Oppenheimer (2023) has taken the world by storm as director Christopher Nolan uncovers the haunting age of nuclear weapons through the eyes of theoretical physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer. The film convincingly reproduces the simmering anxiety over cataclysmic nuclear war that was the background noise of the 1940s—an anxiety that could only be quelled by increasingly antagonistic American foreign policy. Amidst the shroud of uncertainty and dread ushered in by the global race for atomic bombs, public views of nuclear weapons easily succumbed to the pressures of war in order to achieve American war aims. This wave of national urgency laid the foundations for the U.S. government to prioritize developing weapons of mass destruction. In order to protect the country and the world from a nuclear holocaust, America sought to be able to guarantee absolute destruction. 

But American foreign policy on nuclear deterrence and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction is extremely flawed. Not only is nuclear competition primarily driven by domestic pathologies rather than preserving international peace, but the premise of nuclear deterrence relies on the logic of mass murder to maintain an illusion of security. Policy debates center around threatening hundreds of millions of deaths—the higher the numbers, the greater the perception of security. Leaders convince their nations of a looming existential threat in order to justify the vast expenditure of resources on costly weapons, whose purposes are to never be used. Though the only protection provided is psychological, unfaltering global acceptance of nuclear deterrence theory justifies an equally unwavering incentive for nuclear proliferation. As such, the United States has spent over $100 billion on missile defense systems and continues to spend $10 billion annually. Avoiding global annihilation essentially hinges on an unpredictable game of chicken that, if begun, is already over. 

Unfortunately, hypothetical scenarios of destruction are not necessarily distant warnings or tools of nuclear policy; they are reality. In directing Oppenheimer, Nolan intentionally chose not to depict the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Oppenheimer could never firsthand understand the tragedy and anguish of Japanese civilians. While the movie could be criticized for submitting to a historical blindness, there is at least a degree of global acknowledgement of the tragedies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Accordingly, the only instances of real nuclear catastrophe given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, the most blinding scene in Oppenheimer is not the silent moment when Trinity is dropped; it is when Oppenheimer claims the “uninhabited” lands of Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project’s test site despite the area’s active occupation by the San Ildefonso Pueblo. As the U.S. began to intensively mine and process nuclear materials on Indigenous lands, local Native American tribes (including the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, Yakama, and Nez Perce) weren’t compensated. Instead, they were banished from living on lands where they had camped, hunted, and fished for centuries. For the sake of reconstructing our flawed knowledge of the past and informing our policies for the future, we must move discussions away from canonized figures to include marginalized voices. Margaret Davies argues in Knowledge, Identity, and the Politics of Law that, since we as individuals are constructed by our experiences, acknowledging our social positioning is acknowledging responsibility in knowledge and subsequent political implications. The harms become abundantly clear when we recognize that the traditional approach to knowledge has not been an impartial position, but firmly grounded in a white, male, middle-class perspective. Though this perspective poses as an unbiased detachment, it is a “view from above,” not a “view from nowhere.” Thereby, Davies concludes that “knowledge that challenges existing inequalities, or oppressions, should be valued over knowledge that perpetuates inequalities.” To move towards more holistic understanding, we ought to include Indigenous knowledge in discussions on nuclear development and give them equal weight as information from policy analysts, politicians, and military generals. Politics is based on available knowledge—it shapes our past and informs our future. If our knowledge is exclusive, we can never fully realize the true implications of policies when they harm disenfranchised communities. 

Rather than focusing on the strategic dilemma of nuclear weapons, we should instead divert our focus to how nuclear arsenals make the radioactive colonization of global indigenous populations inevitable—production, mining, testing, and waste storage have resulted in countless lives lost to radiation exposure. However, threats to native livelihoods are suppressed in the interests of national security. Nuclear pollution in total has contaminated the earth’s biota to the equivalent of 34,000 Hiroshimas, with eighty percent of the nuclear fuel chain occurring on or near indigenous lands. As a result, numerous communities have suffered incalculable loss. The Nevada Test Site is located in the land of the Western Shoshone and South Paiute, making the Western Shoshone the most bombed nation on the earth: 814 nuclear tests have been conducted on their land since 1951 and substantial radioactive fallout has contributed to a high concentration of cancer and leukemia on the reservation. The story of the uranium miners in the Navajo Nation in particular highlights how excluding knowledge can kill. While working on the Manhattan Project, Navajoland uranium miners were excluded from health protections and even the very knowledge of what they were mining. Ironically, the traditional ecological knowledge of the Navajo (Diné) warned against uranium in a creation story—naming the mysterious yellow powder in the soil Leetso, or yellow monster. Despite these cultural warnings, the sacred mountain Tsoodzil would become the largest underground uranium mine in the United States. Leetso became yet another example of how Western disregard for Indigenous ideologies is detrimental to everyone, but especially Indigenous people. 

Native American miners, who were not given health warnings, drank water from cracks in the mine walls and were often coated in fine layers of yellow uranium dust. In addition to being exposed to radon with no protective gear, miners were physically abused and economically exploited with wages averaging $1.62 a day. Low pay and lack of health or environmental regulations kept the price of uranium artificially low, and it was these exclusions and purposeful negligence that allowed the high-tech worlds of nuclear accelerators and nuclear technologies to flourish. The new nuclear industry and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had a keen interest in keeping the price of production low, so when a 1952 interim report of dire mining conditions was sent to companies and public officials, the report was not shared with workers in fear that they would flee the mines. Worse still, secret medical studies from the U.S. Public Health Service used the Navajo miners, their labor, bodies, and deaths (without their knowledge or consent) as experimental subjects to set safety standards for other workers. In the end, some Diné miners had radiation exposures forty-four times higher than the levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Given that these atrocities have been mostly invisible to the public eye, our ethical judgements should not be limited to theoretical, large-scale futurisms of nuclear violence, but rather the current war. Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges Stefanie Fishel argues that the unspeakability of nuclear war has led to depoliticized and dog whistle policy paths and political realities. Nuclear deterrence is no longer a debatable political issue; it has become a fixed aspect of our military funding. We need ways of collective remembering that allow for richer engagement in ethical relations and debates, especially engagement that incorporates the lived experiences of historical events to interrelate past, present, and future. The tragic failure of our nuclear policy is summed up in a paradox: in attempting to avoid a nuclear war, we have waged an even greater war. 

Beyond this historical threshold, nuclear catastrophes in the policymaking realm have been confined to the realm of fantasy and apocalyptic imagery. However, it is undeniable that nuclear war has been taking place in the name of “nuclear testing” since the first nuclear explosion in 1945. The primary targets of warfare (or “test sites,” as they are termed by nuclearized nations) have been nations of the Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. History has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Australian Aborigines, the Western Shoshone Nation, the Christmas Islands, Hawaii (Kalama Island), the Republic of Kazakhstan, and the Uighur Province. Thus, the illusion that we are somehow preventing nuclear armageddon is a fabricated agreement amongst developed countries. Masahide Kato, professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, declares that the ideological hierarchization between nuclear test explosions and declared nuclear war is the very vehicle through which the “history and the ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations are wiped from the consciousness of the First World.” 

Most of this ideological division can be attributed to our philosophical understanding of war as an event instead of a presence. Christine Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia, reflects on the political, ethical, and ontological dimensions of war that demand a more nuanced approach to how militarism intersects with our lives. Crisis-based politics like threats of nuclear war are problematic because they “distract from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of oppression.” Only when we recognize the constant state of state-sponsored and institutional violence that we live in can we begin to form more nuanced and practical modes of resistance. One such method of resistance involves collaborating with Indigenous peoples to create the tools to solve policymaking issues. Indigenous communities are sources of knowledge about traditional resource management strategies and conservation of the earth’s vulnerable ecosystems. Their knowledge systems hold the potential to contribute solutions to global health, food insecurity, and climate change challenges. Despite this, Indigenous Peoples are among the world’s most marginalized populations and often face systemic exclusion from social, economic, and political systems. Improving the welfare of Indigenous Peoples requires a deeper understanding of the intersection between the underlying structures of marginalization and possible methods of empowerment. As the United States Agency for International Development defines it, empowerment requires that Indigenous Peoples have secure land and resource rights, acquire the power to act freely, and advance their own development priorities as full and equal members of society. 

In addition to obvious policy changes, we need to fundamentally reshape our epistemologies so that we do not conflate our peace and diplomacy with violence against marginalized communities. Otherwise, this kind of ignorance will result in complacency towards small-scale violence because it doesn’t look like the “crisis politics” that receives political attention, even as small-scale violence accumulates to become genocidal. That was the reality of radioactive colonization in the mid-twentieth century. Therefore it is our obligation as current students and future world-changers to acknowledge the importance of including marginalized voices in policy discussions and challenge understandings of history and knowledge which are rife with exclusions and assumptions. We cannot risk repeating a history where entire worlds, their histories, and their futures have been destroyed. With Oppenheimer’s famous line from the Bhagavad Gita ringing in our ears: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”