The Irradiated

Abstract

This chapter discusses American fiction produced during the period after WW2 to the present and reveals how it registers and rationalizes the enormous, but also notably inexpensive, violence and death that nuclear weapons made possible. The release of this violence during and after the war produced stories set in futures where the climate of the planet has clearly broken down as an effect of militarized capitalism and where the capitalist world-system is crumbling. In some of these stories, a planet damaged by nuclear violence and lingering radiation takes the form of a gigantic, monstrous, and uncontrollable security threat that demands the attention of the military. By telling such stories, the chapter argues, these narratives must be considered as the proper beginning of the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

Cheap War and Nuclear Fictions

As noted in Chapter 2, publications by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) argue that the Anthropocene begins ‘historically at the moment of detonation of the Trinity A-bomb at Alamogordo in 1945’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015, p. 200). This is because this test produced radioactive fallout that settled into the stratigraphic record where it can now be detected. An obvious problem with the AWG’s dating of the formal beginning of biospheric breakdown to the Trinity test, and to the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is that it ignores the material (and cultural) history that led up to the detonation of these weapons. It should be obvious that the deployment of nuclear weapons in the 1940s comes out of a specific military world-system history engineered by, and privileging, a limited group of humans. Eliding this history makes it enormously difficult to understand what has brought biospheric erosion about, and that this erosion is profoundly socio-ecological in nature rather than simply climate-related. The failure to centre this basic state of affairs also makes it difficult to prevent further erosion.¹

That said, while the first atomic bomb does not mark the historical beginning of the socio-ecological breakdown the AWG has called the Anthropocene, it does denote an important new material, military, economic, and cultural phase of this breakdown. Understood in relation to the long history of securitization of extraction that accompanied the evolution of the capitalist world-ecology, and thus as a particular stage of what Jason W. Moore (2016) has theorized as the Capitalocene, the deployment of the first atomic weapons began a revolution in military technology similar to what I call Petrowar in the previous chapter. While nuclear energy made it possible to further accelerate military technologies such as the submarine, its main contribution to militarized capitalism was its ability to make destruction and killing on a planetary scale cheap.

Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project and the de-facto engineer of the atomic bomb, was deeply aware of this and commented on the bomb as precisely a cheap weapon after the war. In the essay ‘The New Weapon: The Turn of the Screw’ (1946), he estimates that in ‘this past war it cost the United States about $10 a pound to deliver explosive to an enemy target. Fifty thousand tons of explosive would thus cost a billion dollars to deliver’ (p. 24).² He then figures that the sum involved when delivering the same amount of explosive via nuclear technology is ‘several hundred times less, possibly a thousand times less’. Thus, ‘[a]tomic explosives vastly increase the power of destruction per dollar spent, per man-hour invested’ (p. 24). Oppenheimer also notes that while the nuclear bomb can be used against military personnel and equipment, ‘their disproportionate power of destruction is greatest in strategic bombardment: In destroying centers of population, and population itself, and in destroying industry’ (p. 25). If, as Moore (2016) and Patel and Moore (2018) have argued, capitalism has sustained itself through the cheapening of essentials such as nature, energy, food, labour, and life, the invention and use of the atomic bomb marks a new stage in this development. With the atomic bomb, planetary-scale mass death and destruction were suddenly perfectly affordable. At the same time, (settler) cities, sites of refinement, and plantations of various types had become more vulnerable than ever before.

This produced a new set of opportunities for the hegemon of the world-system, but also a new sense of insecurity. After the war, nuclear bomb testing was resumed under the codename Operation Crossroads. After deporting the Indigenous Micronesian population from the Bikini Atoll that is part of the Marshall Islands, the US tested a series of increasingly powerful nuclear bombs. As testing continued, and when US allies and the Soviet Union also began to test weapons, it became clear that fallout from detonations was spread across the planet, so that it could potentially enter and alter human bodies in detrimental ways. American geneticist Hermann J. Muller warned already in his 1946 Nobel Prize lecture that even minute doses of radiation may lead to genetic damage and mutations. In addition, nuclear weapons were shown to be able to drastically destroy entire geographies, and even to potentially alter the global climate. In 1952, the US erased the Pacific Island of Elugelab/Āllokļap from the face of the Earth with the help of the first hydrogen bomb ‘Mike’, replacing it with a radioactive crater. In 1957, the US Department of Defense published the book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons which speculated that nuclear detonations, just like volcanic eruptions, could be capable of throwing so much dust into the atmosphere that it may obscure light from the sun (see Glasstone and Dolan 1957, pp. 70–71). Out of this assumption emerged the notion of ‘nuclear winter’, described as a prolonged cooling of the planet produced by atomic warfare. In this way, the nuclear bomb was understood as a weapon that could produce slow, insidious, and mutating violence across the globe, and that may also, potentially, change the climate of the planet. Already in 1947, the newly formed Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock and set it to seven minutes to the midnight that marks oblivion.³ With this clock firmly and publicly in place, the idea that modern society may be moving towards a terminal, military, and world-systemic crisis had been firmly established and disseminated.

This realization produced texts that speculated on the possibility that human activity might ruin the planet for human and extra-human life. Donald Worster (1985) has termed the post-war period the ‘Age of Ecology’ (p. ix) and argued that it was inaugurated by the ‘dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gases’ (p. 342) produced by the detonation of the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo in 1945. The realization that radioactive fallout may produce mutations, that large-scale nuclear war may radically alter the conditions for life on the planet, and that the world may be moving towards a terminal ecological crisis, were registered in fiction from a US nation-state that had, at this time, clearly become the new core of the capitalist world-system/ecology. Thus, as Harold L. Berger (1976) has argued, the post-WWII period saw the birth of a new kind of science fiction that was ‘prophetic, increasingly more concerned with disasters than marvels’ (p. x). The event that ‘fertilized the soil from which [such] science fiction grows’ was, Berger observes, the ‘atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima’ (p. 147). This new breed of science fiction was not overly interested in people who had, or may, suffer nuclear war in Japan though. Instead, it speculated on what life might be like for (white, middle-class) Americans in futures transformed by radiation and nuclear war. By exploring worlds where military-grade violence has damaged the planet and thrown the US nation-state into a sudden state of terminal crisis, it produced a new ecological and geological paradigm in American fiction. While the Petrowar text did evoke images of large-scale destruction, the pre-1990s Petrowar narrative tended to view this destruction as local. In the Petrowar text, there is somewhere to escape to when the land is burning. In what can be named Nuclear War Fiction, such refuge cannot be taken for granted.

This chapter discusses the irradiated worlds that these post-WWII nuclear narratives conjure. The chapter first examines the early wave of post-WWII speculative fiction that locates humans within a post-atomic war future. In some texts, this world is utopian, but in most, it has been severely damaged by nuclear military violence. Emerging out of the already existing martial and eco-phobic literary tradition described in the previous chapters, these early stories can be said to make up the earliest examples of the fully formed American Climate Emergency Narrative. As the chapter shows, the first wave of post-WWII science fiction thus registers the capacity of the militarized, modern state to profoundly alter or even destroy the precarious ecosystem of the planet. This registering, I argue, provides space for a certain radical literary tradition in science fiction, but it also paves the way for texts that cast profound ecological and social crises as, in the words of Marzec, ‘an engagement opportunity’ (2015, p. 9). These are texts that cast an irradiated and riotous ecology in the shape of an enormous, and enormously aggressive, chthonic being that levels megacities and that must be fought by the very military institutions that, in many cases, have participated in its creation. This type of story first appears with the release of the American The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Louri 1953) and becomes part of global popular culture with the Japanese Gojira (Honda 1954). Both films feature a prehistoric creature energized by nuclear energy into a planetary-scale threat. As the chapter discusses, this gigantic figure has become central to the contemporary American Climate Emergency Narrative. Particularly, as the chapter argues, the Warner Brother’s Monsterverse films Godzilla (Edwards 2014) sponsored by the US Department of Defense, and Godzilla II: King of the Monsters (Dougherty 2019) are central to the evocation of the US military as the only system capable of addressing the planetary emergency it has been instrumental in creating.

Entering Irradiated Socio-Ecological Futures

When the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the initial American reaction was triumphant. In Congress, California representative Jerry Voorhis argued that when ‘the scientists released atomic energy […] the greatest event in the history of mankind except only the birth of Christ Himself took place’ (Jerry Voorhis cited by Weisgall 1994, pp. 79–80). Mississippi Representative John Rankin concurred, arguing that ‘Almighty God has placed this great weapon in our hands at a time when atheistic barbarism is threatening to wipe Christianity from the face of the world’ (Rankin cited by Weisgall 1994, p. 80). The detonations of the first nuclear bombs were thus presented as a kind of divine intervention, with God hailing (and securing) the progress of settler capitalism at a time of large-scale global crisis.

This jubilant greeting of the atomic bomb and the mass death it produced gave rise to a series of utopian stories such as Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), and to films such as Irving Pichel’s Destination Moon in 1950 (an adaptation of Heinlein’s story), where atomic energy makes it possible to extend the settler capitalist project into space. In Destination Moon, a coalition of US corporations and free-lancing military men build a moon-bound spaceship energized by nuclear power. The main purpose is to secure cislunar space: ‘The first country that can use the moon for the launching of missiles will control the Earth! That, gentlemen, is the most important military fact of this century!’ the director of the project exclaims. At the same time, the journey is conducted to ensure access to the new commodity frontiers offered within the solar system. Having reached the moon and taken ‘possession’ of it in the name of God and the US, the astronauts discover Uranium deposits that make the moon a viable resource for the military and also for a capitalist world-system perceived in the film as transitioning away from petromodernity towards new nuclear commodity frontiers.

However, even unapologetically utopian narratives such as Destination Moon voice some concern. From space, the Earth appears ‘vulnerable and exposed forever’, and one of the astronauts jokes that the Uranium found could be used to ‘blow up the moon too’. This barely voiced counter-discourse can be traced back to the publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima in 1946. This horrific journalistic account of the bomb and its aftermath revealed the enormous proportions of the suffering caused by nuclear warfare. Hersey’s text uses first-person testimony to piece together the massive violence released by the bomb. People, architecture, and extra-human nature closest to the detonation are vaporized by the shock wave and the firestorm, leaving an area ‘of four square miles of reddish-brown scar, where nearly everything had been buffeted down and burned’ (p. 21). Equally horrific is the new form of slow violence that lingers in the wake of the detonation. When the fires have been extinguished and survivors cared for, people remaining in the city of Hiroshima are struck by insidious and unexplainable illnesses. Small wounds caused by the detonation have ‘suddenly opened wider and were swollen and inflamed’ (p. 103), and, as if a plague of some sort has invaded the city, people vomit, their hair falls out, skin blisters, and organs fail. The land on which Hiroshima stood has been turned hostile by military violence. People sicken and die simply by entering this irradiated space.

The nightmarish images disseminated by the publication of Hersey’s account merged with the aforementioned research that argues that radiation causes genetic damage and with the reports suggesting that large-scale nuclear war may alter the climate of the planet. Joseph Masco has termed what rises out of this merger ‘the nuclear uncanny’, described as ‘a psychic effect produced, on the one hand, by living within the temporal ellipsis separating a nuclear attack and the actual end of the world, and on the other, by inhabiting an environmental space threatened by military-industrial radiation’ (Masco 2006, p. 28). He furthermore argues that it is via the nuclear uncanny ‘that the concept of “national security” becomes most disjointed, as citizens find themselves increasingly separated from their own senses and distrusting of their own surroundings due to an engagement with nuclear technologies’ (p. 28). Put differently, the nuclear uncanny is triggered by the tacit realization that the system that is supposed to keep citizens at the core safe is in fact also eroding possibilities for life and social cohesion. Similarly, Jill E. Anderson (2021) has argued that atomic ‘horror […] actually becomes the norm that works to control the motivations of American citizens, elevating and normalizing anxieties rather than alleviating them’ (p. 6). It is by exploring such problematic and divisive concerns that the first wave of post-WWII, apocalyptic texts contribute to the development of the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

As Berger contends, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, as well as continuing bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean, were followed by an outpouring of new and critical science fiction in America. Some of the first stories that describe how nuclear war produces profound and disturbing ecological havoc and thus a terminal crisis for the world-system are Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘Thunder and Roses’ and Paul Anderson’s and F. N. Waldrop’s ‘Tomorrow’s Children’, both published in 1947 in Astounding Science Fiction. ‘Thunder and Roses’ records life in a US military facility after a large-scale nuclear attack by an unnamed enemy has devastated much of the nation. The soldier protagonist notes that ‘[a]ll the big cities are gone. We got it from both sides. We got too much. The air is becoming radioactive’ (p. 77). The question that haunts this protagonist, and the other soldiers that remain on the US base, is whether the US should retaliate or not. If they desist, the ‘spark of humanity can still live and grow on this planet. It will be blown and drenched, shaken and all but extinguished, but it will live’ (p. 86). If they choose to strike back, the planet will be sterilized, reduced to ‘a bald thing, dead and deadly’ (p. 86). The story is a striking testimony to how fiction at this time had begun to narrate military-grade nuclear violence as planetary in scale. While the Petrowar narrative discussed in the previous chapter reveals that American fiction tacitly registers militarized capitalism as destructive to ecology, the atomic bomb story further elevates military violence to an existential, planetary-scale end-game.

In Anderson’s and Waldrop’s ‘Tomorrow’s Children’, large-scale nuclear war has not erased all life on the planet, but it has fundamentally altered it and also caused the collapse of most nation-states. A significant portion of the world has been transformed into spaces of ‘deadness’ with ‘[t]wisted dead trees, blowing sand, tumbled skeletons, perhaps at night a baleful blue glow of fluorescence’ (p. 58). What remains of the global community is plagued by bandits, ‘homeless refugees’ (p. 65), radiation, and plagues. The only person who has faith in the future is General Robinson, the de-facto president of the US who is hiding out with some loyal soldiers in rural Oregon. True to his namesake, Robinson is trying to make the best of the situation, but soon discovers that radiation is transforming the human race itself: ‘seventy-five per cent of all births are mutant, of which possible two-thirds are viable and presumed fertile’ (p. 78). Robinson considers radical eugenic action, the obliteration of an entire mutant generation, but when his own son is born with ‘rubbery tentacles terminating in boneless digits’ (p. 78) instead of arms and legs, he realizes that the planet has been so thoroughly inundated by radiation that ‘it’s everywhere. Every breath we draw, every crumb we eat and drop we drink, every clod we walk on, the dust is there. It’s in the stratosphere, clear on down to the surface, probably a good distance below’ (p. 78). This is not a development that can be effectively combatted via eugenics or some other technology of capitalist modernity. The ecological crisis is terminal and humanity—and human society as Robinson imagines it—will fade away.

The Arrival of the American Climate Emergency Narrative

‘Thunder and Roses’ and ‘Tomorrow’s Children’ espouse what can be described as a tentative radicalism. They are not openly critical of capitalism as a system, but they do note that the effort to securitize the world-system with the help of devastating military violence is destructive. In both short stories, the planet and the species that inhabit it have been irrevocably changed and heteronormative, capitalist society is effectively gone. In ‘Thunder and Roses’ continued ongoing military violence will sterilize the planet and, in ‘Tomorrow’s Children’, the son and heir of the last US president is a tentacled hybrid. In this way, they can be considered as the first examples of narratives that consider how systemogenic violence may permanently alter the planetary biosphere. These texts are produced by white authors in close proximity to the core, but they also exemplify a tendency to critically mine the fissures and breaks that capitalism inevitably produces.

However, many of the texts that come out of this era are far less radical. In a number of fictions, the irradiated, dystopian worlds that texts such as ‘Thunder and Roses’ conjure are combined with the self-confident militarized storyworlds inherited from the tradition of writing begun by the settler capitalist text. In this other and very different set of texts, the mutant beings that emerge out of irradiated landscapes are not sons or daughters, but chthonic monsters. These are the stories that present the military and other members of the US security machine with what Marzec (2015) calls an ‘engagement opportunity’ (p. 9). Unlike the nominally radical short stories that channel the horrors of Hiroshima, these texts insist that the real emergency is not the damage done to the planet, but the damage that an eroding planet might inflict on capitalist society. In this way, this type of text can be considered the first fully formed American Climate Emergency Narrative.

The first widely circulated narrative of this type is Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), loosely based on Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘The Fog Horn’ (1951). In the film, American scientists are conducting ‘Operation Experiment’, the code name of a ‘top-priority scientific expedition’ the purpose of which is to detonate a nuclear bomb ‘far north of the Arctic Circle’. On the eve of ‘X-day’, scientists and military personnel in the control room are excited. ‘Every time one of these things goes off, I feel we’re helping to write the first chapter of a new Genesis’, one scientist exclaims. Yet there is also a concern: ‘What the cumulative effects of these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell’. Following a tense, ten-second countdown, the nuclear weapon is detonated. At this juncture, archival film from the detonation of the atomic bomb ‘Baker’ over the Bikini Atoll on 25 July 1946, fills the screen. In the sequence, filmed from three different perspectives, an enormous pillar of water is thrown up into the air, forming the characteristic mushroom cloud. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms does not acknowledge the origin of these images, but presents them as part of its own narrative; as a test taking place in the Arctic. Even so, their inclusion makes this (and many other films that also edit them into the story) into a kind of snuff movie where images of actual human and ecological death are quietly inserted into a popular entertainment feature.⁴

In the film, the effect of these inserted images on the environment is sudden and spectacular. Icebergs melt into a gaseous sea. A huge mass of earth and ice rises and crumbles into fragments. Notably, these images are eerily reminiscent of much more recent, documentary photography of the melting Arctic ice shelf. This is a sequence that clearly and presciently registers how massive, nuclear-accelerated military violence disturbs the natural ecological order (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1

Collapsing Arctic icebergs in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

The dimensions of this disruption increase further when an enormous, prehistoric dinosaur eventually identified as a ‘Rhedosaurus’ rises out of the melted ice as an unspeakable and uncontrollable figure of planetary horror. Roger Luckhurst (2020) and Rebecca Duncan (2024) have aptly argued that, at a time of capitalogenic socio-ecological breakdown, we need to read monsters differently. As Duncan puts it, in an ‘age of global but unequal crises, we might also expect a global proliferation of monsters’ that speak to these crises. Duncan shows how a series of texts from the Global South ‘deploys monstrosity as a language in which to dramatize experiences at the periphery, but also to render visible and interrogate the dynamic of peripheralization itself’ (np). A similar kind of monstrous rendering occurs, I argue, also at the hegemonic core of the world-system. From the vantage of this core, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms clearly speaks about the possibility that the militarized society of the core may produce a profound ecological and social crisis. By inserting an archival film of an atomic bomb detonation in the Pacific Ocean into a film that features an ultra-destructive, carnivorous dinosaur, the film creates an immediate and undeniable connection between potentially Earth System-altering military violence, and large-scale monstrosity.

With this in mind, the Rhedosaurus can be understood as an avatar of an embattled planet but also as a kind of monstrous rendering of the core itself. As such, the Rhedosaurus is an early visualization of the epochal crisis that the world-system is moving towards. The Rhedosaurus proceeds by trying to evict the militarized capitalist modernity that has awakened it from its long sleep. The dinosaur sets a course for New York and the Hudson River, its old mating grounds. Having reached Manhattan, the Rhedosaurus progresses by knocking over buildings, and by trampling and biting people and cars. The Rhedosaurus apparently hates skyscrapers and Western Union, it hates Wall Street and its pretentious architecture, and it hates the bright lights of the Coney Island amusement park. It eats police officers, military men, and other agents tasked with the securitization of the hegemonic core. Bullets do not affect the monster and when a well-aimed shot from a bazooka finally manages to penetrate its thick, prehistoric reptilian hide, the situation only worsens. Scientists discover that the ‘monster is a giant germ-carrier of a horrible, virulent disease. Contact with the animal’s blood can be fatal’.

As argued by Dawn Keetley (2021), this is the inauguration of another trope central to the contemporary climate narrative. The possibility that prehistoric pathogens may lie dormant in now slowly thawing permafrost is a real concern for climate science (Miner et al. 2021; Wu et al. 2022) and it informs films such as The Thaw (Lewis 2009) and novels such as Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue (2021). Paving the way for such narratives, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms describes how violence exerted by human activity on the Arctic permafrost releases not only enormous chthonic creatures but also a blood-borne, microscopic pathogen that has lain dormant in the ice for millennia. The virulent disease is incredibly aggressive and drops soldiers where they stand. The scientists now know what the cumulative effects of the atom bomb they set off will be: an eruption of an absolutely furious ecology that seeks to restore the violent Hobbesian order of the Cretaceous period (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2

The Rhedosaurus on Wall Street in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

The final solution to this crisis is not, however, to cease doing violence to the planet, but instead to put renewed trust in the institution that produced this uncontrollable horror in the first place. The ‘full-scale war’ that the National Guard fights on the streets of New York may not have the desired effect, but when the military again turns to the nuclear option, a viable solution is discovered. A ‘radioactive isotope’ is shot into the monster’s bloodstream, killing it, and ‘destroying all that diseased tissue’. The beast thrashes and screams in front of a burning Coney Island roller coaster until the film ends. Militarized atomic energy is restored to its sublime state and the monster and its payload of pathogens are sent back into oblivion by the same energy, the same military complex, and the same logic as that which raised it from the dead.⁵

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms creates a template for the (cinematic) Climate Emergency Narrative where gigantic monsters rise in response to an ecological disruption caused by military violence. In the 1950s, it was followed most immediately by Them (1954), a cult film where ants in the Alamogordo desert (where the first atomic bomb was tested) have grown enormous and begun to attack the nearby community. In It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) a gigantic octopus has been driven from its habitat by nuclear bomb testing, and in the British The Giant Behemoth (1959) a monster very similar to the Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms destroys much of London.

However, the most well-known of the many monster films from this era is the Japanese Gojira (1954).⁶ This version of the gigantic and irradiated monster—typically referred to as kaiju—drew from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but it was also inspired by US testing of the thermonuclear bomb Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954. This test yielded 15 megatons, 2.5 times the original estimate and almost 1000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb (Brown 2014). The energy released produced extensive fallout as radioactive and pulverized coral was thrown up into the atmosphere and spread throughout the surrounding sea. In the days that followed radioactive particles were detected in many parts of the world (Bouville 2020). André Bouville (2020) estimates that nuclear bomb tests such as Castle Bravo caused tens of thousands of cases of cancer in the US alone, but the fallout from Castle Bravo first created acute radiation sickness in the population inhabiting many Pacific Islands and also in the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel called the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, or Lucky Dragon (Cho 2019). When the ship returned to Japan with a severely ill crew and a cargo of thoroughly radiated and inedible tuna, the nation was again forcibly reminded of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Before the year was over, Ishirō Honda had written, directed, and premiered the first of many films featuring this particular reptilian avatar of the planet.

Just like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Gojira is a consequence of nuclear bomb testing. Scientists in the film speculate that radiation from nuclear bombs has mutated an ancient sea creature into a 50-foot-tall monster that does not only sink ships and topple buildings with the help of its incredible bulk, but also breathes atomic fire out of its mouth. When Japanese forces build a large electric fence to prevent it from reaching Tokyo, Gojira melts it with its atomic breath. The monster then wanders into the city, wading through architecture and terrified civilians. Just like the Rhedosaurus, Gojira appears to hate the modernity that has, accidentally, spawned it. The death toll is enormous and when Gojira escapes back into Tokyo Bay, survivors suffer, as did those who lived through Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from horrible radiation poisoning. Mark Bould has suggested in The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021) that ‘Godzilla is the [atomic] bomb’ (p. 27), but a more precise analysis is that Gojira, like the Rhedosaurus, is the planet. These two monsters thus manifest how the planet reacts to the enormous military-grade violence that the atomic bomb unleashes.

Gojira is a fiction from the Asian semiperiphery of the world-system, and as such notably different from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. While the scientists of the American film very quickly understand what the Rhedosaurus is, how it came to be, where it is heading, and why, Gojira’s origins and purposes remain mysterious in the Japanese film. In addition to this, Gojira is much larger and far more devastating than the American counterpart. Like the monster texts analysed by Duncan, Gojira can be said to register the experience of being (semi)peripheralized. This is an experience that takes many shapes (economic, military, medical, social), but it obviously needs to be traced back to the moment when the first bombs were dropped on Japanese soil, when Japan lost its bid for world-system hegemony, and entire cities were wiped from the land. It must also be connected to the lingering slow violence inherent in the encounter with irradiated clouds and contaminated fish in the wake of nuclear bomb tests carelessly performed by the victorious and dominant core. It is indeed not strange that Gojira renders the experience of being semi-peripherialized as that of being trampled, having cities levelled, and being washed by atomic fire. In this way, Gojira can be described as a kind of translation of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms into Japanese for a traumatized and peripheralized audience.

For the rest of the twentieth century, there is a constant, low-budget production of kaiju movies in both the US and Japan. These two branches have some things in common. The irradiated monster rises out of seas, ice vistas, or the perforated underbelly of the planet to invade the vast urban cityscapes capitalist modernity has created. Iconic buildings are scaled and crushed, and soldiers, guns, and tanks are trampled. However, in Gojira and many of the Japanese sequels, the violence is far more extensive, unexpected, sudden, and spectacular than in the American, drive-in examples. In the American monster narrative, the emergence of an irradiated, gigantic, but also righteously angry, avenger makes a different kind of sense. There is a certain radical logic to the arrival of the Rhedosaurus on Wall Street. The notion of a gigantic, prehistoric being awakened by the testing of nuclear weapons and returning to the city and the context which brought it to life testifies to the surfacing of a political (or ‘Anthropocene’, as Bould would have it) unconscious. These irradiated gigantic creatures tacitly express the fear that the extractive violence performed in the peripheries of the world-system—the Alamogordo desert, the Arctic, or the Indigenous Pacific—may come back to literally bite the capitalist core that has organized it. Read in this way, the Rhedosaurus is a figure that represents an emerging climate emergency. It is a creature let loose by melting Arctic ice, but it can also be understood as the crisis itself. When the Rhedosaurus invades Wall Street it is bringing the crisis it represents to the location most symbolic of the core within the world-system.

However, as Treasa De Loughry (2020) has observed, fiction from the core is strikingly adept at containing such eruptions of the political unconscious. Thus, while the American post-WWII monster spectacular does register the advent of a new type of economic and ecological crisis for capitalism, it also finds ways to resolve this entangled crisis. To this effect, most US versions pose an alliance between nuclear science and the military-industrial Petrowar complex as the only viable solution to the imminent emergency the monster constitutes. The ending of the US version, up until the turn of the millennium, is invariably the death of the monster at the hands of the military and the military science complex. The triumphant reestablishment of capitalist modernity follows. In this way, the solution to the emergency these texts evoke is more of the violence that produced the emergency in the first place. Ultimately, the object of this first version of the American Climate Emergency Narrative is not to restore ecology but the conditions that allow capitalism to perform its extractive work. Thus, the closure of the American kaiju film is the restoration of the state of business-as-usual. To the uniformly white, middle-class people who run to shelter when the kaiju appears, and who are ultimately saved by the intervention of technoscience, this ending is utopian and greeted by triumphant music. The suffix ‘The End’ that completes the film ultimately signals the return of this particular state of capitalist equilibrium.

A New Godzilla Rises

Except for the 1976 remake of King Kong directed by John Guillermin, the monster spectacular entered the 1970s as a low-budget, fringe culture phenomenon. It was not until 1998 that advances in CGI technology, along with French nuclear bomb testing in Polynesia, prompted Tristar Pictures to create the first mega-budget US version of the Godzilla story. As in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the original Japanese Gojira and their various copies, what brings this Godzilla into the world is the release of militarized nuclear energy, although in this case, these tests are performed by the French. Even so, and in concert with previous films, military violence is perceived as the ultimate antidote to the ecological/military crisis that Godzilla represents. Trapped by the steel suspension cables of Brooklyn Bridge, Godzilla is an easy target for the fighter jets sent to end the monster’s sudden incursion.

While the 1998 Godzilla makes use of new-generation CGI to create a uniquely realistic-looking monster, it retains much of the (partially involuntary) comedy that saturates the early kaiju film. The film was shot in the wake of what Francis Fukuyama termed the End of History (1992), a time when liberal capitalist society appeared to have eclipsed all other forms of social order, when the threat of Soviet nuclear holocaust seemed all but over and when China was little more than a new periphery to source for cheap labour. But, as discussed in the previous chapter, the film also comes out of what has been called the Age of Anxiety (Dunant and Porter 1996), a time when the IPCC had produced a first series of reports showing how the climate was quickly warming, and when it was also becoming increasingly clear that capitalist predominance did not mean that democratic principles and core privileges would become global. Giovanni Arrighi was one of a growing chorus of voices that predicted that, in the years to come, extractive, capitalist ‘violence in the world system at large will get even more out of control than it already has, thereby creating unmanageable law and order problems for capital accumulation on a world scale’ (Arrighi 1994, p. 342). Registering these different historical, social, and economic developments, the 1998 Godzilla does not seem to know if the crisis it depicts is a joke or not.

When Godzilla was rebooted in 2014 by Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros, it entered, and registered, a world where many of the anxieties voiced before the turn of the millennium had been realized, and where a host of new insecurities had emerged. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, the both slow and fast violence that followed the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, and the global recession that began in 2007 and that was a consequence of these wars and of the unsustainability of the capitalist project, left many in America and across the world-system reeling.⁷ The resurrection of Russia as a capitalist competitor seemingly rich in cheap nature and energy, and the rise of China and India as fast-growing economic superpowers, further added to the increasing sense of vertiginous crisis. If the pre-millennial period had promised the end of all histories except that of liberal capitalism, the post-millennial era appeared to give credence both to Arrighi’s warning of increasing world-system tension, and to Samuel P. Huntington’s (1996) aforementioned suggestion that the coming years would see a prolonged ‘clash of civilisations’. Radical intellectuals (Chomsky 2003; Hardt and Negri 2000; Harvey 2003; Johnson 2000; Wallerstein 2003) who had long recognized that the US was effectively a capitalist empire, suddenly found their thesis supported by neoconservative, right-wing pundits and historians who called American imperialism the world’s best and last hope for stability, and urged continuing US military expansion (Boot 2001; Ferguson 2005). The notion of an American Empire thus arrived in the general political conversation at a time when this entity appeared to be heading for its inevitable fall.

This sense of political, military, and economic crisis combined with new climate research that conclusively showed that the planet was facing an ecological emergency of existential dimensions. This understanding had been growing at the core since the ‘Age of Ecology’, but it was importantly energized and transformed by the publication of Crutzen and Stoermer’s aforementioned article ‘The “Anthropocene”’ in the May 2000 newsletter of The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP). As discussed in the introduction, this concept has important shortcomings, but, as Moore notes, it was also a concept that importantly sounded ‘the alarm’ (Moore 2016, p. 6), and made an increasingly large number of people (in the Global North) aware of the fact that human activity is the most important factor for the development of the climate of the Earth System. During the first few years of the millennium, the idea that the climate was transforming was evidenced by a series of natural disasters ‘supercharged’ (Rice et al. 2022) by climate change. These had the most devastating effects on precarious communities in the Global South, but events such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2011 Texas wildfires took place in close proximity to the core and clearly impacted lives lived there. In this way, the erosion of the Earth System, the depletion of soil and of Cheap Nature generally, and the dire conditions that such erosion and depletion caused for the extractive capitalist world-system began to be perceived precisely as a profound, dispersed, and interrelated emergency.

As this book argues, this emergency and the layered insecurities that it is made of were essential to the American Climate Emergency Narrative after the turn of the millennium. When the next generation of American kaiju cinema appeared, it did so deeply informed by these precise crises. In particular, Godzilla and its 2019 sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters gave form to this post-millennial trend. More than in previous US monster spectaculars, the monsters of these two films evoke a sense of terminal, epochal, and planetary crisis. Whereas the Rhedosaurus and the original Japanese Gojira confined their movement to a single city, the new Godzilla, and the other kaiju that feature in the films, move very quickly across (and through) much of the planet and the audience is repeatedly told that total human extinction is a definite possibility. Furthermore, both new films explicitly tie the enormous monsters they showcase to climate breakdown while being at the same time clearly aware of the history of irradiation and military violence that has produced the ongoing crisis.

Thus, in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the eponymous monster, and the other mountain-sized kaiju (referred to as ‘Titans’ in the film) that feature in the re-awakened franchise, are clearly described as having been provoked into being by what the film describes as anthropogenic climate change. One of the many scientists who feature in the film explains in a sad voice to both fellow scientists within the film and to the cinema audience that:

Humans have been the dominant species for thousands of years, and look what's happened. Overpopulation. Pollution. War. The mass extinction we feared has already begun. And we are the cause. We are the infection. But like all living organisms, the Earth unleashed a fever to fight this infection. Its original and rightful rulers. The Titans. They are part of the Earth's natural defence system. A way to protect the planet, to maintain its balance. But if governments are allowed to contain them, destroy them, or use them for war, the human infection will only continue to spread. And within our lifetime, our planet will perish. And so will we. Unless we restore balance.

In this way, Godzilla and other kaiju are described as extensions of an ecosystem that has been severely damaged by a universalized humanity that has overpopulated, polluted, and made war on the planet. Clearly, as is the scientist’s point, they cannot be fought in the conventional sense, with the help of guns, rockets, nukes, fighter jets, submarines, and special forces soldiers. In fact, fighting them is the opposite of what humans should be doing.

This seems to steer the narrative away from the logic of environmentality: the militarized mentality that, as Robert P. Marzec (2015) observes, proposes that an eroding environment presents the US DoD with an ‘engagement opportunity’ (p. 9).⁸ Logically, with the scientist’s analysis in mind, the audience should expect Godzilla and the other Titans to level cities, to cull the human horde, to de-industrialize, and to disarm global society. How else can the Titans restore a balance clearly destroyed by human (militarized and capitalist) society? But Godzilla is fiction from the core in the same way as Top Gun (1986) and Battle: Los Angeles (2011) discussed in the previous chapter.⁹ Supported by the US Department of Defense in exchange for a narrative that furthers the ideals and priorities of the DoD, Godzilla cannot tell a story where US soldiers, fighter jet pilots, and billions in military hardware do not help to secure the nation. Energized by the DoD, these films must find a way for modernity to dismantle the problematic eco-logic that informs the scientist’s narrative.

In Godzilla, this is done by creating a new category of monster that does try to evict humanity. In Godzilla, this creature is referred to as the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism or MUTO. This monster finds and consumes radioactive material in nuclear power plants and in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, this as a preliminary to laying thousands of eggs that will produce an army of MUTOs so vast that organized capitalist modernity must surely go extinct. Before long, Godzilla is fighting these breeding kaiju instead of the humans that are arguably destroying the planet. Although not receiving support from the DoD, Godzilla: King of the Monsters follows suit. In this film, the angry avatar of the planet is King Ghidorah, an enormous, flying, three-headed kaiju. However, it turns out that he is not an eco-restorative Titan, but an invasive species from outer space. He challenges Godzilla as the new alpha of the Titans and initiates a massive, terraforming project that will make the Earth uninhabitable for humans, transforming the planet in ways strikingly similar to those of extractive capitalism. Again, Godzilla and allied Titans proceed to fight not the humans that are described as having disrupted the Earth System, but instead the kaiju that attempts the terraforming project. This Godzilla, it turns out, does not hate humans, houses, cities, modernity, power lines, trains, Wall Street, and the military.What this Godzilla hates are the MUTOs and King Ghidorah as they lay waste to human cities or when they bring volcanos to such frenzied eruptions that the biosphere begins to transform. Meanwhile, the scientist who has warned her fellows and the US military machine that the Titans are avatars of the planet, and that they must be released (rather than experimented on), has been outed as part of an eco-terrorist endeavour. While her analysis stands, her misguided effort to aid the Titans has caused additional harm to the planet (Fig. 4.3).

Fig. 4.3

King Ghidorah terraforming the Earth and fighting the US military in Godzilla: King of the Monsters

The military cleverly adapts to this shifting scenery by joining forces with Godzilla who is now an (expendable) extension of the military itself. In Godzilla, US warships and planes escort this new asset as it heads towards its final showdown with the MUTOs. The protagonist of the film is white, heroic US Navy officer Ford Brody who has just returned from Middle Eastern battlegrounds where he has been dismantling improvised explosive devices. Along with his fellow soldiers, he promises to do ‘anything it takes’ to stop the hostile species. For no good reason except to flaunt military technology, his platoon conducts a high-altitude (HALO), night-time parachute drop into San Francisco where the battle is already raging. While Godzilla keeps the MUTOs busy, Brody conducts conventional Petrowar on the hatching brood, burning them with gasoline from a fuel truck that has crashed into the now-exposed underbelly of the city. The brood expires in flames and thanks to the distraction the burning eggs cause, Godzilla is able to tear the MUTOs to shreds, breathing arcane atomic fire into their bodies. Brody unites with his burgeoning family and Godzilla returns to the sea. Godzilla: King of the Monsters tells an identical story, where the entire arsenal of the militarized state—nuclear submarines, fighter jets, helicopters—are again showcased and used to wage war on King Ghidora. When Godzilla falters, the military energizes the monster by detonating a nuclear weapon in the kaiju’s immediate vicinity. Godzilla hunts Ghidorah down and again breathes devastating atomic energy into the invasive monster’s body.

In this way, both films can be seen to perform a (disrespectful) reworking of the original Gojira figure into an avatar, not of the planet, but of humanity or modernity or even the military. This poorly executed sleight of hand brings socio-ecological breakdown to the surface but only so that it can be appended to a story about the vitality of militarized capitalism. Again, when the entire US military machine is depicted as releasing a storm of missiles, depleted uranium bullets, and shells from tanks and warships into immense monsters in a Hollywood film supported by the DoD, what emerges out of the ruins, smoking monster bodies and raging fires is not ecology victorious but the notion that ecology can be successfully combatted. Militarized nuclear energies may produce monsters, but it is also somehow the antidote to ecological monstrosity.

Atomic Emergencies

The arrival of the atomic age further evolved the story told by the settler capitalist story, the plantation narrative, the coal frontier text, and Petrowar fiction. The enormous destructive potential of the nuclear bomb suggested the very real possibility that the militarization of the world-system could lead to planetary-scale ecological demise. The launching of the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists even located a moment in the near future when human military conflict might have altered the Earth System to such an extent that life, as it was lived in the core by certain strata, would be impossible. This prompted the publication of several novels and short stories that register this possibility and contemplate solutions to it. Some of this writing is nominally radical and ignores the Cold War politics that stated that mutual destruction was preferable to yielding control of the world-system. The same development also prompted monster spectaculars where an abused and irradiated ecology takes the form of a gigantic lizard or insect. Thus, films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms tell stories of how the release of militarized energies literally produces monsters who then proceed to wreak vengeance on the militarized modernity that created it.

In this way, stories taking place in irradiated worlds register the ecological violence that militarized capitalism exerts. When people living through a future atomic war decide to die in bunkers rather than retaliate and thus sterilize the entire planet, or when they bring tentacular offspring into the world, it becomes possible to understand and critique the ecocidal practices of the US military on a very basic level. When an abused planet rises in the form of gigantic insects or an irradiated lizard to destroy the capitols of the world-system and to lay waste to the war machines ostensibly built to protect them, this allegory enables a certain critical understanding of the history of violence and the policies that have produced escalating socio-ecological breakdown. As The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms suggests, the irradiated monster is a logical consequence, as well as a just response, to violence performed on ecology by the military-industrial complex.

It must also be noted that the emergency that the kaiju narrative registers is not simply ecological, but profoundly systemic. Again, and as Moore (2015) has proposed, the current crisis is combined in the sense that the capitalist world-ecology’s depletion of the planet’s capacity to yield nature cheaply is also manifesting as a crisis for the capitalist world-system as such. This system has for some time undergone ‘an irreversible decline in capital’s capacity to restructure its way out of great crises’ (p. 35). This means, as discussed in the introduction, that the world-system ‘may be experiencing not merely a transition from one phase of capitalism to another, but something more epochal: the breakdown of the strategies and relations that have sustained capital accumulation over the past five centuries’ (p. 13). In other words, the planetary ecological disaster that extractive capitalism has caused is becoming a crisis not simply for those humans and extra-humans inhabiting the commodity peripheries and semiperipheries where resources are extracted (and atomic bombs tested), or even for the US as the core of the capitalist world-ecology, but for the capitalist world-ecology as such.

The planetary proportions of the kaiju, their obvious hatred of the various megacities of the capitalist world-system, and the fact that they so clearly constitute an extinction-level threat to human capitalist society make them emblematic of this development. They first appear at the dawn of the Age of Ecology, at the very moment that the Great Acceleration begins saturating the planet with carbon and radioactive fallout, and in this early form, they denote the possibility that the now dominant, extractive, and militarized capitalist world-system directed by the US may just be too extractive and effective for the planet to endure. When the kaiju reappears just before the millennium, and when it becomes a central figure on the cinematic stage in the 2010s and 2020s, it does so as an avatar of the planet but also as a figure representing a social and economic crisis so profound that the world-ecology may not survive it. Since the first kaiju appears in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, this monster has grown so that the sheer size of the kaiju signals the similarly enormous scale of the crisis that these texts register.

That said, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, are fictions produced at the very core of the world-system. They may all declare the arrival of an imminent and colossal emergency, but with the same straight face as they declare the crisis, they also propose that the only imaginable solution to this epochal crisis is more of the institutions and processes that produced it in the first place. In this way, the US kaiju film seeks to contain the crisis it narrates and to structure how audiences understand the stakes of this crisis. Hijacked by the DoD, the potential of the kaiju story to problematize the long history of military and capitalist ecological violence is almost entirely foreclosed. At the same time, the terminal ecological and systemic crisis of the present becomes little more than an occasion to demonstrate the determination and arsenal of the military. Indeed, as I have argued, American (DoD-sponsored) kaiju films powerfully illustrate Marzec’s observation in Militarizing the Environment that ‘nature comes into existence in the narration of the security state as fundamentally a concern of the war machine, and catastrophic socio-ecological breakdown is taken as an “engagement opportunity”’ (p. 9). In the kaiju story from the core, the military is given an opportunity to engage ecology gone wild and to beat it back into the planet.