Nuclear Gaia: Media Archives of Planetary Harm challenges us to see the planet itself as shaped by nuclear processes—an evolving entity where past accidents, detonations, and military strategies continue to radiate through environmental and social landscapes. Agnieszka Jelewska and Michal Krawczak explore how media archives and open-source investigations transform nuclear memory and create new forms of justice beyond the domain of scientists and politicians.
Bringing together nuclear studies, media theory, and environmental humanities, this book reveals how independent researchers and local communities are reclaiming the narratives of nuclear harm. With fresh case studies and bold conceptual frameworks, Nuclear Gaia sets the stage for a new era of postnuclear studies, where AI, quantum mechanics, and nuclear technology intersect in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
260 pages | 6.69 x 9.61 | © 2025
BCMCR New Directions in Media and Cultural Research
Earth Sciences: Environment
Political Science: Political and Social Theory
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
Introduction: Welcome to Nuclear Gaia
1. Post-nuclear Studies and Infrastructures of Nuclear Regimes
Media archives and grassroots practices
Quantum entanglements
Digital information, energy, and matter
Sentient media and radiation
Quantum media theory
Media as geological sedimentation
Infrastructures of violence
Hyper-aesthetics of nuclearity
2. Nuclear Gaia: Oscillating Between Spacetimemattering and the Nuclear Colonial Drive
Splitting the atom, or the intertwining of scientific experiments, historical time and military policies
Masculinist nuclearism
Nuclear criticism: the end of linear archives and the bomb as a medium
Spacetimemattering and the memory of nuclear violence
Nuclear Gaia as technologically mediated Earth design
Colonial traces of Nuclear Gaia
A lustful gaze at the exosphere and the moon as the 8th continent
3. From Biosphere to IT Gaia
The Earth in the state of total peace
Vernadsky’s biosphere and its noo¨spheric transformation
The Quest for Gaia, or Lovelock’s tale about the superorganism, climate change and nuclear sadness
Earth Science System and the self-reflective global subject
The Earth as we knew it no longer exists
4. Nuclear Communication and Grassroots Archives of Catastrophes
The advent of nuclear-proof communication
Simulation as a tool of the real: between war games and catastrophes
The postnuclear seismic order
The Fukushima Daiichi disaster and proof of communication collapse
Live archiving of nuclear regimes
Top-down archive as a theater of simulating nuclear future
An inaccessible archive
Records from the zone of alienation
Against nucleocratism
Beyond the linear paradigm
5. Nuclear Violence and Planetary Harm: Testing the Endurance of Humans and the Environment
Media labs of atomic tests
New media of the nuclear renaissance
Ahead of the Time: three visions of Russian nuclearism
Atomic steppe: the Semipalatinsk Test Site
Seismic studies of nuclear power
Fallout archives: the Nevada Test Site
The Downwinders’ archive
Toxic archipelago archives: the French Polynesia Test Site
Atoll archives: the Bikini Test Site
Nuclear savages
Decolonizing nuclear regimes
6. Anthropocene: The First Geological Epoch of Nuclear Gaia
Indices of the Anthropocene
Metadata of the Anthropocene
Nuclear Anthropocene: toxic minerals and landscapes
Nuclear harm: conditions for half-life
A Great Extractivism
Deep time future of radioactive waste and cross-generational justice
No Apocalypse, Not Now …
References
Index