Even if threats are real, the imagery of nuclear scenarios in the middle east is inherently tied to a post 9/11 American orientalist international regime

The photo-montage creates a nuclear aesthetic that is found in the world of cinematic make-believe and in the literature and reporting of 9/11. While disaster films make us imagine nuclear disasters that give birth to mutant monsters and desolate urban areas, the 9/11 literature and journalistic reporting mislead us into believing that we have finally witnessed, experienced, and ultimately survived, a “nuclear-like attack”. Accounts of the attacks on the Twin Towers include descriptions of nuclear-like power emanating from the exploding airplanes, the absence of humanity in an urban area, ash-covered streets that are compared with nuclear winter, an American president locked in a bunker command center, and an American government that went into pro- tective hiding. All these nuclear references may have fooled Americans into believing that a nuclear attack can be isolated to a few city blocks, a couple of thousand deaths, with many people able to escape unscathed, a temporarily crippled economy, and a trium- phant presidential return to the White House later that evening. This photo-montage provides similar false hopes. But this is exactly what Fallows calls out against: fear that creates self-inflicting wounds. The photograph undermines Fallows’ thesis by providing us with a scene that scares us (as an event like this should) and yet fools us into believing we can handle a nuclear attack of this magnitude. Fallows reminds us that the fallout of a nuclear attack will be much greater than that of 9/11. But 9/11 seems to have circumscribed our imagination of nuclear devastation, as is evident in this photo-montage. Ritter’s work lends banality to the nuclear attack that Fallows fears.