Thinking with the Groundhog. An Animal and Media History of the Nuclear Bunker in Cold War Switzerland

Dissertation

Our experience of working on a comparative project entitled ‘Organising Disaster. Civil Protection and the Population’, whilst trying to find the ‘same, same but different’, has directed our attention to the practicalities of undertaking social scientific forms of comparison, as well as to some of the ethical and political questions that arise from its use. We aim to show, first, that achieving comparison is a complex process in which a comparator has to be actively assembled. In our case, this comparator is a group of people mediated by a number of research technologies. Second, we show that this comparator is shaped by (and shapes) the research object in a continual process. Finally, we explore the potential of an approach that explicitly seeks to provoke comparison — in which developments within our research result precisely from the specific way in which our comparator has been assembled.

As the public and private sector spend and invest billions of dollars maintaining, repairing, securing, constructing, and informationalizing infrastructure, scholars of communication continue to neglect the central role of infrastructure in shaping contemporary mediascapes. This neglect stems from a number of tendencies in the field of communication, including a move away from the transmission model of communication, a separation in thinking about the communication of information and the communication of people and objects, and a tendency to think about technologies in terms of their historical development, mediation, effects, uses or potentials rather than to understand technologies as cultural forms subject to alternative arrangements. While these academic biases make the study of communication, mobility, and technology challenging, my work takes an interdisciplinary approach that recognizes and works to move past historical divisions in the disciplines in the interest of exploring the ways in which informationalization is changing communication, culture, and mediascapes. I locate informationalization—adding a data layer to processes through instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence—at the center of changing articulations of communication, transportation, information and housing infrastructure. I take as central a double reorganization of infrastructure under two competing logics: a utopian view that positions the informationalization of networks as “smart” and can be traced across a variety of popular, industry and government discourses as a compelling argument for connection; and a logic that positions infrastructure as “critical,” which while intensified by post 9/11 sensibilities, has clear origins in earlier beliefs about the dystopian potentials of connection, including computer crime and cyberwarfare. I first develop a set of working definitions for a variety of terms as they relate to informationalization. I then explore specific contexts of informationalization, examining utopian discourses of connection as “smart” in a growing market for electrically powered automobility, dystopian discourses of informationalization in terms of critical infrastructure and cyberwar, and finally to disconnection, examining the grid and “grid away from the grid” life assurance solutions. Through these cases, I work to understand informationalization as an apparatus that rearticulates infrastructure according to a new infrastructural ideal and an associated politics of security that are coextensive with both utopian and dystopian discourses of informationalization. I ultimately argue that communication and mobilities scholars must look to processes of informationalization with a particular emphasis on those infrastructures that are designated both “smart” and “critical” in order to reveal the ways in which smart infrastructure can mean more than informationalized infrastructure, and to discern to what and to whom critical infrastructure is critical. It is my hope that this project will serve as a starting point for productive and meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration concerning a process that promises to radically alter the way that we access and use communication, transportation, housing, services and infrastructures.

ABSTRACT: This article provides a theoretical and empirical contribution to the political history of technology by articulating a new conceptual perspective on the power of technological things and through outlining a history of modern urban technological terror and terrorism. It introduces a user-centered perspective on technological politics in the form of ‘subject histories of technology’ which, contrasting with prevalent ‘object histories of technology’ on technological inventions and innovators, emphasize the self-fashioning power of technological artifacts. Through an overview history of technology of ‘terrormindedness’ covering the three subsequent waves of urban terror arising from aerial bombardment, nuclear weapons and substate terrorism it shows how technologies have been used by individual citizens to cope with the experience of man-made fear and insecurity. In conclusion it argues that the political history of technology should to the focus on community politics and system politics of big institutional technologies add an attention to the personal politics of the emotional and material power of small technical things." In the editors' introduction Martin Collins says: "In this issue, Mats Fridlund and Lissa Roberts, in their respective articles, take up a central problem in recent historiography and discussions of historical explanation: the interplay of materiality, the articulation of social and political space, and the constitution of individual experience. Each article seeks to make strong historical and methodological claims. In Fridlund’s narrative, it is to bring forward ‘subjectivity’ as a problem, using the history of terrorism as his interpretive lens. The sociocultural effects are his focus; he considers historical actors in the everyday world and their encounter with terrorism- related objects and discourse about these objects in particular places and times – early nineteenth century Copenhagen, London in the interwar years, and the United States after World War II, and, respectively, to each case, associated objects such as buckets; warning sirens and gas masks; and, then, bomb shelters and bollards.""

The year 1954 saw the first public detonation of an H-bomb, a weapon whose radioactive fallout challenged the existing spatialized notions of targeting and post attack recovery by making a whole country vulnerable to the vagaries of drifting toxic clouds that drew no distinction between urban centers and rural periphery. In response, the UK government established a network of 1,518 underground nuclear fallout monitoring posts spread uniformly across the country. This article considers how planning for this new reality brought a diffusion of cold war urban anxieties and practices into the UK countryside, but in a way that was awkward and approximate. This article considers the implications of the rise of the H-bomb for the United Kingdom's (UK) experience during the 1950s of "cold war urbanism". Cold war urbanism is taken here to encompass (1) the influence of cold war anxieties upon urbanists, their professional discourses, and practices and (2) the production of built environments shaped by or in service of cold war objectives. This article investigates the UK's experience of cold war urbanism by presenting a case study that considers the planning and implementation of one of the few conspicuously cold war motivated building schemes actually undertaken in the UK: the creation of a network of 1,518 underground nuclear fallout monitoring posts spread uniformly across the countryside.

Reseña bibliográfica

La guerra prima di essere fatta deve essere immaginata e deve

This book examines how international expectations intersected with the United States Air Force’s fight for autonomy and utility, explains how the service began to change, and asks how airpower—and the US military as a whole—might further deepen its efforts. The author expands perspectives on assessing and directing the use of airpower and encourages further work to maximize both mission accomplishment and civilian protection. The recent evolution of US airpower offers inspiring, if incomplete, evidence that the conduct of war can become more humane while remaining effective. Technology, adversaries, and the goals of armed conflict will continue to evolve, but the central challenge of humanizing war will endure. Part one outlines the challenge that contemporary expectations about the American use of force pose for airpower. Part two describes the Air Force’s adaptation to modern expectations of civilian protection, tracing operational experiences during the 1990s and the consequent operational and institutional innovation.

During the 1950s, the United States made enormous strides in nuclear weapons development and in understanding their effects. The arsenal grew from a relatively small number of fairly simple fission devices to a large number of tactical and strategic weapons with a very broad spectrum of yields. The nuclear arms buildup had profound repercussions for U.S. national security policy and for the personnel involved in testing the weapons of mass destruction. On the one hand, the large and rapidly growing inventory of nuclear weapons allowed the Eisenhower Administration to give U.S. national security policy a “New Look,” saving the American tax payers untold millions of dollars. On the other, a number of soldiers and civilians involved in the tests paid for the advances in nuclear weapons technology with their health.

Since the Soviet defector arrived before the war ended in 1945 and continuing until the tactical nuclear air-to-air Genies missiles arrived at RCAF Base Downsview in 1965, Canada's role in NORAD has always appeared ambiguous to the citizens of Toronto. Just as the government of the city and the country alternated between promoting peace dividends and planning civil defense, Torontonians alternated between apathy and anger as fifth-column scandals and strategic nuclear initiatives affected everything from the newspapers to the new architecture of the city. This multidisciplinary study examines the first 20 years of Cold War history when Toronto the Great was at the center of the brave new nuclear world... when everyone in town knew (and sometimes openly admitted) that they faced an actual nuclear megadeath under the defense-in-depth system designed for NORAD... yet the world flocked to the continent's fastest-growing city of Toronto for a chance to influence the changing mental and physical landscapes of the nuclear mid-century both overtly and covertly, both in the jet-fighters above and in the subways beneath, becoming famous for Canadian peacekeeping while maintaining the city's freedom from any nuclear weapons limits. The author is a born Torontonian trained in American espionage, and she interprets the conference theme of "soldiers and civilians in the cauldron of war" by examining and interpreting the history of her hometown for both American and Canadian audiences. This is a preliminary study intended to become a book-length examination of Toronto for the general public.

Preparing for disaster involves sets of activities that are at once deeply social and deeply technical. Organising Disaster: Civil Protection and the Population sought to investigate these links. It did so by comparing the civil protection practices of three countries: India, Switzerland, and the UK. This report summarises some of the findings of this research for the benefit of practitioners. It complements further more detailed and theoretically oriented papers that have been published in a range of academic venues.

| Landscape may be made up of both physical and geographical features but they are also constituted through perceived experiences. We construct landscape through imagination as much as through vision. We also inhabit and cultivate our environment and transform it into multifaceted cultural landscapes. Wars transform these cultural landscapes both physically and mentally, and with dramatic consequences. Evidence is visible not only in the mental constructions of landscape (in ideas, concepts, texts, images, or maps), but also in the physical landscape itself: traces and material witnesses of war are manifold. Remaining structures and objects such as battlefields, front lines, walls, or fortifications have been either transformed into heritage sites or closed off as prohibited zones. War graves, cemeteries, and memorials were built to bury the dead and to commemorate countless lost lives. War gardening programs were initiated to counteract scarcity of food and depression at home. Camouflage landscapes created invisibility and devastated areas called for restoration. Even in Switzerland, said to be a land of peace and plenty, we can find traces of war landscapes and land used for defense. Evidence is also given in theoretical approaches to landscape. The term "sense of place" is a key concept that focuses on behavioral and emotional approaches and attitudes toward spatial settings and landscapes. It highlights the love for landscape but also points to fear and danger as determining elements. After all, the direct experience of war has greatly influenced landscape perception and reflection, as is visible in the work of both the German sociologist Kurt Lewin and the US-American landscape historian John Brinkerhoff Jackson. In this paper 1 , I will focus on how war shapes landscapes and informs our understanding and perception of landscape. I will first discuss landscape perception in the context of fear and danger and then I will present exemplary war-related structures and practices of shaping the landscape, some of which persist to this very day.

Protest against nuclear power plants, uranium mining and nuclear testing was a major mobilizing force in the rise of mass environmental movements in the 1970s and 1980s around the globe. Nevertheless, the historiography of anti-nuclear protest remains largely limited to national stories about heroic conflict and the rise of movements. The contributions to this focus issue explore the so far under-researched transnational dimension of the conflict in a global perspective. They make visible for the first time relevant transfers of scientific knowledge and protest practices as well as transnational exchange between activists and experts from Western Europe, the United States and Australia. Rather than taking transnational interaction for granted, the authors explore the conditions facilitating and hampering the transfer of ideas. They analyse why only certain activists were committed and able to cross borders, as well as the obstacles they were facing. Thus, this focus issue contributes to current academic debates in environmental history, the history of social movements as well as global and transnational history.

The Durance is the principal river draining the French side of the Alps toward the Mediterranean. It takes its origin in the south of the French Alps and has a catchment area of 14 225 km2 and a channel length of 325 km. It runs throughout the north of the Provence area, connects two distinct biomes, the Alps (upper course) and Mediterranean (lower course) and is the last major Rhône left bank tributary. It’s a braided gravel-bed river with floodplain segments characterized by a dynamic mosaic of aquatic/terrestrial habitats whose floods could be very violent and flashy before damming initiated in the mid-nineteenth century (nowadays, without these changes it would be almost comparable to the last natural river system in Europe, the Fiume Tagliamento in Italy). This river has always been essential for local people who have maintained complex and beneficial relations with it and who had to defend regularly against catastrophic floods. Because of the multiplication of human settlements and urban development but also with the need to secure a sustainable water supply all the year round, through arid territories in which water scarcity has always been a recurring problem for both farmers and urban dwellers, the river became a lifeline for all the cities in the south east of France and then for an entire region in the late twentieth century. Both the need for water and that to limit the damages done by floods have concealed very early the fate of the Durance. Indeed, from the late Middle Age, both numerous and ambitious embankment and water diversion projects followed one another but it was only from the mid-nineteenth century that a first large canal to carry potable water - the Canal de Marseille – was built and that the river regulation really started. In this context, we propose to explore the interactions between local communities and their river (e.g. the specific location of small towns on hills before damming) and to identify the different changes in traditional uses of water responsible of the progressive river regulation during the last two centuries. First, after presenting briefly the hydro-geomorphology of the Durance River, the paper will highlight how urban and rural societies have adapted to regular torrential floods and unpredictable changes in river flow and what solutions have been found, especially in the nineteenth century during which three millenial floods occurred and for which climatic and hydrologic data are accurate. Second, the paper will also show how, from 1849, despite risks due to its flashy and variable pluvio-nival flow regime, it has become increasingly essential to the people of the Provence area mainly because of its role in the water supply, both for Marseilles city and for numerous towns dispersed along its course. Finally, to conclude, the paper will examine how, from the fifties and during the thirty years following World War II, with the achievement of extensive hydroelectric-power and irrigation-water supply projects thanks to the multiplication of dams intended to limit the extent of flooding (the most important is the Serre-Ponçon dam, the second largest in Europe), the Durance allowed significant socio-economic and environmental transformations in the south east of France while becoming, at the same time, the most regulated French waterway.

Articles: [“America First Committee,” 2:499-500; “Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies,” 2:508-509; “Cuban Missile Crisis,” 2:718-721; “Eisenhower, Dwight D.,” 2:575-577; “Fight for Freedom (Century Group),” 2:515-516; “Kissinger, Henry,” 2:734-735; “Nixon, Richard,” 2:746-748; “Reagan, Ronald,” 2:750-752; “Salisbury, Harrison E.,” 2:673-675]. The Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America brings together a group of distinguished scholars to explore how war has been reported and interpreted by the media in the United States and what effects those reports and interpretations have had on the people at home and on the battlefield.Covering press-U.S. military relationships from the early North American colonial wars to the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this two-volume encyclopedia focuses on the ways in which government and military leaders have used the media to support their actions and the ways in which the media has been used by other forces with different views and agendas. The volumes highlight major events and important military, political, and cultural players, offering fresh perspectives on all of America's conflicts. Bringing these wars together in one source allows readers to see how media affected the conflicts individually, but also understand how the use of the various forms of media (print, radio, television, film, and electronic) have developed and changed over the years. This fascinating compilation of reference entries documents the unique relationship between mass media, propaganda, and the U.S. military, a relationship that began in the period before the American Revolution and continues to this day―sometimes cooperative, sometimes combative, and always complex. • Introductory essays describe the types of media most important to each conflict period, how they were used, by whom, and to what effect • A general essay outlines how media has been used to spread messages about conflicts throughout U.S. history • Photographs and illustrations add an important visual element

The practice-led art research project 'Gathering Shadows' investigates the ‘tragic’ visual poetics of a speculative ‘ecological gaze’ at a time of ecological crisis. The work replaces the distancing objectification of lens-based capture with a unique indexical methodology focussed upon the cameraless outdoor nocturnal photography of live invertebrates and human artifacts. The work presents a symbolic order of dark and intimate x-ray like shadows in which insect umwelten operates as an index of nonhuman selfhood and place and insect abjection alludes to the multiple ‘tragedies’ of the human and non-human ecological predicament. The subjects of these works are drawn from two sites. The first, semi-arid Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee once informed a sacred reciprocity of sky with country in indigenous culture. The loss of this reciprocity is memorialized by using starlight falling on the lakebed to contact print films with the imagery of insects gathered from the lakeshore, imaging one species en masse on paper and digitally reiterating another. The second site, sub-alpine Mount Buffalo in the Australian Alps is a region already in decline due to climate change. Here, cameraless images of the keystone species Bogong Moth (Agrotis infusa) were gathered from a summit cave and digitally reiterated as detailed inkjet enlargements. A summary piece comprising cameraless imagery from both locations links the two sites. The project confirms the auratic power of the site-specific indexical analogic methods, establishes the unique revelatory potential of digital reiteration of cameraless imagery and contributes to the biosemiotic reimagining and anti-anthropocentric repositioning of invertebrates and ‘landscape’ within photography in ways that aim to legitimize the tragic form as an appropriate aesthetic frame through which to apprehend our ecological predicament.

ABSTRACT This report summarises the observations and interpretations of a reconnaissance trip to central Ecuador in November 2004. The purpose of the trip was to investigate infrastructural and agricultural volcanic impacts and volcanic hazard emergency management in Ecuador, focussing on lessons for New Zealand.