06: Nuke the Whales

For nearly a century, nuclear armageddons have been imagined across American film, television, comics, and multiple literary genres. From early sci-fi pulp magazines, to Cold War thrillers, to 90s-era Nickelodeon cartoons, to contemporary big budget gaming-turned-streaming franchises like Fallout, citizens of the United States have consumed their own obliteration, courtesy of atomic reckonings.  On this episode, you'll hear from visual artists Trevor Paglen, Cara Despain, Kentarō Ikegami, and Nina Elder, as well as scholars Traci Brynne Voyles and Joseph Masco. This installment of Time Zero also considers how the late philosopher Mark Fisher's concepts of the weird and the eerie, Reza Negarestani's experimental theory-novel Cyclonopedia, and Donna Haraway's "tentacular thinking" can offer productive frameworks for critically analyzing nuclear narratives—and for imagining nuclear-free futures.  Episode 06 asks: Should we be thinking about uranium as sentient?  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.