Nuclear politics: beyond positivism

Abstract

What is it possible to say, or think, about nuclear weapons today? The answer will depend less on what you know than on who you are: on where you are situated, and on what the background rules of memory, discourse and research that shape your community's understanding of the nuclear problem are. Are you Russian, American, or Iranian? Are you a strategist in the Department of Defense or a Washington DC beltway think tank, or a Marshall Islander or Navajo native American struggling with the legacy of testing and mining? In a small way, this special issue of Critical Studies on Security aims to highlight the discursive architectures, and the material stakes, of the politics of knowledge around nuclear weapons. This politics was brought home to me, once again, in New York City a year before this issue went to press. Over the course of a long conversation with one of the contributors, someone who has moved between government, think tanks and academia, they remarked that nuclear disarmament remains an almost unspeakable notion in the United States. At best, it is not seen as geopolitically realistic or germane to US national security; at worst, its concerted advocacy would be damaging to one's career. My eyes flared in surprise; as believable as it was, it still seemed shocking. Did not the US President give a speech in a European capital evoking a world, many decades hence, without nuclear weapons? (Obama 2009) Had not four former US leadersthe so-called 'gang of four'made a similar call and their voices been joined by numerous former cabinet members, generals and political leaders? (Burke 2009, 507, 511; Schultz and Goodby 2015) How could the think tanks and university schools, known for their hundreds of leading thinkers on strategic and security affairs, be so far behind? My disbelief was enhanced by the ironic fact that, earlier that day, I had been sitting in the United Nations Headquarters on the East River watching diplomats debate during the ninth Review Conference (or 'Revcon') on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which includes the core Article VI committing its member states to 'pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament'. At the very least, this centrepiece of the global regime governing nuclear weapons ought to mean that disarmamenthowever complex or politically fraughtshould be seen as part of the American nuclear real. Yet the remaining weeks of the review conference bore out the ghostly quality of disarmament in global nuclear politics: a vast gulf separated those many states who are so frustrated by the slow pace of disarmament that they are promoting new legal mechanisms (the 'effective measures' of Article VI) to ban nuclear weapons, and those nuclear weapons states and their allies who maintain that disarmament must remain a faltering, incremental process

Narrative and nuclear weapons politics: the entelechial force of the nuclear origin myth

“…26 The purpose of the narrative ordering of events in time provides one answer to Shepherd's question of 'what does narrative do, analytically' in contrast to 'discourse' or 'ideas'. 27 15 Studies include but are not limited to Booth 1999;Abraham 2006;Burke 2016;Biswas 2014;Ritchie 2014Ritchie , 2013Fishel, 2015;Pelopidas 2016Pelopidas , 2011Peoples 2016;Considine 2017;Egeland 2021. 16 Hagström and Gustafsson 2019.…”

“… 15 Studies include but are not limited to Booth 1999; Abraham 2006; Burke 2016; Biswas 2014; Ritchie 2014, 2013; Fishel, 2015; Pelopidas 2016, 2011; Peoples 2016; Considine 2017; Egeland 2021.…”