This article contributes to the empirical and theoretical discourse on the ‘stability–instability paradox’, the idea that while possessing nuclear weapons deters cataclysmic all-out war, it simultaneously increases the likelihood of low-level conflict between nuclear dyads. It critiques the paradox’s dominant interpretation (red-line model), which places undue confidence in the nuclear stalemate – premised on mutually assured destruction – to prevent unintentional nuclear engagement and reduce the perceived risks associated with military actions that fall below the nuclear threshold. Recent scholarship has inadequately examined the unintentional consequences of the paradox in conflicts below the nuclear threshold, particularly those relating to the potential for aggression to escalate uncontrollably. The article employs empirically grounded fictional scenarios to illustrate and critically evaluate, rather than predict, the assumptions underpinning the red-line model of the stability–instability paradox in the context of future artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled warfare. It posits that the strategic cap purportedly offered by a nuclear stalemate is illusory and that low-level military aggression between nuclear-armed states increases the risk of unintentional nuclear detonation.

In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and under the growing threat of planetary cataclysm, an array of prominent intellectuals grappled with the significance of nuclear war for the human condition and reflected upon the possibilities of escaping its peril. Following on the early interventions of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the collected thoughts of Karl Jaspers, Hans Morgenthau, and Günther Anders outline a philosophical current of ‘nuclear existentialism’ preoccupied with the nihilistic ‘being-towards-species-death’ entailed by the advent of the Bomb. Faced with the apparent negation of reason in bringing about the means of its own destruction through the scientific piercing of nature’s innermost workings, the nuclear existentialists end up reaffirming, however precariously, a teleological conception of history in which the apocalyptic fear of the Bomb figures as the necessary condition for the ultimate realisation of human freedom. In the light of the contemporary resurgence of nuclear anxiety, this article surveys and critically assesses the corpus of nuclear existentialism, drawing upon the distinctive existential phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas to trace a potential alternative for thinking life and death under the Bomb.

This article explores the BBC television drama Vigil (2021) as a significant site for the construction of public knowledge about nuclear weapons. In doing so, it extends beyond discourse-oriented approaches to explore how nuclear discourses manifest in visual communication, everyday encounters, and popular imagination. In a close reading of Vigil, this article questions concepts of security, peace, and deterrence, revealing how the series (occasionally) challenges conventional discourses while reproducing gendered and racialised representations of nuclear weapons politics. The exploration asks questions of responsibility for nuclear decision-making, the portrayal of anti-nuclear activists, and the depiction of nuclear weapons as agents of both peace and destruction. While the BBC series reproduces existing (and problematic) discourses, it also provides a ‘thinking space’ for critical engagement. Amid the current geopolitical landscape, this article emphasises the urgency of studying contemporary representations of nuclear weapons and the need for scholarship that challenges traditional Cold War perspectives.

Infrastructures are central to processes of state formation. The revival of materialism in International Relations has made an important contribution to our understanding of states through careful analysis of the politics of infrastructure and state building. Yet, to date, engagement with the state-theoretical tradition associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and Bob Jessop has been absent. Through comparison with the external-relational ontology of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), this article argues that state theory and its internal-relational ontology avoids reifying the state while providing an analysis of infrastructure and state formation sensitive to the historical reproduction of social orders over time. Developing Gramsci’s concept of the ‘integral state’, it emphasises the necessary interpenetration between civil society, the state apparatus, and the creation of infrastructure. These conceptual arguments are illustrated through an analysis of the United States’ development of nuclear infrastructures during the early Cold War period, in the internal relations between infrastructure and the integral state are explored through Civil Defense Education programmes. Clarifying the internal relations of past, present, and potential future forms of socio-technical order is an important task for rethinking the politics of technological design in International Relations.

This paper examines the influence of nuclear weapons on fantasies of racial violence. Specifically, it argues that weapons impact the emergence of social formations, producing unique patterns of thought, desire, anticipation, and identity. While the effects of nuclear power have been central to disciplinary debates in international studies, existing critical commentary has largely focused on the discriminatory nature of the global nuclear hierarchy. By focusing on the productive impact of weapons on cultural registers, this article demonstrates that nuclear power not only reinforces global structures of racism and colonialism but also creates new articulations of white supremacy. It argues that a specific fantasy of nuclear genocide, seizing nuclear power as a means for executing a global race war, is an expression germane to the nuclear age. This article concludes by arguing that this fantasy plays an important role in white supremacist approaches to politics and existing forms of racist hierarchy.

In this essay, I propose five principles to make U.S. nuclear deterrence policy more just and effective in the future: sever the link between the mass killing of innocent civilians and nuclear deterrence by focusing targeting on adversaries’ military power and senior political leadership, not their population; never use or plan to use a nuclear weapon against any target that could be destroyed or neutralized by conventional weapons; reject “belligerent reprisal” threats against civilians even in response to enemy attacks on one's own or allied civilians; replace nuclear “calculated ambiguity” threats against biological or cyberattacks with “deterrence by denial” strategies; and work in good faith toward eventual nuclear disarmament.