Geographers and Nuclear War: Why We Lack Influence on Public Policy

Issues of nuclear war and deterrence are inherently geographical, yet our disciplinary literature is either silent on the subject or poorly focused. The result is very little impact on public policy. Through a review of this literature, seven potential research areas are identified: peace education and professional responsibility, environmental effects of nuclear war, post-nuclear landscapes, emergency management, peace movements, societal transformations based on nuclear war preparation, and cartography. I suggest that there are two reasons why the discipline's contribution to the public policy debates on this issue has been so small: the lack of a comprehensive geographic theory to explain the impact of nuclear war and the fragmentation of the discipline. Geography's greatest strength is its ability to focus on a wide range of interdisciplinary theories and analytical techniques and apply these to the understanding of specific regions or areas. Concentrating on the effects of nuclear war and war preparation on specific places through the use of micro-level analyses, combining both human and physical geography, can provide new perspectives to the current policy debates.