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The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance. The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. The key concept is that of the archipelago - a network of nuclear facilities spread throughout the Soviet territory, but mutually reliant on each other and densely connected. The story traces the emergence of nuclear science and technology for military and civilian purposes through to the post-Soviet Russian nuclear corporations as providers of resources and technology. The book explains how nuclear developments in the Soviet Union interacted with processes of environmental and landscape change. The spatial lens offers an analytically fruitful and pedagogically stimulating way to comprehend the nuclear histories of the Soviet Union and its successor states

Military geography in Australia is being revived. Under the Institute of Australian Geographers a Strategic and Military Geography Study Group has been formed to contribute some new thinking on military geography. Current themes are: strategic security geography, strategic military geography and military landscape ecology. The initial work of the group is framed by four key tenets: thinking "big picture" and taking a holistic view; using systems thinking; taking a participatory approach and engaging broadly; and using a multi-level learning process that maps across tactical, operational and strategic military domains. These concepts are applied through methodologies such as Systemic Action Research (Burns 2009) and are described in Holloway et al (2015) as an analytical framework that includes physical geography, human geography and cyber-geography. These explorations are firmly based on existing theories and practices in military geography and integrative geography, and seek to consider inter-linked fields such as post-conflict activities and humanitarian aid. The outcomes of the group's inaugural meeting included consideration of climate change impacts on the military and on security, Defence land management and military ecology, Defence-civilian information sharing and joint operations, teaching and using geography within Defence. Problem based and mission based research, integrated researchThe paper outlines this new thinking, some results and discusses potential opportunities for collaborations with other researchers interested in strategic and military geography.

In 1986, 585 out of 5,686 members of the Association of American Geographers declared their allegiance to the Historical Geography Specialty Group; among 50 AAG specialty groups, the historical geographers ranked 7th. Yet one prominent human geographer regards historical geography as "overdetermined," an "empty concept" conveying "few (if any) significant analytical distinctions" (Dear 1988: 270). Dear's argument is that, by definition, all geography should be historical, since "the central object in human geography is to understand the simultaneity of time and space in structuring social process." So the only subdisciplines of human geography which have any intellectual coherence are those focused on distinct processes—political, economic, social. To me, even this distinction is unrealistic and impracticable for research purposes. But Dear does not go so far as to argue that historical geography or other "overdetermined," "multidimensional," or "peripheral" subdisciplines are wrong, merely that they are incidental to geography's "intellectual identity."