In search of Cold War modernity's endpoints: Urban-nuclear entanglements and diachronic solidarity

Abstract

This article scrutinizes a Soviet nuclear industry's urban settlement from the perspective of this industry's endpoints. It approaches the nuclear industry's endpoints both in the register of city-enterprise relations and in the register of the spatio-temporal and institutional reality of the Cold War. The article's argument rests on empirical research of urban development after nuclear power in the town of Visaginas in Lithuania, a satellite of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP). Today Visaginas is in the process of disentangling itself from the USSR's strategic Cold War exclusive nuclear industry network. I single out and reflect on three units of analysis of this disentanglement – biography, site, and schedule. By documenting the modes of spatiality and of temporality produced by urban-nuclear entanglements, I challenge the application of the notion of ‘de-industrialization’ to phasing out nuclear power plants. I show that nuclear technology has given rise to a type of industrial site and to Cold War modernity as a spatio-temporal and institutional reality, which have no intelligible endpoints. Despite the unintelligibility of Cold War modernity's endpoints, nuclear settlements serve as explorers of the institutional and infrastructural hyper- long-term, and therefore they nurture diachronic solidarity via a diachronic division of labor.