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Short abstract

From atomic stockpiles to energy-hungry server farms, this contribution compares nuclear deterrence and AI Cold War. Reading MAD across both domains, it explores how existential risk and apocalyptic scenarios function as techniques for performing sovereignty over globally entangled infrastructures.

Long abstract

In April 1984, Jacques Derrida described nuclear war as "fabulously textual." By this, he pointed to its reliance on systems of textual communication and to its status as a fable that can only be imagined or spoken about. The ultimate threat, therefore, was not physical but the "remainderless destruction of the archive": the annihilation of the conditions that make culture possible. Nuclear war thus functioned as an ever-threatening yet never-materialized horizon; an imminent apocalypse that structured global politics precisely by remaining virtual.

This contribution brings Derrida’s insight to the present AI Cold War. Comparisons between AI and nuclear weapons increasingly circulate under a shared acronym: MAD. While Mutually Assured Destruction stabilized geopolitical order through the stockpiling of warheads, Model Autophagy Disorder names the degradation of large language models through recursive self-consumption. The parallel is more than rhetorical: it reveals how existential risk organizes geopolitical power.

As part of the Cold War theater, nuclear deterrence was performed through the logic of accumulation and the indefinite stockpiling of atomic bombs. AI sovereignty, conversely, is enacted through energy-hungry server farms whose operation depends on continuous electrical supply. The renewed turn to nuclear power exposes a striking inversion: the infrastructure that emerged out of the nuclear age now underwrites the potential future development of AI. The exploration of future apocalyptic AI scenarios, in this context, has a productive role to play. Namely, it offers, as Robert J. Lifton noted, the extension of one’s imagination to its limit to prevent that which exceeds imagination itself.