Conceptions of the Bomb in the Early Nuclear Age

Abstract

This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing innovative new agendas for approaches to, and understandings of, peace and conflict studies and International Relations. Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have contributed to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to the search for positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace. New perspectives on peacemaking in practice and in theory, their implications for the international peace architecture, and different conflict-affected regions around the world, remain crucial. This series' contributions offers both theoretical and empirical insights into many of the world's most intractable conflicts and any subsequent attempts to build a new and more sustainable peace, responsive to the needs and norms of those who are its subjects.

Introduction: New Paths in Civil Defence History

“…Second, the nature and history of civil defence efforts suggest that they contain a deep, perhaps even constitutive, ambivalence between fear and hope-an ambivalence that has also been found in wider studies of nuclear culture (Boyer 1985;Kinsella 2005;Hogg 2016;Sylvest 2020b). Significantly, however, while the hopes invested in civil defence activities may have had utopian qualities (see, e.g., Rose 2001), they just as often reflected a longing for maintaining or extending into a postwar situation the operation of existing norms and aspirations governing social life.…”

Untitled

“…The processes of creating nuclear weapons in these countries have been highlighted in numerous studies. In particular, C. Sylvest studied the role of nuclear weapons in the intellectual history of the first decades of the Cold War, mainly in the USA and Europe (Sylvest, 2020). In his conclusion, the researcher identified four points of contention: questions of morality, questions of use, questions of stability, and a more amorphous set of questions related to the human condition in the nuclear age.…”

Superweapons and the myth of technological peace

“…Analysis of the superweapon has been mostly limited, for understandable reasons, to the nuclear realm. Historical accounts of nuclear development and proliferation highlight early and lasting optimism in the "war-ending" potential of this technology (Franklin, 1988;Smith, 2007;Sylvest, 2020). Critical security scholarship has further detailed the ideological, technopolitical, and utopian assumptions that underpin the historical and contemporary nuclear order (Cohn, 1987;Egeland, 2021;Hecht, 2012;Peoples, 2019).…”