This article examines how nuclear weapons are depicted in video games. While the literature has explored the social and symbolic meanings of nuclear weapons and how they have been represented in popular culture, existing accounts have not thoroughly engaged with video games. Examining the bestselling game Call of Duty, I show how gameplay narratives contribute to normalising dominant knowledge about nuclear weapons. The overarching argument advanced in this article is that representations of nuclear weapons in video games contribute to legitimising the ongoing possession and modernisation of nuclear weapons. Drawing on feminist post-structuralist theory, I show how nuclear weapons are programmed to be an exclusive item that only the most skilled players can obtain, reinforcing the exclusionary power dynamics sustaining the nuclear status quo. Moreover, I show how game dynamics produce nuclear weapons as a win-condition, and thus a symbol of power and success that reinforces dominant understandings of their military value while masking the horror of killing. Deconstructing the playing dimension of video games, I situate the ludic aspect as a meaning-making system, working synergically with gameplay stories to reinforce dominant knowledge about nuclear weapons. Ultimately, the article draws attention to everyday discursive mechanisms that render a nuclear world possible.

The past two decades have seen many social, political, and international relations (IR) theorists make extensive use of Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics—or how political power interacts with biological life. What has so far passed unnoticed, however, is that Foucault formulated his highly influential theory about how living populations became political objects in the context of an overarching concern with what he termed “the power to kill life itself.” This essay reassesses Foucault’s biopolitics in light of his broader discussion of the potentially existential threats posed by nuclear weapons and gene editing technology. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess Foucault’s famous critiques of both sovereignty and political universalism, while also providing a succinct introduction to his theories of power and the general history of anthropogenic existential threats. The article concludes by raising fundamental questions for political and IR theory concerning what happens when the biological survival of the human species ceases to be a necessary prerequisite for politics and instead becomes a contingent outcome of politics.

IM.G. Sheftall's oral history of the dawn of the nuclear age, Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses, is published this month. The book is based on interviews Sheftall, a historian and professor at Shizuoka History, conducted over eight years with dozens of hibakusha survivors and others in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Sheftall, who previously wrote an acclaimed oral history of wartime kamikaze pilots, said he was prompted to take on his latest project after an epiphany during U.S. President Barack Obama's historic visit to Hiroshima in 2016. Over 545 pages, the book plunges into the horrors of the bomb, its victims and its occasional ironies, among them that a Japanese scientist, Hideki Yukawa, had indirectly helped the development of the bomb by being the first to mathematically show the existence of strong nuclear forces in the universe.

Sheftall notes that while Hiroshima was considered a military target, most of its residents were too young or too old to evacuate; the population had fallen from 420,000 in 1942 to 245,000 in 1945, leaving mostly children, caregivers, adults in war work, government employees and 40,000 soldiers. The book makes no pretense at being ‘objective’ on the subject of nuclear weapons, describing bodies carbonized and blown apart by their impact. “If you are going to defend these weapons’ use, it is morally imperative that you own that image,” Sheftall says, after dismissing antiseptic alternatives such as ‘vaporized.’

“Turn it around in your head a bit. Imagine it happening to ten thousand children or even a single child. Imagine it happening to your child.”

The following contains edited extracts from an interview with David McNeill.

During the recent years the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has rapidly advanced to the rank of a nuclear power, drawing simultaneously lots of attention on itself both by other states and the media. We argue that this means much more than only increase in its weaponry. Combined with its decades old steadfast strive for independence and opposition to the United States, this means a qualitative change in its position in the international system. The theoretical tool used for this analysis is not statistical size, but rather the style of behaviour. Small and great powers tend to have different styles of behaviour. Small powers usually orient towards acting as “good international citizens” performing important integrative and stabilizing tasks for the system, while great powers tend to play classical realist power games, ranging from readiness for military conflict to willingness for occasionally breaking international law. Despite its small size, North Korea systematically behaves like a great power, and its actions can meaningfully be interpreted from that angle.

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.

The book presents personal accounts by veterans of an Army nuclear weapons storage base in Henoko Village, Okinawa during the 1960's in the context of nuclear weapons history, Cold War tensions, and the proposal to use them in Vietnam. They describe their entrances into the Army, training, leave times, re-entry into civilian life, and illnesses associated with radiation exposure three of them later suffered, one of whom died in 2015.

In recent years, successive Australian governments, in coordination with the United States, have responded to the dramatic rise of China with military and economic policies that directly challenge the possibility of accommodation with China.

The discourse of tragedy has significant value in a military context, reminding us of the temptations of hubris, the prevalence of moral dilemmas, and the inescapable limits of foresight. Today, however, this discourse is drawn upon too heavily. Within the tragicized politics of nuclear and drone violence, foreseeable and solvable problems are reconceptualized as intractable dilemmas, and morally accountable agents are reframed as powerless observers. The tragedy discourse, when wrongly applied by policymakers and the media, indulges the very hubris the tragic recognition is intended to caution against. This article clarifies the limits of “tragedy” in the context of military violence and argues for a renewed focus on political responsibility.

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.