Nuclear Fictions - by Michael Gardiner (Hardcover)

About the Book

Looks at cultures of deterrence and 'war-ending' weapons and suggests their longer role within the development and stasis of the Anglosphere.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

In this startlingly insightful study, the brilliant and heterodox Michael Gardiner asks us to become critical theorists (and political historians) of the very ubiquity of the nuclear option. Nuclear Fictions brings intellectual history and cultural studies to the kit-bag of the dedicated anti-exterminist. Gardiner draws out the subtle yet powerful legitimations that Enlightenment thought, in its Anglosphere mode, provides for nuclear deterrence. A very important and literally vital book.--Pat Kane, musician, writer, activist and author of The Play Ethic