Michael Gardiner: Empire of Deterrence

Repeater Books, 2025, softcover, 165 pages, 19 x 14 cm 

Empire of Deterrence reveals how nuclear strategy, once framed as a tool for security, has become an invisible but ever-present law — shaping the very foundations of political authority, economic order, and cultural imagination in the Anglosphere. Rather than merely deterring conflict, nuclear logic now smothers dissent, flattens alternatives, and enforces a regime of stasis masquerading as stability.

Drawing on a vast range of Cold War-era thought and culture — from the strategic philosophy of Paul Virilio to the haunting dramas of Stephen Poliakoff, the aesthetics of Folk Horror, and the metaphysical critiques of the Kyoto School — this book traces how deterrence became hardwired into governance, ideology, and the feedback loops of Western managerial culture.

At once theoretical and urgent, Empire of Deterrence asks: How did nuclear logic come to rule us? Can we break its psychic grip? And is it still possible to think and act beyond the empire it sustains?