In the Anthropocene, International Relations must confront the possibility of anthropogenic extinction. Recent, insightful attempts to advance new vocabularies of planet politics tend to demote the profound historical and intellectual links between our current predicament and the nuclear age. In contrast, we argue that it is vital to revisit the nuclear-environment nexus of the Cold War to trace genealogies of today's intricate constellation of security problems. We do so by reappraising the work of Jonathan Schell (1943–2014), author of The Fate of the Earth (1982), who came to regard extinction as a defining feature of the nuclear age. We show how a deep engagement with nuclear weapons led Schell to an understanding of the Earth as a complex, delicate ecology and fed into a sophisticated, Arendtian theory of extinction. Despite its limitations and tensions, we argue that Schell's work remains deeply relevant for rethinking human–Earth relations and confronting the Anthropocene.

中文翻译：

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核武器、灭绝和人类世：重新评价乔纳森·谢尔

在人类世，国际关系必须面对人为灭绝的可能性。最近，推进行星政治新词汇的富有洞察力的尝试往往会降低我们当前的困境与核时代之间深刻的历史和知识联系。相反，我们认为重新审视冷战的核环境关系以追溯当今错综复杂的安全问题的谱系至关重要。我们通过重新评估 Jonathan Schell (1943–2014) 的工作来做到这一点，他是地球的命运(1982)，他开始将灭绝视为核时代的一个决定性特征。我们展示了与核武器的深入接触如何使 Schell 将地球理解为一个复杂、微妙的生态系统，并融入了一个复杂的阿伦德灭绝理论。尽管存在局限和紧张，但我们认为，谢尔的工作对于重新思考人类与地球的关系和面对人类世仍然具有重要意义。