American Nuclear: A Convergent History of Landscape and Power

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Barraclough, Laura

Abstract

American Nuclear is a wide-ranging spatial, historical, and cultural study of the production of nuclear power—both bombs and energy—in the American landscape. Despite the fact that US nuclear production has required a massive deployment of resources, infrastructure, and has irreversibly impacted environments and lives in often spectacularly violent or toxic ways, the events and geographies of this production have remained submerged in mainstream narratives of American history. Countering this, American Nuclear argues that the legacies of US nuclear production can be found hidden in plain sight in the everyday landscapes of the continental United States. Employing research in government and corporate archives, scientific reports, and a creative interweaving of visual analysis and personal history, this project demonstrates that nuclear landscapes exist beyond, and in relation, to the usually cited locations of US nuclear power. To this end, I focus on four chapter-long case studies of different everyday American landscapes in which this nuclear history has been obscured. I locate threads of the US nuclear industry in what may seem like surprising locations: the banks of the Mississippi River in Vicksburg, Mississippi, an eroding beachside cliff on the edge of Cape Cod, an empty lot in New Haven, Connecticut, and my great-grandfather’s ranch house in suburban Maryland. From each of these landscapes American Nuclear traces the uneven impacts of radioactive waste and nuclear fuel supply chains, narrates the history of military engineering laboratories and radar stations, and explores the way that nuclear landscapes are ideologically produced through photography and visual culture. Focusing on sites that have been considered mundane, small, or tangential, the project illuminates how a multitude of everyday landscapes and lives have been shaped and produced by the U.S. nuclear-industrial complex in ways that can be hard to see, continue in the present, and are part of longer American histories. I find that despite their connotation as geographies of the 20th and 21st centuries, everyday nuclear landscapes are ciphers that highlight the way that the production of nuclear technology in the United States has long been made possible by intersecting historical and spatial legacies of American violence and inequality: geographies of the plantation, settler-colonial expansion across the continent, the wrested possessions of US empire, and the ongoing project of US military preparedness, or militarization. American Nuclear contends that the material and cultural production of nuclear geographies in the past created an understanding of space and landscape that persists today.

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