"The nuclear is like revolution. nothing is gained from hoping for the one or fearing the other, since both have already happened. Everything is already liberated, changed, subverted. What more do you want? There's no use hoping: the things are there, born or stillborn, already in the past- it's exasperating, but what can you do about it? No future. No cause for panic either: everything's already nuclearized, enucleated, vaporized. The explosion has already happened, the bomb is only a metaphor. What more do you want: everything is already wiped off the map. It's no good dreaming: the confrontation has already happened, quietly, everywhere. Yet it isn't enough for things to have happened: we also want to see them as a spectacle. The people wanted the spectacle of the revolution. Things themselves also want to experience the rupture of a spectacular metaphor. This is the revenge of the objectivity in which we have confined them.
What will become of the nuclear? Will we insist on having the grand spectacle of the atomic confrontation for the beauty of it? If that happens, it will not be for reasons currently advanced - the fatal dynamic of the use-value of weapons or the species becoming resigned to its own destruction - but from the irresistibility of the spectacle of destruction and the necessity, for us, of deriving some enjoyment from it."
From Cool Memories by Jean Baudrillard translated by Chris Turner verso publishing 1987 NY p 55-56
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