 This practical-theoretical approach led those associated with "Arena" into a number of key debates and causes of the 1980s.The renewal of a 'hot' Cold War by the Reagan administration and of the nuclear arms race – 'exterminism' in E. P. Thompson's phrase – was analysed as an over-determined consequence of an instrumentalised, maximally abstracted way of life.Advances in medical research such as in-vitro fertilisation were given a more critical account, examining the manner in which such technologies were harbingers of a wider cultural contradiction arising from the reconstruction of nature at the molecular biological level.