ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a critical dissection of the relationship between realism and utopianism. At first sight, utopianism appears to fit uncomfortably with most forms of political realism, which historically, and rightfully, given their fundamental commitments, have been ill-disposed towards fantastic blueprints of future societies. Naturally, given the Cold War context, the hope that Mills invested in the sociological imagination also extended to issues of war and peace. Nuclear realist proposals for moral reform entailed a quest to reopen the future, a quest that was critical of a technocratic, anticipatory approach within future studies. If the dominant mode of seeing the future, both during and after the thermonuclear revolution, was based on statistical probability, associated with a focus on quantification, foresight and diagnosis, the nuclear realist approach to the future evinced what Arjun Appadurai calls an 'ethics of possibility'.
