Empire of Deterrence

<b>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</b><br><br><i>Empire of Deterrence</i> 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>At once theoretical and urgent, <i>Empire of Deterrence</i> 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?