ABSTRACT
The Bomb creates a colonization of the mind and the future, a psychic toxicity, and a particular form of transgenerational nuclear trauma. Just like the material half-life of radioactive matter, the psychic half-life of nuclear trauma approximates notions of an immortal force. Nuclear trauma resists integration into the psychic fabric. The psychic afterlife of the Bomb has, in fact, led survivors to question whether the damage done by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can ever be repaired. The nuclear uncanny forms the core of a proliferating imaginary that emerges as a long-term effect of living in the shadow of a global plutonium economy. The psychosocial legacies of living within a nuclear ecology are ubiquitous at the global level as well, albeit with a radically unequal distribution. The formation of nuclear subjectivities under the impact of nuclear trauma is, of course, most pronounced in victims of nuclear catastrophes.
