An in-depth exploration of the nuclear age, and how the development of the atom bomb transformed humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

We often think about nuclear weapons as a future security threat: bombs that could be detonated now or later, altering the fate of our world.

Yet nuclear weapons have already seeped into our waters and tapped into our soils. Since its invention, it has and continues to harm all of life — humans and non-humans alike.

 

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From the literal claiming of land as territory to resource extraction that fuel weapons production, human impact on the natural world in the name of national security carries a tension between cultivation and control, peace and conflict. This tension undergirds the atomic age: the creation of the atom bomb, in an effort to dissuade future wars through deterrence, has left global environmental scars in its wake, from uranium mining to nuclear testing.

While nuclear security and environmental justice are intimately entangled, there is a troubling disconnect between the two fields. Nuclear policy, particularly the branch of study dedicated to the nonproliferation, control, and eventual disarmament of nuclear weapons, rarely cross-pollinate with the environmental social sciences. A sincere attempt to make sense of these complex entanglements — of bombs, science, ecologies — requires an expansive set of expertise that does not neatly fit the current construct of nuclear policy. What kinds of insights could emerge if nuclear security and environmental disciplines exchanged knowledge? What would happen if non-human life forms are part of our peace & security frameworks, rather than just national interests?

Through artistic interventions (bookmaking and gardening) and multidisciplinary research (the convergence of nuclear policy, anthropology and ecology) Atomic Terrain explores the ways in which nature — the humble existence of plant life around us — as an alternative access point to our nuclear past, and encourages us to reckon with the ways this history reverberates in today’s geopolitics and cultural landscape.

Atomic Terrain was a featured exhibition at the 2024 Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair, showcasing How To Make A Bomb with Gabriella Hirst, Warren Harper, Tammy Nguyen & Lovely Umayam.

COLLABORATION:

B(L)OOM Art Book


An art book written by Lovely Umayam and made by Tammy Nguyen, that retells nuclear weapons history from the perspective of plants and communities that have persevered through nuclear threat and destruction.

 

It is also an invitation for anyone to share their stories about how plants and landscapes have helped them contemplate destruction, resilience, and survival.

COLLABORATION:

How to Make a Bomb

A collaborative art-and-gardening workshop by Gabriella Hirst and Warren Harper examining the connections between horticulture, state power, and nuclear colonialism. How to Make a Bomb made its U.S. debut in the summer of 2023 in New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.

Convergence and Collaboration

During a series of virtual and in-person meetings in the summer of 2023, we asked nuclear policy scholars, environmentalists, and anthropologists, how can we create scholarship frameworks and systems of support to better connect nuclear policy and environmentalism? Together, we will present multi-scalar research – examining nuclear weapons from non-traditional frameworks of TIME, SPACE, and KNOWLEDGE - and demonstrate how to leverage knowledge from different fields to expand how we think about nuclear threat beyond the anthropocentric point of view.

The summary notes from Atomic Terrain meetings are now available.

Specific research projects will be announced in the Fall / Winter 2024

ATOMIC TERRAIN COLLABORATORS

Aditi Verma

University of Michigan

Dr. Aditi Verma (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan. Aditi is broadly interested in how energy technologies and their institutional infrastructures can be designed in more creative, participatory, and equitable ways. Read more

To this end, her research group at the University of Michigan works towards developing a more fundamental understanding of the early stages of the design process to improve design practice and pedagogy, and also improve the tools with which designers of complex sociotechnical systems work. Aditi holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT.

Eleana Kim

University of California, Irvine

Professor Eleana Kim is a cultural anthropologist whose research and writing are organized around core anthropological concerns with nature and culture and the biological and the social in the production of personhood and social value. Read more

Her research seeks out the particular ways in which conceptions of the nation, personhood, politics, and human/non-human relations are performatively and discursively made and remade through cases that confound everyday assumptions about what is “natural” or “cultural.”

Jackie Waight

Bombshelltoe

Jackie Waight is a lifelong learner, creative, and racial/social justice advocate based in the community of Los Angeles, CA. More than just a child of Miss Saigon and Chris, their “Yellow Peril” blood flows to further the fight of their Vietnamese ancestors to disrupt imperialism and seek liberation for all. Read more

Through creativity and an intersectional lens, they strive to educate and empower themselves as well as others to fight for a better world for everyone, together. Jackie dives headfirst into multiple disciplines to diversify their perspective, further their reach to combat imperialism, and expand connections across different sectors and people. Unorthodox but well-rounded, they have a music background; worked with teaching artists, youth, and nonprofits; have written poetry and articles; hosted/spoke on panels; co-chaired WCAPS’ Human Rights Working Group; and underwent an anti-nuclear fellowship with Beyond the Bomb, all to serve their aspirations of building community and bringing radical change.



Jessica Lambert

Princeton University

Jessica Lambert is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation and a first-generation descendant of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She is a Princeton graduate with a degree in Anthropology (Law, Politics, and Economics Track) and certificates in Environmental Science & Engineering and Technology & Society (Energy Track). Read more

Her academic work at Princeton focused on environmental contamination in Indian Country and its impacts on public and environmental health, Tribal policy, and relationships with the land. Jessica serves as a Research Associate for Nuclear Princeton, investigating nuclear legacies across Indian Country and contributing to many of Nuclear Princeton's research and education projects.

Lovely Umayam

Bombshelltoe

Lovely Umayam is a writer and a nuclear nonproliferation researcher. She is the founder of the Bombshelltoe Policy and Arts Collective, a creative organization pushing for an active exploration of arts, culture and history to promote nuclear nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Read more

Bombshelltoe is the first-prize recipient of the US Department of State’s Innovation in Arms Control Challenge in 2013. Since then, Bombshelltoe, in collaboration with scientists, artists, historians and other experts developed a wide range of multimedia works featured in official spaces such as the United Nations and other diplomatic fora, as well as more public platforms including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Einstein Forum, AWWWARDS Design, and others.  Her creative and policy work have appeared in various platforms, including The New York Times, Associated Press Newswire, SxSW, Wired, Pioneer Works, Catapult Magazine, among others.

Molly Hurley

Bombshelltoe

Molly Hurley has a Master of Fine Arts in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Rice University. From previous work with organizations such as Beyond the Bomb, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Women Cross DMZ, Daisy Alliance, and Reverse the Trend, she has garnered experiences in advocacy, philanthropy, social media and website development, and research. Read more

She co-runs a monthly column for Inkstick Media that analyzes pop culture phenomena and their ties to national security. She’s also published multiple times in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In her artmaking practice, she most often comes back to explorations of connection: connections between humans, animals, and nature; connections both long-lasting and fleeting. As a community artist, she believes it is the connections between the individual and the community that, in union, form the basis of both individual and community identities.

Tammy Nguyen

Passenger Pigeon Press

Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking and book making. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. Read more

She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. Born in San Francisco, Nguyen received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. The year following, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014 and a NYFA Fellowship in painting in 2021. She was included in Greater New York 2021 at MOMA PS1 and has also exhibited Smack Mellon, Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, and the Bronx Museum, among others. Her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library, among others. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University and represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, London.

Warren Harper

How to Make a Bomb

Warren Harper is a curator and researcher currently based in Toronto, Canada. He was director then co-director at The Old Waterworks (TOW), an artist-led charity in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK, that provides studios, facilities, and research and development opportunities for artists. Read more

Warren is also a board member of The Other MA (TOMA) and a supporter and member of the Working Class Creatives Database, which is a platform to share and highlight the work of working class creatives. He is a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is working on a curatorial research project exploring Essex’s role in Britain’s nuclear story. Warren has worked with various galleries and institutions including Arts Catalyst (UK), Cement Fields (UK), Focal Point Gallery (UK), South London Gallery (UK) and Goldsmiths, University of London (UK).

Chanese A. Forté

Union of Concerned Scientists

Dr. Chanese A. Forté is a scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the Global Security Program, specializing in environmental toxicology and epidemiology. Their research focuses on the health and well-being of communities affected by nuclear weapon mining, exposure, and the threat of exposure.

Gabriella Hirst

How to Make a Bomb

Gabriella Hirst is an artist. She was born and grew up on Cammeraygal land (Sydney, Australia) and is currently living between Berlin and London. She works primarily with moving image, sculpture, performance, and with the garden as a site of critique and care. Read more

Gabriella’s practice explores the politics of capture. She is interested in how art and archival structures attempt to keep dynamic places, objects, people and stories in a state of stasis. Gabriella has long worked with plants and gardens as a key part of her practice, considering care for plants and the stories they carry as a negotiation of how certain histories and social connections are formed and maintained, and how the non-human, vegetal world is made legible. 

Gabriella's recent projects have been exhibited and commissioned by the Kunsthalle Osnabrück (DE), Focal Point Gallery (UK), The Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Australian Center for the Moving Image (AU). She is the recipient of the 2020 ACMI/Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, is a previous Marten Bequest Scholar and a recipient of the John Crampton Fellowship. She is an associate lecturer in Media Studies with the RCA School of Architecture.



Jamie Kwong

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Dr. Jamie Kwong is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on public opinion of nuclear weapons issues; threats climate change poses to nuclear weapons; and multilateral regimes including the P5 Process, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Katlyn Turner

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Katlyn Turner is a Research Scientist within the Space Enabled research group. In that role, her primary research includes work on inclusive innovation practices, and on principles of anti-racist technology design. Dr. Turner earned her PhD in Geological Sciences from Stanford University, where she researched novel nuclear waste forms.

Matt Korda

Federation of American Scientists

Matt Korda is a Senior Research Fellow for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, and an associate researcher with the Nuclear Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Read more

Korda’s research and open-source discoveries about nuclear weapons have made headlines across the globe, and his work is regularly used by governments, policymakers, academics, journalists, and the broader public in order to challenge assumptions and improve accountability about nuclear arsenals and trends.

Ryo Morimoto

Princeton University

Professor Ryo Morimoto is a first-generation student and scholar from Japan. Regionally centered on Japan, Morimoto’s research creates spaces, languages, and archives through which to think about nuclear things, along with other not immediately sensible contaminants, as part of what it means to live in the late industrial and post fallout era. 

Teresa Montoya

University of Chicago

Professor Teresa Montoya’s manuscript project tentatively titled, Permeable: Diné Politics of Extraction and Exposure, approaches territorial dispossession and environmental toxicity as pervasive features of contemporary Indigenous life. Read more

Based on over 15 months of ethnographic research on the Navajo Nation, her research engages local modes of relating, both in its political and kinship imaginings, to understand the entanglements of checkerboard allotment, tribal jurisdiction, and regulatory failure among Diné communities of present-day northern Arizona and New Mexico. She is Diné and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.