Techno-Imaginations of a Nuclear Regime. How a Power Plant Became a Proxy Bomb (A. Jelewska, M. Krawczak)

In this article, we discuss how techno-imaginations are designed within the nuclear regime as a tool to neutralize responsibility for military violence. We directly refer to the strategy of nuclear terrorism used by the Russian army against civilian infrastructure during the war in Ukraine. This situation is spectrally embedded in the interference of various media discourses and refers to the nuclear renaissance policy, which is one of the official cultural and political doctrines of contemporary Russia. We use the infrastructural perspective of media studies (Parks and Starosielski 2015), at the same time referring to the founding texts of nuclear criticism (Derrida 1984, Kerckhove 1984) to show the need for a new critical approach to analyzing the dependence between nuclear infrastructures and the cultural consequences of these transformations. We put forward the thesis that one of the most critical cultural consequences of intertwining the nuclear industry with the media, and the narratives generated by them, are new forms of weaponizing civilian nuclear infrastructure and a new topological figure of time in which the present shrinks to strengthen the future. This onto-technological dependence generates new forms of atomized memory in which the past is justified by pursuing a sustainable nuclear future, the present facts are displaced, and the negative aspects of nuclear accelerationism are neutralized.