Listening to Cold War Decay: Sound Matters of Atomic Radiation

The iconic mushroom cloud visually overshadows much atomic materiality. In this essay, I focus on the aural foundations of atomic culture, precisely through the figure and logic of radiation as decay. Radiation has often been considered insensible—unable to be seen, heard, tasted, touched—but it is sensible as material-particle decay. To counter such claims of material exceptionality, I read Cold War decay as resonance. This affords a temporal dimension needed to critically approach the experiential realities of the impact of radiation on bodies and lands and expose other fallacies of the Cold War, such as containment, promises of freedom worldwide, and democracy, which all remain unrealized impossibilities within the context of nuclear power’s historical global debt to clean up radioactive detritus and offer culturally specific plans of remediation to affected populations worldwide, such as the Marshallese. From 1946 through 1958, the United States detonated sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, irradiating atoll populations to different degrees, depending on their proximity to the “tests.” My sonic archive is comprised of Marshallese radiation songs as well as Federal Civil Defense recorded guides to survival, which are part of the larger program of US atomic regulation during the Cold War that depended on classification, secrecy, and security. These sound objects amplify a need to rethink what it means to be civil defenders of an American empire forged during the Cold War. While the records that command Americans to “be alert and stay alert” to survive an atomic attack no longer grace the shelves of US record stores, the necessity unpacking the political and social implications of US national security policies and environmental practices surrounding nuclear material, sounded in the rhetorical subtext as the needle hits the grooves of the vinyl, is as crucial as ever.