[SE]

In delineating the notion of "nuclear war," both of these discourses shape an intriguing leap: from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the "possible" nuclear explosions in the indefinite-yet-ever-closer-to-the-present future. Thus any nuclear explosions after World War II do not quality as nuclear war in the cognitive grid of conventional nuclear discourse. Significantly, most nuclear explosions after World War II took place in the sovereign territories of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. This critical historical fact has been contained in the domain of nuclear testing. Such obliteration of the history of undeclared nuclear warfare by nuclear discourse does not merely posit by the deficiency of the discourse. Rather, what it does to reveal the late capitalist form of domination, whereby an ongoing extermination process of the periphery is blocked from constituting itself as a historical fact.

-Masahide T. Kato

appearing in Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze