and actual. The non-combatant wants it in the background, and
always as an open possibility, to feed his imagination. War is human nature at its
uttermost. We are here to do our uttermost. It is a sacrament. Society would rot without
the mystical blood-payment.
—William James, “Remarks at the Peace Banquet”
1
We are still waiting, still unsure, as the great nuclear cataclysm prophesied by so
many in the years after 1945 remains a non-event. Everything that this so-called
“destroyer of worlds” once destroyed has been rebuilt (and rebuilt again many times
over). Interstate war is far less common now and less bloody, though it remains quite
costly and must be constantly threatened, even when nations are at peace. Perhaps it is
the appearance of peacefulness that keeps us from asking, “why are we still here, despite
all the forewarning?” Was it madness that drove the wild-eyed man draped in sandwich
boards to proclaim, in the previous century, that the world would soon be consumed in
the fires of nuclear war? Now that the world has outlasted visionaries like him, is it safe
to declare their vision false? Even this question seems past its time. These days the
culture industry is transfixed by a different order of nightmares; in politics, the sign of
the enemy threat has assumed other forms; and as for the doomsday prophets roving
our city streets, they now carry clipboards and warn of other immanent catastrophes.
But what happened to the nuclear issue in the years after attention shifted elsewhere?
Did the world grow safer with each passing day? Did the perilous risks of nuclear
armament diminish over time? Did the bomb cease being the indisputable backbone of
2
international relations? And are we at risk, if responding in the affirmative, of mistaking
the non-event of the past for the guaranteed continuation of our present? That
unthinking conflation—believing that the world will not burn simply because it has not
already burned—is at the heart of the many problems addressed by the present study,
now that the appearance of a peaceful nuclear stalemate, insofar as it dampened the
burning questions of war, may have become a danger to itself.
When the non-event of nuclear war is attributed to something other than dumb
luck, which is to say, when it is claimed to be the direct result of human control, it is
linked to either a deterrent balance of terror or to an idealistic “taboo” against nuclear
weapons use normatively imposed by political and religious stigmatization.1 On some
accounts the nuclear taboo has transcended its apparent origin in the brutish logic of
1 The dumb luck theory was offered up by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara:
“Errol Morris, in The Fog of War, asks McNamara what he thinks protected humanity from
extinction during the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union permanently threatened
each other with mutual annihilation. Deterrence? Not at all, McNamara replies: 'We lucked out.'
Twenty-five or thirty times during this period, he notes, mankind came within an inch of the
apocalypse [sic].” Quoted by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in The Mark of the Sacred, trans. M.B. DeBevoise
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 184. Deterrence is the older of the latter two
explanations, a position well-articulated by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State, and War: A
Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). For the more recent theory of
the taboo as springing from normative design, see Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The
United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
3