Nuclear apocalypticism creates an erasure of nuclear colonialism, legitimizing the death of the periphery

Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has never been the “unthinkable” single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the “real” of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth’s Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of the “nuclear testing” in the Pacific. Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere…were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the Earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself. Although Firth’s book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of “nuclear testing” in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the “nuclear explosions” and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject (“we”) is located higher than the “real” of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the “real” of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakeable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.