Reviving Nuclear Ethics: A Renewed Research Agenda for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In 1976 the noted Catholic ethicist J. Bryan Hehir expressed concern about the waning sense of moral urgency over the existence of nuclear weapons with each passing year that superpower nuclear war was avoided. Acknowledging that international ethicists had justifiably turned to other global problems, such as world hunger and poverty, Hehir still worried that the relative exile [of the ethical analysis of the nuclear] issue [that] has endured in the academy . . . , if not in government during the last decade, is not healthy. The price of error on this issue is still catastrophic; the chance of redress is minimal. Yet each year the genie kept in the political bottle contributes to our confidence of control and can contribute to our lack of attention. But the complexity of the issue and the costs of ignorance require attention, ethically and politically. 1 This hiatus in nuclear ethics lasted until the Reagan administration reasserted a confrontational posture with the former Soviet Union, including a proposed comprehensive missile defense system (colloquially referred to as Star Wars), at which time popular fears of nuclear war resurfaced. In response, the journal Ethics devoted an entire volume in 1985 to superpower nuclear ethics. 2 Nonetheless, another hiatus followed the end of the cold war in anticipation of a broad peace dividend. International ethicists again turned their attention from issues of great power security to such demanding and seemingly more immediate issues as human rights, humanitarian intervention, refugees, democratization, and economic globalization.

Oslo’s “new Track”: Norwegian Nuclear Disarmament Diplomacy, 2005–2013

“…Støre was not alone to harbour concern for the NPT. In the years leading up to the initiation of the humanitarian initiative, a range of observers had suggested that the NPT was fraying (Sauer 2006;Dhanapala 2008;Allison 2010;Doyle 2010;Auner 2011). According to internal Norwegian MFA memos, lacking progress on disarmament threatened the "legitimacy and effectiveness" of the NPT, as well as the "sustainability" of non-proliferation more generally (MFA (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs) 2012; MFA (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs) 2010a; MFA 2013b).…”

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the question of nuclear meaning

“…Its answer to the second is that nuclear meaning is located in our shared understandings of the weapons themselves, so manipulating those shared understandings through stigmatisation and propagating anti-nuclear norms changes the meaning of the weapon. In this way, the debate about nuclear meaning provoked by the TPNW is to a large extent framed through the 'moral ontology' of the weapon itself (Doyle 2010). Are nuclear weapons morally different from other weapons and so subject to particular censure?…”

Nuclear politics: beyond positivism

“…There are important connections between these standpoints and contemporary writers such as Shampa Biswas (2014), whose postcolonial critique of dominant structures and interpretations of the non-proliferation regime is more fundamentally concerned with exposing forms of nuclear vulnerability and harm that it has kept hidden, or worse, actually enabled. In a similar way, Thomas Doyle (2010) has been working to widen the field of nuclear ethics beyond its Cold War limits.…”