Nuclear Forms

Nuclear Forms extends the more recent approach of attending to the narratives of the broader networks of living in the nuclear age, focusing in particular on the ongoing cultural legacies and material realities of nuclear technology after the end of the Cold War. By shifting attention from the Cold War to these broader entanglements, the contributions to this collection make explicit what has often remained implicit in much of this recent scholarship: namely, that the nuclear is not only analogous to or overlaps with a number of concerns crucial to current research in the Environmental Humanities but that we also need to understand and take seriously the Nuclear Age and the Anthropocene as co-constitutive. As such, the individual chapters in this collection attend to instances of nuclear concerns becoming environmental and vice versa, understanding the core concerns such as risk, vulnerability, planetarity, etc. shaping the fields of nuclear scholarship and the Environmental Humanities as mutually enlightening each other. The collection therefore builds on recent work by scholars, which shifts the focus from the nuclear as imaginary to the nuclear as material presence; from the nuclear as exceptional occurrence to mundane infrastructure; from the nuclear as sudden event to its incremental effects; and from the nuclear as integral to the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union to the many communities experiencing the ramification of nuclear technology in both its military and civilian uses.