In “Our Tools of War, Turned Blindly Against Ourselves,” Rob Nixon discusses the perils of depleted uranium in the high-tech arsenal of the U. S. military. Although it is claimed that precision-guided munitions–so-called “smart bombs”–reduce collateral casualties, their use of depleted uranium introduces environmental contaminants to the battlefield that produce casualties, civilian and military, long after the immediate violence of the combat action. Nixon writes,
War deaths from environmental toxicity demand patient, elaborate proof. Spikes in renal collapse; infertility; leukemia; testicular, brain, and breast cancers; and clusters of infant malformations are harder to link to war’s technologies than is a bullet through the head. The military statistician can simply count corpses within a given place and time, subdivide those columns into combatants and civilians, and draw a line beneath his sums. Such calculations conform tidily to our preconceptions about the time frame within which a war is waged. However, to view war through the prism of ecological time demands a different ethical attention span, one that strives to give the slow, discounted dead their due.
Nixon’s insight into the incalculable nature of this “slow violence” can be extended to the unintended consequences of weapons technology, not only on the environment but also culture itself. In the case of latter, weapons technology can transmit the values, assumptions, and prejudices of the culture that created it. When this phenomenon reproduces violence of the said weapon, the product is a weaponized culture–a culture that itself can be a destructive tool.
WeaponizedCulture.org is dedicated to the study of the confluence of war, technology, and culture to investigate this unique phenomenon. Through interdisciplinary research, this website will study weapons, new technologies that have been adapted for warfare, and their lasting effects in the world around us. Examples will include topics such as the latest developments in small arm design, emergent research on cyberwarfare, and technology’s influence on cultural beliefs and practices. Moreover, this blog will also discuss weapons and technology in popular culture, literature, film, and new media.
My hope is that WeaponizedCulture.org will become a ’staging ground’ for new interventions in cultural studies and the social sciences into the arena of war and technology.
More posts will follow!
