2---Perm fails. ‘Add-women-and-stir’ links at the level of form.

So how can we begin to tell more feminist stories about the nuclear beginning? Below are a few reflections, they are by no means definitive or even fully finished but are simply some paths I see forward for the future of the nuclear past. One step is to reconsider whose story gets told, remembered, and commemorated and to ask Cynthia Enloe’s question of ‘where are the women?’ (1990). While the agonised decision-making of the elite men making the first atomic weapons has been lionised in popular culture, there is limited discussion of the fact that most workers, including a vast majority of the women working on the Manhattan Project doing assembly line tasks, had no ability to make such judgements either about their willingness to partake in such a project or on the impacts of such work on their own health (Schwab 2020). While there is some research on the role of women in the Manhattan Project (Kiernan 2013; Rall 2006; Howes and Herzenberg 1999), more could be done.

Simply adding women’s stories to the nuclear origin myth is, however, not adequate to challenge its socio-political implications and does not necessarily mean one is telling a feminist story. Rather, given that the Manhattan Project was embedded in colonial, racialised structures and practices, a feminist narrative may not just be one that tells the story of women but rather one that has an orientation ‘towards marginalised bodies and sites that start with a feminist politics that take women and gender seriously; however, where this departure point takes any given feminist research and politics are infinite.’ (choi 2021, p. 63 see also Richter-Montpetit 2016). There is great potential for research that studies the marginalised bodies and sites of the Manhattan Project and their gendered socio-political dynamics and contexts. For example, at the Hanford facility in Washington State where the plutonium in the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki was produced, Du Pont Corporation management paid African American and Mexican Americans less than white workers, setting up a ‘coloured barracks for African Americans and forcing its Mexican American employees to ride a bus 60 miles to the plant to work and segregating the site’, in doing so it ‘introduced racial segregation into eastern Washington’ (Brown 2013, p. 27). This story is just one example of marginalised bodies and spaces in the gendered fantasy of the Manhattan Project that warrants further study.

A second step towards telling feminist stories could be to rethink the way in which the nuclear origin myth locates the atomic weapon along a historical continuum of violence and progress: as the outcome of a long history of humankind’s war-making tendencies as well as the outcome of the development of enlightenment thinking and scientific discovery. It is possible to narrate the development of the atomic bomb as located along a different (though intimately related) timeline, one of a history of extraction and colonialism (Biswas 2014; Teaiwa 1994). Feminist work has asked us to reconsider what a continuum of violence means in relation to the Manhattan Project and how violence occurs not just in time but that ‘at linked points along other continuua too—of space and place (bedroom to battlefield), of scale (fist to bomb) and of type or kind (cultural and institutional, overt and direct)’ (Cockburn 2004, p. 357). By centring the everyday, the gendered and marginalised bodies and sites it is possible to also locate the atomic bomb along violent continuua of place, scale and type. One can see how, for example, the racialised violence at Hanford is inextricable from the violence of the nuclear explosion at Nagasaki made with Hanford plutonium. Or how the forced expulsion of Pueblo and native New Mexicans from the land taken for use on Los Alamos and the return of these communities to the site as maids and janitors are at once a specifically located violence and at the same time connected with the tests of US thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands in Pacific, whose peoples were also displaced in service of ‘the bomb’.