Introduction: Problematising the Maintenance of Nuclear Weapons

Abstract

Atomic weapons are useful because of the stories people tell about them, the fears those stories inspire, and the actions by which people respond to those fears" -John Canaday 1This book investigates how it is possible that a state maintains nuclear weapons. 2 This is unusual. The conventional nuclear research agenda does not consider the maintenance of nuclear weapons much of a puzzle. In short, nuclear weapons are seen as so obviously useful for a state engaged in "self-help", that no right-minded government would ever willingly give them up (Chapter 2). Nuclear weapon possession has thus prompted a great deal of investigation into how best to manage these weapons, but far less on how states maintain them. Indeed, Security Studies, informed by Realism (e.g. Waltz, 1979), was traditionally concerned with 1 Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2000 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.2 Doty (1993, p. 298) provides in my view the most lucid account of what "howpossible" questions entail: "In posing such a question, I examine how meanings are produced and attached to various social subjects/objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions which create certain possibilities and preclude others. What is explained is not why a particular outcome obtained, but rather how the subjects, objects, and interpretive dispositions were socially constructed such that certain practices were made possible".