Encompassing most of the shuttered Savanna Army Depot, the Lost Mound Unit is a small portion of the huge Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, a 261-mile long stretch of river and adjacent land in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. An exemplary military-to-wildlife conversion, the Lost Mound Unit is an “overlay” refuge, meaning land not actually owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service is managed for conservation while the EPA and the US Army handle clean-up. About 3,000 acres were transferred to Fish and Wildlife Service ownership in 2003, with the remaining 6,000 acres to be transferred once decontamination is accomplished to levels agreeable to all parties. Another 3,000 acres–containing most of the base’s administrative and residential buildings–have been transferred to a redevelopment authority, which is busy seeking businesses to take up residence and offset the 400 jobs lost when the based closed. While severe contamination remains in the refuge–including unexploded ordnance, chemical dumps, asbestos, and soil so laden with TNT it will burn–the refuge has genuine ecological value. The size, secrecy, and remoteness of military bases often resulted in unintentional habitat preservation. The site is a haven for 47 Illinois endangered and threatened species and contains the largest sand prairie remnant in the state–punctuated by munitions storage bunkers and peppered with TNT.

The Savanna Army Depot was opened in 1918 as an artillery test range of the Rock Island Arsenal (located further down the Mississippi). From 1919 to 2000, it functioned as an ammunition testing, storage, and recycling facility. While the Savanna mostly handled conventional weapons, it did store nuclear missiles in some of its bunkers. Additionally, armor-piercing depleted uranium shells were stored and possibly tested there, and munitions recycling involved the dismantling and washing of both TNT-shells and some chemical weapons, including mustard gas, into unlined lagoons that ultimately drained into the Mississippi River. As a result, there is significant soil and groundwater contamination, and the most severely contaminated portions of the River have been roped off with large buoys to discourage boaters and fishermen. The cordoning off of the sections of the backwaters is representative of the EPA’s quixotic, highly bureaucratic efforts at remediation. Designating specific types of contamination or geographical areas “operating units” overlooks the relationships between bodies of land and bodies of water–not to mention the unpredictable interactions between chemicals and their breakdown products in the environment. Much of Lost Mound is a floodplain, and the entire site drains into the Mississippi River–itself a toxic soup of industrial and agricultural chemicals, untreated animal manure, antibiotics and who knows what that is always moving, always carrying contamination downstream.

Because cleanup is mandated only for levels of contamination that threaten human health, the EPA and the Army’s favorite way of dealing with it is to remove the people from the land. The conversion of a base to a restricted-access wildlife refuge is an efficient way to accomplish this, since the health of the wildlife is not a major factor in determining how much contaminated land must actually be cleaned up. This creates inevitable tension between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army. By simply boarding up and fencing off contaminated buildings, they have been administratively “remediated” to the point of protecting human health–even if, as in Lost Mound, their floors are so saturated with TNT that dropping a rock can set off a spark. Once a ‘preferred option’ (to use the bureaucratic term) for remediation has been established, no other course of action will be funded by the EPA or the Army. This means that Lost Mound is peppered with toxic military buildings that the Fish and Wildlife Service itself must pay to dismantle. Meanwhile, the operational budget at Lost Mound is $20,000 per year, and Alan Anderson has to take creative measure to accomplish his goals–like ‘subcontracting’ building demolition to a volunteer fire department as a training exercise.

Anderson displayed cynical humor in describing his budget and dealings with the military. When we met at the office-cum-visitor center, Anderson opened by explaining the he’d been “sequestered” in both the familiar spatial and more recent financial senses of the word. He has lost six or seven staff positions over the last five years, and he cheerfully notes he now holds meetings with “me, myself, and I–who don’t necessarily agree!” He recounted a meeting between the local Congressman, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the EPA, and the Army in which the military retinue outnumbered staff from all the other agencies combined. Of the Army’s proposed solution to essentially dump dirt on top of toxic waste near the Mississippi River, the wildlife biologist noted the solution as an example of “military intelligence.” Yet there must be something he likes about the unique environment of military-to-wildlife conversions: Lost Mound is his third such post. He has also been stationed at Pease Air Force Base/Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. When asked about the differences among the three sites, Anderson said, “Well, at least here you’ll see what’s gonna kill you–at Pease it was nukes and the Arsenal it was chemicals. Here it’s just ordinary bombs.”

In additional to maintaining a streak of black humor, Anderson’s response to working in a politically charged environment is to avoid talking politics as much as possible. As we zigzagged between bunkers and across overgrown gravel roads, he demonstrated a wildlife specialist’s eye for eagles, vultures, and hawks and a land manager’s attention to invasive species. He proudly pointed out the hundred acres of sand prairie he personally cleared of invasive cedars with a bush hog. It took five years. Our first stop was to a fenced area where Anderson was leading a team of volunteers in re-introducing the ornate box turtle to the refuge’s shrapnel-studded sand prairie. It is the only habitat in the state where the turtle could survive.

Yet the politics of the site cannot be avoided. When asked about relations with surrounding community, Anderson responded quickly, “They blame me, personally, for the base closure. Not the Army, not the Fish and Wildlife Service. Me.” While acknowledging that time has somewhat dulled the pain of the loss of the depot’s jobs and land, he still lives 35 miles away to avoid local hostility. Former employees of the army depot apparently have found it hard to believe that the land where they worked for decades is a public health hazard, and the lack of jobs has depressed wages and population. Carroll County, where the town of Savanna is located, has seen an 8% drop in population since the base closed. Anderson describes the closure announcement in 1995 as coming something of a shock. “This place was flying high during the First Gulf War,” he explained, but introduction of the much-heralded (if less accurate than claimed) ‘smartbombs’ during that war spelled the beginning of the end for the Savanna Army Depot. While the redevelopment of the buildings is looked upon favorably for its economic benefits, the closure of two-thirds of the base to public use–let alone any kind of economic activity–has been far more difficult to accept.

Our visit to Lost Mound was immediately preceded by a stop at the Jo-Carroll Depot Local Economic Development Authority, a bare-bones office in one of the base’s former administrative buildings. After a moment of confusion as to why a group of art students might be interested in the site, one of the employees helpfully explained the process whereby buildings are leased to private businesses with the option to purchase when cleanup is complete. In contrast to Anderson, the redevelopment specialist seemed frustrated with the thoroughness of the army’s remediation efforts, citing property transfers needlessly held up due to the presence of harmless metal scrap. Nonetheless, several properties are currently listed for very low prices, such as 3,700 square feet of office on 1.5 acres for $50,000. Businesses operating at the depot include a photography studio, a grain handling operation (with the humorous name of Area 51), communication technology companies, an electric parts supplier, and a firm developing technology for the oil and gas industry. Other ideas have been floated over the years, including using the bunkers for long-term data storage (ruled out by climate control and Internet access problems), while the Sac and Fox Tribe of Oklahoma to hoped to open several businesses, variously proposing a casino and resort hotel, ethanol plant, and call center. The Savanna Army Depot lies on Sauk lands stripped from the tribe after the Black Hawk War of 1832, but the proposal was rejected by the Redevelopment Authority, citing uncertainty around federal regulation of Indian gaming.

Re-development has proceeded slowly, and many of the buildings are in significant disrepair. Our group went inside a 1918-era building that has been abandoned since the army left 2000; among sheaves of paper, stacks of old books, and dozens of plastic mats for office chairs, a raccoon was found nesting on the second floor– blending the economic development and wildlife habitat functions of the depot in an unexpected way. Even occupied buildings look dilapidated: peeling paint and grass growing in the front steps is the norm, not the exception. But a run-down appearance does not mean that the businesses here are struggling: one company headquartered at Savanna apparently has a satellite office on the West Coast. The depot is both an Illinois Enterprise Zone and a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ), offering huge tax and tariff savings to anyone operating in it. One of the largest and, according to Alan Anderson, most profitable businesses operating in the former Savanna Army Depot is a company that moves and stores rail cars. As an FTZ, the depot is not considered part of the US for tariff purposes, so shipments can be warehoused (for a daily rate) until market conditions improve enough for the railcars (and their contents, if any) to be sent to another destination. If the former depot does not quite look like what you’d expect from a wildlife refuge, it also does not look like the “a privileged and effective environment for managing your products and raw materials” promised on the FTZ website. That it is both should prompt us to re-evaluate our expectations and become better able to respond to a world of complex and overlapping fields.

We’re pleased to release our wishfully official (or officially wishful) agency video introducing our primary organizational initiative through 2020: The National Cold War Monuments and Environmental Heritage Trail.

The Nike missiles in Marin were among the first guided, surface-to-air missiles to be deployed on a mass basis. From 1954 through 1974, the US operated a total of 280 Nike missile facilities across the country, ringing major cities and strategic military installations, as a last line of defense against Soviet planes bearing nuclear bombs. The first generation Nike missiles – the “Ajax” – were equipped with high-impact explosives, while the second generation, the “Hercules” were capable of carrying nuclear payloads. San Francisco – heavily fortified at least since the Civil War – was ringed by 24 Nike sites. New York, a city ten times the size, was protected by 20. Each installation consists of three sites spread over at least a mile: an integrated fire control center with radar arrays and guidance systems; a launch area housing the missiles; and barracks and support facilities for the crew. While the precise locations of nuclear-equipped missiles was a state secret, a weapons system this extensive was impossible to keep under wraps. The Army, which oversaw Nike operations, produced films designed to impress the public about the sophistication of this “shield that will protect us all.”

These films are among the artifacts that greet visitors at the small museum in the former administration building at the Nike site in the Marin Headlands. The room is crammed with missile ephemera: mission and squadron badges, control consoles, Nike contractor newsletters, uniforms and gas masks, a partially dismantled Ajax body, and inspirational posters (“If it flies, it dies.”). Taking in the nostalgic bric-a-brac is overwhelming; displays are anachronistic and idiosyncratic, probably assembled from the personal collections of the Nike veterans who first approached the Park Service to open the site. A few photographs of recent classes graduating from the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Weapons Intern Program exist side-by-side with once-official diagrams of world surface-to-air missiles labeled “United States,” “Free World,” and “Soviet Union.” The graduation photographs are one reminder that the Nike program’s closure merely closed one chapter in the very much ongoing story of nuclear weapons.

National Park Service Ranger Brian Powers greeted the handful of visitors promptly at the top of the hour, his green uniform echoing the Cold War-era Army work uniforms worn by the mannequins posting sentry by the entrance. Powers, who appeared to have been born in the waning years of the Cold War, delivered a summary of the Nike program and an outline of the deterrence doctrine in an incongruous surfer drawl. He seemed justifiably proud that he’d spent a year preparing tour guide training materials and formalizing the interpretive program at SF-88, and he was well in command of the technical details and the history of weapons system evolution. Demonstrating a component of the once room-sized analog computer that controlled missile trajectories, Powers announced that a typical iPhone has vastly greater computational power. On cue, a visitor produced one from his pocket, the palm-sized black screen contrasting sharply with the suitcase of gears and pins. Yet comparing the guided missile system unfavorably to a cell phone did not rob it of its power; rather, the finely-turned circuits that could have triggered a nuclear war become more awesome through their machine-age limitations.

Such meditations about variations on the technological sublime were not the point of the tour, however. Leaving the museum, Powers explained the radar system and battery control trailer that had been relocated from the former command station on a ridge across the valley. Details about the power of the radar array (200 kilowatts), missile range (50 miles for Ajax, 110 miles for Hercules), and the guidance process flew by, and it was hard to formulate questions that could keep up with the flow of information. I asked about any environmental consequences of the enormous number of Nike sites across the country. Powers replied that there was some reason to believe the acquisition radar arrays, with beams up to 6 megawatts, had killed thousands of migrating birds, essentially cooking them midair with the power equivalent of 8,000 microwave ovens.

The underground tour of the missile storage facility is usually identified as the highlight of the tour experience in online reviews, and it’s unsettling to descend into the bunker, flick on the flourescents, and stand face to face with a half-dozen disarmed nuclear weapons. The technological sublime is at work here, along with the phallic power of these long, sleek missiles, but so is the anachronistic quality of the museum. The underground bunker is pristine, so effectively restored and maintained that with very little imagination one could imagine a crew of men much like the ranger called to lift the missiles to the surface in a timed drill. Yet the bunker is a space devoid of computers—those devices that embody precision and professionalism today—and instead runs on cogs and visible conduit (not to mention the muscle of the missile crew). The effect is the bunker seems less a time capsule than a zone of suspended animation, a place where the Cold War isn’t neither fully present nor completely past.

The unsettling quality of the bunker could open up discussions about the unfinished business of the Cold War—about the effectiveness of deterrence, about the wisdom of the lopsided investment in defense, about the cultural impacts of militarization and secrecy, about the long-term environmental and health effects of bombs and their infrastructures. But the National Park Service’s apparent desire to present ‘just the facts’ in a way that would allow the visitor to draw his own conclusions limited the possibility that any conclusions would be drawn at all—let alone ones that challenged preconceptions. Unspoken questions hung in the air at several points in the tour, while some answers begged for follow up discussion. When one of my fellow tourists asked about the effect of detonating a bomb twice the power of Fat Man in the air, one hundred miles off the coast of San Francisco. Powers shrugged and said, “It would have meant the start of World War III, so that would be the least of their worries.”

As we climbed up the stairs to the angled December sunlight, I found myself thinking that the Park Service’s commitment to neutrality forced an interpretive framework that was not neutral and only barely interpretive. Reciting technical details of weapons systems and contextualizing them in terms of military doctrine risked recapitulating the mainstream narrative of Cold War necessity. But adding anything to that narrative courts controversy—something government agencies with precarious budgets are careful to avoid. But the absence of controversy—in San Francisco, no less—leaves too much out of the story. Moreover, it makes it difficult for visitors to assemble and reflect upon the many threads of information and impressions that almost all of us arrived with. I asked the ranger who comes and asks for a tour; he answered that it’s a diverse group that includes Nike veterans and school groups, hikers and international visitors, history buffs and families. Surely these people would have a lot to say to one another, but it is beyond the scope and ability of the National Park Service to facilitate these conversations. It seems vital that someone do it, however, if the Cold War is not to recede in the public imagination into analog-era curiosity.

On Saturday, November 17, National TLC Service personnel conducted a site visit to the shuttered BONUS (Boiling Nuclear Superheater) reactor, located directly adjacent to a legendary surfing beach near Rincón, Puerto Rico. While current and former military installations dot US territory – and encompass much of the commonwealth’s smaller land mass, Vieques, the BONUS reactor is the only site in Puerto Rico supervised by the Department of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management. The National TLC Service made the two-hour drive from San Juan to learn more about it.

Built by General Electric, the US Atomic Energy Commission, and the Puerto Rico Water Resources Authority, 18-MW BONUS reactor on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico was constructed from 1960-1963 and went critical in 1964. The construction of the prototype plant, designed to establish the feasibility of the integral boiling-superheating concept, must be understood in light of three mid-twentieth century development programs pursued by the US government as civil society extensions of the Cold War. Most directly, the reactor was an extension of the Atoms for Peace program established in 1953 to develop civilian applications of nuclear fission in order to build public, especially international, support by taking the image of nuclear technology. But it was also constructed in the context of Operation Bootstrap, a program begun in 1948 to transform Puerto Rico from a rural, agrarian society into an industrially-oriented economy that functioned as a quasi-offshore entity for US corporations (with lower labor costs, duty-free imports, and tax-protected profits). Finally, the reactor was constructed during some of the tensest years of the Cold War, as the United States reacted to the Cuban Revolution with great anxiety, military escalation, and diplomatic activity, eventually establishing the Alliance for Progress (1961) to foster economic development throughout Latin America in keeping with a pro-US, free-market model. The position of the reactor on the island—looking back to the mainland United States over Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba—is if not strategic than certainly symbolic within the geopolitical situation at that time.

Regardless of various reasons for its construction, the BONUS reactor’s operational life was very short. Running at full power only from 1965-1968, its operation was terminated due to technical difficulties. Following the removal of spent fuel and special nuclear materials back to the continental US and the entombing of the reactor vessel and internal components in concrete and grout, BONUS achieved listing on the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places in 2008, and a museum of atomic science was established on the site. By the time of our visit, however, there was no evidence of the museum, and reactor campus was enclosed by a locked chain-link fence, rusty from the salt air. A single car—probably a security guard’s—was parked inside the fence, but we saw no evidence of its owner. The most visible protection was provided by stray dogs who had taken up residence inside the fence and barked almost continually at the beach traffic parking just outside the gate. The reactor’s striking architecture has, in fact, lent its name to this surfing hot spot: the beach is known as “Domes.”

We scampered down a muddy hill to the beach, then rounded a rocky point to glimpse the reactor from the ocean. The green dome rose over the tropical canopy, a rusting monument to a century that dawned in Puerto Rico under U.S. military rule after centuries of Spanish control. Comparisons between BONUS and the fortification around San Juan were perhaps inevitable. On one side of the island, Spanish castles projected hard power from limestone walls. On the other side of the island, the reactor projected an apparently softer power, the promise of technology and modernization, backed with the unfathomably harder power of nuclear weapons. This sleeker, more modern form of colonialism is still hard to recognize, while the other far easier to romanticize. These two nationally-recognized ‘historic places’ attract far different numbers and kinds of visitors each year as a result.

Crossing the beach, we found a very muddy trail running alongside the reactor’s perimeter fence. Following it, we came upon a ruined outbuilding—perhaps part of the plant’s water cooling intake—repurposed for various recreational activities and bedecked with anti-imperialist, anti-police, pro-drug sentiments. An adjacent structure had collapsed to the forest floor. The vines reclaiming it offered shelter to a diversity of iguanas, hermit crabs, frogs, and insects. In this tropical ecosystem, the very existence of the trail was evidence of its maintenance, and as we continued we found more signs pointing to the dance between adventure-seekers and boundary-enforcers: patched fence, cleared brush, piled trash. If efforts to transform BONUS into a legitimate tourist destination through the museum failed, energy is clearly being expended to prevent its becoming an unofficial attraction.

In the absence of an institutional presence on site, inquiries about the reactor’s history and any remaining contamination are met with either bureaucracy or local lore. The Department Of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management—the long-term steward of post-Cold War domestic legacies (i.e., hazards)— holds jurisdiction over the BONUS site and posts information about the closure and cleanup and annual monitoring reports online, but these contain little evidence of public outreach or involvement, aside from references to the museum. Several Puerto Ricans we asked about the reactor were unsure if it had ever been operational but were quite concerned about seismic activity in the area: the Puerto Rico Trench is about 100 kilometers north of the island, and various large and small fault lines are associated with it. Unless this seismic threat is realized, the site is likely to be more forgotten than commemorated: a once-upon-a-time experimental nuclear zone overlaid on a tropical surfing “hot spot.”

Many of these items appear to earnestly celebrate the “home team” of the larger nuclear enterprise and adopt the atomic bomb as an icon for potency and strength. Richland, Washington is home to the Hanford Site, a mostly decommissioned nuclear production facility that for decades manufactured plutonium for atomic weapons. Considered a feat of engineering genius and the centerpiece of the Manhattan Project, the B reactor at Hanford was built in secrecy in only 13 months by over 50,000 workers, who did not know what they were building. Commissioned to produce plutonium-239 by nuclear fission for the US nuclear weapons development program during WWII, B Reactor was the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor. After more than 20 years of plutonium production, including that used in the first atomic test–Trinity–at Alamogordo, NM and in the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, B Reactor was shut down in 1968 and was scheduled to be cocooned for seventy-five years, to allow for on-site radioactivity to decay.

The remaining enrichment facilities for the atomic weapons complex were decommissioned by the late 1980s, though the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, the Hanford Observatory, and a commercial nuclear power plant continue to operate on the site. The most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, Hanford is the focus of a major, ongoing clean-up effort and is now open to tourism–in part to reassure the public that the site is ‘safe enough.’ The city of Richland would scarcely exist without Hanford and, despite the indelible (and largely invisible) marks left by radioactive waste the city still identifies strongly with its nuclear heritage. Richland High School’s mascot–The Bombers–was never decommissioned, and the high school sports teams continue to use the mushroom cloud logo (adopted in 1972), despite intermittent controversy.

Other artifacts of more general provenance appear accept the Cold War doctrine of deterrence.

Some domesticate, feminize, and sexualize nuclear detonations in a manner familiar from the Miss Atomic Bomb pageant or, indeed, the nuclear namesake of the bikini swimsuit itself.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that people purchase these items for varied reasons, with ironic consumption potentially a larger share of the market than the manufacturers planned.

Some items are intended less for mass marketing and tailored instead to a small subset of nuclear workers. These often reveal a much more cynical strain of humor. This hat, for example, seems to be a play on the popular 1980s children’s TV show, “Pound Puppies.”

The hat circulated among disillusioned workers at the Rocky Flats plutonium trigger production plant outside of Denver, CO  when it was revealed that management had dealt with radioactive waste by dumping it into an on-site pond. The “solution” was to dredge the contaminated mud, mix it in concrete, and place the resulting “pondcrete” in cardboard boxes on outdoor shelves, exposed to the elements. Rocky Flats was raided by the FBI for environmental crimes in 1989 in an operation called “Operation Desert Glow.” The production of weapons components ended at Rocky Flats in 1992.

This shirt, also from Rocky Flats around the same time period, draws its iconography from bottled water labels. Below the expected pristine mountain stream, however, the shirt depicts an industrially polluted waterway, with ominous barrels of waste leaking beyond the confines of the image’s frame. The shirt came “pre-stained” with splash marks, purportedly from the radioactive water. The bitter tagline: “Don’t Think, Just Drink! Guaranteed safe by the US Government. Bottled below the source, Broomfield, Colorado.” An expedited clean-up was declared complete in 2005, and the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge was established in 2007.

About the Archive

When the National TLC Service was established in May 2011, we were tasked with developing collaborative cultural projects to help build a more robust public dialogue about the Cold War. After extensive internal study, we concluded that, at initial levels of staffing (2) and funding ($0), the most feasible project proposed in our establishing documents would be the Digital Archive of Nuclear Humor, dedicated to “chronicling the inventive ways that 20th and 21st century people laughed in the face of mutation.” The National TLC Service recognizes that the ironic mode, mobilized into satire, has long been the most popularly accessible form of nuclear critique, practiced to legendary effect in the classic film, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb While we are cautious about the potentially politically disabling effects of irony (such as practiced by white hipster culture), we hypothesize that ironic consumption of Cold War monuments and icons may be most individuals’ first and most intimate expressions of nuclear unease. The National TLC Service has initiated this digital archive of nuclear humor to consider how the affects and aesthetics of irony, satire, and camp might be activated to permit the contemplation of the unimaginable and forge the new, trans-natural identifications and solidarities demanded by a world characterized by widespread exposure and shared but unequal risk.

Sarah Kanouse’s written and visual work examines how physical and political landscapes are socially produced in order to create alternate, oppositional experiences of them. She looks into the spatial practices—visible and invisible—that have produced a certain place over time and influence how politics are lived there. By alternately supplementing, shifting and undermining the visual dimension of space, she offers what W.J.T Mitchell calls an “account of landscape…[that traces] the process by which landscape effaces its own readability and naturalizes itself” in order to produce alternate ways of seeing and inhabiting those places. Her artwork has appeared in exhibitions, screenings, and events mounted by Concordia University (Montreal); the University of Michigan; the Smart Museum (Chicago); Artlink (Belgrade, Serbia); University of California Berkeley; Columbia College (Chicago); Indiana University; University of Wisconsin Madison; and the Centro Cultural Rosa Luxemburg (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and many other festivals and artist-run spaces. Sarah’s writings have been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Leonardo, Acme, The Democratic Communiqué, Critical Planning and Art Journal. An Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Iowa, she teaches specialized classes in video/time-based media and art and ecology. More information is available at www.readysubjects.org

Shiloh Krupar is a cultural geographer, with interests that lie at the intersection of geography, architecture, performance studies, and environmental justice. Her work has focused on the politics of nature conservation, environmental memory, and labor/compensation issues at decommissioned military sites and nuclear facilities in the western United States, and the curatorial practices and spectacular spaces of the future in postsocialist urban China. New projects include: disaster and cities in aftermath, the unseen medical geographies of waste, and interfaces of the body with cancer detection technologies. Collaboration and performative methodologies, such as absurdist humor and institutional mimicry, are central to her practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Culture and Politics Program at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on critical geography, cultural theory, green politics, and global cities. She is currently finishing a solo book project entitled Hot Spotter’s Manifesto: Practicing Transnatural Ethics, Politicizing Uncertainty, and a co-authored book Waste=History with C. Greig Crysler (UC Berkeley). Krupar’s research projects have been published in such venues as Society and Space, Public Culture, Radical History Review, and Liminalities. Her latest article “The Biopsic Adventures of Mammary Glam: Breast Cancer Detection and the Practice of Cancer Glamor” will appear in the guest-edited volume Social Semiotics 22.1 (with Nadine Ehlers, Georgetown University). On the side, she accumulates artifacts for an ongoing museum of bureaucracy. More information at explore.georgetown.edu/people/srk34

AN ACT TO ESTABLISH THE NATIONAL TOXIC LAND/LABOR CONSERVATION SERVICE

Whereas nearly the entire United States was historically and geographically drawn into an assembly line for making nuclear weapons, with more than 300 sites nationwide involved in mining, milling, refining, and enriching uranium, making and machining plutonium and bomb parts, special materials handling centers, assembly, research and development, as well as testing grounds;

Whereas the post-Cold War period has revealed the many hidden sacrifices demanded of people and the land in the name of national security, including environmental devastation of an unprecedented magnitude; secret human plutonium experiments; radioactive atmospheric fallout; national sacrifice zones for the making and testing of nuclear weapons; and the ever-lingering problem of nuclear waste disposal;

Whereas the unwitting risks experienced by and sacrifices demanded of people due to United States military activity disproportionately affected rural, poor, native, and other minority groups, as well as workers within the nuclear industry itself;

Whereas an estimated 600,000 workers associated with these historic and current activities experience occupational illnesses and premature death due to exposures to radioactive and toxic materials while working in the factories and laboratories of the atomic bomb complex, often without governmental recognition of its responsibility for their illnesses and inadequate resources to care for their health;

Whereas the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) have undergone neoliberal restructuring, with the environmental threats generated historically by former DOD military arsenals, DOE nuclear facilities, and the United States’s industrial warfare economy more generally, contributing to the downsizing, remediation, and transfer of land from the DOE and DOD to the Department of the Interior’s  (DOI) U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to administer as part of the U.S. national wildlife refuge system—referred to as military-to-wildlife, warfare-to-wildlife, bombs-to-birds, or “M2W” conversions;

Whereas the subsequent effect of these conversions too often involves evacuating the natural histories and human lives that existed prior to, during, and after military-industrial production for the purposes of nostalgic ecological reconstructions, thereby obscuring the profound and ongoing material transformations of such sites and the legacies of injustice, deceit, irresponsibility, unaccountability, ongoing colonial occupation, disaster and domination;

Whereas the greening of the DOE and DOD continues apace, in spite of these organizations’ leading role in worldwide ecological damage, with the DOE spearheading an “Environmental Sustainability Program” at contaminated sites and waste-reduction targets directed at its own organizational operations, and with the Pentagon, in partnership with private industry, now touted the ecological steward of twenty-five million acres of public land with 100,000 archaeological sites and 300 listed or candidate endangered species;

Whereas these and other military sustainability programs demonstrate the greenwashing of the environmental havoc caused by the DOD’s, DOE’s, and their military contracters’ own activities, which fueled a multi-billion-dollar remediation industry and a new DOE and DOD mission of biodiversity protection and environmental security as organizing principles of military-industrial policy, budgets, and research infrastructures;

Whereas the DOE and DOD now claim responsibility for protecting human and ecological health through effective and efficient long-term surveillance and maintenance at decommissioned and remediated sites (arsenals, nuclear facilities, testing sites, etc), yet are trying to evade the long-term costs and risks associated with operating, monitoring, and managing those decommissioned sites under their management in perpetuity;

Whereas the DOE has explicitly identified environmental justice goals as part of its mission of managing the legacy of the environmental impact of over 100 sites within the estimated 3,300 square miles of continental landmass comprising the U.S. nuclear landscape;

Whereas innovative grassroots movements involving former workers, environmentalists, minority, native, and downwind/downstream populations, academics, and artists are responding creatively to the failure of the DOE and DOD to adequately address environmental justice, occupational health, cultural memory, and human rights issues in its long-term land stewardship practices;

Whereas the Department of the Interior, long derided as the “Department of Everything Else,” is uniquely suited to address the many people, lands, and stories similarly remaindered by the United States nuclear programs;

BE IT ENACTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THAT THERE IS HEREBY CREATED IN THE DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR THE NATIONAL TOXIC LAND/LABOR CONSERVATION SERVICE, HEREAFTER KNOWN AS THE NATIONAL TLC SERVICE.

SEC. 1 DEFINITIONS

As used in this act, unless the context otherwise indicates, the following terms have the following meanings:

1. That “National TLC Service” shall mean the National Toxic Land/Labor Service;

2. That “Department” shall mean the Department of the Interior;

3. That “national military catastrophe” shall mean the cumulative environmental, health, labor, cultural, economic and human rights impact of the military activities of the Department of Energy and Department of Defense;

4. That “national sacrifice zones” shall mean any area rendered uninhabitable by human beings and hazardous to non-human life due to the cumulative military activities of the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and their contractors;

5. That “remediation” shall mean the removal of contaminants from environmental media, such as soil, groundwater, surface water, or sediment, for the purposes of protecting human health and the environment according to regulatory requirements and subject to assessments of human health and ecological risk where no legal standard exists and/or where nothing can be known with certainty or even certain uncertainty;

6. That “greenwashing” shall refer to the misleading, deceptive, and/or purposefully obscurantist promotion of policies and products that are supposedly beneficial to the environment but do not address or reform underlying practices that produce environmental harm and whose underlying purpose is to increase profit and/or unaccountability;

7. That “downwind/downstream populations” shall mean potentially the entire population of the United States.

SEC. 2 MANDATE

The National TLC Service is hereby charged to develop cultural programs that address issues of environmental justice, labor, and human rights related to national sacrifice zones. It is expected that these programs will be undertaken in collaboration with the grassroots movements, non-governmental organizations, and affected individuals already involved in contesting and reforming the Department of Energy and Department of Interior’s land and legacy stewardship practices.

This mandate includes, but is not limited to:

2.1  Exploring and establishing creative and collaborative methodologies of broad wishful thinking regarding the National TLC Service’s mandate, by drawing on the knowledge and practices of artists, environmentalists, activists, nuclear workers, Native communities, scholars of the bomb, and more;

2.2  Developing vital cultural institutions that bring together the myriad constituencies affected by national military catastrophe to collectively explore the new forms of subjectivity and community forged in the face of uncanny hyper-materials such as plutonium and radioactive waste;

2.3  Coordinating and providing resources for the conception, design, and installation of monuments, museums, and other markers concerning the cultural and environmental legacy of the US nuclear state, and producing interpretive programming at former military sites transferred to the Department of Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and at other national sacrifice zones more generally;

2.4  Imagining new forms of outreach programs and projects that will fund and provide fair and adequate health services, environmental stewardship, and networks of care between humans and nonhumans for the myriad life-altering and life-threatening conditions caused by exposure to large quantities of toxic and radioactive employed by the United States military.

SEC. 3 FIELDS OF EXPERTISE

Given the unprecedented scope and duration of the national military catastrophe, which includes multiple interlocking environmental, cultural, and human impacts that will continue to unfold and compound over a timeline that is, in all practical terms, infinite, the expertise required to direct the mission of the National TLC Service cannot be supplied by any one person. Accordingly, this Act stipulates that the National TLC Service be co-directed by a group of three individuals, to be appointed with the following categories and caveats in mind:

3.1 Public Scholar in the Humanities

Much as the Department of the Interior is the “Department of Everything Else,” the      humanities contain a wide array of scholarly disciplines that lagged behind, existed on the fringes of, or pointedly criticized the mass instrumentalization and militarization of human knowledge that marked the 20th and early 21st centuries. As such, they represent one location for resistance to the crude technocratic solutions that often mark the institutional and governmental response to the conditions of national sacrifice zones and the physical, cultural, and emotional needs of downwind/downstream populations.
3.2 Visual, Performing, or Conceptual Artist

The awareness of the affective, aesthetic, and political dimensions of form required by the National TLC Service’s mandate is presently found most prominently in the practice of contemporary artists. Furthermore, a traditional training in creative problem-solving and an increasing emphasis on collaboration in the education of artists directly reinforces the mandate described in Section 2.1 of this Act.
3.3 Environmental Justice Activist

The environmental justice movement has long recognized the complex interconnections between ecological damage and social, economic, cultural, and human rights issues. Because grassroots groups have already responded to the conditions addressed by the Act—in particular the greenwashing of the DOD and DOE via their own “sustainability” programs and the remediation activities of this Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service—fulfillment of the mandate of the National TLC Service requires participation from affected people and groups at the very highest levels.
3.4 Prohibition on former or future employment by the national sacrifice zone industry

This Act recognizes an inherent conflict of interest between former or future employment by the military and/or entities whose primary business involves the perpetuation, management, or remediation of national sacrifice zones. In addition, this Act recognizes a conflict of interest between public statements betraying open hostility to, or disbelief in, any Federal agency’s mission and service as the director of that same agency. Understanding, however, that people’s beliefs and values may genuinely change over time, this Act hereby stipulates that the co-directors and managerial and professional staff of the National TLC Service must not be employed in the service of national sacrifice zones, or related industries, for a period of ten years immediately preceding or following their association with the National TLC Service. In addition, public statements betraying hostility to, or disbelief in, the mandate of the National TLC Service—including, but not limited to, disbelief in the existence of the Service itself—should be closely scrutinized.
SEC. 4 RECOMMENDED ACTIONS AND OUTCOMES DURING THE AGENCY’S FIRST TERM

Upon formal adoption of this Act and the successful appointment and confirmation of the three co-directors as described in Section 3, it is expected that the following recommended actions will be undertaken immediately:

4.1 Public Communications

The National TLC Service must produce and regularly update quality communications to educate and inform the public concerning its mandate and programs. Such materials include, but are not limited to:
4.1.1  National TLC Service logo
4.1.2  National TLC Service website
4.1.3  National TLC Service fact sheet or brochure
4.1.4  National TLC Service annual report

4.2 Site-specific, collaborative, ephemeral cultural programs
Within the first year following adoption of this Act, the National TLC Service shall initiate one collaborative, site-specific cultural project, in the spirit of those itemized below:

4.2.1  An annual national ball for former nuclear workers and downwind/downstream populations, to be MC-ed by Denver-based radioactive drag queen comedienne NuClia Waste     (www.nucliawaste.com)[1];

4.2.2  A program to assist people and their descendants in adopting and ensuring the safety and well-being of orphaned plutonium-239, an uncanny element that will be dangerous to current forms of life for as long as 240,000 years;

4.2.3  A digital archive of nuclear humor, chronicling the inventive ways that 20th and 21st century people laughed in the face of mutation.
4.3 National Cold War Memory Project

Within the first year following adoption of this Act, the National TLC Service shall produce a feasibility study concerning the eventual establishment of the following:

4.3.1  An impossible monument to human radiation testing on or near the National Mall in Washington D.C.;

4.3.2  The National Cold War Environmental Heritage Trail and Visitor Centers, connecting the Pentagon, major military contractors, military-to-wildlife conversions, nuclear waste holding areas, impacted native lands, community and health centers for downwind/downstream populations, and other national sacrifice zones.