A New Nuclear Metaphysics: Civil Defense Rituals and the Reclamation of Possibility

This paper argues that early American civil defense drills, large-scale rehearsals for nuclear war performed in cities across the United States, are usefully interpreted as rituals inscribing new nuclear metaphysics. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) operated with the stated goal of preparing the nation for surviving atomic attack, even as planners privately acknowledged the implausibility of national survival. This paper argues that an under-theorized tactic—if not goal—of the FCDA was the transmission of a nuclear metaphysics assigning ultimate causative power to the bomb itself. Bringing scholarship on civil defense from the fields of affect theory, performance studies, and cultural criticism into contact with the framework of ritual to reevaluate the FCDA archive allows a clearer evaluation of these metaphysics. This paper further argues that the reinscription of the bomb as a metaphysical entity rendered invisible all forms of imperial violence other than total nuclear war.