Proliferation optimism is the controversial theoretical and worrisome practical product of neorealism. This article reviews and ultimately rejects proliferation optimism by showing how it actually reproduces what it seeks to eliminate: pessimism. This article interprets proliferation optimism through the lens of Burkean conservatism and contends—adopting the formative reasoning of neorealism and optimism—that as the ideal nuclear society which optimism envisions resembles the ideal conservative society Burke describes in his Reflections, that optimism reproduces a core belief of conservatism: flawed human nature. The article contends that, contrary to the first principles of neorealism, an unheralded view of human nature operates within optimism to yield its reservations about widespread proliferation which, in turn, reveal optimism's essential pessimism. Illustrating how optimism is pessimism may diminish its theoretical and practical allure.
International relations theory overdetermines proliferation but few states possess nuclear arms. This article maintains the linguistic construction of ‘proliferation’ accounts for the international nonnuclear order. Following an overview of its approach, the article begins with a review of earlier works and notes the inability of ‘nuclear language studies’ to account for the order of rejection rather than acquisition of nuclear arms. The article traces that limitation to a practical assumption about the world that animates scholars to attend to how wordsdistortrather than create reality. The article then introduces a version of constructivism that claims speech acts produce constitutive rules that create what ‘is’ and oblige order (as ‘same use’) to suggest how language accounts for the order that turns on rejection of nuclear weapons. Finally, the article illustrates how states, following this constructivist process, often used discursive practices that emphasized the ‘unnatural’ to create ‘proliferation’ between 1958 and 1968.
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