Any concept which — like "exterminism" — collates all the "inertial," "irrational," "symmetrical" and institutionally "autonomous" aspects of the arms race into a single over-riding process will make it harder to understand the purposeful, strategic function of the current arms build-up within the larger context of the New Cold War.

Trump’s election has raised the specter of nuclear war in a way unseen since the 1980s, the last time a global mass movement pushed back against the threat of nuclear catastrophe. One of the major intellectual forces behind that mass movement was E.P. Thompson. With the utopian hopes surrounding the ban treaty now meeting the actually existing dystopia of US policy, it is high time for an update to Thompson’s seminal concept of “exterminism.”