Blog 4

Throughout the readings and podcast this week, the overall theme of secrecy and miscommunication about nuclear weapons and nuclear testing was discussed.  

In Kristen Iverson’s, piece, Mother’s Day, she discusses her first-hand experience with the secrecy surrounding the nuclear testing site at Rocky Flats, Colorado. Iverson’s comparison between her own family’s secrets, and the secrets the government acts upon throughout their projects of nuclear testing, helps to use a level of pathos to show readers how much trust is being broken, with the people we are supposed to have faith in. By having detailed first-hand experience of the amount of secrecy surrounding her family, that which she is supposed to trust, helps to show the broader perspective about the lost faith in the government that is supposedly there to protect us. The lack of information presented to the public lead people to have a false sense of security in the safety of their hometown, as seen on page five when Iverson states, “No one knows what the factor will produce. No one cares. It means jobs. It means housing.” The fact that everyone had this undeniable trust in the government that they wouldn’t put the people in harm’s way, is automatically refuted with stories of people who fall ill, people who end up risking their lives to work in these dangerous conditions. Overall, Iverson attempts to address readers in a way that would reach their sense of trust in how the government has handled issues, and the secrets that they keep from us that has a huge impact on our safety. 

Terry Tempest Williams, author of, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Time and Place,as well as an environmentalist, shows readers, in the same way Iverson did, how the government attempts to hide the truth behind the risks of their actions. Through her heartfelt stories about those who were impacted in Utah from the nuclear testing, she talks about women who have had to get mastectomies in order to survive. In a way, the government’s lack of disclosing the effects of their testing destroyed the lives of many, and Williams includes that. “all the evidence is buried.” Physically in those who died because of the actions, and figuratively, in the sense that the government is hiding things. 

The doomsday clock that is conducted by many scientists, attempts to use a level of logos, Kairos, and pathos, in the way they construct their ideas about how close we are to the end of the world. The diction they use to express their ideas has a level of harshness that scares readers and viewers into understanding the full effects of our actions and that we need to fix them. 

In the Podcast, “Fallout,” the ideas of how nuclear testing rhetoric is approached throughout the years is discussed. Specifically, the secondary research conducted in interviewing Jeffery Lewis, the author of a book depicting the effects of nuclear war and how we speak about it. In this interview the possibility of nuclear war is very probable in Lewis’s eyes, and he believes that we don’t speak enough about the North Korean point of view or ideology. Lewis uses a sense of logos in an attempt to get listeners to logically think about how we view the threat and that if we don’t attempt to speak about both sides, then we are ultimately doomed.