Time Zero

Time Zero is a ten-episode series about the nuclearized world from American writer, researcher, composer, and visual artist Sean J Patrick Carney. Episode 01 arrives June 25.  Visit timezeropod.com to get an essay version of every episode with citations, links, and images delivered directly to your inbox. 

On the premiere episode of Time Zero, we look at the ways that the threat of nuclear annihilation has shaped global realities for 80 years—and how contemporary artists, filmmakers, and writers have responded.  We also consider the nuclear industry's many ecological violences, from uranium extraction, to large-scale atomic energy disasters, to the ethical and engineering failures inherent to the disposal of radioactive waste. Time Zero aims to make one thing abundantly clear: if we are to imagine any future narrative for our species, we must rethink the nuclear entirely, understanding it not as a technology, but as a monster.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at timezeropod.com. 

In the early hours of July 16, 1945, the US military detonated Trinity, the world's first nuclear weapon, in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico. Locals were not warned beforehand, evacuated after the blast, or given any follow-up information.  On this episode, you'll hear from members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, artists Joanna Keane Lopez and Eric J. Garcia, and anthropologist Joseph Masco. We'll also consider aesthetic represenations of the Trinity detonation in two contemporary media properties: Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" and David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: The Return." And we'll take a deeper look at the Radiaction Exposure Compensation Act—or RECA—and its recent and surprising return to national politics.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

Between 1945 and 1992, the United States detonated over 1,000 nuclear bombs, primarily at the Nevada Test Site and in the Marshall Islands, with additional detonations in New Mexico, Alaska, Mississipi, Christmas Island, Colorado, and in the Pacific Ocean. That amounts to, essentially, setting off a nuclear bomb every two weeks for half a century. The colossal amounts of radioactive fallout produced by these "tests" have permanently contaminated diverse landscapes and harmed generations of communities across the world.  On this episode, you'll hear from artists Trevor Paglen, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, Richard Misrach, Cara Despain, and Michael Light; environmental scholar Sarah Fox (Downwind, 2014); downwind activists Mary Dickson and Tina Cordova; nurse practitioner Rebecca Barlow; and Stephanie Wheeler and Melissa Carter of the St. George Art Museum.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com. Read "Witness to the Cold War in the desert" by Terry Tempest Williams for High Country News.

The US government knew that uranium mining posed existential threats to workers. But throughout the Cold War, as they bought ton after ton of uranium ripped out of the Four Corners region—frequently on the Navajo Nation—they provided miners, millers, and transporters little, if any, protective equipment or education about the well-documented dangers of radioactive materials.  In Episode 04: Wastelanding (Part 01), you'll hear from Diné artists Will Wilson and Shayla Blatchford; Center for Land Use Interpretation director Matthew Coolidge; environmental scholar Traci Brynne Voyles (Wastelanding, 2015); uranium researcher Dr. Tommy Rock; and Curtis Francisco and Eldon Francisco, of Laguna Pueblo.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com. And make sure to check out Shayla Blatchford's Anti-Uranium Mapping Project. 

This week, we continue our investigation into uranium extraction on Indigenous landscapes across North America, and consider diverse community and artistic strategies for documenting and confronting the ongoing legacies of nuclear colonialism. It is time to name these monsters.  In Episode 04: Wastelanding (Part 02), you'll hear from interdisciplinary artists Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European); Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo, Creek, and Greek); Mallery Quetawki (Zuni Pueblo); Shayla Blatchford (Navajo); and Bonnie Devine (Serpent River First Nation of Northern Ontario, Anishinaabe/Ojibwa). You'll also meet physician and photographer Chip Thomas, who worked on the Navajo Nation for 36 years. And environmental historian Traci Brynne Voyles (Wastelanding, 2015) returns to discuss the obfuscation of mining in the nuclear weapons and fuel chain, the cultural naturalization of the American Southwest as pollutable, and the empowering capacity of counter-mapping.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com. To support resistance efforts to uranium mining at the Grand Canyon, check out the Indigenous-led activist group Haul No!  And for a wealth of historical documentation of uranium extraction across the Navajo Nation, dive into Shayla Blatchford's Anti-Uranium Mapping Project, which recently won a major award from Creative Capital. 

When the Manhattan Project arrived on the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, the land was not uninhabited. To establish the highly secretive Site Y, the United States military forcibly removed generations of Nuevomexicano ranchers and blocked regional Indigenous groups from accessing sacred sites. Almost immediately, the lab began detonating massive amounts of explosives, scarring the landscape. Military personnel regularly dumped nuclear waste into local canyon systems that ultimately flowed into the Rio Grande. When World War II came to a close, though, the lab did not.  More than eight decades later, an apocalyptic weapons factory—Los Alamos National Laboratory—still looms over the Pueblos and villages north of Santa Fe. Ninety miles south, Sandia National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base store thousands of nuclear warheads beneath the city of Albuquerque. Both laboratories are expanding in scope and scale.  This week, you'll hear from Dr. Alicia Romero, curator at the Albuquerque Museum and part of the steering commitee of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium; Yvonne Montoya, a Nuevomexicana dancer and choreographer; Dr. Myrriah Gómez, a scholar documenting nuclear colonialism in New Mexico; Joni Arends, co-founder and executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety; Archbishop John C Wester, of the Archiocese of Santa Fe; and members of Veterans for Peace.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com. For a deep dive into the impacts of nuclear colonialism across the state of New Mexico, check out (and bookmark) Nuclear Watch New Mexico.  And visit the website of Tewa Women United to learn more about intersectional justice projects that center northern New Mexico communties. 

What would happen if a wildfire consumed Los Alamos National Laboratory? Over the last 25 years, LANL has narrowly escaped two major wildfire events. On a warming planet, it may be only a matter of time until the lab's luck runs out, and its almost 30,000 acres of plutonium pit facilities, nuclear waste storage, contaminated canyons, and explosives caches are turned into an atomic incinerator. You've seen how far wildfire smoke can go, right?  On this episode of Time Zero, you'll also learn about the radioactive lanthanum (RaLa) experiments, where, prior to the 1945 Trinity event, lab employees detonated dozens of nuclear weapons in the canyons of the Pajarito Plateau—canyons that drain into the Rio Grande.  You'll meet sculptor Rose B Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo); contemporary saint maker Nicholas Herrera, AKA El Rito Santero; Taos-based ceramicist Serit Inez Kotowski de Lopaz; and artist and educator Nina Elder. Returning voices you'll recognize include scholar Dr. Myrriah Gómez (Nuclear Nuevo México, 2022); longtime activist Joni Arends (Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety); choreographer Yvonne Montoya (Safos Dance); anthropologist Joseph Masco (The Nuclear Borderlands, 2006); and landscape researcher Matthew Coolidge (The Center for Land Use Interpretation).  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

For nearly a century, nuclear armageddons have been imagined across American film, television, comics, and multiple literary genres. From early sci-fi pulp magazines, to Cold War thrillers, to 90s-era Nickelodeon cartoons, to contemporary big budget gaming-turned-streaming franchises like Fallout, citizens of the United States have consumed their own obliteration, courtesy of atomic reckonings.  On this episode, you'll hear from visual artists Trevor Paglen, Cara Despain, Kentarō Ikegami, and Nina Elder, as well as scholars Traci Brynne Voyles and Joseph Masco. This installment of Time Zero also considers how the late philosopher Mark Fisher's concepts of the weird and the eerie, Reza Negarestani's experimental theory-novel Cyclonopedia, and Donna Haraway's "tentacular thinking" can offer productive frameworks for critically analyzing nuclear narratives—and for imagining nuclear-free futures.  Episode 06 asks: Should we be thinking about uranium as sentient?  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

Seemingly overnight, a coordinated blitz for a "nuclear power renaissance" has emerged. Big tech billionaires, millennial energy start-ups, and the Trump administration all insist that deregulating nuclear power is the only way to secure America's economic, computing, and national security futures. Well-meaning liberals, desperate to decelerate climate change, are overlooking the documented dangers of radioactive energy production, from the environmentally and culturally catastrophic practices of the uranium mining industry, to the inevitability of future Chernobyls and Fukushimas, to the absolute lack of any plan whatsoever for what to do with the nuclear waste that such a transition is bound to produce.  On the first part of Neon Green Energy, you'll meet UK curator Jason Waite (Don't Follow the Wind); interdisciplinary photographer Abbey Hepner; and Greenpeace nuclear specialist Shaun Burnie. Environmental historian Traci Brynne Voyles (Wastelanding) and anthropologist Joseph Masco (The Nuclear Borderlands) both return to share their perspectives on the temporal and environmental fantasies inherent to the promotion of nuclear technologies.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

In 2015, an inaccessible art exhibition opened inside the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone in Japan. Its organizers, a collective called Don't Follow the Wind, entered the zone dozens of times over multiple years, working with displaced local residents and a roster of international artists to secretly install site-specific artworks across an area that is categorically uninhabitable. The show will open to the public when the zone is deemed safe for reentry. That could be in three years, or 30 years, or 30,000 years.  Widespread adoption of nuclear power will make future Fukushimas inevitable. It will also require enormous amounts of new uranium mining. For tech billionaires, these are small prices to pay to cover what they claim are going to be enormous demands on data centers—demands they're already blaming on you, for using ChatGPT to make shopping lists.  In this second installment of Neon Green Energy, you'll hear from several familiar voices, including photographer Abbey Hepner, whose experiences volunteering in the cleanup efforts in Japan led to a project about "nuclear mascots." You'll also hear from people involved with Don't Follow the Wind: curator Jason Waite, interdisciplinary artist Kentarō Ikegami, and artist and geographer Trevor Paglen. Greenpeace nuclear specialist Shaun Burnie also returns to explain why, after 70 years of operation, nuclear reactors have proved themselves "irrelevant" in the quest for net zero.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

How do we prevent future generations from excavating the most dangerous material we have ever produced? Across the planet, there are hundreds of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel that will be radioactive for—at the very least—tens of thousands of years. Some people have suggested launching it into outer space. Others have proposed sinking it into the ocean. The current solution, though, is to bury it underground. On the purported precipice of a "nuclear renaissance," the United States still has no plan whatsoever for managing our 90,000 existing tons of high-level nuclear waste. An underground storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has completely stalled, and our existing deep geological repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, is only meant to secure transuranic waste from the weapons industry, not spent nuclear fuel. Finland thinks they've solved the conundrum with Onkalo, an underground tomb carved into their coastal bedrock. But can we trust countries like the United States or Russia to build such a facility, and not cut corners?  In this installment of Time Zero, you'll meet Rosemary A Joyce, an anthropologist, archaeologist, and author of "The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World's Most Hazardous Material" (2020). By looking at the nuclear waste problem through the lenses of deep time, the American land art movement, and a critique of cultural heritage common sense, Rosemary illuminates the detrimental assumptions and wicked problems that plague the nuclear industry.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

Nuclear deterrence is the concept that the mere possession of nuclear weapons, particularly by rival states, prevents their use. The only way to avoid the end of the world, we are told, is to stockpile enough weapons to end the world, several times over. This schizophrenic worldview has turned the United States into a nuclear death cult.  In this first half of A Doomsday Gap, we'll cover the arc of the deterrence mindset, from Truman's early stockpiling, to Reagan's interstellar force field fantasies, to Obama's atomic cash infusion, to Trump's recent announcement of the military contractor bonanaza known as the Golden Dome. We also look at Broken Arrows, nuclear weapons accidents that do not lead to nuclear conflict. The US military admits to 32 such incidences, though journalist Eric Schlosser uncovered hundreds more.  Detroit-based artist Shanna Merola unpacks her collage series Nuclear Winter; Archbishop John C Wester returns to outline Catholic Church's anti-nuclear pivot; and artist and geographer Trevor Paglen talks us through the the violence of banal imagery.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

In the second half of A Doomsday Gap, we continue to dive into nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction, unpacking how atomic anxiety underscored the Space Race, suburban architecture, UFO sightings, billionaire behavior, and even.. lithography?  New York-based performance artist Michael Smith walks us through his snack bar that turns into a government approved fallout shelter. Alex Boeschenstein, an interdisciplinary printmaker and photographer in Austin, Texas, explains the Southwestern Uncanny and introduces listeners to the podcast's first feline guest, Cow Boss. And artists Cara Despain and Trevor Paglen both return to talk about why there never was, and never wil be, a civilian space program.  Next week is our final episode. Thanks for listening.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

On the final episode of Time Zero, we visit the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, a continent-wide monument to the advent of the nuclearized world.  You'll hear from several familiar voices, including photographer Richard Misrach; folk historian Sarah Fox; anthropologist Joseph Masco; archaeologist Rosemary Joyce; sculptor Rose B Simpson; choreographer Yvonne Montoya; activist Joni Arends; and Dr. Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos.  Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of this episode at: timezeropod.com