Politics of Security

Abstract

Th is book has been long in the making, and its journey has been a transnational one. Accordingly, I have accrued many debts over the last few years. My study of the protests against nuclear weapons originates in an Oxford D.Phil. thesis. For making my move to the UK possible, I would like to thank the Rhodes Trust for its generous fi nancial, but also moral and communal support during my time at Oxford. University College provided an ideal community of scholars, and its Old Members' Travel Fund very generously supported many of my research trips to German and British archives. My D.Phil. supervisors, Martin Ceadel and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, provided intellectual support as the project was taking shape: I have learned a great deal from Martin's intellectual rigour and quest for analytical precision, and Hartmut has been a true Doktorvater , whose tolerance and openness for approaches other than his own are a model for scholarship. Ross McKibbin's support for my work, his unrivalled knowledge of Labour Party politics, and his keen interest in comparative perspectives have also been an important infl uence. My D.Phil. examiners, Jane Caplan and Pat Th ane, pushed me to turn the thesis into a real book by encouraging me in subtle ways to think about some of my original assumptions about the protests. Patrick Major, who subsequently outed himself as one of the anonymous reviewers for the Press, also made a number of very astute suggestions that were very helpful in improving the text.Over the course of the gestation of this book, I have learned a great deal by presenting my work to a number of audiences at conferences and workshops and by discussing aspects of

The politics of the unknown: Uncertainty and the nuclear threat in Britain, 1979–1985

“…17-18, andsome contributions in Greiner, Müller, &Walter, 2009). To explore the social and cultural dimensions of the politics of the unknown about the expected effects of nuclear war, this international relations and political science literature could be brought into conversation with work on the cultural history of "the political" (Frevert & Haupt, 2005;Landwehr, 2003;Mergel, 2002), security (Conze, 2005;Conze, 2009;Daase, 2012;Graf, Ressel, & Zwierlein, 2010;Nehring, 2013;Zwierlein, 2012), and insecurity (e.g., Weldes et al, 1999).…”