The Cold War as an Anthropocenic War

The “Cold War” is a term coined to describe a period of tense relations between the United States and the Soviet Union short of direct military engagement. One historian has even dubbed the Cold War as a “long peace” due to the absence of Great Power warfare in the second half of the twentieth century. In recent years, however, scholars have challenged such a view of the Cold War from the centers of power, calling attention to the extraordinary brutality of “proxy wars” that killed millions of people in the Third World. The perspective of the Anthropocene reveals yet another way in which the Cold War was no less violent than actual conflicts, albeit with an important twist. From 1945 to 1980, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons aboveground and underwater to develop and upgrade their nuclear forces. This undertaking by the Great Powers to keep the Cold War “cold” through nuclear deterrence generated a massive amount of radioactive debris that spread all over the world. The resulting global and deep-time contamination, however, systematically obscured its own health effects by displacing them across time and space. This paradox of scale, intrinsic to the Anthropocene, meant that the fallout victims did not simply exist “out there” to count but rather had to be methodically conceived of on the ever-changing matrix of science, ethics, social relations, and geopolitics. This contested socio-epistemic construction of victimhood was essential to recasting the seemingly innocuous phenomenon of global fallout as a form of violence to be confronted and stopped internationally. In this sense, the Cold War was an Anthropocenic war - a type of armed conflict which actually kills people through the workings of the Earth System with impunity.