ABSTRACT
In the classic Hollywood science fiction film, Them! (dir. Gordon Douglas, 1954), Los Alamos weapons science and Cold War logics of “containment” are turned quite sensationally on their heads. Rather than producing international security in the form of a military nuclear deterrent, the American nuclear complex is portrayed as the domestic source of proliferating radiation effects, creating an entirely new ecology of risk in the form of gigantic mutant carnivorous ants. These fantastic creatures are identified, in the film, as the products of the very first atomic explosion in central New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The Trinity Test is portrayed then not as the first triumph of American big science, nor as the technoscientific means of ending World War II, nor as the military foundation of the world’s first nuclear superpower. Rather, the first atomic explosion, in this science fiction, is the source of an inverted natural order, in which the smallest of creatures can become a totalizing threat, and where the security state must be deployed to protect citizens from the unintended consequences of nuclear science. Them! engages a new kind of nuclear fear in 1954, one based not on the apocalypse of nuclear war but on the everyday transformation of self and nature through an irradiated landscape. Remembered today mostly for its McCarthy-era theatrics in which the giant ants play a thinly veiled allegory for the communist “menace,” the film more subtly presents a devastating critique of U.S. nuclear policy at the very height of the Cold War: it argues that on July 16th 1945 Americans entered a post-nuclear environment of their own invention. From this perspective, the nuclear apocalypse is not in the future – a thing to be endlessly deterred through nuclear weapons and international
relations – it is already here, being played out in the unpredictable movement of radioactive materials moving through bodies and biosphere.
