This event is part of Cartography on the Frontline, a programme of events exploring the links between map making and war making, organised by the Livingmaps Network in partnership with Pushkin House.

Programme

WEINBERGER, WILD BILL, AND THE NUCLEAR CARTOGRAPHY OF THE SECOND COLD WAR: TIMOTHY BARNEY

At an infamous 1984 Oxford debate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defence, Caspar Weinberger, and socialist anti-nuclear activist, E.P. Thompson, fought over the resolution, “That there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.” In one of Thompson’s most heated arguments, he indicted the defence cartography of both superpowers by referring to the maps in a series of booklets overseen by Weinberger that challenged the Soviet Union’s build-up of armaments, and the ensuing response of the Soviet Union to challenge the Reagan Administration’s own armament strategy through maps. Around the same time, radical geographer, William Bunge, created the polemical Nuclear War Atlas (started as a broadsheet in 1982 and expanded to book length in 1988), a project that sought to map the potential destruction of a nuclear holocaust.

This presentation brings both of these mapping projects into conversation with another, and argues how the nuclear geopolitics of the so-called Second Cold War revealed that the strategic potential of individual places on the map were supplanted by the speed and scale of the projectile missile. The globe was reduced to a plane of “hyper-internationalism,” where all areas of the world were brought so close together that conventional notions of distance were rendered obsolete. Both the defence booklets and the Nuclear War Atlas represent how maps can advocate for social change but are also limited by their history as a tool of state control—a duality that remains relevant today in the ongoing relationship between war and cartography.

Timothy Barney is Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Communication Studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia, USA, where he teaches courses on geopolitics, international relations, and visual rhetoric. He is the author of Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power (UNC-Chapel Hill Press, 2015), and his work has been featured in a number of interdisciplinary journals and international press venues. He was the recipient of the Rhetoric Society of America Early Career Award in 2019. His current projects revolve around the rhetorics of development in the Cold War and their geopolitical implications.

BUNKERING DOWN : BUILDING FOR THE END TIMES BRADLEY GARRETT

Drawing from a three-year ethnographic research project with 'doomsday preppers', Brad will guide us into the shadowy realm of closed communities built to survive the collapse of society, order, and even the environment itself. These 'preppers', like the 'survivalists' that emerged in the midst of the Cold War, are confronting seemingly irresolvable problems we are failing to address as a species by placing faith in adaptation to crisis, having given up hope of mitigation. Brad argues that contemporary bunkers are more communal, sustainable, and ultimately hopeful than their Cold War counterparts, and the emergence of this movement of private emergency planning refracts a deep-seated dread underlying the contemporary human condition.   

Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer, writer, and photographer based in Southern California. He has written for The Atlantic, the Guardian, Vox, and GQ, and his research has been featured on media outlets worldwide including the The Joe Rogan Experience, National Geographic, 60 Minutes, and the 99% Invisible podcast. He holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, and is the author of five books translated into four languages and over fifty journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book is Bunker: Building for the End Times (Penguin 2020).