Environmental crises and the looming threat of war have given rise to the bunkerized subject, who prioritizes personal safety and survival in a way that aligns with capitalist, neoliberal values. In her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Emily Ray traces the emergence of the bunkerized subject in the nuclear age, analyzes its persistence, and explores ways to escape the bunker.
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Both war and climate change are charged with apocalyptic imagery and described in apocalyptic language. They herald the end of the world, imply total destruction with few survivors, if any, and are often pitched as existential battles between life and death, or between the past and the future. One such response to the much-heralded apocalypse of war and climate change is to bunker down and ride out the changes to emerge on the post-apocalyptic other side. Bunkering is more than occupying a physical bunker, and functions as a subjectivity which my co-author and I call bunkerization.
Privatized preparedness
The notion of bunkerization suggests that the citizens and nationals of the United States of America are people who bunker up, and that bunkering is more than just hiding out in an underground shelter. Bunkering is a way of thinking about our relationship to ourselves and others – as people who self-isolate from community during emergencies. It involves the concept of ideological conservation in the face of potential harm and the anticipation that the state will be unable or unwilling to care for its citizens during an emergency. Bunkerization makes us imagine that we are ‘prepared’ for apocalyptic conditions by avoiding harm, rather than caring for and sharing vulnerability with other species and racial groups. This is not to say that people never engage in mutual aid or come together as a community when experiencing shared catastrophe, as recent tragic storms in Appalachia and Texas demonstrate, but these instances are exceptional.
These responses in the United States are not part of state training programs offered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Rather, local, state, and federal emergency preparedness guidelines emphasize personal accountability and stockpiling supplies. Middle-class families may be able to afford water purification systems, or weeks’ worth of emergency provisions to store in homes that have enough surplus square footage for such allowances. Big box retailers make this easy with Readywise food buckets, or the more evangelically-oriented can buy emergency provisions from the evangelist Jim Bakker, called “Bakker Buckets.”
Purchasing for preparation can far outpace the average person’s income. After all, who can reasonably afford missile silos converted into luxury bunkers with movie theaters and state-of-the-art security systems to protect against unsheltered ‘outsiders,’ biological warfare, and extreme weather events? Clearly, not everyone has access to the preparedness market, leaving many people behind. In the meantime, the superrich have access to helicopters, superyachts, and golden passports to their international hideaways.
After disaster
Even if those who were rich enough or clever enough to prepare for the War on Earth survived, what were their post-apocalyptic visions? We already have inklings of it because this has unfolded before and is unfolding now, from Gaza to South Sudan. Rob Nixon’s work on slow violence argues that war often continues unofficially in the deadly landscape of conflict, from tanks in Iraq exhaling depleted uranium from U.S. weapons to unexploded cluster bombs biding time in someone’s home to fields of unexploded land mines lying in wait across Cambodia and the Balkans. In eastern Washington state in the U.S., the Hanford nuclear production complex may be decommissioned but it’s certainly active, leaking millions of gallons of radioactive waste substances into the ground and water, producing a nuclear landscape of irradiated plants, animals, and waterways.
In “Unmaking the Bomb” (2023), Shannon Cram describes the problem of assuming there is a way to clean up and create a post-apocalypse that is less contaminated. The stories about remediation imply an end of risk, “it frames the cleanup as a neutralizing force, implying that one day there will be an ‘after’ to atomic violence. The story does not explain how (some) injury and death is built into the cleanup’s very logic,” as Cram argues. The logic of assumed and acceptable injury and death is shared by the bunkerized subject, who knows that some people are going to suffer and die; but not them, they are too savvy to be so vulnerable. This sense of savviness occludes from view the truth: we are all collectively exposed to harms, we are collectively vulnerable to the violence of the past, present, and future which co-exist and amplify one another.
However, instead of confronting this collectively, the bunkerized subject is conditioned and encouraged to account for it as an independent unit that must demonstrate self-sufficiency and a willingness to endure some discomfort to survive and continue on after the crisis. Choosing to help others, share provisions, or otherwise remain exposed to maintain community through vulnerability is discouraged and, as the U.S. government worried in the 1950s during the height of Cold War panic, a sign of ‘communism taking root in the American psyche.’
War gardens
Prior to the atomic age panic, many U.S. citizens were fearful that industrialization would replace their self-sufficiency with dependence on industrial production. The do-it-yourself (DIY) movement tried to protect the power of small-scale production and craft, functionally another way to protect the skills necessary to be prepared for disruptions in industrial processes and to maintain frontier survival skills in case of catastrophe. Being prepared in such a way was imagined as an opt-out of industrialization, either entirely with extreme off-the-grid compounds or as a way to choose when to plug into industrialization and when to rely instead on one’s self-sufficiency and craft skills.
For example, during the world wars, U.S. households were asked to plant war or victory gardens to redirect more outputs of industrial food production towards the war effort rather than to domestic markets. The war gardens were not meant to replace the grocery store, but to engage the DIY spirit to supplement the food supply with at-home production. This approach to preparing for war and environmental danger, from atomic bombs to bomb cyclones, gives the impression of industrialization as something which is manageable: There is an outside and inside, and the everyday consumer can choose when to be in and shop the grocery store, and when to be out, by harvesting their backyard tomatoes.
Yet industrialization is what makes modern prepping possible, with ready-to-use objects fabricated in factories and shipped to your door. Industrialization is also the set of background processes that produce those harms people take pains to avoid or minimize. As Cram states, “There is no outside to industrial production and its inequitable body burdens”.
New radioactive environments
The production of industrial weapons created the conditions for long-term contamination, resulting in novel environmental burdens and radioactive environments due to the persistence of these burdens. Kate Brown documents this in “Plutopia” (2013), a history of plutonium production towns in Washington state and in Russia operating simultaneously during the 20th century Cold War period. These novel environments are part of the production of war, with the U.S. practicing the means of war on itself to demonstrate its readiness to effectively use it on others. The Cold War was assumed to be indefinite, and in many ways, it is. Not only are the same actors still involved in mutual antagonism and weapons development and stockpiling, but the effects of permanent wartime production have made a future already marked by wars that may never occur. Without dropping any bombs on one another, major nuclear states have already ensured we all live in the conditions of mutually assured destruction.
In “Radioactive Ghosts” (2020), Gabriele Schwab reminds us that we now always exist as nuclear subjects. The deadly link between industrialization, war, and nuclear technologies adds radioactivity to the bunkerized subject. “Nuclear subjectivities” have a half-life as long as the radioactive substances that now circulate through our living environment – not just as a potential risk, but as a fact. In the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Ursula Schönberger reminds us that the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s was both against war and against environmental contamination – a sharp departure from current efforts to make nuclear energy a green alternative to fossil fuels. In “The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making” (2021) Joseph Masco points out that nuclear security produces global insecurity and environmental degradation that cannot produce healthy outcomes for living things enmeshed in earth systems – a real challenge for the bunkerized subjects who choose to ‘opt out’ of industrial food and energy production in hopes of establishing self-sufficiency and vitality of body and spirit.
Recognizing mutual co-dependence
What does this mean for a pluriverse of peace? I do not know how to achieve such a thing, but I suspect it is something that is an ongoing project, rather than an endpoint. Embracing a pluriverse contains multiple possibilities, but only possibilities that are peaceful, just, and environmentally sustaining for many forms of life. This takes great courage. To engage in this process, I argue that we need to acknowledge and accept the futility of doomsday prepping as an individual endeavor, as something that allows individuals and their families to bypass the worst, most destructive aspects of shared and intertwined lives with the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.
Despite our commitment to preparing for disasters and the end of the world, we are turning the remains of former inhabitants of Earth into fossil fuels through incineration and preparing a carbon-heavy and irradiated home for ones still to come – whether we do so from our rural compounds, homesteads, high-tech condos with air and water filtration systems, or from far-flung suburbs and slums. In “The Force of Nonviolence” (2020), Judith Butler has written about shared conditions of vulnerability and precarity: from those experiencing war first-hand to residents in southern Utah drinking well water spiked with radionuclides from the Las Vegas gunnery bomb experiments over seventy years after their detonation, to the Diné nation families with uranium brick homes and matriarch activists who fought the federal government’s exploitation of Diné miners.
Butler contends that these linkages should not be built on identifying the most vulnerable populations and applying paternalistic policies to ‘save’ them, but to recognize our shared condition, and that vulnerability is not antithetical to strength, resistance, and world-making. Butler asks, “What if the situation of those deemed vulnerable is, in fact, a constellation of vulnerability, rage, persistence, and resistance that emerges under these same historical conditions?” Recognizing mutual co-dependence is a start, not the final revelation. The final revelation may never arrive, depending on your apocalyptic outlook, but seeing our subjectivities as nuclear people who prepare may be remade as new points of connection and solidarity, to think about the pluriverse of peace not as one cleansed from the sins of the modern world but as world-making within the conditions we already inhabit. We do not need to wait; we are ready as we are.