VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

Cold War heritage in the UK is an unfixed category. While museums advocate collections strategies that reflect the rich heritage of Cold War experience, they struggle to identify representative material to do so. More often than not, the Cold War is exhibited through metallic, hyper-specialised objects, such as nuclear warning radar machinery or cutting-edge aircraft. Yet, contemporary public discourse and emerging scholarship continues to transform what Cold War heritage means and thus the expectations of present-day museum visitors. As custodians of the past, guarantors of material and public educators, museums are obliged to proactively reconsider the metal comprising their collections. In this paper, I explore the materiality of a single Cold War object, a pin badge which is unexhibited and logged without descriptor in the collections of the Imperial War Museum. Applying a thorough object biography, I consider its value as both scrap metal and heritage ‘under construction’. The badge was produced and sold by charity the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief to commemorate peace on World Memorial Day, 1 January 1992. It is made from the scrapped metal of SS20 and Pershing II missiles, weapons eradicated under the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Culturally and politically, the moment of hope it signifies has disappeared. So what kind of heritage is this scrap metal? Can we account for the versions of the Cold War that it harbours and the futures of that heritage still unconstructed? Are museums ready to scrap metal and replace it with alternative material heritage?