Evidence synthesis is increasingly recognised as an essential element of the provision and use of expert advice in areas of public reasoning and decision-making.1 Synthesis here refers to an authoritative account of the best available knowledge in a field or fields, relevant to a question of policy interest and accessible to all interested audiences. Synthesis as a practice is well established in many areas of science and medicine. Although less frequent in the humanities, recent examples from funders and the British Academy illustrate increasing recognition of its importance.2 This article outlines why synthesis matters and, while pointing to some systemic challenges, shows how it can be done. It illustrates the findings from the literature with practical material from two recent projects led by the authors.

This article examines the often-noted “cuteness” in early post-war Japanese animation, and explains how this style has led in more recent years to grittier works depicting war's devastation through fantasy and cinematic technology. Anime provides insight into the social attitudes of each post-war era; and, into how collective memory has processed “unimaginable” horror. The author argues that what is concealed within “unrealistic” animation often reveals more than what is shown about people grappling with an apocalyptic legacy in search of a national identity.

While China's energy system is still largely a “black” system depending on fossil fuel inputs, the electric power system is greening at the margins. We demonstrate, using 2014 data on additions to China's electric power system, that the system is greening– with powerful implications for the future of the country's energy profile. We utilize three lines of argument: first, utilizing data for electric energy generated, where we show that China actually generated less energy from thermal sources in 2014 than in 2013, while increasing generation from water, wind and solar; second, examining capacity additions, we show that new capacity in water, wind and solar (WWS) exceeded new capacity for thermal; and third, in terms of investment. We argue that such data rebut claims made that China is getting blacker while its greening efforts remain small and insubstantial, or that China will become dependent on nuclear power rather than hydro, wind and solar as it cleans its energy system.

In August 2021, Yukiyo Kawano, a third generation Hiroshima hibakusha, was refused permission to install her sculptural evocation of the Nagasaki bombing, at the first commemoration of the atomic bombings within the National Park Service's Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford, Washington, where plutonium for the “Fat Man” device was produced. The artist nonetheless raised the piece near the restricted Hanford zone. We consider the work's complex ritual symbolism and the Park's resistance to interpreting the impact of nuclear weapons and the legacies of environmental toxicity associated with plutonium production at Hanford during WWII and the Cold War.

Antarctica is often cast as a last wilderness, untouched by humans and set aside for peace and science. Yet it also has a nuclear past that foreshadowed a shift in human interactions with the continent, away from development and towards protection. This paper examines the discourse around the installation and the dismantlement of PM-3A, the first and only large-scale nuclear reactor to have been used on the Antarctic continent. Affectionately known as “Nukey Poo,” the reactor was greeted with optimism by the USA and was seen as a catalyst for a more comfortable and technologically advanced future for the humans at McMurdo Station. This techno-optimism spurred visions of a resource-rich Antarctic future. When it became apparent a decade on that the reactor was too costly and had been leaking, the narration shifted to centre on environmental protection, resulting in the removal of a mountainside of gravel in the name of ecological restoration. The reactor is gone, but not forgotten – the site is designated as a Historic Site and Monument under the Antarctic Treaty System. Spanning from the Cold War to the Madrid Protocol era, the story of Nukey Poo provides a useful lens through which to track the evolution of attitudes towards Antarctica and to reflect on imagined Antarctic futures.

Studies of nuclear politics and IR more widely have failed to seriously engage with what future nuclear-disarmed worlds would or should look like. I respond to this failure of imagination by advocating for a project of ‘post-nuclear worldmaking’. Counter-hegemonic political efforts around the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) are a useful first step to ‘connecting’ our nuclear-armed present to a disarmed future. However, they do not tell us much about the broader characteristics of this future. Moreover, they often fail to transcend conservative assumptions of plausibility and probability, which unnecessarily exclude what might be called ‘utopian’ visions of alternative futures. In the context of mounting uncertainty generated by threats to planetary security, post-nuclear worldmaking can assist in drawing strong connections between the present and radically different future worlds, which should not be discounted as improbable or impossible. This project enables a widening of the scope of nuclear futures and policy options which are considered thinkable, as well as contributing a future-facing, prefigurative element of politics which complements existing counter-hegemonic strategy. It highlights the unavoidable obligation for nuclear scholars to think in utopian terms.

Nuclear weapons are different from every other type of weapons technology. Their awesome destructive potential and the unparalleled consequences of their use oblige us to think critically about the ethics of nuclear possession, planning, and use. Joe Nye has given the ethics of nuclear weapons deep consideration. He posits that we have a basic moral obligation to future generations to preserve roughly equal access to important values, including equal chances of survival, and proposes criteria for achieving conditional or “just deterrence” to minimize the risk of nuclear use and help preserve these values. While Nye's conditions are laudable, they are not achievable. They rely on flawed assumptions about the nature of nuclear weapons and the inherent risks of the nuclear deterrence system. Since the Cold War ended, the strategy and practice of nuclear deterrence has grown riskier, more urgent, more dangerous, and less stable. It is time to rethink how we manage nuclear risks. A new nuclear security system must be built on the design principle that the consequences of system failure cannot threaten to end or fundamentally disrupt civilization. We owe the future a new nuclear security strategy that can prevent an existential global nuclear event.

A $C^{*}$ -algebra A is said to detect nuclearity if, whenever a $C^{*}$ -algebra B satisfies $A\otimes _{\mathrm{min}} B = A\otimes _{\mathrm{max}} B,$ it follows that B is nuclear. In this note, we survey the main results associated with this topic and present the background and tools necessary for proving the main results. In particular, we show that the $C^{*}$ -algebra $A = C^{*}(\mathbb {F}_{\infty })\otimes _{\mathrm{min}} B(\ell ^{2})/K(\ell ^{2})$ detects nuclearity. This result is known to experts, but has never appeared in the literature.

We expand upon work from many hands on the decomposition of nuclear maps. Such maps can be characterised by their ability to be approximately written as the composition of maps to and from matrices. Under certain conditions (such as quasidiagonality), we can find a decomposition whose maps behave nicely, by preserving multiplication up to an arbitrary degree of accuracy and being constructed from order-zero maps (as in the definition of nuclear dimension). We investigate these conditions and relate them to a W*-analogue.