MA D theory: nuclear deterrence and the thanatopolitical limits of Empire

Considerable attention has been turned in recent years to the processes by which war has become globalised. As numerous political commentators have argued, our contemporary era is witness to a new relationship between politics and warfare, one that has dramatically reordered the post-Westphalian system of international state relations in the wake of the Cold War.1 Obviously, militarised violence has not dissipated in the twenty-first century. Contemporary interest in war has in no small part been sparked by the war on terror and a growing proliferation of political violence across the globe. Warfare has, however, increasingly been oriented around the maintenance or disruption of world peace and order, a form of war associated with neoliberal projects for global governance rather than the territorial strategic objectives of nation states. Much of the analysis of this trend towards new forms of warfare has coalesced around a concern with the biopolitical dimensions of war.2 Deriving largely from the first volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality and given impetus by the subsequent publication of his 1975–76 lecture series at the Collège de France, Society Must be Defended, the concept has been treated at length by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their Empire trilogy and in the work of Giorgio Agamben in their efforts to understand the operation of sovereignty, globalisation, and modern political, military, and economic structures (Agamben 1998; Foucault 1981, 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005, 2009). A growing body of work associated with their insights has now developed to explore how war operates in the biopolitical mode as a practice designed to preserve and promote life.Implicit in much of this work on new wars, therefore, is an acknowledgement that we have seen the end of Cold War era apocalyptic threats of global nuclear annihilation (Cirincione 2008, p.85). Military strategists themselves have been central to such developments, announcing a revolution in military affairs in response to the end of the geopolitical strategies imposed by the Cold War that would see war built around information networks, automated control, and precision munitions (Bousquet 2009). The USA notably undertook a massive programme to reduce its arsenal of nuclear weapons immediately after the First Gulf War (Cirincione 2008, p.69). It is claimed with increasing frequency that nuclear weapons no longer possess any serious threat to the world. Yet however much wars of biopolitics may be seen to have displaced those of geopolitics, the colossal military infrastructure of the Cold War era and its nuclear armaments has remained in place. The world is still confronted by vast nuclear weapons systems constituted by fleets of aircraft and naval ships, satellites, missiles, military bases, think tanks, military nuclear reactors, and research programmes.This article questions whether the geopolitics of nuclear war can be entirely dismissed from the biopolitics of contemporary military conflict. It does so by examining one of the few studies to have considered the ongoing significance of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era, Hardt and Negri's Empire trilogy and their treatment of nuclear weapons in relation to the sovereignty of Empire. Yet although they propose that nuclear weapons play a fundamental role in structuring a global Empire, they nonetheless insist that the deterritorialising operation of biopolitical capital means that the prospect of nuclear conflict has begun to simply fade away. By revisiting an earlier body of philosophical work on nuclear weapons, this article proposes that we can see continuity between their work and an earlier postmodern line of thought on the nature of nuclear deterrence. Drawing on Carl Schmitt as a key figure in contemporary thought on sovereignty, and offering a re-reading of his thought via this earlier generation of thinkers, it will examine the relationship between air power, atomic weaponry, and the political ordering of a global nomos in order to conceptualise deterrence in the present moment. This article proposes that the geopolitics of nuclear deterrence not only continues to underpin the biopolitics of Empire, but that it renders Empire a more indeterminate structure in world affairs than Hardt and Negri suggest, governed by a reigning thanatopolitical geostrategy of death as much as a biopolitics of life. The largely overlooked nuclear dimensions of postmodern theory can remind us of the actuality of that theory, and of the ongoing salience of the nuclear situation that inspired it