Producing Collapse: Nuclear Weapons as Preparation to End Civilization

In the diverse studies of historical collapse presented in this volume, a common thread has been that each civilization faced uncertainty in the timing or cause of collapse. In this chapter, Zia Mian and Benoît Pelopidas present an analysis of nuclear weapons as an “exterminist structure”—an application of modern science to weapons by political, social, and military formations in a system of nation-states that gives ruling elites in a handful of these states the agency to instigate a civilizational collapse, potentially choosing the appointed hour of a thermonuclear holocaust. In motivating their analysis of nuclear collapse, Mian and Pelopidas outline the production of a planetary scale nuclear destructive capacity over the last 75 years alongside the production of its relative invisibility despite a determined continuous contentious politics aimed at confronting this set of exterminist systems and the threats it poses. Their goal is to show how and why the exterminist dangers inherent in the nuclear age and its foreseen possible catastrophic ending endure and have not been and still are not well understood. They show that the inescapable impact of a nuclear collapse on humanity and the environment is a compelling rationale for achieving greater public understanding of this threat and action to keep open and create the human future.