Hope under the shadow of the mushroom cloud: from the crisis of nuclear modernity to the “miracle” of a world free of nuclear weapons

This article reconstructs Hannah Arendt’s arguments in relation to crisis and hope against the rise of modern society, with a focus on the global crisis posed by nuclear weapons. Although Arendt was critical of twentieth century utopianism, she provides a standpoint for non-perfectionist utopian hope in the twin phenomena of natality and political action. Braiding together Arendt’s account of the modern world with the invention of atomic weapons, this article provides a twofold contribution to understanding the emergence of nuclear modernity and the possibility of averting looming nuclear catastrophe. First, the entanglement between the production of nuclear weapons and mass consumer capitalism spotlights the role of technoscientific instrumentality in facilitating organized complicity with modes of destruction capable of extinguishing all life on the planet. Second, Arendt’s ontology of natality sheds light on the potential of human beings to imagine novel ways of living and acting together, which speaks to the “miraculous” capacity of human freedom to bring about transformative sociopolitical change. Several initiatives regarding nuclear weapons non-proliferation and abolition are examined to demonstrate what transformative change has been achieved already as well as what still may be realistically hoped for to reach a world without nuclear weapons.