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.

Le 13 février 1960, à 7h04, au milieu du Sahara algérien - encore français - retentissait la première explosion atomique française. « Hourra pour la France ! Depuis ce matin, elle est plus forte et plus fière », s'exclame le général de Gaulle par télégramme. Avec cette explosion commence l'histoire des essais nucléaires français, qui aura pendant six ans le Sahara pour théâtre. Entre février 1960 et avril 1961, quatre essais atmosphériques - c'est-à-dire des explosions à l'air libre - auront lieu sur le site de Reggane.

The possibility of thermonuclear war has in many ways shaped the agendas of History and International Relations. Rigorous counterfactual analysis effectively demonstrates that the risks of unintended and runaway escalation were higher than generally assumed. Nuclear war planning and proposals for arms control and disarmament are based on imagined future scenarios. Current thinking about the future rarely goes beyond extrapolation. Counterfactual analysis provides a more sophisticated foundation for forward looking narratives in contrast to the usual extrapolation of present trends.

There are a multitude of terms describing the set of decisions leading to the final outcome of a given actor not possessing nuclear weapons: restraint and rollback are only two of them, along with forbearance and reversal. This chapter reviews the problems with the current conceptualizations and proposes another analytically and politically relevant concept, i.e., renunciation.

Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Stein’s We all lost the Cold War remains an important and widely quoted contribution in the fields of political science and political psychology twenty years after its publication. As opposed to other classics on the so- called “Cuban Missile Crisis”, which are also analysed in this edited volume, this book is not exclusively focused on t his crisis. It is recognized as “the most acute confrontation of the Cold War” (p.5) and is one of the two case studies in the book, the other one being the 1973 Middle Eastern crisis.

France and the UK have had different approaches to the possibility of nuclear disarmament; these derive from the different post- Second World War national narratives in which the development of nuclear weapons has been embedded. This started from two different attitudes toward the NATO Alliance and its nuclear component, two different sets of lessons learned from the 1956 Suez crisis (Pelopidas 2015a), and it culminated in two different reactions to the increase in nuclear disarmament advocacy worldwide, which is the focus of this chapter.

In this chapter, I discuss the future of US extended nuclear deterrence and the possibility of change in nuclear weapons and alliance policies. While several chapters in this book document and analyze the limits of extended deterrence arrangements, the goal of this chapter is to take a step back and look at the understanding of history that frames possible and desirable change in US nuclear weapons policy and submit it to historical critique based on European case studies...

In this paper, I address three of the most frequently used arguments for maintaining a significant measure of dependence for international security on nuclear deterrence both globally and regionally:
1. Nuclear weapons have deterred great powers from waging war against each other, so a world without nuclear weapons will lead to, or at least might encourage, great-power war.