ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Exploring the normalization of civilization-ending infrastructures in nuclear history via three new objects of study

• In Event: Nuclear History as Global History: Current Debates and New Perspectives 3

English Abstract

Environmental history has recently documented how ‘modern disinhibitions’ (Fressoz 2024) have enabled planetary scale risk taking in the realm of energy policy and foreseeably harmful planetary scale processes while being wrongly portrayed as ignorance of the risks that were being taken and absence of reflexivity before 1970 because the possibility of modern disinhibition was not considered and grounded in primary sources. Similarly, this paper proposes to engage with the normalization of civilization-ending infrastructures in the field of nuclear history. It does so by introducing three relatively new objects of study of global nuclear history which de-normalize this entrenchment: the funding of knowledge production regarding global nuclear policy (Egeland and Pelopidas 2025; Evangelista 2025; Wilson 2025); the role of visual popular culture as a necessary mediation to overcome citizens’ disbelief in what scholarship has established about the condition of nuclear vulnerability and not just as a mode of representation (Pelopidas 2021); and the role of factors beyond control in the study of why unwanted nuclear explosions have been avoided (Pelopidas 2017; Lebow and Pelopidas 2023; Sherwin 2020; Plokhiy 2021). The paper explores whether their absence from the field until recently could help explain this effect of normalization.

Author

• Benoit Pelopidas