Their fear of the nuclear east is rooted in racist and neocolonial logic and should be rejected.

At various moments, Western nuclear powers have censured India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, and Israel for their efforts to acquire nuclear weaponry. Bush’s "axis of evil" phrase is only the most recent version of a longstanding discourse in which nuclearity was defined as appropriate for some nations but not for others. In return, these inappropriately nuclear nations have condemned the NPT and IAEA safeguards as neo- colonial. Thus the nuclear and the post-colonial both confront and depend on each other repeatedly in a battle for geopolitical legitimacy. The regimes of discourse produced in these confrontations shape the possibilities for action, insistence on the illegitimacy of "third" or "second" world nuclear aspirations means, in effect, that attempts to persuade these nations not to develop nuclear weapons are decried as neo-colonial, and are therefore themselves illegitimate. Because the dichotomies of nuclear rupture-talk tend to erase national or regional political complexities and insist on a rupture from colonial relations, they have become – somewhat paradoxically – worse than useless in non-proliferation efforts. On another front, consider the US's latest anti-ballistic missile defense fantasies. These descend directly from unrequited Cold War lusts embodied in systems such as SAGE and SDI. These systems never worked to fulfill their stated purpose of automatically tracking and shooting down incoming bombers (in the case of SAGE) or missiles from space (in the case of SDI)-though they did work in other, political and economic ways. There’s ample evidence that the latest version of a protective shield won't work either: its detection systems can’t tell the most basic differences between a decoy and a warhead. There's also good reason to think it won't work politically, These problems don't seem to bother most lawmakers in Capitol Hill or the White House, however. Insisting on the "post-ness" of the post-Cold War world, ABM proponents argue that these systems will defend America from "rogue states," despite bloody evidence that "states" aren't necessarily our worst enemy, and that you don't in fact need a nuclear missile (or even biological or chemical weaponry) to terrify a superpower. No matter: the fantasists have apparently persuaded the nation to cling bravely to the conviction that technopolitical power can be circumscribed and fully specified; that despite the "diabolical" clevemess of turning box-cutters and airplanes into extra- ordinarily effective weapons, the true threat comes from those good old Cold War technologies: missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Here the "axis of evil" slogan helps the fantasist cause mightily, since it defines states that could-if they were stupid and insane enough-manage to lob a missile over to US territory. Of course, since even the fantasists must admit that missile defense doesn't currently work, Bush and his Dr Strangeloves have several new plans allegedly aimed at foiling such scenarios. Plan A: attack Iraq. The justifications for such an attack oscillate. Some days Iraq's potential possession of nuclear weapons gets trotted out. When the imminence of Iraqi nuclearity is contested, the need for a "regime change" is invoked, At this writing, the fate of Plan A is very much up in the air, And debates about it have deflected attention from Plan B, which is in some ways bigger, more sweeping, and likely to keep the military-industrial complex happy for years to come: the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). In this latest manifestation of nuclear rupture-talk, the US would develop tactical nuclear weapons to burrow into underground bunkers in which the "axis of evil" might be confectioning nuclear. chemical. or biological weapons. (This is not the only aim of the NPR, but I`lI limit myself to this for this paper.) Plan B seemed to surprise observers, but as recently as October 2001 congressman Steven Buyer eerily presaged elements of the NPR when he advocated plugging up Afghan caves with tactical nuclear weapons-an idea also favored by several other Republican representatives. Plan B has been both decried and praised as a post (or post-post-?) Cold War plan: either way. observers view the NPR as technopolitical mpture. Its opponents claim that this is the first time the US has contemplated using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear States; they forget Korea and Vietnam. Proponents claim that September ll signaled the death-knell of traditional nuclear deterrence; in the era of suicide bombers, nuclear retaliation is no longer a protective threat. They funher insist that such mini-nukes (a cutesy designation to soften the blow?), aimed at burrowing deep underground, wouldn`t cause widespread radioactive devastation»- this in the face of clear evidence that such weapons could never go deep enough to be significantly contained. Like its predecessors, this latest manifestation of nuclear rupture-talk is aimed at soothing and/or terrifying its audience. And like its predecessors, what it decidedly does not do is leave room for complexities. The portion of the NPR aimed at "rogue states" leapfrogs over the deterrent posed by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction because these states don 't have arsenals the size of Russia’s. In initial public discussions of the NPR there was- weirdly, given September 11-no sense that other forms of retaliation might be possible. No sense that states subjected to nuclear attack might have angry friends. Certainly no admission of the ways in which imperial power regimes remain embedded in our own technopolitical systems. And ongoing total incomprehension of why and how former empires might want to Strike back. Just as the stark dichotomies posited by the Cold War world got fuzzier the closer you examined them, so too for today's dichotomies. Consider my personal favorite: the line between nuclear and non-nuclear. I’ve argued that even during the Cold War it was not in fact all that clear what was nuclear diplomacy and what wasn't. But in those good old days, you knew what nuclear weapons were (or at least you thought you did). Now, it's not so apparent. Do munitions loaded up with depleted uranium count as "nuclear"? Not if you're NATO or the U.S. using them in the Balkans or the Gulf War. But if you’re a terrorist contemplating packing a bomb with radioactive material purchased on the black market, you’ve violated a fundamental taboo. By crossing the nuclear/non-nuclear divide, you`ve committed an act of pollution: you’ve made a "dirty bomb." (One does wonder which bombs are the clean ones.) What qualities such bombs as "dirty" is not so much the technical infraction of mixing the "nuclear" with the "conventional" but rather the technopolitics of who’s doing the mixing. how, and to what ends. The stubborn persistence of global technopolitical hierarchies figures here in important ways, most interestingly in the "how" part: calling these bombs "dirty" signals not just moral outrage at technological pollution, but also disdain for the inability of the bomb builders to produce a "real" nuclear weapon. My point, of course, is not that it should be acceptable for terrorists to make radioactive weapons of any kind, or that Saddam Hussein should be allowed to develop weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it’s that the current shape of global technopolitics has deep roots in the dialectics between nuclear and post-colonial rupture-talk, between nuclear and post-colonial technopolitics. These dialectics have defined the parameters for global power relations, and shaped geopolitical subjectivities in multiple registers and in ways whose significance we have barely begun to grasp, lf we are indeed in a "post" or a "post-post-" Cold War world. then it’s the same kind of "post-ness" that we find in the "post-colonial." The infrastructures and discourses of Cold War technopolitics continue to shape the parameters of global and local action, just as the infrastructures and discourses of colonialism do, We ignore those roots-and the contradictions they produce-at our peril.