Thinking through and beyond survival in a nuclear age

Abstract This article investigates the assumption that survival should form the goal of the politics both of nuclear weapons and of International Relations (IR). Rather than being a self-evident grounding upon which political contest then plays out, survival has its own implications and limitations in the thermonuclear age, in which survival has become premised on the threat of total annihilation. As such, nuclear weapons allow us to unpack ‘survival’ in a unique way because they have the power to destroy everything: to end all survival. Yet at the same time, nuclear weapons have become deeply embedded into our world. In an age of thermonuclear weaponry, survival through annihilation has thus become a paradox that structures the ambivalence of nuclear technology and the tensions of nuclear politics. The article first establishes the nature of assumptions of survival as a taken-for-granted goal of IR and nuclear weapons politics. It then argues that the paradoxical logic of survival as annihilation that accompanied the nuclear era has resulted in a politics of repetition in which both deterrence and disarmament actors have become trapped. The article ends by outlining the limits of understanding whose survival is at stake in nuclear weapons discourse and why this matters.