Morality and the Atomic Age: Interpreting the Ethical Meaning of the Nuclear

Abstract

Modernity has been said to be the Atomic Age, but what the Atomic Age means, and what atomic or nuclear itself means is not immediately clear, and is perhaps beyond fathoming, as Martin Heidegger notes in The Principle of Ground. However, as something with which humanity lives, something that can potentially cause human if not global extinction, the meaning of the nuclear must be at least partially understood if humans are to know how to respond to dwelling in the Atomic Age. This meaning is fundamentally moral or ethical, since the nuclear poses the real risk of causing unimaginable death. That is, the nuclear is related to life by its threat to end all life. This article argues that the nuclear is the summation of modernity, understood in a techno-scientific sense, which results in the confrontation of modernity and science with the ethical. For the nuclear is innately a modern knowledge. Further, the atomic has the capacity to mass manufacture death on a scale that has never been witnessed, and, thus, is death incarnate. It is the unleashing of the elemental in the splitting of the atom onto the face of the earth to eliminate life. The fundamental meaning in terms of ethics of the nuclear is its being unethical, as what eliminates humans altogether. The atomic is the negation of morality itself.