General Theory of Nuclear Weapons Corpus
Toward a broader account of what the nuclear structure does to the world
The General Theory takes the next step beyond Nuclear Singularity Theory. It asks a larger question: if nuclear weapons have become a single structure rather than a mere pile of separate devices, then what follows from that? What kind of world does that structure produce, and what kinds of behavior does it quietly force on everyone living inside it?
The answer is not just about weapons or deterrence. The Nuclear Weapons Corpus affects how states think, how institutions behave, how global risks interact, and even what counts as serious action. It shapes the larger field. It becomes part of the hidden architecture of modern life.
I am nearing completion on this work and should have it done by June, projected.
One of the central claims of the General Theory is that what people usually call “nuclear war” has never actually happened.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrifying and historically decisive, but they came at the end of a conventional war. They show us something terrible and important, but they do not amount to what doctrine later came to imagine as nuclear war.
In that sense, humanity has spent decades living under the structure of nuclear war without ever really entering the thing that is constantly being modeled, theorized, and threatened.
That creates an obvious question. If we are going to have a theory of Nuclear Weapons Corpus, what good does it do us?
My answer is that a theory like this has to lead somewhere practical. It has to make possible a form of entry into the same level of modeled reality where governments, militaries, and the broader military-industrial world have already been operating for decades.
The official world already lives inside scenarios, simulations, strategic abstractions, and game-theory assumptions about the future. That is part of how it thinks. That is part of how it acts. It does not merely describe a possible nuclear future; it rehearses one.
If that is true, then ordinary people need some way to enter that level of play themselves, not in order to imitate the government, but in order to stop being excluded from the mental space where the future is already being staged.
That is where N-LARPS comes in.
N-LARPS stands for Nuclearistic Live Action Role Playing. The idea is simple: if the system is already operating through scripts, scenarios, symbolic positioning, and future-modeling, then one answer is to build forms in which people can begin operating at that same level themselves.
In other words, if the military-industrial world has been playing out its version of the nuclear future for decades, then other people need a way to enter the field with a different mentality and a different aim.
KardtricK is one of the first N-LARPS in that sense.
It gives people a structured way to enter symbolic and strategic play through an ordinary deck of cards. It trains memory, dreaming, association, and long-range imaginative thinking. It creates a small portable theater in which another relation to the nuclear condition can begin to form.
But for me this did not begin with KardtricK.
My first N-LARP was back in 1986, when I started the Save Madonna from Nuclear War, Inc. movement.
That was already a live-action intervention into the nuclear narrative. It took a subject people thought belonged to experts, officials, and apocalyptic abstractions, and moved it into public symbolic space in another form. Looking back, I would say that was an early example of the same underlying move.
N-LARPS is the broader name for that move. KardtricK is one developed form of it.