But devaluation falling short of disarmament will be hard to prove, difficult for other states to rely upon, particularly unappealing to authoritarian regimes, and potentially reversible, while its essential appeal to strategically influential constituencies will be circumscribed by cultural and geostrategic factors. Political pressures for some form of devaluation will continue, especially within nuclear weapon states concerned to limit further damage to the NPT regime. These judgements will be informed by different, often unstated, assumptions about the value of nuclear weapons, particularly the intangible, strategically shaping effects of nuclear capabilities on the peacetime strategic landscape. This article surveys the emerging field of meaning represented by ‘nuclear devaluation’, and the arguments likely to be publicly or privately articulated against it by the elites of nuclear capable states, reaching judgements through the prism of their own strategic cultures in relation to their own national and regime interests. Nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented! Why not?
RACERENDER G FORCE ADJUST PORTABLE
On the basis of empirical material on the invention and re-invention of nuclear weapons, and an in-depth ethnography of laboratories inventing a portable radiation detector, both the process of invention and the ‘objects’ themselves (weapons and detectors) are shown to be fragile and not wholly irreversible processes of assembling diverse actors (human and non-human) and provisionally stabilising their relations. Drawing on ‘new materialism’, this article produces a different understanding of invention, reinvention and uninvention as ontologically similar practices of techno-political invention. The claimed impossibility of uninvention is an assertion that invention is irreversible.
This article seeks to make this claim controversial by showing that it is premised on attenuated understandings of invention and the status of objects operative through familiar but problematic conceptual dualisms. If there is one uncontroversial point in nuclear weapons politics, it is that uninventing nuclear weapons is impossible. Nonetheless, the Treaty faces difficulty in dislodging the practices of the nuclear-weapon states, suggesting that its value lies in its long-term normative influence. This shift away from the structural constraints of the NPT allows non-nuclear states a degree of agency they did not previously possess. The “humanitarian initiative” and Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons challenge this “normal” nature of nuclear weapons, re-casting them as incompatible with humanitarian law, and delegitimizing them for all states. Factors which have allowed this to flourish include the relative absence of humanitarian considerations, nuclear decision-making by a select few, and the unequal nature of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), where the P5 states have shaped the nuclear order on their own terms. The nuclear age has come to be seen as “normal,” marked by a process of “nuclearism” whereby nuclear weapons and deterrence are seen as inevitable and acceptable elements of international security. It is time to open up a new debate, time to consider the possibility that nuclear deterrence is not a valid framework for international security in the 21st Century. Continuing to premise security on the basis of a concept with weapons with which a “small accident” would have huge consequences would be folly. The evidence for its reality is weak, whereas the risks are enormous. Security for many countries has been built around the concept of nuclear deterrence for over sixty years. It is time to place the burden of proof on those that would retain nuclear weapons. The process would of course be open to all who shared the vision and over time, a wider group of interested states would help build momentum. The group would begin with developing the terms and elements of a convention to outlaw the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Reinstating the more cautious approach of conventional weapons, whereby one mistake in their use, while ghastly and to be utterly avoided, is not on the scale of one mistake with a nuclear weapon.Ī group of like-minded countries, in partnership with NGOs and international organizations, could begin a process that would begin the drive for global nuclear disarmament. Delegitimization has been neglected in the name of a strategic utility. Delegitimization will be a self-reinforcing endeavor, affecting the credibility of deterrent threats and allowing the restatement of the immorality of both the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons.
What deterrent legitimacy they possess has been conferred on them through the mind-games of the Cold War, a period that is now over. Nuclear weapons have no inherent legitimacy as weapons of war in that they are inhumane, indiscriminate and cause unacceptable harm.
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