Proving Grounds or: How I Still Don't Worry About the Bomb But Maybe Should

Proving Grounds by Jean-Paul L. Garnier, Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2023.

We don’t hear much about nuclear proliferation and nuclear wars. If we do, the specter of nuclear war remains an abstraction because it is presented as an ancillary concern to matters that are more central to the committee-written political narratives that these days pass for journalism. Vladimir Putin comes to mind, where the nuclear saber-rattling attending the Ukraine conflict remains a vague bit of stage scenery set well behind Putin’s stalking persona, intentions, lawlessness, and so on. The “monster” is not nuclear war so much as a politician who is defying the will of the “true” international order as defined by the elites controlling that order, and who are competing with the elites that "monster" represents. But nuclear war is itself a monster, and maybe in the consideration of the human condition and the fragility of civilization, we should not lose sight of what nuclear weapons are and what they can do.

As a child of the 1960s, and then as a witness to the successful anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s, I think by the time I was in my late-teens I had become accustomed to the feeling that the threat of nuclear war was a thing of the past. Pink Floyd's pulling the nuclear fear rabbit out of the hat in The Wall (1979) was passé and dull. The dragon had been slain. By the 1980s, even the sometimes-alarming emotions concerning Ronald Regan’s nuclear saber-rattling seemed rather quaint. After all, that fear “long ago” had been drowned in the laughter produced by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  

There was some further worry in the early 2000s when India and Pakistan were squaring off, and I only vaguely recall Donald Rumsfeld flying over to the Indian subcontinent to remind the Indians and the Pakistanis that nuclear war was not an option. Throughout that episode I had assumed, as if it was a given fact, that the human race was thoroughly sane in this matter, and that nuclear war would never occur. Maybe I was right.

Perhaps this is why that among our contemporary cultural artifacts there is a paucity of expressions serving to remind us of the horror of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Jean-Paul L. Garnier’s Proving Grounds helps to fill this gap. A slim, cleverly illustrated, classic paperback-size production, this new book reminds me of the excitement and “relevance” characterizing Marshall McLuhan and Quenton Fiore's very “mod” and remarkably dynamic collaborations: The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village.  Garnier’s slim volume presents us with 29 poems, each accompanied by a detailed, black and white photograph of a nuclear explosion. It has a historical feel—a sort of mal du pays for the atomic age and 1950s science fiction; the combined effect of reading the poems and viewing the fiery images produces curious impressions.  Here are contemporary manifestations of Charles Baudelaire’s flowers-of-evil aesthetic refracted through the lens of our memories of the atomic age and the strange (and relatively unexplored) lens of considering such weapons over three generations later in the 21^st century.

The recent Godzilla Minus One is a strong reminder of what nuclear war means, and how even the most militaristic of societies can transform and abandon war as a means of pursuing foreign policy and then re-direct its energies to the purpose of improving peoples’ lives. The wonderful success of that film suggests that nuclear weapons and nuclear war is a subject that we must continue to consider; it is a subject that still, and with good reason, haunts us in profound ways.

In that spirit, Garnier’s Proving Grounds is a healthy reminder that nuclear weapons are antithetical to civilization, notwithstanding their psychological effects, i.e. frightening whole populations into compliance of one kind or another.  Nuclear weapons remain unacceptable, and we must continue—notwithstanding our sense of security and our sense of the continuum of civilization—to not only overcome the threat of nuclear war, but to also free ourselves from these weapons entirely.

Click the cover image to view the Proving Grounds Amazon page: