Issue 189, August 2025

Annihilation Aesthetics: The Disappearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Guest editors: Brad Evans and Caroline Holmqvist

Ten years ago, an edited volume was curated for Thesis Eleven that sought to address the legacies of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seven decades on from the atrocities. At the time, it was felt that while the violence of the bombings was fading from memory, there was also a normalisation in the appearance of atomic clouds in every kind of representation that dealt with end of world narratives. This was matched by a declining interest in mass movement protest against the existence and development of nuclear technologies, which offered a marked departure from previous campaigns for nuclear disarmament that were notably prevalent during the 1980s and 90s. Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to be fading from memory, as the world was dealing with a multitude of catastrophic threats marking the post-Cold War period, even if the aesthetic of the destruction appeared like an ever-present strategic and cultural motif that was continually rearticulated.

Today, we are in a different political and strategic moment. As the spotlight on the history of the bomb has been given renewed cultural focus through popular films such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, there has also been a stark and ominous return to the language of nuclear annihilation. The threat of nuclear violence once again looms over zones of crises, notably Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, as the technological world continues apace, Big-Tech pioneers like Sam Altman, chief executive officer and co-founder of OpenAI, now openly call for a new ‘Manhattan Project’ to reign in (or legitimise?) the destructive potential of artificial intelligence (Johnson, 2023). So how are we to make sense of this situation today? What can still be said about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years on? And can we return to those horrifying events from 1945 so that we might be able to offer a deeper and more reflective critique on technological violence?

Introduction

Annihilation aesthetics: The disappearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki [open access]

Brad Evans and Caroline Holmqvist

Artist statement

A study for a bomb [prepublication version available open access here]

Chantal Meza

Articles

Annihilated landscapes: Disappearance, desolation and the memory of the abyss [open access]

Brad Evans and Daniele Rugo

This article addresses both the conceptualisation and visualisation of annihilation landscapes of suffering and despair. Rethinking the history of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what it means for understanding the past and present of atrocity, the essay attends to key concerns with the logics of the abyss and the nihilism of technologically enabled destruction. These will be addressed through a number of films that will highlight our main concerns with the violence of disappearance, desolation and the (im)possibility of memory.

Nuclear memories for the future: Gaps and forgetting in European publics’ understandings of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Sterre van Buuren, Benoît Pelopidas and Alexander Sorg

Using two novel surveys of representative samples of Europeans in nine countries, we identify two gaps in Europeans’ understandings of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First, there is a gap in awareness of Hiroshima versus Nagasaki, which obscures the potential significance of the Nagasaki bombing for evaluating the morality and controllability of nuclear explosions. Second, there exists a gap between older and younger generations’ knowledge and perceptions of the bombing. Younger generations perceive the bombings as overall less impactful yet do not have alternative memories of nuclear events. The dominance of Hiroshima over both Nagasaki and other nuclear-historical events is explored in terms of its implications for Europeans’ ability to understand the possibility of future nuclear harms. We put forward global nuclear testing and cases of the lucky avoidance of nuclear explosions as productive ways to supplement currently existing memories and to connect them to the future.

Bunkerization as a fantasy of consumer sovereignty: The politics of American disaster preparation

Robert E Kirsch and Emily Ray

This paper theorizes “bunkerization” as an organizing principle in American society that emerged after the atomic bombings of Japan and continues through contemporary crises. Bunkerization reconfigures domestic space as a defensive fortress through consumer choices, inverting Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty from “the sovereign is he who decides in the exception” to “the sovereign is he who is decided by the exception.” Three key arguments are advanced: (1) bunkerization explains how Americans oriented themselves post-1945 and manifests distinctively in American society; (2) bunkerized society transforms citizens into consumer-sovereigns managing personal micro-states while maintaining American identity; and (3) this consumer sovereignty fantasy reveals how America conceptualizes its katechontic function—restraining apocalypse while envisioning post-collapse futures. Bunkerization is critiqued as a neoliberal fantasy that individualizes collective threats, making them manageable through market choices rather than collective action, leaving citizens to purchase their way to an illusory safety.

Imagining spectral violence: On morality and meaning in the cyber-nuclear age [open access]

Caroline Holmqvist and Elke Schwarz

This article is about our relationship to two lethal technologies that blow the mind: nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence – and their mutual imbrication. Our diagnosis is that we are missing an ethical critique adequate to the (emergent/resurgent) technologies of mass destruction. In particular, we are dissatisfied with the persistence and dominance of algorithmic reasoning and/in contemporary just war theory, manifest in deterrence theory. We argue that such approaches fail to take into account the intrinsically human capacity to exercise moral judgement and the quintessential human-ness of ethical relations. In response to deprivation of ethics as algorithmic thinking, we summon a distinctly human quality – the imagination – and argue that it is pivotal to exploding the conceptual categories that hamper ‘ethical’ theorising. Imagining the Apocalypse is not the answer; imagining otherwise is. With this in mind, we foreground the imagination as vital to ethical reasoning and political critique.

Post-August 1945 apocalypse: Imagined annihilation after atomic bombs

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 marked a fundamental rupture in human history, reshaping our collective imagination of catastrophe and extinction. This article examines how post-atomic discourse has developed an ‘annihilation imaginary’ – a cultural and aesthetic framework through which societies mediate the possibility of obliteration. Drawing on Anders’s critique of technological alienation, I explore how narratives of apocalypse often serve as ideological mediations rather than radical critiques. While the prospect of environmental collapse, nuclear annihilation, or technological singularity dominates contemporary speculative thought, these imaginaries frequently reinforce rather than challenge the capitalist logic they seek to critique.

The bio-historiography of a lethal career: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Michael J Shapiro

In a reading of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, the essay features a cinematic historiography of the creation of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The emphasis is on the role of sound in the film and the interaction of careers, both scientific and military. Much of the analysis is concerned with the contingencies through which Oppenheimer consummated a process that ended in an atrocity: his relationship to Judaism, his love of New Mexico, his aspiration to do applied physics, and his meetings with military officers.