Nuclear Fictions

In this book, Michael Gardiner suggests that the conception of the ‘war-ending’ weapon was tied up with a longer commitment to unified space and singular progress. The mission for total weapons can be seen rising with the highly-technical defensive war of the later nineteenth century, and passing through twentieth century atomic research, then the targeting of the outsides of commercial empire, and the post-war consensus with deterrence as its foundation. The end of the Cold War brought an opportunity to fully naturalise deterrence, but also brought a tacit acceptance of nuclear violence while forms of violence against the individual were rigorously sought out. If the world-unifying role of deterrence has always been undermined by the rise of rival empires, it has also been questioned by critical communities including the consensus-sceptics of the 1950s–60s, 1980s–90s Nuclear Criticism and readers of ‘nuclearism’, millennial campaigns for Scottish independence, and twenty-first century descriptions of nuclear colonialism. Recently it has become more obvious that an Anglosphere concept of ‘worldly’ deterrence was bound to a singular and ultimately nihilistic idea of progress.[bio]Michael Gardiner is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick.