Ready? Now Drop the Bomb

A Feminist Reading of Nuclear Overlay Maps and the Cartographic Politics of Comparison

Bibliographic Data

ID4781007
AuthorsEmily Mitchell-Eaton (0000-0002-6643-1490, Colgate University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume30
Issue4
Pages1759-1794
Publication date2025-08-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2025.2461510
OpenAlexW4407773669
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited97

This article engages a feminist and critical cartographic lens to examine nuclear overlay maps, which superimpose a nuclear event from one place onto another. Often used to promote nuclear awareness, these visualisation techniques nonetheless evoke a troubling history of mapmaking and war simulations in service of state violence. While nuclear overlay maps can effectively evoke an emotional response (i.e. fear and awe), they tend to reinforce hegemonic geographical imaginaries, and may thus impede meaningful anti-nuclear solidarities. Engaging feminist geographies of emotion, scale, and intimacy-geopolitics, I analyse a series of popular open-access nuclear overlay maps to show how they (1) eliminate place relationality; (2) reproduce colonial notions of Indigenous land as terra nullius; (3) misleadingly depict nuclear events as fixed points in space and time; and (4) permit viewers’ continued geographical ignorance. The increasingly prevalent use of nuclear overlay maps warrants critical examination of their implications for geographical knowledge production

Nuclear weapon · Overlay · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Telecommunications · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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