| Description |
The cultural interaction between nuclear technology and the American West was a two-way process. On one side, an elite brotherhood of scientists and engineers at Los Alamos incorporated the romance of the frontier into the nation's atomic origin story. On the other side, the mythical construct we call "the West" mutated and matured due to its entanglement with the nuclear cycle. Only recently has it become clear that the engineer left an indelible mark on the American West equal to or even greater than that left by the cowboy. However, the engineer and the cowboy were always twin figures in the western imagination, even if the engineer usually lurked in the cowboy's shadow. The links forged between these two symbols early in the twentieth century were deliberately co-opted into the national atomic story after the war. In response, a variety of western atomic discourses began to emerge that both resisted and interacted with national narratives. As nuclearism wrote itself into the West, the stories westerners tell about themselves and their history started to change. Although the focus of this research is on the atomic literatures and discourses of the West-including fiction, memoir, poetry, drama, and nature writing-this is a multidisciplinary project that incorporates an extensive amount of history as well as a bit of scientific theory in order to more fully explore how nuclearism contributed to the changing cultural constructions of wilderness and technology in the twentieth-century American West. |
