Strategic fictions: Crisis, invention, and discovery in the American narratives of nuclear defense.

摘要

In his dissertation, "Strategic Fictions: Crisis, Invention, and Discovery in the American Narratives of Nuclear Defense," Doug Davis examines the central, troubled, and surprising role that storytelling, and specifically future war storytelling, played within the Cold War policy of nuclear deterrence. Combining the science studies theories of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway with science fiction genre theory and the nuclear criticism of Jacques Derrida, Davis analyzes a diverse body of literature that concerns the future prospects of nuclear war, including national policy documents, scientific texts, journalism, pro- and anti-nuclear propaganda, and numerous works of literary fiction and film. Davis shows how these strategic fictions participated in the construction of an American narrative of nuclear defense, a future imaginary of a world at war that prescribed Cold War American global policy. However, as the practice of nuclear defense also meant imagining and writing about a future when that defense failed, the American narrative of nuclear defense engendered military and political crises and reversals with its every articulation. After detailing how this inherently contradictory narrative came to define Cold War American global policy, Davis explores how nuclear defense's contradictions were negotiated in film, literature, and science. First, he examines Hollywood films about the Air Force, focusing on Anthony Mann's Strategic Air Command (1955) and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), to show how Hollywood participated in the cultural politics of nuclear defense by telling cyborg love stories. He then considers two postmodernist novels, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), to show how literature about World War II worked upon the imagination of World War III. Finally, Davis analyzes the geological science of impact-extinction theory (the Alvarez thesis), which posits that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid or comet impact, as a metaphoric product of the Cold War's state of nuclear defense. Davis concludes by considering how our understanding of Cold War America's strategic fictions of nuclear war may help us understand the strategic fictions of nuclear terrorism that are currently guiding the United States' national security strategy of preemptive war.