Sophia University Junior College Division Faculty Journal
第 45 号, 2024, 35-53

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s
Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of
Nuclear Waste
Yoshihiro Nagano
Abstract
This study explores the issue of radiation in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which
involves a nuclear crisis that is domestically generated by weapons tests and radioactive
waste. Drawing on research on the long-term effects of radiation, it examines how thenovel’s protagonist, Nick Shay, conceptualizes and practices nuclear waste managementin the face of the awe-inspiring incalculability of radiation. To achieve that aim,
the study first explores the nuclear landscape and examines how DeLillo, against acontaminated landscape, raises problems with the technological mastery of nuclear
power, chief among which are the amount of time required for radioactive decay andthe sensation of the mathematical sublime Nick develops in his response to the complex
effects of radiation. To approach Nick’s sublime sensation, the representation of theuntouchable—a group of individuals who have been exposed to deadly radiation arounda nuclear test site—is also important. Overall, the article investigates the geographic,
aesthetic, and ethical aspects of DeLillo’s narratives about radiation in conjunction with
waste management’s long-term responsibility for the protection of life.

Introduction
Don DeLillo’s Underworld can be regarded as a national epic of America thatfeatures critical military tensions with the Soviet Union and the serious consequencesof the arms race. As a Cold War novel, it depicts nuclear threats, including those otherthan direct missile attacks. Set in the Southwestern desert, the opening episode of
the 1992 narrative present describes a memory of America’s first atomic explosion,
the Trinity test conducted in 1945. This primal scene of explosion, as imagined by
the protagonist Nick Shay, a professional waste manager, foregrounds the threat ofradiation that unsettles him forty-seven years after the original explosion. From the
beginning, the novel problematizes radiation as a major crisis that America has long
been facing. Intriguingly enough, the radiation was not caused by America’s foreign─ 35 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano

adversaries. In fact, some types of radiation that haunt the novel are domesticallygenerated by weapons tests and radioactive waste. This domestic nuclear crisis andNick’s involvement with it form a central concern of the present study.
The nuclear waste crisis that affects Nick and many other American citizens has
been created, to a large degree, by the nation’s economic and military developmentin the Cold War era. Concerning waste as a byproduct of individual and national
empowerment in Underworld, Patrick O’Donnell writes, “Waste is . . . the fallout of
our quest for empowerment in life (whether that comes about through the possessionof objects and the accumulation of capital or through the demonstrations of militaryprowess that characterizes an arms race)” (110). A most potent means of empowerment
is nuclear generation, but the waste it leaves behind is extremely difficult to handle.
Other critics have, like O’Donnell, discussed the problems posed by nuclear waste
in Underworld. Exploring DeLillo’s treatment of American Cold War ideology, Mark
Osteen states, “The ideology of containment . . . encompasses weapons and waste, whosedevastating physical and psychological repercussions constitute DeLillo’s primary
theme in Underworld” (215). Approaching this issue from an environmental, planetary
perspective, Isabel Lane underscores the significance of “byproduct time.” Regarding
a tension between human time and nuclear time, she writes, “This tension between
annihilation and permanence, between short-lived human life and its tenacious waste, iscentral to the novel, which pits human time against geology, dramatizing the persistenceof man-made byproducts and the fragility of human existence” (110). The question oftime scale has been a major concern in the study of the nuclear sublime, as exemplified
by scholars like Allan Stoekl. Exploring the complex interconnections between natural
phenomena and human interventions, Stoekl points out the fundamental incalculabilityof the effects of harmful waste on life forms and the environment. He argues that
this “version of the sublime entails an infinity that precisely resists computation (thesublime of externalities); we are bound to compute, but are ultimately, and repetitively,
incapable of it” (45). Taking advantage of this mathematical sublimity, the present study
focuses on the long-term effects of radiation in Underworld and examines the ways inwhich Nick Shay conceptualizes and practices nuclear waste management.
To achieve this aim, I first explore the nuclear landscape of the Southwestern desert
and examine how DeLillo, against the background of that contaminated landscape,raises problems with the technological mastery of nuclear power, chief among which
are the amount of time required for radioactive decay and the sublime response Nickdevelops to the complex effects of radiation. In addition, the study analyzes Nick’s─ 36 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Waste

esoteric, pseudo-religious view on radioactive waste. Artistically, this view enriches
the sublime representation of nuclear waste, but scientifically it poses a threat because
his discourse undermines the rationality of nuclear waste management. In analyzing
this threat, I discuss the sacralization and diabolization of nuclear waste. My last aim
is to examine DeLillo’s representation of the untouchable—a group of individuals who
have been exposed to deadly radiation around a nuclear test site. Overall, the paper
investigates the geographic, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of DeLillo’s narratives about
radiation in conjunction with waste management’s long-term responsibility for theprotection of life.

In the Nuclear Landscape: Mastery of Nuclear Power and Fearof Radiation
The novel’s opening sections, which move dramatically through space and time,
underscore the persistence of nuclear waste problems in America. The prologue, which
revolves around the 1951 playoff game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn
Dodgers that would decide the pennant, conveys news of the Soviets’ second atomic
bomb drop test in the Kazakh test site. Immediately after the prologue, the 1992
narrative present unfolds itself in the American counterpart of the Kazakh steppes.
It is a desert about 200 miles southwest of the Trinity test site—a deeply symbolic
location in New Mexico where the first American atomic bomb was tested. Set shortly
after the declaration of the end of the Cold War, the 1992 episode describes Nick Shay’svisit to his one-time lover Klara Sax, who now runs an art exhibition of mothballed
B-52 bombers in the desert. While the presence of the aesthetically recycled bombers
celebrates the end of the Cold War, the episode directs readers’ attention to the masked
presence of unrecyclable radioactive waste. In her militaristic discourse, Klara refers
to the toxicity and danger of that waste: “So we use this place [the desert] to test ourweapons. It’s only logical of course. And it enables us to show our mastery. The desert
bears the visible signs of all the detonations we set off. All the craters and warning
signs and no-go areas and burial markers, the sites where debris is buried” (71). To her,the marks of destruction and contamination of the land are signs of human masteryover nuclear power. In addition, she stresses her own artistic mastery by recycling andexhibiting the nuclear-capable B-52s. Comparing Klara’s attitude toward waste with
Nick’s, John Duvall argues that “Klara’s and Nick’s careers oddly reflect one another—both are waste managers” (272). “Like Nick,” Duvall observes, “Klara makes invisible
the waste of consumer culture, but with a twist” (272). This twist includes Klara’s─ 37 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano“paint[ing] in rainbow colors the decommissioned B-52s that previously had carried
the nuclear payload that could have annihilated humanity” (272). To be sure, shemanages to exert artistic control over them and hide the danger they once posed, but—
preoccupied with America’s and her individual mastery over nuclear power—she shows
little concern about the effects of nuclear waste, which is buried in the area beyond thesigns of mastery.
Her representation of the Southwestern desert radically underplays the devastationof such radioactive sites. For instance, compare her landscape with that of Area G—thelargest nuclear waste dump in the area surrounding Los Alamos—described by Joseph
Masco in his anthropological study The Nuclear Borderlands. As Masco observes, “dozens
of cement plugs [were] sticking out of the ground, noting where shafts of tritium-and
plutonium-contaminated waste were buried. Alongside the football field sized open pits,
neatly packed with containers of radioactive contaminated waste, are fences posted withradioactive warning signs” (150). In both Area G and in Klara’s aesthetically rendereddesert, radioactive materials are not mastered or disposed of. Stored deep underground,they retain their tremendous power for an astronomically long period of time, as wesee below. Thriving aesthetically on nuclear destruction, Klara exhibits a nonchalantattitude toward the danger surrounding her, but DeLillo’s art unmasks it throughanother, traumatic chronological leap.
As the episode draws toward its end, there is a sudden shift back in time to a primal
scene of nuclear detonation in New Mexico. After his visit to Klara, Nick imagines “theworld’s first atomic explosion, which occurred about two hundred miles northeast of mypresent position” (84) or the Trinity nuclear test, conducted on July 16, 1945. Nick’s
historical national memory gravitates toward a disturbing anecdote about Edward
Teller—a scientist who participated in the production of the first American atomic bomb.
According to Nick, “the story said how Dr. Teller feared the immediate effects of theblast at his viewing site twenty miles from zero point” (84). In the seemingly peacefuldesert, forty-seven years after the blast, radiation still triggers an undeniable fear in
Nick. Unlike Klara, who places too much trust in the mastery of nuclear power, Nick as
a professional waste manager knows how radiation persists far beyond the “immediate
effects” and continues affecting the area. When the 1992 desert episode summons
Teller’s fear into the present, it belies the sense of an ending suggested by Klara’s art
exhibition and brings to the surface the long-lasting threat posed by radiation.

─ 38 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Waste

Radioactivity, the Nuclear Sublime, and Fantasies about
Nuclear Waste
As Nick grapples with nuclear waste, he reveals a deeply disturbing view of it. A
case in point is a remark he makes near the end of the narrative present, when he has
become a senior executive qualified to offer expert advice on waste management. In theepisode, Nick reflects on the lectures he gives on the risks of nuclear waste:
I talk to them [his audience] about the vacated military bases being converted
to landfill use, about the bunker system under a mountain in Nevada thatwill or will not accommodate the thousands of steel canisters of radioactive
waste for ten thousand years. . . . The waste may or may not explode,seventy thousand tons of spent fuel, and I fly to London and Zurich to attend
conferences in the rain and sleet. (804)What is disturbing is that Nick speaks about possible radioactive leaks and nuclear
explosions in such a nonchalant, even defeatist, manner that he violates his professional
trust. Commenting on the passage above, Mark Taylor keenly observes Nick’s strong
self-doubt: “By the end of the book, however, it is clear that Nick regards his success as
failure. Plans and purposes that once seemed clear become obscure” (207). Though Nickhas certainly been a successful businessperson, he finally realizes his own powerlessness
in the face of radioactive waste. What defeats him is the time scale of the “ten thousand
years” required for nuclear waste storage. That time scale, however, is not necessarily
correct.
To better understand Nick’s attitude, we must consider in greater detail estimationsof the time required for safety assurance. The issue is clarified by recent criticism of
nuclear management. Daniel Cordle, in his analysis of cultural and literary anxieties
in the nuclear age, cites the example of Onkalo, Finland, a nuclear waste storage
facility located in an underground space carved out of rock. Drawing on Into Eternity—
a 2010 Finish documentary film about Onkalo—Cordle writes, “Designed to containradioactive materials until they are no longer dangerous, Onkalo must last, we are told,1

for 100,000 years” (230). When Cordle refers to the time required for safety assurance,
he stresses how the ethical responsibility for nuclear waste management persists onan unimaginable time scale. Cordle also quotes fundamental questions raised in thefilm: “What knowledge of nuclear toxicity will future societies have? What languages
will people speak and how can we warn them not to excavate Onkalo’s tunnels?” (230).

─ 39 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano

The duration of radioactivity generated by high-level nuclear waste utterly surpasses
current human plans for containment. As we have seen above, this is a deeply troubling
aspect of nuclear waste management that Klara Sax, armed with the nonchalance of a
victor, blithely disregards. She does not seem aware that the victorious “warning signs
and no-go areas and burial markers” (71) will most likely be meaningless and fail to help
sustain human responsibility toward those who will inhabit the land in the far distantfuture.
Klara’s mastery over nuclear power for survival is short-sighted and limitedin scope. She recycled the B-52s to show a “survival instinct . . . a graffiti instinct—
to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are” (77). Analyzing this claim, Paul
Gleason writes, “For Klara and DeLillo, art is an assertion of freedom, a way in whichhumanity can reject and survive an American culture whose mass-market capitalism
and weapons of mass destruction threaten individualism and human life” (140). Klara
and DeLillo certainly make powerful artistic assertions of freedom and human survival,but readers might wonder whose survival is being discussed and who Klara means by“we.” Her triumphalist post-Cold War rhetoric seems to exclude those who have alreadylost their lives and those who might do so in the future due to radiation exposure. Unlike
Klara, Nick as a professional waste manager must face the question more seriously.
To return to Nick’s approach, we need to see how radioactive decay takes placein complex, long-term processes of natural evolution and human interventions in thatevolution. When humans attempt to grasp the totality of such processes, as Allan Stoekl
argues, “we experience awe before the sheer task of calculating sustainability” (45) or“the sublime of externalities” (45). Such interlocking processes defeat current humanestimations. Likewise, in Underworld, it is this type of sublime sensation that confounds
Nick to the point where he succumbs to radioactive leaks and even nuclear explosions.
In so doing, Nick is in a deeply disturbing state of mind, which Stoekl regards as a formof “claustrophobia” (46). As Stoekl observes, “above all the fundamental incalculable
nature of externalities, we can affirm only our consciousness. We revel in the thought of2

apocalypse, of the fate of the earth both in our hands and somehow out of them” (46).

Nick is stuck in the thought of an apocalypse that he imagined himself and accepts it
because, near the end of his career, he is defeated by the long-term effects of radioactive
waste that relentlessly undermine his containment efforts.
Before Nick reaches that impasse, however, he and his colleagues are more
confident in their ability to contain hazardous waste. Remarkably, they approach itwith aesthetic feelings grounded in the sublime, as an oft-cited Staten Island waste─ 40 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Waste

management scene demonstrates. Brian Glassic, a colleague of Nick’s, inspired by the
pyramids of Egypt, meditates on the waste management facility on the island:
He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at
Giza—only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying
perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All thisingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishingspace. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance andhe sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one [the idea on thelandfill]. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all thegreat works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to thisculminating structure. (184)Impressed by the large-scale management of massive waste, Brian exhibits complex
feelings of awe. The vision of the waste management facility, which exceeds the Great
Pyramid in magnitude, is grounded in the mathematical sublime, but it is far-reachingenough to evoke aesthetic, even romantic, feelings of awe. As Immanuel Kant argues,
the aesthetic sublime “brings with it the idea of the sublime and produces that emotion
which no mathematical estimation of its magnitude by means of numbers can bringabout”; it also “presents magnitude absolutely, as far as the mind can grasp it in an
intuition” (90). In the grip of such feelings of awe, Brian develops his vision and boasts of
the “poetic balance” between the symbol of global capitalism and its waste management
facility, connected by modern infrastructures and technologies. In his meditation, Brianmakes the mathematical, aesthetic, and technological sublime work together so as tofully represent the greatness of the facility and the innumerable human endeavors thatmake it work.
At the same time, though, Brian’s sublime, euphoric meditation can be consideredan act of denial. The “poetic balance” masks the material reality of a decidedly unpoetic
imbalance caused by the massive accumulation of harmful waste, an imbalance thatis increasingly worsened by nuclear waste, the most harmful material imaginable,
which haunts America well beyond the Cold War and will do for 100,000 years to come.
Therefore, it is not the modern high-rise buildings like the World Trade Center in
Manhattan but the nuclear landscape described by Klara Sax that might, in the distantfuture, dominate what remains of human civilization. From such a post-apocalyptic
perspective, Daniel Cordle writes about the relationship between civilization and─ 41 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano

nuclear waste: “Our civilization’s most abiding legacies might surprise us: not, perhaps,
the spectacular, hubristic sky-scraping edifices currently springing up around the globe,
but a hidden, tomb-like architecture . . . not our technology, but its toxic residues” (231).
This is a grim, unsettling vision, but the increasing amounts of radioactive waste might
result in the triumph of the “tomb-like architecture.” This post-apocalyptic vision isshared by Nick, who succumbs to radioactive leaks and anticipates nuclear explosions.
Like Brian, however, Nick has heroically struggled to contain nuclear waste. It isnotable that behind his pride lurks a pseudo-religious feeling of awe that is rooted in his
Jesuit education. For instance, readers can observe how Nick approaches nuclear waste
through esoteric metaphors: “We were waste managers, waste giants, we processed
universal waste. Waste has a solemn aura now, an aspect of untouchability. White
containers of plutonium waste with yellow caution tags” (88). First, by taking advantageof the sheer scale of his business and especially the risk he takes in radioactive waste
management, Nick aggrandizes himself. Furthermore, when he sees an “aura” groundedin the “untouchability” of radioactive waste, he endows the waste with a quasi-religious,transcendental quality to further elevate its status and, by extension, his own.
Nick’s sense of awe toward nuclear waste can undermine his professional
responsibility. In another scene in the Texas desert, a burial of nuclear waste isunderway:[Nick] watched men in moon suits bury drums of dangerous waste insubterranean salt beds many millions of years old, dried-out remnants of a
Mesozoic ocean. It was a religious conviction in our business that these depositsof rock salt would not leak radiation. Waste is a religious thing. We entomb
contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread. It is necessary torespect what we discard. (88)Here, as he develops his pseudo-religious fantasy, Nick self-mockingly reveals how
the containment of nuclear waste stands on fragile scientific grounds. Metaphorically,
the terms “burial” and “entombing” indicate the death of radioactive materials, but
technically, it is incorrect because of the extremely long-term effects of high-level
radioactive materials. The geological storage of nuclear waste described by Nick is a
widely accepted method, but that storage is affected by many factors, including chemical
reactions triggered by minerals and salt, changing water flows, and different levels ofengineering. It is fair to say that when Nick generates a pseudo-religious fantasy, he is─ 42 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Wasteat pains to come to terms with such overwhelming uncertainties.
Nick’s pseudo-religious, sublime feelings become darkly twisted, and this disturbing
phenomenon can be effectively approached using concepts from anthropology. Taking
advantage of the anthropological concept of “ambiguity” originally developed by Mary
Douglas, the critic Robert McMinn underscores “the anthropological puzzle of categories:
or how the sacred shades into the profane. In Underworld the form this puzzle takes is3

the sacralization of waste” (45). In McMinn’s argument, the sacralization of waste is“a form of transubstantiation” (45). Through the act of waste management, which Nickdescribes in ways that evoke religious ritual, he recycles profane substances into usefuland even aesthetically acceptable objects. Nuclear waste, however, resists Nick’s actof sacralization because it is fundamentally unrecyclable. In an attempt to represent
the awe-inspiring, destructive power of plutonium, Nick generates a profoundly darkmyth about Pluto, the Roman god of death. This act of representation enables him tosimultaneously sacralize and diabolize nuclear waste. In the manner of his colleague
Brian Glassic, who compares the large-scale waste management endeavor to “theconstruction of the Great Pyramid at Giza” (184), Nick claims, “We build pyramids ofwaste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried
to sink it. The word plutonium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of theunderworld” (106). Unlike Brian, who sees a balance between capitalist production andthe disposal of consumer waste, between the secular world and the underworld, Nickfearfully imagines the supremely diabolic figure that unsettles the balance.
His awe suggests deeper implications of the sacralization of the discarded. To use
another anthropological concept, the lord of the dead and the person who deals with thedeadly waste in the underworld are figures related to taboo. Both belong to the realm
that is considered simultaneously sacred and unclean. Or to use Giorgio Agamben’s
words, “the ambiguity of the ban [taboo], which excludes in including, implies theambiguity of the sacred” (77). This ambiguity surrounding taboo derives from thecontradictory inclusion of the untouchable into the social, cultural system. Likewise,
Nick is a type of the untouchable who hold an ambiguous position in society. He serves
Pluto or plutonium, which is divine in its tremendous capacity to generate power andabominable in its capacity to bring about mass death.
It seems that part of him seeks this social identity because of a murder hecommitted in the past. As a minor in the Bronx, he murdered a bartender who waslike a father figure to him. Being an outcast by choice, he identifies himself with theuntouchable. In other words, by aligning himself with the lord of death, he is at pains to─ 43 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano

come to terms with himself and his past. At the same time, though, another part of him
relies on the dark power of Pluto to increase his own power and authority. As Graley
Herren insightfully comments, “throughout his life he resorts to mythic fabrication toreconceive his relation to the real” (453). Herren stresses the way in which Nick takes
advantage of “mythic fabrication” as a measure to deal with his traumatic experiences.
In addition, as we see below, Nick is fully aware that the power of plutonium affects the
lives of many citizens, but the problem is that his denial of the real prevents him fromestablishing a meaningful relationship with the very victims of radiation with whom heshould identify.

Radiation Exposure, Evacuation, and the Return of Repressed
Kazakhstan
Underworld includes possible cases, including Nick, of radiation exposure. For
example, critics have noted the presence of strontium in the novel (Wallace 374-75;
Boxall 198)—a radioactive isotope produced by nuclear fission or as fallout of a nuclear
explosion. Peter Boxall, analyzing an episode in which Nick and his brother recall theirshoe shopping experience as children, hints at the bone damage Nick has suffered due
to radiation exposure. He directs readers’ attention to how Nick, trying on a new pair ofshoes at a store, puts his feet in an X-ray machine to see if they fit. Associating the shoes
with the shoes of Kazakh radiation victims, Boxall argues that “like those of the Kazakh
child, they contain radiation which, Matt [Shay] suggests, may have caused Nickhimself to ‘suffer bone damage’ . . . to become another of the blind victims of the militaryindustrial complex” (198). Certainly, Nick can be among many marginalized victims ofradiation in the novel because of his possible exposure to radioactive materials. And
what complicates the problem is the blindness Boxall cites, indicating that Nick cannot
see his own exposure and victimization. What is worse, however, is that he lacks any
concern for victims of radiation.
In Underworld, DeLillo describes people who have been exposed to radiation—
those who are thoroughly marginalized. Nick fails to imagine those individuals mainly
because, in DeLillo’s America, those who are called downwinders remain objects
4of paranoid rumors. It is near the end of the narrative present, when Nick visits
Kazakhstan, that he finally faces radiation victims and recognizes the devastationfrom which they suffer. There is, however, a foreshadowing of the event. As David
Cowart observes, “The Kazakh victims of radiation figure proleptically in DeLillo’s
imagined Sergei Eisenstein film Unterwelt, which supplies this novel’s title with one of─ 44 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Waste

its important referents” (51). In an episode set in 1974, DeLillo shows Unterwelt as if toprepare for the upcoming traumatic encounter with radiation victims in Kazakhstan,
individuals who have been foreclosed from American and international memories. The
1974 episode, focalized through Klara Sax, represents anonymous radiation victims inshadowy images to suggest a nightmarish nuclear holocaust. Those radiation victims
evoke prisoners who built the city of Semipalatinsk at great cost. According to Klara, thefilm shows how “escaped prisoners move across flat terrain, some of them hooded, themost disfigured ones, and there are fires in the distance, the horizon line throbbing insmoke and ash” (442-43). As she notes, this disastrous scene is created with dexterous
skills, developed out of the filmic technique of “typage”:
The audience was stilled. You saw things differently now. If there was a politics
of montage, it was more intimate here—not the themes of atomic radiation orirresponsible science and not state terror either, the independent artist who
is disciplined and sovietized. These deformed faces, these were people who
existed outside nationality and strict historical context. Eisenstein’s method of
immediate characterization, called typage, seemed self-parodied and shattered
here, intentionally. Because the external features of the men and women did
not tell you anything about class or social mission. They were people persecutedand altered, this was their typology—they were an inconvenient secret of thesociety around them. (443)
While watching the catastrophic scene, the avant-garde artist Klara is fascinated by
Eisenstein’s filmic technique. In Klara’s mind, the montage method is “intimate” rather
than political because Eisenstein could not have openly criticized state-led nuclear
science, especially its disastrous outcome. Typage includes a technique of casting
nonprofessional actors whose appearance expresses certain types, such as social classand profession. For example, as James Goodwin argues, there is typecasting of workingclass people: “In regard to physiognomy and camera point of view, the working class is
an ideal type, distinctive for its physical power, artlessness, and collective identity” (73).
DeLillo’s version ironically reveals how nuclear destruction and the spread of radiation
affect the “persecuted and altered” or an undesirable type located outside the Soviets’social norms. In addition, the dreary scene induces Klara to wonder whether the scene
was shot in Kazakhstan, where Eisenstein’s magnum opus Ivan the Terrible was filmed.
She associates the scene with Kazakhstan because it is a major nuclear weapons test─ 45 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano

site. In a study on the legacies of Soviet nuclear testing, Susanne Bauer et al. note that“[a] total of 715 Soviet nuclear tests were carried out between 1949 and 1990, with 456
and 130 near Semipalatinsk and on Novaia Zemlia, respectively” (244). The former testsite is in Kazakhstan and the latter in extreme northern Russia, an archipelago in the
Arctic Ocean. Klara’s evocation of Kazakhstan, triggered by the imaginary Eisensteinfilm, foreshadows Nick’s truly traumatic experience in that area near the end of thenarrative present.
Furthermore, as described at the beginning of the present study, the narrative
present begins in the symbolic nuclear detonation site in the American Southwest. As
the novel approaches its close, the narrative finally moves to the Soviet counterpart—or,
to be more exact in terms of the novel’s chronology, the narrative returns to Kazakhstan
because it was imagined by J. Edgar Hoover back in the 1951 prologue, when he heard
about the news of the Soviets’ second atomic bomb detonation. It is a sinister vision of “alonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site, the tower armed with the bomb, and ...
the wind blowing across the Central Asian steppes” (50). The location, reintroduced by
DeLillo near the end of the novel, assumes a different narrative role. “The wind blowing
across the Central Asian steppes” not only poses a threat to America but also evokes thedamage done to local downwinders. Furthermore, DeLillo calls readers’ attention to theincreasing risks of nuclear waste and nuclear armament.

Beyond the Cold War Boundary: Challenges from the RussianCounterpart
The Kazakhstan episode gives Nick a final test of professional responsibility. Afterthe fall of the Berlin Wall, Nick and his colleague Brian Glassic visit their Russiancounterpart Viktor Maltsev, who works for Tchaika, a waste management firm. They
are surprised by Viktor’s bold plan to dispose of nuclear waste in a most violent anddisturbing manner: “We try to bury it [radioactive waste]. But maybe this is not enough.
That’s why we have this idea. Kill the devil. And he smiles from his steeple perch. The
fusion of two streams of history, weapons and waste. We destroy contaminated nuclear
waste by means of nuclear explosions” (791). This violent act of pitting nuclear power
against nuclear power would disperse nuclear waste rather than dispose of it. If Tchaika“put it in the ground and vaporize it” (788), it would further harm the local population.
Then, Viktor unexpectedly takes Nick and Brian to the Museum of Misshapens andto downwinders living around Semipalatinsk. The museum, resembling today’s Semei
State Medical University Anatomical Museum, displays radiation victims preserved─ 46 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Waste

in formalin. Trying to determine Viktor’s true motive, Nick comments, “This is a man
who is trying to merchandise nuclear explosions—using safer methods, no doubt—andhe comes here to challenge himself perhaps, to prove to himself he is not blind to theconsequences. It is the victims who are blind” (800). Viktor, however, does not have tochallenge himself or prove anything to himself. What he is trying to do is reveal Nick’s
blindness to or ignorance of the devastating effects of radiation on humans. Unlike
Nick, Viktor is fully aware of the conditions of the deformed humans in the Museum of
the Misshapens and of the surviving downwinders. At the museum, Viktor guides Nickand Brian to the traumatic scene: “The fetuses, some of them, are preserved in Heinz
pickle jars. There is the two-headed specimen. There is the single head that is twice thesize of the body. There is the normal head that is located in the wrong place, perchedon the right shoulder” (799). Here, DeLillo’s repetitive use of “there is” underscores the
sheer scale of devastation. Along with these displayed specimens, the Heinz pickle jars
that contain them disturb readers. The act of putting the dead from a predominantly
Muslim area into an American consumer object desecrates those minority victims—theuntouchables killed with impunity due to the fierce arms race between the Soviets andAmerica.
DeLillo then takes Nick and Brian to a radiation hospital in Semipalatinsk so thatthey can witness the conditions of life after nuclear explosions and rigorous state control
over them. Nick and Brian immediately realize that the main purpose of the clinic is
not medical care but research: “the bald-headed children standing along a wall in theirunderwear, waiting to be examined” (800). More specifically, “Their hair, nails and teeth
5

have fallen out and they are here to be studied” (801). This biopolitical control over barelife turns the radiation victims into mere bodies useful for data extraction. In describing
the scene, DeLillo exposes how children who are biologically vulnerable to radiation
are relentlessly abused as research subjects. DeLillo’s effort serves a humanitarian
purpose at a critical time in the history of Kazakhstan. In a broader context, Bauer et
al. write: “After the independence of the Kazakhstan Republic and the official closureof the test site, the Kazakhstan government asked for assistance in the assessment andmanagement of its nuclear legacies. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution
on Semipalatinsk at its 52nd session in December 1997, asking for the support of theinternational community” (250). DeLillo, in this 1997 novel, directs readers’ attention
to the legacies of Semipalatinsk through his radiation narrative, one that discloses theterrible suffering of Cold War enemies.
DeLillo goes even further and imagines a situation where those individuals can─ 47 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano

be harmed by multinational waste when he describes Tchaika’s scheme to makeKazakhstan a dumping ground of nuclear waste produced overseas. Regarding thisbold scheme, Nick comments that Tchaika “want us to supply the most dangerous
waste we can find and they will destroy it for us. Depending on degree of danger, they
will charge their customers—the corporation or government or municipality—between
three hundred dollars and twelve hundred dollars per kilo” (788). This disturbing plan
subtly foreshadows an announcement made by Kazakhstan’s national atomic company,
Kazatompom. To base the episode on historical fact, it was in 2001—four years after the
publication of Underworld—that “Kazatompom suggested that Kazakhstan could importforeign nuclear waste and use the income to dispose of (bury) all waste—Kazakhstan’s
own and imported—at once,” according to a source in World Nuclear News. This,6

however, was not realized because “[p]ublic opposition muted those plans.” In DeLillo’s
novel, the further contamination of Kazakhstan by multinational waste is still an
emergent possibility surrounded by uncertainties, but he clearly indicates how exporting
nuclear waste to Tchaika damages the lives of the local Kazakhs, who have been alreadyplaced in an extremely precarious position.
Tchaika’s scheme includes a more dangerous transformation of nuclear waste
management: nuking nuclear waste is an act of destruction rather than management.
Furthermore, it blurs the boundary between nuclear waste management and nuclear
weapons testing. In fact, the Tchaika project could bring about a radical change in therole played by waste managers because they would gain the authority to deploy anduse nuclear weapons. Tchaika even maintains an army, as Nick and Viktor note. Nicksays, “A small private army, I hear,” to which Viktor replies, “Also intelligence unit. To
protect our assets” and to “scare the hell out of the competition” (790). The excessive
militarization of the organization poses a threat that is further complicated by theshady individuals and groups around Tchaika. Viktor coyly hints at their motives andpractices: “There are geologists and game theorists and energy experts and a journalist
with a book contract. I see waste traders and venture capitalists, piroshki and skewered
lamb. There are arms dealers looking to make bids, Viktor says, on the idle inventory of
weapons-grade plutonium floating at the fringes of the industry” (794). The implicationis that such a shady, ad hoc network could lose control over nuclear materials. Due tothe expanding access to nuclear materials, the risk of nuclear destruction increases.
In reality, nuclear threats dangerously increased in Semipalatinsk after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union. To put a stop to it, scientists from Russia, Kazakhstan,and the United States joined forces to contain nuclear materials in the area. According─ 48 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Waste

to Eben Harrell and David E. Hoffman, “It began in 1995, after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, when experts from the Los Alamos National Laboratory were told during a visit
to Kazakhstan that plutonium residue in recoverable form was likely to have been
7

abandoned at the test site” (1). In a vacuum of authority, plutonium was available foruse by formerly unauthorized individuals and groups, and that is the situation DeLillounderscores in this episode. The cooperative efforts to contain nuclear materials wascompleted in 2012, but with Underworld published in 1997, DeLillo is unable to addressthat cooperation.
It is no wonder, then, that Nick is incapable of coping with the emergent threat
posed by uncontrolled nuclear materials; the problem is that Nick’s time in Kazakhstan
does not inspire him professionally. That experience should have provided him witha crucial lesson about nuclear waste management. The Kazakh episode is followed by
one that includes Nick’s defeatist musing about nuclear waste management, which isanalyzed at the beginning of the present study. To return to the disturbing musing,
Nick ponders “the bunker system under a mountain in Nevada that will or will notaccommodate thousands of steel canisters of radioactive waste for ten thousand years.
Then we [Nick and his wife Marian] eat lunch. The waste may or may not explode,seventy thousand tons of spent fuel” (804). This fatalistic moment reveals Nick’s stateof mind as an executive waste manager near the end of the narrative present. He seems
helpless after witnessing the tremendous power of radiation in Kazakhstan, and what isworse is his indifference to the effects of nuclear explosions on humans and the natural
world.
Throughout the novel, Nick has not been able to develop mature views on nuclear
waste management. Critiquing the professional ethics that Nick believes are fully
grounded in solid reality, Randy Laist comments that “Nick’s boast that he lives‘responsibly in the real’ represents an evasion of certain new kinds of reality such as
nuclear radiation and genetic pollution which elude conventional empirical definitionsof what constitutes ‘reality’” (141). To be sure, Nick has struggled to anchor his life in
the real by shaping his career in waste management, but he has failed to recognize
the larger implications of his job, especially his responsibility to protect life fromradiation. The real that Nick has been evading is exemplified by the suffering of the
Kazakh victims. This evasion also induces him to give in to the claustrophobic musing
in which he nonchalantly waits for a nuclear apocalypse. Ultimately, he cannot thinkor act responsibly for the victims of radiation, those who are abused by a system thatprioritizes the maximization of nuclear power.

─ 49 ─

Yoshihiro Nagano

DeLillo critically exposes the underside of that system when he powerfully describes
the extremely difficult lives of vulnerable people, lives that are sustained in precarious
ways after a series of nuclear explosions and repeated exposure to radiation. By crossing
the Cold War boundary between the United Sates and the Soviet Union and imagining
those who have been severely damaged by the nuclear arms race, DeLillo incorporates
the radiation narrative about enemy aliens into the national narrative of Cold War
America. DeLillo, however, does not fully address American downwinders, though hesporadically has his characters discuss rumors about them. His reticence creates a blindspot in his radiation narratives and thus contributes to the hollowness lying at theheart of Nick as a waste manager. As the beginning of this paper shows, DeLillo starts
the narrative present in a contradictory manner by juxtaposing Klara Sax’s claim on
the mastery of nuclear technology with Nick’s fear of radiation. Nick’s worst fear is notrealized in America but in the land of its Cold War enemy. By describing the Americanand Russian waste managers working together in Kazakhstan and by learning fromthe Kazakh situation about the long-term effects of radiation, DeLillo underscores theurgent need for cross-national cooperation in addressing nuclear crises that manifest indifferent ways after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Notes
1

	The documentary film Into Eternity (2010) was directed by the Danish film-makerMichael Madsen. Onkalo is a waste storage facility located at the Olkiluoto Nuclear
Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland.

2	To locate Stoekl’s argument in the history of nuclear criticism, one must note that
he develops his critique of apocalyptic claustrophobia based on Frances Ferguson’s
early critique of the nuclear sublime. In her 1984 article, Ferguson remarks that“the notion of the sublime is continuous with the notion of nuclear holocaust: tothink the sublime would be to think the unthinkable and to exist in one’s own
nonexistence” (7).

3	Douglas’s concept of “ambiguity” between the clean and the unclean, the sacred andthe profane, is grounded in her analysis of the cultural construction of classification
systems: “Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification ofmatter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This ideaof dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up withmore obviously symbolic systems of purity” (44). Exploring such ambiguities in therealms of myth, religion, and hygiene, she reveals various forms of ambiguity in the─ 50 ─

Radiation Narratives in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
Managing the Incalculable, Long-Term Effects of Nuclear Waste

construction of orderly, pure systems.
4	That there are only rumors among the characters is partly due to their inability toaccess such information. It was not until the mid-1990s that official investigations
into human radiation experiments in the United States began. In 1994, President
Clinton created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments anddirected it to investigate human experiments.

5	The hospital is reminiscent of the Dispanser No. 4, a Semipalatinsk medical facility
established in 1957 for the study of radiation effects on humans: “This Dispanser
No. 4—often code-named ‘brucellosis hospital’—was specialized in oncology andradiation medicine. Its main tasks included radiation monitoring, assessment of thehealth impact due to fallout, and medical follow-up of the population living in areas
affected by fallout” (Bauer et al. 246).

6

	There is another significant reason why the plans were finally aborted. “WhenKazakhstan signed the agreement on establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone inCentral Asia in 2006, it accepted an obligation not to import foreign nuclear waste”(“Kazakhstan’s”).

7	To provide greater detail, I quote further from Harrell and Hoffman, who note thatin 1997,
Siegfried S. Hecker, just retiring as director of Los Alamos, decided to look
more closely. Hecker, who helped pioneer cooperation with his counterpartsin the Soviet and later Russian nuclear weapons laboratories, used personalconnections to push for action. . . . Scientists and engineers from the UnitedStates, Russia, and Kazakhstan overcame deep-rooted suspicions in theirgovernments to find technical solutions to the plutonium threat at Degelen
Mountain. . . . The operation took 17 years to complete, a period in history
that saw the rise of al-Qaeda and its nuclear ambitions, the 9/11 attacks,
and spanned three different U.S. administrations, the latter two of which
proclaimed nuclear terrorism the greatest threat to U.S. security and spentbillions of dollars to prevent it. (2)Works Cited
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Bauer, Susanne, et al. “The Legacies of Soviet Nuclear Testing in Kazakhstan: Fallout,─ 51 ─

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Public Health and Societal Issues.” Social and Ethical Aspects of Radiation Risk
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