UNITED NATIONS, Mar 06 (IPS) – This week countries and communities converge in New York for the 3rd Meeting of State Parties on the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), with multiple side events to address the social, political and cultural impact of nuclear abolition across different sectors.
On March 5, the Permanent Mission of Mexico to the United Nations held an event called Fábulas Atómicas – Artists Against the Bomb in collaboration with Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, in which the relationship between the arts and the use of nuclear weapons was discussed. Throughout the last century, the arts have been used to provide cultural commentary on the threats that nuclear weapons pose to humanity.
“Using art for disarmament can take many different forms. I started by transforming gun parts into musical instruments, for instance taking a rifle and transforming it into a flute…What is the principle of a nuclear weapon? I thought it was possible to make a chain reaction that could be a creative force rather than a destructive force. That is how Artists Against the Bomb was born,” said Reyes.
Since 1952, the United Nations Disarmament Commission (UNDC) has continuously stressed the importance of international peace and disarmament. With geopolitical tensions on the rise and world superpowers such as Russia, North Korea, and the United States wielding more atomic weapons than ever before, the threat of nuclear proliferation is the highest it has been in decades.
“The bilateral and regional security arrangements that underwrote global peace and stability for decades are unravelling before our eyes. Trust is sinking, while uncertainty, insecurity, impunity and military spending are all rising. Others are expanding their inventories of nuclear weapons and materials. Some continue to rattle the nuclear sabre as a means of coercion. We see signs of new arms races including in outer space,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
Despite this, conversations surrounding nuclear weapons have been largely absent from the cultural zeitgeist. The Atomic Age, also known as the period of time between the detonation of the first atomic bombs in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991, was saturated with pop culture that dealt heavily with themes of nuclear fallout.
Since the late 1980s, projects began to shift away from these themes. Reyes highlighted the importance of art in relation to cultural commentary surrounding nuclear weapons by saying, “The end of the 80s made it seem like the cold war was over. To a certain extent, people born after 1989 had not been exposed to cultural materials…With the nuclear testing ban, there haven’t been any nuclear detonations since around 1999. There’s a saying called ‘out of sight out of mind’. The threat became somewhat invisible. It is our job to use culture to bring awareness to this issue through culture by provoking rage and fear.”
Reyes adds that the current undersaturation of the nuclear weapons issue in pop culture helps to facilitate conversations as the public has become wary of discussing issues that dominate culture today. “There is no fatigue about the subject. There’s a certain fatigue surrounding projects that have been strongly discussed in the past twenty years. Nuclear weapons are an issue that we have not spoken out about enough in recent times. We need to take advantage of this lack of fatigue,” he said.
The Nuclear Art movement rose in 1945, shortly after the United States’ detonation of two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. At this time, the majority of the American public were unaware of the scale of destruction that had occurred in Japan.
Japanese photographers that had survived the attacks such as Yoshito Masushige (Hiroshima) and Yosuke Yamahata (Nagasaki), as well as American photographers such as Wayne Miller and Joe O’Donnell, published photos of the aftermath, which were classified by the United States government for decades. Much of the world instead relied on artwork that visualized the devastation.
Contemporary artists and corporations alike began incorporating themes of atomic weapons and nuclear fallout in their work shortly after the bombings in Japan. This movement grew more prominent after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which is considered to be the closest the world has ever come to nuclear warfare.
Western art pieces, such as Charles Bittinger’s 1946 painting, Atomic Bomb Atomic Bomb Mushroom Cloud, brought the now well-known mushroom cloud imagery into public consciousness in the United States. Other examples include U.S. military artist Standish Brackus’s pieces Still Life (1946) and At the Red Cross Hospital (1945), which depicted the wide scale destruction that nuclear weapons inflict on civilian infrastructure and the human body, respectively.
Additionally, Nuclear Art also became a fixture in Western propaganda. In 1957, the Walt Disney Company released an episode of Disneyland titled Our Friend the Atom, which highlighted the ways atomic weapons can be used for peace, falling in line with the themes of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech at the UN General Assembly in 1953.
In the early 1950s, blockbuster films from both American and Japanese studios led to a widening public consciousness surrounding nuclear weapons. Science-fiction films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1959) highlighted the unintended biological consequences of nuclear fallout.
However, On the Beach (1959) marked a pivotal shift in the depiction of nuclear fallout by explicitly marking humans as responsible for a deliberate detonation that led to a societal collapse. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) expanded on these themes by using absurdism to emphasize humanity’s role in nuclear proliferation.
Most recently, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) brought nuclear weapons into the public consciousness once more, particularly in the West, There have been critiques on if modern artists are depicting these themes effectively. Reyes told an IPS correspondent that the arts have the ability to sway audiences in either direction. Certain representations of nuclear weapons in pop culture can be classified as either “above the cloud” or “under the cloud”.
“Films like Oppenheimer show the overwhelming power of science and the moral conflict of atomic bombs but never show the victims or consequences. Films like that are almost pro-bomb because they fail to humanize these conflicts. Other films show what’s really at stake. It’s important to be able to identify which side cultural productions are on,” said Reyes.
It is crucial for contemporary artists to depict the correct messages in their work to achieve any substantial cultural progress in nuclear disarmament. Pop culture must continue to show the true extent of the dangers that nuclear weapons pose.
“We have to be very clear in arguing that nobody can win a nuclear war,” said Reyes. “And that’s why it’s very important to show the consequences. It has been normalized through video games and other mediums that make them seem not as problematic as they are. It’s our job to do a lot of explaining and find entertaining ways for people to understand.”
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