Denin Slage-Koch

     The weirdest part about growing up in the town that built the bomb is that you don't think anything of it until you leave and come back again. Even in high school, when I would walk beneath an enormous green 'R' with a mushroom cloud erupting from it every day, the gravity of my hometown's cultural and societal significance never occurred to me.

 

     I remember one night eating dinner with my friends during my freshman year at Whitworth University, about 150 miles from Richland. I was wearing a sweater from my high school with the logo emblazoned boldly across my chest. When I had put it on that morning, I thought of it as a sweater from my high school and nothing more. One of my friends was addressing the group when they abruptly stopped and stared quizzically at my shirt. When they asked what it was, it was as jarring as if everything around me had suddenly changed colors. I instantly became aware that my hometown was not just an apple pie, high school football, church-on-Sunday kind of Small Town, USA like I had always assumed. As I grew older and traveled farther, I continued to wrestle with the social, cultural and historical implications of Richland, and I found little connections to Richland everywhere I went. I eventually realized that nearly every facet of human existence had been impacted by the things that took place just a few miles from where I used to get tucked in every night.

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    During the summer of 2016, I took a tour of the B Reactor, the world's first large-scale production reactor just a few miles from Richland. It's designated as a National Historic Landmark now, and the tours are completely free. When you step into that reactor for the first time and turn the corner to face the reactor core, it's a little bit like the feeling you get on a roller coaster when it first starts to tip beyond the crest of the first hill, except it doesn't go away for a while. That's about the best way I can describe it - there's no way to describe in words the feeling of standing before a device that, in my mind, has bent time, space and the history of humanity around itself. Immediately after returning home from that tour, I penned "B Reactor," which, three years later, became the core of this project, "re: manhattan project."

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   As time has passed, the presence of nuclear weapons has risen and fallen from our collective consciousness with the news cycle. Most of the time, we drift through our lives in a sleepy haze, relatively oblivious to the unholy power laying dormant in silos and bunkers across the world. However, we're occasionally shaken rudely awake not from but into the nightmare, jolting from our slumber to news of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the aftermath of 9/11, or the sudden escalation in the American-Iranian conflict of January 2020. The truth is, peace and security can not and will not be achieved so long as nuclear weapons exist in our world. Simply put, regardless of the ethics of what happened in August 1945, the world is less safe and more violent when atomic weaponry is present. The disparity in power between nations that have atomic weaponry and nations that don't is startling, and so long as that dichotomy in influence exists, it is incredibly difficult for any country without to guarantee the security of its own citizens. Furthermore, the spontaneity and volatility of humanity continues to become more obvious by the day. As we learned from the heroic dissent of Vasily Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear war is much closer and more possible than most of us acknowledge.

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My hope is that those who hear this music will be inspired to consider the implications of anyone having nuclear weapons at any time or anywhere. Peace is not an idyllic state that falls like rain but a conscious choice that every person must make in every second of every day. Nuclear weapons represent the fear of losing power and the need to wield an apocalyptic threat against our fellow men. In the world that we all wish we lived in, we won't be needing them anymore.