Description
Climate change and nuclear danger are structuring forces in world politics, owing to their shared potential to reshape, disrupt, and collapse prevailing global order and human life as we know it. How do national security organisations imagine these existential concerns, and to what ends do they deploy these imaginaries? Which accounts are upheld and valorised, and which are suppressed? To answer these questions, this study analyses how climate change and nuclear danger are embodied in scenarios, simulations, and wargaming activities in the context of the American national-security system. Borrowing from Science and Technology Studies, it defines and describes how these organisations develop a shared, existential sociotechnical imaginary. By doing so, it uncovers important ways that these organisations anticipate, frame, and crucially construct the future, thus advancing our understanding of both imaginative processes in the national security context, as well as the likely trajectory of response and governance to crucial existential problems defining 21st century international politics.
