On Political Vulnerability in the Nuclear Age–VULPAN

Nuclear weapons choices commit populations and societies for decades, can wipe them out in a matter of minutes, but are subject to little public debate. Similarly, although concerns have been raised about the complacency of the post-Cold War generation towards the nuclear danger, we know little about the attitudes in question. Drawing on archival research carried out in eight countries, this project proposes the first in-depth comparative investigation of the effects of nuclear weapons programs on regimes’ democratic accountability and their way of predicting the nuclear behaviour of other states. Through large-scale polling across all EU countries, it also documents the attitudes of the post-Cold War generation of EU citizens vis-a-vis nuclear weapons. By reconnecting the scholarship on democracy in political science to the International Relations literature on nuclear weapons, and grounding its findings in primary sources, VULPAN contributes to the history, theory and policy of non-proliferation.