Bungle-Space

Miniature War Room Set at the Stanley Kubrick Exhibit at LACMA

“The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.”

—Marshall McLuhan, The Book of Probes (2011)

The nuclear beast is “born secret,” covered in a solid black lanugo, an occultation that embraces every limb of its existence. In the United States, any information related to the "design, manufacture, or utilization of atomic weapons" is classified as "Restricted Data”. As such, nuclear weapons are essentially an occult technology. They are siloed from the rational organs by a meniscus of myth and taboo, a glowing ooze between physics and alchemy.

Since WW2, there have been zero nuclear weapon attacks. In 70 years of nuclear proliferation, there have been zero accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonations. Contrary to decades of alarmist propaganda, for anyone living outside of bug cities, even an all-out nuclear war is 90% survivable. Nuclear armageddon, effectively, does not exist. There is only the nuclear deterrent— the deterrence of atomic heroism, the obstruction of divine justice, and the torture of Prometheus.

National Security Memorandum which shows Nixon administration ordered a DEFCON [Defense Readiness Condition] 3 alert during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The document on the left was released in 1989, and a heavily excised version was released in 2008. Its secrecy is a living thing, it grows back if removed.

In contrast to the somber, almost religious tone of films like Oppenheimer, a clownish reality exists where these most fearsome artifacts of human engineering—nuclear bombs—have repeatedly eluded the tight grip of their custodians. The slapstick trope of "Broken Arrow" accidents, occurring no less than 32 times since 1950, where earth-flattening devices have harmlessly dropped out of the sky or sunk to the bottom of the ocean, poses a comical counter-point to the supposed volatile and, for some, the inherent nature of these devices.

The revelation that no less than six such weapons have been irrevocably lost by the US during the Cold War, with little to no Atomic Mayhem arising, further accelerates us into the surreal reaches of bungle-space¹. These bombs, supposedly primed for annihilation and yet lounging dormant in swamps, fields, and ocean beds, dapple a whimsical fallout over the hills of Har Megiddo. Decades of survivalist anticipation betrayed by the demon named “Nothing Happens”.