This essay aims to define a relationship between the worldview produced by technopolitics and the advent of the nuclear bomb, both events of the 20th century. most influential contributions to the global perception of temporal and spatial relations between nations and the conduct of war. Three major aspects of technopolitics define its role in changing perceptions of society and the state at this time, a "new politics based on technical expertise", locates Mitchell in his article Can the Mosquito Speak? First, the “concentration and reorganization of knowledge” within the community of experts versus the introduction of new expertise; secondly, the recurring question of maintaining projects which “encountered continuing practical difficulties” in their development; and third, the existence of various “failures and adjustments” regarding these projects which were either neglected or covered up to avoid having to deal with them (Mitchell 2002, p. 41). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Nuclear testing has been forced to adapt its methods to facilitate nuclear testing within the confines of international politics and political agreements between states. Masco describes three nuclear testing regimes, the first, the surface testing era from 1945 to 1962, during which scientists experimented with nuclear testing through the senses, the second, the underground nuclear testing era of 1963 to 1992, during which this sensory access was "reconfigured" and "abstracted" into less tangible forms of examination, and the third, the era of a post-Cold War program called "Science- Based Stockpile Stewardship” from 1995 to 2010, in which tests were based “on an increasingly virtual system”. nuclear bomb” which further transformed the field and mechanisms by which scientific opinion or expertise on the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons was derived (Masco 2004, p. 2). Beginning with the advent of the surface testing regime carried out by American scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Masco describes how scientists at this preliminary stage reacted viscerally to the blast of the first atomic explosion carried out at their site . Evoking the sublime – a descriptor of transcendence given to an object or event that evokes awe and terror while offending the senses in its wake – the explosion produced by the first nuclear test at Los Alamos stirred up enough emotion among these scientists to produce comparisons with religious events. fear and experience. Masco notes that, through this discourse, these scientists “reinvented both the physical world and the international order from the deserts of central New Mexico” (Masco 2004, p. 4). In this way, the scientists—nuclear experts at Los Alamos—satisfied the technopolitical demands of Mitchell's technopolitics, whereby the worlds of religious and scientific understanding merged through the sensory experience of the atomic bomb. Mitchell describes this first element of technopolitics by citing the example of the dam built in Aswan, Egypt, which had been renovated by different sectors and powerful individuals who sought to exploit the river in various ways (Mitchell 2002, p. 41). Not only was the dam increased in height in 1933, "completing a network of dams, dams and canals begun in the mid-19th century that converted most of the country's agricultural land to year-round irrigation”, but it was also the subject of an installation process of hydroelectric turbines proposed to meet the national demand of the time for fertilizer production (Mitchell 2002, pages 20 and 33). Mitchell uses this process to describe how exactly knowledge is reimagined and implemented through technopolitics in the material sense, but this theory can be extrapolated to that of the nuclear bomb experiment by the Los Alamos scientists. It only takes this first step to reconsider a concept combined with other forms of existing knowledge to produce results that were not explicitly the initial intention of the expertise initially sought or carried out. In both cases, this is exactly what happened, as those who saw themselves as the masters of their projects ultimately became the most affected by them. The second aspect of technopolitics concerns the confrontation of experts faced with complications in projects during the processes of developing them. These complications are highlighted by Masco when he recounts how scientists, entering the era of underground nuclear testing, became psychologically oblivious to "the direct human sensory experience of the explosion" and how this shift in testing nuclear power has thus “transformed the meaning of the explosion”. technology within the laboratory” to an abstract conceptualization of mutually assured destruction and political risk (Masco 2004, p. 3). To clarify this, Masco cites the view of a Los Alamos weapons scientist who describes that for underground testing, the problem was "not the effort to protect the human body from the effects of the blast." , as in the surface tests, “but, rather, it is a question of making the exploding bomb visible to the human senses. Thus, Masco quotes the scientist: “The difficulty comes from the inaccessibility of the diet”. Here, without the visceral experience of the sublime, nuclear development quickly became controlled by political assumptions rather than conservative respect for the bomb, as part of an experience "underscored by a national security imperative" that "has encouraged scientists to understand the Cold War era from a strictly technological approach.” terms” (Masco 2004, p. 7). Mitchell develops this second aspect of techno-politics by continuing the example of the Aswan Dam, citing various misfortunes of the projects that had been carried out there. Every project, Mitchell says, failed on some level, because "the hybrid corn seedlings 'wilted,' the oil-stabilized mud brick was a failure, the use of helicopters 'ran up against various complications” and the new nitrogen fixation technology was a failure. for fertilizer manufacturing did not work as expected” – yet the technical experts overseeing these projects attempted to learn from them and correct them through other means of technological development (Mitchell 2002, p. 41 ). The result, however, was that the reparations did not work, because these experts did not attempt to bridge the gap between technology and natural resources, instead continuing to distort the natural geographic and topographical boundaries of the territory (Mitchell 2002, p. 42). The third aspect of technopolitics, the incompetence of experts to remedy the failures and adjustments of their projects, is highlighted through Masco's discussion of politics and its disconnection from scientific knowledge about the composition of nuclear weapons. In 1970 and 1974 respectively, the United States signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which promised that the United States would destroy its resources » »?