Ground zero at the city on a hill: Apocalypse and the politics of form in the nuclear age

Since the first atomic explosion in 1945 the United States has dedicated more economic, human, and environmental capital to nuclear technology than to any other national project. This dissertation argues that American literature has responded to the atom bomb not only as a sublime image or a future threat but also as a new national infrastructure that has determined the flow of resources and risks across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading works by authors as dissimilar as Ayn Rand, James Baldwin, Samuel Delany, Tony Kushner, David Foster Wallace, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Tim LaHaye, “Ground Zero” shows how American fiction of the nuclear age registers and resists the apocalyptic narratives of the nuclear complex by re-forming apocalypse itself. During and after the Cold War the threat of apocalypse and the promise of millennial victory were used in settings from legal documents and presidential speeches to urban planning proposals and scientific studies to justify the national commitment to the nuclear complex. These discourses represented populations marked by racial and sexual difference as inherently futureless even as they legitimated infrastructural changes that disproportionately threatened the survival of those populations. Writing from positions that are defined as futureless in the national imaginary, the authors in this project take up apocalypse to explode futures that have no place for them and establish more livable presents, developing a form of apocalypse that is neither politically passive nor a fantasy of destruction but rather a reparative relation to worlds at risk