This essay intends to define a relationship between the vision of the world produced by techno-politics and the advent of the nuclear bomb, two of the main innovations of the 20th century most influential contributions to the global perception of temporal and spatial relationships between nations and the conduct of war. Three main aspects of techno-politics define its role in changing the perception of society and the state in this period, a “new politics based on technical expertise”, situates Mitchell in his article Can the Mosquito Speak? First, the “concentration and reorganization of knowledge” within the expert community with respect to the introduction of new skills; secondly, the recurring issue of maintaining projects that “have encountered continuous practical difficulties” in their development; and third, the existence of various “failures and fixes” regarding these projects that have been overlooked or hidden to avoid having to address them (Mitchell 2002, p. 41). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Masco's explanation of the United States' development of nuclear warheads easily aligns with Mitchell's description of techno-politics, as state-led, temporally progressive nuclear testing regimes have been forced to adapt their methods to facilitate nuclear testing within the confines of international politics and political agreements between States. Masco outlines three regimes of nuclear testing, first, the era of above-ground nuclear testing from 1945 to 1962, in which scientists experienced nuclear tests through the senses, second, the era of underground nuclear testing from 1963 to 1992, in which this sensory access was “reconfigured” and “abstracted” into less tangible forms of examination, and the third, the era of a post-Cold War program titled “Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship” from 1995 to 2010 , in which the tests were based “on an increasingly virtual system”. bomb” which further transformed the field and mechanisms through which scientific opinions or expertise on the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons were derived (Masco 2004, p. 2). Beginning with the advent of the above-ground testing regime conducted by American scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Masco describes how scientists at this preliminary stage reacted viscerally to the explosion of the first atomic explosion conducted at their site. Evoking the sublime – a descriptor of transcendence attributed to an object or event that evokes awe and terror as it offends the senses in its wake – the explosion produced by the first nuclear test at Los Alamos stirred emotion in these scientists enough to produce comparisons with the religious phenomena. fear and experience. Masco notes that, through this discourse, these scientists “reinvented both the physical world and the international order from the deserts of central New Mexico” (Masco 2004, p. 4). In this way, scientists – experts in the nuclear realm of Los Alamos – fulfilled the techno-political requirements of Mitchell's techno-politics, according to which the worlds of religious and scientific understanding merged through the sensory experience of the atomic bomb. Mitchell first describes this element of techno-politics by citing the example of the dam built in Aswan, Egypt, which had been renovated by various sectors and powerful individuals seeking to exploit the river in various ways (Mitchell 2002, p. 41) . Not only had the dam received a height increase in 1933, "completing a network of dams, weirs and canals begun in the mid-nineteenth century that converted mostof the country's agricultural land to year-round irrigation", but had also been installed hydroelectric turbine process proposed to meet the national demand at the time for fertilizer production (Mitchell 2002, pp. 20 and 33). Mitchell uses this process to outline exactly howknowledge is rethought and enacted through techno-politics in a material sense, but this theory can be extrapolated into that of the Los Alamos scientists' experience of the nuclear bomb this first step is the reconsideration of a concept combined with other forms of existing knowledge to produce results that were not explicitly the original intention of the experience initially sought or performed. In both cases, this process is exactly what occurred, since those who considered themselves masters of their projects ultimately became the most affected. The second aspect of techno-politics concerns the confrontation between experts with complications to the projects during the processes of developing them. These complications are made clear by Masco when he recounts how scientists, entering the era of underground nuclear testing, became psychologically unaware of “the direct human sensory experience of the explosion” and how this change in nuclear testing thus “transformed the meaning of the explosion “technology inside the laboratory” to one of the abstract conceptualizations of mutually assured destruction and political risk (Masco 2004, p. 3). To clarify this point, Masco cites the perspective of a Los Alamos weapons scientist in describing that for the underground tests, the problem “was not the effort to protect the human body from the effects of the explosion,” as in the tests on the surface, “but, rather, making the exploding bomb visible to the human senses.” Therefore, Masco quotes the scientist: “The difficulty comes from the inaccessibility of the regime.” Here, without the visceral experience of the sublime, nuclear development quickly became controlled by political hypotheticals rather than conservative reverence for the bomb, part of an experiment “underscored by a national security imperative” that “encouraged scientists to understand the period of the Cold War according to strictly technological criteria". terms” (Masco 2004, p. 7). Mitchell delves into this second aspect of techno-politics by continuing with the example of the Aswan Dam, citing various misfortunes of the projects that had been conducted there. Each project, Mitchell says, failed on some level, as “hybrid corn seedlings 'withered,' petroleum-stabilized mud brick was a failure, the use of helicopters 'encountered various complications,' and new technology nitrogen fixation for fertilizer production did not work as expected”; however, the technical experts overseeing these projects attempted to learn from them and resolve them through additional means of technological development (Mitchell 2002, p. 41). The result, however, was that reparations did not work, because these experts did not attempt to bridge the gap between technology and natural resources, instead continuing to distort the land's natural geographic and topographical boundaries (Mitchell 2002, p. 42). The third aspect of techno-politics, the incompetence of experts in dealing with the failures and adjustments of their projects, is shown through Masco's discussion of politics and its disconnection from scientific knowledge of the composition of nuclear weapons. In 1970 and 1974, respectively, the United States signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which promised that the United States would destroy its nuclear and non-nuclear test assets.'”?