Hiroshima City University and online

Wednesday October 29, 5–7pm Hiroshima (8–10am London, 11am–1pm Amman)

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nuclear-futures-from-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-to-palestine-and-beyond-tickets-1845769940579

Join ActforPal for a roundtable discussion with Peter Trnka (Memorial University), Aoe Tanami (Hiroshima City University), Nakamura Taira (Hiroshima University), Tahrir Hamdi (Arab Open University), Kaori Hatsumi (Seinan Gakuin University), Laleh Khalili (University of Exeter), Fazil Moradi (Hiroshima University) and Ilan Pappé (University of Exeter).

Questions will be taken from the audience and the international transdisciplinary scholarly journal, Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, will publish the roundtable discussion and related work in its tenth issue, scheduled for summer 2026.

The world faces an intensifying existential tension, brought on by spreading planetary racism and the proliferation of biopolitical warfare of genocidal proportions, with the imminent danger of nuclear war. The at-the-limit character of nuclear bombing latches onto the shape of racialized thinking, also existentially extreme and intense in its separation of the human from the nonhuman. The politics of race-making and racist thinking loves the idea of an annihilating, people-erasing bomb, to the point of pathological suicidal ideation.

Following the inauguration of nuclear racism at the hands of the US in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, new forms are developing in the colonial 21st century. The threat of nuclear bombing of Palestine by Israel has been a significant possibility since the 1960s and forms the presumptive basis of the unspoken racist contract governing the de facto ‘right’ of Israel to do whatever it wants before its pathologically failed sponsor-father, the US. Israel’s packaging of its nuclear weaponry in the form of the Samson Option shows the existentially extreme and intense, racist and destructive—including mass-suicidally self-destructive—truth of this way of thinking.

The fact that Israel is a nuclear power remains largely unacknowledged publicly while the US and EU continue to direct disproportionate scrutiny toward Iran, a non-nuclear state. This disparity is deeply tied to the unfinished imperial desire for planetary domination and the systemic and systematic dehumanization of Palestinians and, more broadly, the peoples and nations in what is naturalized as the ‘Global South’. What is the face of nuclear futures today, at Hiroshima, at Nagasaki, in Palestine, and beyond? And how can it be confronted?