ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the origins and development of the national security sublime between the end of World War II and the 9/11 attacks, focusing on its use of aesthetic elements from the Gothic novel and from Romantic painting and poetry. The chapter finds two distinct aesthetics in the period. The Cold War sublime tends to follow the model of Gothic, responding with awe and trepidation to the possibility of massive conspiracies within and against the government. The sublime during what the chapter terms the Echelon Moment, a period from the end of the Cold War to the turn of the millennium, begins, by contrast, to turn toward familiar Romantic places and images in an effort to capture the specter of global threats from new enemies, imagining conspiracies that extend beyond the government and even the planet, but also expressing new doubts that these conspiracies can ever be wholly revealed.
