flâneur

Only the deep past can make sense of terrifying nuclear futures | Aeon Essays

aeon.co · 3,594 words · saved by 1 readers

A tunnel to an underground bunker housing the launch control centre for nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles at the US Air Force’s Quebec-01 Missile Alert Facility north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Built in 1962, the facility was deactivated in 2006. Photo by Alan Rogers/The Casper Star-Tribune via AP by Maria Stavrinaki + BIO A tunnel to an underground bunker housing the launch control centre for nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles at the US Air Force’s Quebec-01 Missile Alert Facility north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Built in 1962, the facility was deactivated in 2006. Photo by Alan Rogers/The Casper Star-Tribune via AP is Professeure Associée at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her books include Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art and History (2016) and Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time (2022). Edited byCameron Allan McKean On the morning of 16 July 1945, at exactly 05:29:21, an unparalleled bomb was detonated in a United States desert and the wo

On the morning of 16 July 1945, at exactly 05:29:21, an unparalleled bomb was detonated in a United States desert and the world entered the ‘atomic age’. No other period in human history has dawned so explosively or so precisely. No other period has been calculated down to the second. Instead, the dating of cultural periods becomes less and less exact as we move backward through our past toward the fuzzy edges of prehistory, the period in which our species emerged. While the Middle Ages begin sometime around 476 CE, and classical antiquity begins sometime during the 8th century BCE, the…

related reading