Empire of Deterrence

A nuclear-extinction unconscious has worked over the last 30 years to ’automate’ much political thinking and recuperate it into individualist culture wars that reaffirming the extinction regimes

Empire of Deterrence reveals how nuclear strategy, once framed as a tool for security, has become an invisible but ever-present law -- shaping the very foundations of political authority, economic order, and cultural imagination in the Anglosphere. Rather than merely deterring conflict, nuclear logic now smothers dissent, flattens alternatives, and enforces a regime of stasis masquerading as stability.

Drawing on a vast range of Cold War-era thought and culture -- from the strategic philosophy of Paul Virilio to the haunting dramas of Stephen Poliakoff, the aesthetics of Folk Horror, and the metaphysical critiques of the Kyoto School -- this book traces how deterrence became hardwired into governance, ideology, and the feedback loops of Western managerial culture.

At once theoretical and urgent, Empire of Deterrence asks: How did nuclear logic come to rule us? Can we break its psychic grip? And is it still possible to think and act beyond the empire it sustains?

Michael Gardiner has written a number of books of cultural history, comparative culture, and fiction, and has taught at the University of Warwick. He lives in the north of England.