By presenting nuclear extinction as the single most important event, the AFF naturalizes and legitimizes the on-going colonization of the indigenous periphery.

By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The "real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkbove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe. The history of nuclear violence offers, at best, a reality effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succinctly, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local effects." Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "delocalization" of nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe. The elevation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear criticism through which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze: nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of "extinction" is configured. Herein, the configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction" reveal their interconnection via the "absolutization" of the strategic gaze. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived through the strategic gaze. In other words, the image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a figure on which the notion of extinction is being constructed. Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in locating the subject involved in the conceptualization of extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural origin: "who will suffer this loss, which we somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it; we will be dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears over their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already."