Nuclear Weapons Choices Governing vulnerabilities between past and future

Project Information

NUCLEAR

Grant agreement ID: 759707

DOI

10.3030/759707

Project closed

EC signature date 8 March 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 28 February 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 480 145,00

EU contribution

€ 1 480 145,00

Coordinated by

FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - NUCLEAR (Nuclear Weapons ChoicesGoverning vulnerabilities between past and future )

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Nuclear weapons choices commit populations and societies for decades and can wipe them out in matters of minutes.
In 2021, all nuclear-armed states have initiated plans to retain and modernize their nuclear arsenals for fifty to eighty years. At the same time, a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has entered into force with a view to abolishing these weapons. Courses of action such as pursuing nuclear disarmament or relying on nuclear weapons as an irreplaceable instrument of security both run the risk of nuclear war and no protection against nuclear weapons explosions, be they deliberate or accidental, is in sight.

Given the stakes, the NUCLEAR project asks the following question: How is the scope of available nuclear weapons choices decided?

Direct experience cannot be the answer as no one can rely on personal experience of nuclear war. Most decision-makers no longer even have the experience of the effects of such weapons either given that North Korea has been the only country testing nuclear weapons since 1998 and those tests were underground. The populations’ wishes do not qualify either when it comes to explaining the scope of possibilities in nuclear politics, since they are very rarely consulted and only few studies on citizens' attitudes exist. Therefore this project offers the first in depth global investigation of the grounds on which the scope of publicly acceptable nuclear weapons choices have been based since the end of nuclear testing. To do so, this project constructs an interdisciplinary research program investigating four ways in which nuclear weapons choices are bounded: 1) the intellectual categories we depend on to think about those issues; 2) the governance of nuclear knowledge by nuclear-weapons related institutions; 3) specific readings of the past identifying events or trends from which lessons are expected to be learned about the scope of the possible, and 4) the imaginary of possible futures as opposed to the ones deemed utopian. Combining archival research and interviews worldwide, large-scale polling and discourse analysis of policy officials and strategists over several decades, it assesses the blinding power of categories created several decades ago and sometimes still deemed as irreplaceable lexicon of the nuclear age as well as the way in which nuclear weapons programs modify the governance of knowledge. Based on those findings, it offers a novel understanding of nuclear vulnerabilities in their epistemic and political dimensions, and not only the material ones. Beyond its contribution to scholarship, it will allow citizens to make an informed choice about nuclear weapons policy.

This effort is necessary for the future of a democratic Europe for at least four reasons.
First, as suggested above, there still is no protection against nuclear explosions, either deliberate, unauthorized or accidental, so the possibilities of nuclear war and nuclear accidents remain.
Second, scholarship has identified an enduring disconnect between the official justifications for nuclear weapons policies offered by policymakers and the arsenals that have actually been built.
Third, many questions remain to be asked regarding the relationship between nuclear weapons and world politics. For example, the fields of nuclear security studies and democracy studies largely continue to operate in mutual neglect as though the introduction of nuclear weapons in world affairs had no consequences for the possibility of democratic governance. This assumption remains to be tested systematically and existing works suggest that it is not valid.
Fourth, we only have very limited knowledge of European citizens' knowledge about nuclear weapons and preferences on this matter.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

First, the project has proposed a concept and a method to assess the role of “luck” – factors beyond control, including technical failure, disobedience or practices which do not match protocol and parameters not included in protocol – in past avoidance of unwanted nuclear explosions. It has documented it empirically and identified ways in which lessons from past cases of luck have not been learned.

A second major finding is the identification of a new and under-researched type of effect of nuclear weapons acquisition and policies: its impact on democracy and its possibility, via the production of obstacles to the accountability for such policy. The conceptualization of such effects has been articulated in the project’s PhD student’s dissertation and published in the forms documented above, in "Nuclearization and de-democratization: security, secrecy, and the French pursuit of nuclear weapons (1945–1974)", European Journal of International Relations 31(1), 2025 as well as Sterre van Buuren, “The Arsenal and the Ballot Box. Scoping the Incompatibility of Nuclear Weapons and Democracy”, Perspectives on Politics, online first and the survey-based demonstration in Repenser les choix nucléaires.

A third major finding of the project consists and proposing a method to assess the effects of funding of think tanks’ nuclear weapons policy analysis based on conflicts of interests on the outcome of the research, to conceptualize three types of such effects – direct censorship, self-censorship and perspective filtering – and to empirically document those effects based on a study of the top 45 nuclear weapons policy think tanks in the world. The outcome of this study has just been published as ““No Such Thing as a Free Donation. Research funding and conflicts of interest in nuclear weapons policy analysis”, International Relations, 39(1), 2025.

I would single out the creation of survey data about European publics knowledge about nuclear weapons history and policy and attitudes towards them as a fourth key contribution, for three reasons. Such questions were not asked before this project, so scholarship and policy were conducted on the basis of unverified assumptions about those attitudes. The data we have produced covers 9 countries: the two nuclear weapons-states, the five hosts, and two vocal non-hosts, Sweden and Poland. Finally, the fact that we were able to conduct the survey twice, in 2019 and 2024, opens the way towards a longitudinal study of the change in attitudes vis-à-vis nuclear weapons over time.

The project has also established the existence of very consequential assumptions about the climate nuclear nexus in the fields of nuclear security studies as well environmental policy studies and in the policy documents of four members of the UN Security Council and laid out a research agenda to assess their validity. This was done in “Armes nucléaires et environnement”, Raison Présente 2024/2, n°230, co-authored with Sterre van Buuren and Dr Thomas Fraise, two pieces by Dr Kjolv Egeland, “Climate security reversed: the implications of alternative security policies for global warming”, Environmental Politics 32(5), 2023 and “Disentangling the Nexus of Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change—A Research Agenda”, International Studies Review 27(1), March 2025.

As a result of those findings, we have become able to redefine how possible nuclear choices are scoped and to reconceptualize responsibility in the nuclear age in a context of nuclear vulnerabilities.

The main results of the project outlined above are presented in the video recording of the closing conference of the project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woJmmuSIGQw

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Please see above.

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