Casting the atomic canon: (R)evolving nuclear strategy

Abstract

Looming decisions on arms control and strategic weapon procurements in a range of nuclear-armed states are set to shape the international security environment for decades to come. In this context, it is crucial to understand the concepts, theories, and debates that condition nuclear policymaking. This review essay dissects the four editions of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, the authoritative intellectual history of its subject. Using this widely acclaimed work as a looking glass into the broader field of nuclear security studies, we interrogate the field's underlying assumptions and question the correspondence between theory and practice in the realm of nuclear policy. The study of nuclear strategy, we maintain, remains largely committed to an interpretive approach that invites analysts to search for universal axioms and to abstract strategic arguments from the precise circumstances of their occurrence. While this approach is useful for analysing the locutionary dimension of strategic debates, it risks obscuring the power structures, vested interests, and illocutionary forces shaping nuclear discourse. In the conclusion, we lay out avenues for future scholarship.

On history and authority: the Cold War nuclear arms race and its importance for critical security theory

“…Even as the interests of military institutions and defence contractors predominantly shaped strategic theory, Cold War investment in Earth Science, military research into weaponizing nature, the cultural spinoff of space travel and metaphors of globality also assisted in co-producing new understandings of the global environment as a (fragile) referent of security. The Cold War is clearly relevant not just for understanding the prominence of strategic studies (Egeland, Fraise and Taha 2022) but also as a period when alternative concepts of security were forged out of new understandings of nature, the planet and the common fate of humankind (e.g., Masco 2010;Hamblin 2013;Deudney and Mendenhall 2016). In short, critical thinking should be historical in more ways than one, and it will be a missed opportunity if CSS slips into treating the Cold War as both the rhetorical backdrop to everything that is new and as monolithic myth that cannot but fail to capture the complexity of the near half-century of military, ideological and cultural conflict.…”

La question du secret nucléaire : technologie, secrets d’État et enjeux démocratiques

“…Mais qu'en est-il pour les sciences sociales ? Le champ des nuclear security studies se caractérise par un nombre important d'hypothèses trop rapidement considérées comme des axiomes 27 . Le secret n'y est pas étranger, puisque, comme l'écrivait Leon Sigal, « l'histoire nucléaire est partout occultée par le secret.…”