ABSTRACT
The nuclear defies ordinary timelines and measures of impact, rendering and rupturing memorial practices and public memory in ways that shift and change like the landscape around atomic incidents. The Japanese 3.11 “triple disaster” was not the first time nations, communities, corporations and public history-makers have struggled to memorialise nuclear disaster—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island present cases for comparison, as do sometimes lesser-known nuclear witnesses like the workers of Weldon Spring, Missouri. How do events speak across distances of time, and what burdens do the maintainers of these dialogues bear—how does the maintenance of nuclear memory create new victims? How can memorials effectively convey loss when the timescale of that loss is incalculable? This chapter examines the use of a slow disaster methodology, proposing the history of disaster memory as a way to think about the nuclear not only as a set of material realities, but also as an assemblage of ideas and cultural practices, warnings and hopes and nightmares. Nuclear memory can be an aid to an impoverished historical record, so full of erasures, and also open the way for new critical approaches to disaster governance, climate change activism and explorations of the Anthropocene.
