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Written by a leading scholar in the field of nuclear weapons and international relations, this book examines 'the problem of order' arising from the existence of weapons of mass destruction. This central problem of international order has its origins in the nineteenth century, when industrialization and the emergence of new sciences, technologies and administrative capabilities greatly expanded states' abilities to inflict injury, ushering in the era of total war. It became acute in the mid-twentieth century, with the invention of the atomic bomb and the pre-eminent role ascribed to nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It became more complex after the end of the Cold War, as power structures shifted, new insecurities emerged, prior ordering strategies were called into question, and as technologies relevant to weapons of mass destruction became more accessible to non-state actors as well as states. William Walker explores how this problem is conceived by influential actors, how they have tried to fashion solutions in the face of many predicaments, and why those solutions have been deemed effective and ineffective, legitimate and illegitimate, in various times and contexts.

William Walker's original analysis of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding offers a challenging and provocative assessment of Locke's importance as a thinker, bridging the gap between philosophical and literary-critical discussion of his work. He presents Locke as a foundational figure who defines the epistemological and ontological ground on which eighteenth-century and Romantic literature operate and eventually diverge. He is revealed as a crucial figure for emerging modernity, less the familiar empiricist innovator and more the proto-Nietzschean thinker whose text fosters hitherto unsuspected instabilities and promotes a new kind of rhetorical force to counterbalance them. Walker's reading of Locke is at once finely attentive to the text and engagingly resourceful in placing the Essay in its broadest philosophical and historical context

Separated civil plutonium should be formally regarded as a waste, not a fuel that has value. It is time for governments and industries to acknowledge – everywhere – that civil reprocessing, plutonium's provider, is a waste-generating and complicating technology, a source of dangers and burdens rather than putative benefits. Much better solutions to spent fuel management and energy production now exist. Long unwanted as fuel by utilities, immense stocks of plutonium have accumulated in France, Japan, Russia, and the UK from reprocessing programs launched in the 1970s. Politically embedded, they continued long after the "plutonium economy" and its fast breeder reactors had lost credibility. China, a recent advocate, should beware of the costs of going down this road and of stoking insecurities in Asia and beyond if connections to weapon programs are feared. Drawing upon a recent book by Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, and Jungmin Kang, this essay provides a fresh perspective on plutonium and reprocessing's troubled international histories, including histories of imagined futures that have so heavily influenced their politics and economics. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed