THE KILL CHAIN AND THE HEAT DOME

This paper develops across two interlocking sites of analysis: the fiction of Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) oversight in AI-enabled autonomous weapons systems, and the material threat that anthropogenic climate breakdown poses to the crip body attempting to occupy the rooms where knowledge is made. Both are kill chains. Both are running pattern matching on bodies; invoking accountability structures that have, functionally, already closed. The paper examines the HITL doctrine as operationalised in Ukrainian AI drone targeting and the AUKUS Pillar II programme for uncrewed undersea vehicles.[1] Drawing on the explainability gap, the XAI problem at the centre of the author’s doctoral research, to argue that the epistemic concentration produced by autonomous classification systems is a structural feature, not a technical inconvenience. It draws on Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics framework[2] to ask whose ontological assumptions are being operationalised at drone speed, and on Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism[3] to ask what happens when the body in question refuses to be legible to the system looking for it. The second site of analysis is the June 2026 UK heatwave. The Met Office issued a Red Extreme Heat Warning for three consecutive days, with temperatures peaking at a provisional 37.3°C. [4] This was a new June record, the second red alert ever issued, the first being July 2022.[5] The UKHSA explicitly named vulnerable people as at increased risk, directing health and social care services to prepare.[5] The author, a power chair user with heart failure, is scheduled to present a paper on situated agency and explainability at ACM Creativity and Cognition 2026, 13–16 July, Central Saint Martins, London. The question of whether the room will be cool enough for their body to be present in it is not separate from the paper. It is the paper. This paper also names the compressive temporal structure this double exposure produces as a manifestation of Systemic Negative Panic (SNP),[7] the civilisational non-response to convergent crisis theorised across the Brace Brace Collection, operating here at the scale of a single body, a single week, a single room. The acceleration phase has begun.