Empire of Deterrence

This book considers nuclear deterrence as a form of authority. It describes the rise of deterrence in the Anglosphere particularly as the rule of economic law hardened to protect a civilization in its deterministic, automated phase. Nuclear deterrence has increasingly been leveraged against populations to smother politics and protect an absolute stasis with its heart in a cybernetics of human eclipse–helping to explain why, when nuclear war became immanent and taken for granted in the 1990s, much political campaigning began to collapse into culture wars turning politics into currency for an anxious managerial class.

Pre-set political values now flow from the world’s foremost nuclear power, the US, and its British satellite, relying on a growing sense that conflict is pointless and there is no escape from the feedback loop of performative affirmation. This book resurrects some half-buried Cold War cultural and theoretical resources, from Paul Virilio to Stephen Poliakoff to Folk Horror, and brings up questions of local action and the undoing of the old Anglosphere commercial empire, to ask if there are ways of unthinking deterrence blackmail.