Conference: Unthinking the Imaginary War. Intellectual Reflections of the Nuclear Age, 1945-1990

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Conference: Unthinking the Imaginary War. Intellectual Reflections of the Nuclear Age, 1945-1990

Veranstalter
The Centre for Peace History, University of Sheffield, and the Arbeitskreis für Historische Friedensforschung, in collaboration with the German Historical Institute London and the German Historical Institute Rome
Veranstaltungsort
German Historical Institute London
Ort
London
Land
United Kingdom
Vom - Bis
04.11.2010 - 06.11.2010
Website
http://www.peacehistory.dept.shef.ac.uk/
Von
Benjamin Ziemann

All politics during the Cold War took place under the threat of nuclear annihilation. But what difference did this make? While recent research has pointed to civil wars and insurgencies in Latin America, Africa and Asia to highlight the violence that the Cold War brought, our understanding of the importance and relevance of the nuclear arms race for the Cold War is still underdeveloped. The war-like character of the Cold War in the western world did not consist of injuring human bodies; it consisted of a sustained attack against the imagination (Michael Geyer). The Cold War was an ‘imaginary war’ (Mary Kaldor). The nuclear bombs that were used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 form part of a conventional war effort. As an all-out nuclear war never occurred thereafter, it could only be imagined through the military’s combat exercises, the government officials’ calculations of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, as well as computerised simulations and war-games on the one hand; and, through the often apocalyptic scenarios that Cold War critics drew up on the other. These simulations and images of nuclear war, and the fears they created, formed the essence of the Cold War. It was a war against the imagination, because it forced the civilian population in the belligerent countries to accept the notion that a mutual capacity for global overkill would serve to maintain the peace. Whereas the bombs could be produced, the consequences of their launch could not be properly imagined, and that is why they targeted the imagination rather than the bodies of the people in East and West.

This conference will take these ideas as a guideline for an exploration of the intellectual history of the Cold War. It brings together historians, philosophers and scholars from cultural studies who are interested in intellectual, political and artistic reflections of the ‘imaginary’ reality of a nuclear war in the period from 1945 to 1990. It will discuss how the atomic bomb and its imaginary impact has served as a signifier in political, intellectual and artistic discourses, and how philosophers, writers, artists, but also defence intellectuals tried to think and unthink the political and strategic realities of the nuclear age.

Programm

Thursday, 4 November 2010

2pm: Opening and Welcome, Andreas Gestrich (GHI London)

2.15-2.30pm: Patrick Bernhard (GHI Rome), Holger Nehring (Sheffield), Benjamin Ziemann (Sheffield): Introduction

2.30-4.30pm: Panel I: Long-Term Perspectives on the Nuclear Threat

David Tal (Calgary), The Wilsonian Heritage and US Nuclear Disarmament Policy
Matthew Grant (Middlesbrough), The Atomic Sensation in British Culture
Deborah Sorrenti (Rome), Italian Political Approaches to the Nuclear Menace

4.30-5pm: Coffee Break

5.00-6.30pm: Keynote Lecture: Paul Boyer (Madison, Wisconsin), Fallout. American Thought and Culture in the Nuclear Age

6.30pm: Conference Dinner at the GHI London

Friday, 5 November 2010

9am-12noon: Panel II: Nuclear Apocalypse

Miriam Dobson (Sheffield), Apocalypse, Peace, and Religious Belief: Soviet Representations of the Cold War
Daniel Gerster (Florence), West German and US Catholics, the Bomb and Perceptions of Apocalypse, 1945-1960
Johannes Platz (Cologne), The Atomic Age – War, Peace and Apocalypse. The Views of the German Protestant Military Bishop
Friederike Brühöfener (Chapel Hill), “Angst vor dem Atom”. Debating Cold War Anxieties in West Germany during the 1980s

12-1pm: Lunch

1-3pm: Panel III: Dialectics of Destruction: Imaginations of the Bomb

Jason Dawsey (Chicago), After Hiroshima. Günther Anders and the History of Anti-Nuclear Critique
Patryk Wasiak (Warschau), Good Human versus Computer Villain: New Technologies and the Discourse of Nuclear War
Lars Nowak (Trier) Rehearsals for the Third World War: The American Nuclear Test Films

3-3.30pm Coffee Break

3.30-6.30pm: Panel IV: Expert Cultures: Defense Intellectuals and Peace Researchers

Claudia Kemper (Hamburg), Physicians as Experts. The German Section of IPPNW
Isabelle Miclot (Paris), French Defense Intellectuals and the Modeling of Nuclear War
Eva Fetscher/Øyvind Ekelund (Oslo), Norwegian Peace Research and the Bomb, 1959-1990
Paul Rubinson (Tampa), “The Nuclear Winter Phenomenon”: Antinuclear Protests and Human Rights in the US and the Soviet Union

Saturday, 6 November 2010

9.30am-12.30pm: Panel V: Imagining the Unimaginable: Artists and the Bomb

Vera Wolff (Hamburg), Material Aesthetics for the Nuclear Age. How Japanese Artists undid the Imaginary War
Umberto Rossi (Rome), The War which was not There: Images of World War III in Novels by Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas F. Schneider (Osnabrück), Armageddon and After. Representations of Post Nuclear Societies in Cold War Films

12.30-2pm Lunch

2-3.30pm: Thematic Wrap-Up, introduced by Michael Geyer (Chicago) / Eva Horn (Vienna) / Jost Dülffer (Cologne)

Registration:
Places for delegates are limited. If you want to participate, please email Ms. Carole Sterckx at sterckx@ghil.ac.uk. No conference fee is charged, but participants will have to book accommodation by themselves.

We have a limited amount of funding available to support travel and subsistence for doctoral students and post-docs. Please send a brief abstract that describes your interest in this event and a brief CV to Dr Holger Nehring at h.nehring@sheffield.ac.uk

For queries on the academic content of the conference, please contact Dr Holger Nehring or Dr Benjamin Ziemann, University of Sheffield, Department of History, 1 Upper Hanover Street, S3 7RA Sheffield, UK, fax 0044-114/222 2576, email: b.ziemann@sheffield.ac.uk and h.nehring@sheffield.ac.uk

Kontakt

b.ziemann@sheffield.ac.uk h.nehring@sheffield.ac.uk

http://www.peacehistory.dept.shef.ac.uk/
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