How have Western nongovernmental experts used remote sensing to make public knowledge about Iran’s nuclear program? This article recounts several episodes in which experts and journalists congregated around satellite images to uncover hidden nuclear objects in Iran. Drawing from the theoretical tradition of co-production, I describe this recurrent collective experience as an imaginative exercise that can both coordinate and transform diverse communities of knowledge. I outline common temporal and thematic structures that define these episodes, and illuminate the role of commercial satellite imagery as material anchor that threads distributed imaginings together such that broadly-shared experience and sensibility can emerge. I argue that these collective imaginative practices have fomented civic-epistemic closure, not around affirmative nuclear facts or beliefs about Iran, but around a set of persistent questions about the ‘possible military dimensions’ of its nuclear past. I close by exploring the broader political effects of this form of recursive inquiry within the global nuclear order.

中文翻译：

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围绕卫星图像聚集：核不扩散复合体的视觉媒体周期


西方非政府专家如何利用遥感技术向公众宣传伊朗的核计划？本文讲述了专家和记者聚集在卫星图像周围，揭开伊朗隐藏的核物体的几个事件。借鉴共同生产的理论传统，我将这种反复出现的集体体验描述为一种富有想象力的练习，既可以协调又可以改变不同的知识社区。我概述了定义这些事件的常见时间和主题结构，并阐明了商业卫星图像作为物质锚的作用，它将分散的想象串联在一起，从而可以出现广泛共享的经验和情感。我认为，这些集体的想象力实践促进了公民认识论的封闭，不是围绕着肯定的核事实或关于伊朗的信念，而是围绕着一系列关于其核历史的“可能的军事维度”的持续问题。最后，我探讨了这种形式的递归调查在全球核秩序中更广泛的政治影响。