ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Silent evidence. On nuclear mounds, craters and caves

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 06 | URBAN CULTURES AND LIVED HERITAGE

Speaker

Dr Ludovico Centis (Università degli Studi di Trieste)

Description

Dealing with the heritage of the Manhattan Project does not simply mean expressing one’s position as being against or in favor of nuclear weapons or nuclear energy for civil use. Either we like it or not, and whether we accept it or not, the Trinity test held on July 16, 1945, ushered humankind into a new era.
This proposal focuses on three sites – the Niagara Falls Storage Site, NY, the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas, NV, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad, NM – where the ground still shows the scars of atomic testing and where nuclear waste is stored, shielded by artificial mounds or in deep underground caves. Sites that following the categorization proposed by Alois Riegl in his fundamental text on the cult of monuments would be defined as unintentional monuments. Following the fact that the nuclear waste will remain active for thousands of years, Riegl’s notion of age-value is pushed to its limit, evoking a future so distant that our limited sense of time as human beings can barely grasp it.
The mounds, craters and caves that punctuate these sites, along with others dispersed both through the US and other countries that experienced nuclear testing and activity, testify of the great sacrifices that were inflicted upon territories that, realistically, will never return to their original condition. In the case of sites associated with the Manhattan Project and its legacy, aesthetic considerations remain in the background, considering that many of these landscapes are hostile or deadly to forms of life, and will continue to be for millennia to come.
Considering the kind of impasse we are at today when it comes to dealing with atomic energy’s byproducts, we might agree with Jacques Derrida’s identification of nuclear energy as the most extreme pharmakon, a type of substance that can both injure and be a remedy; we must not forget the contributions of nuclear medicine and the diagnostic abilities it affords. At the same time, as philosopher Guenther Anders pointed out in his groundbreaking works, we must recognize that we live in a society in which the threats generated by scientific development and technological innovation cannot be managed confidently, for it is now capable of exposing us to unprecedentedly large-scale and enduring environmental-pollution phenomena. In this respect, one need only call to mind the Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, as well as the Manhattan Project’s own dangerous legacy at sites such as Hanford, WA.
In the meantime, mounds, craters and caves that punctuate the US landscape in sites as the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, the Nevada Test Site and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant stand as silent evidence of the new era opened by the discovery of atomic power.

References

Anders, Günther (1956) Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck’sche,
Arrenius, Thordis (2012) The Fragile Monument. On Conservation and Modernity. London: Artifice books on architecture.
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Derrida, Jacques (1981) Plato’s Pharmacy. Dissemination. London: Athlone Press, 61-172.
Derrida, Jacques (1984) No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives). Diacritics 14 (2), 20-31.
Forster, Kurt W. (1998) Monument/Memory and the Mortality of Architecture. In Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, 1973–1984. Ed. K. Michael Hays. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998, 18-35.
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Riegl, Alois (1903). The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin. Trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo. Oppositions 25, 1982, 21-51.