Overkill: Nuclear war and climate crisis as 'states of exception'

Seminar abstract

In the Cold War of the 1980s, Stan Openshaw (University of Leeds) and his academic colleagues produced original and sophisticated computer models which concluded that the UK government had vastly underestimated casualties and property damage in the event of a nuclear attack.

The academics believed that these models would lead to policy acceptance that any military move which might provoke a nuclear attack would be unacceptable as casualties could be in the order of eighty percent.

However, Openshaw was unaware that the UK government had already considered a lower threshold of destruction would be an existential threat to the nation and were already considering extreme authoritarian plans for national reconstruction.

Governments in crisis operate in the ‘state of exception’, considering state logics and brutally pragmatic, experimental, forms of response that academics often misjudge in their conceptions of policy impact.

This perspective is used to consider UK government responses to the ‘climate crisis’ as experimental states of exception.

Booking

This seminar is free to attend and we ask you to book your place in advance.

Speaker bio

John Preston is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Leadership Fellow in Conflict, Crime and Security.

John works on the sociology of disasters, emergencies and existential threat. He also works on the sociology of education with reference to class, race, Higher Education, Vocational Education and Adult Education.

His work considers social inequalities in preparedness for disasters and emergencies. This has involved analysis of preparedness campaigns and films from the Cold War in the UK and US, reappraising working class children's agency in the Aberfan disaster, community case studies on public information for terrorist attacks, comparative analysis of national cultures of preparedness and critiquing popular conceptions of existential threat from nuclear war to A.I. 'super-intelligence'.

His latest book 'Grenfell Tower: Preparedness, Race and Disaster Capitalism' (2019) examines the role of fire safety information in the tower block fire.