ABSTRACT
Nuclear fallout, waste, and decay are immensely threatening environmental pollutants, but ionizing radiation is accepted in ordinary everyday life due to the dosimenters of radioactive domination being read and re-read as captured in the "tolerable range". Security morphs into unsafety, territory wastes away for centuries as deadened dominion, and populations are reorganized to express experimentally, or accidentally, the thanatopolitical shadows of biopolitical lives elevating biopolitical disaster to a long catastrophe of half-lives caught in radioactive half-life. As a realm of geopower beyond biopower that mixes the most toxic radiological elements of inorganic nature – made even more dangerous by human manufacture – with all organic human and nonhuman life, nuclear material is a crucial touchstone used to assay sustainability, risk, and resilience. The nuclear condition's prime characteristic is how its massive mesh of technoscience induces the contradictory dynamic stasis of "nuclearity", which fuels governance by crisis.
