Top French officials made plans in early 1960 to transform an abandoned silver mine in Corsica, called the Argentella Massif, into an underground site for nuclear explosions. By June 1960, they had canceled these plans. This article shows how a mass movement on the Mediterranean island forced their hand, and it explains why Corsicans of diverse political affiliations took to the streets.
Numerous scholars have in recent years concluded that the field of nuclear weapons policy analysis is plagued by widespread self-censorship, conformism, and enduring disconnects between accepted knowledge and available evidence. It has been hypothesized that this tendency is fostered in part by many analysts’ reliance on funding from donors with interests in the perpetuation of the existing nuclear order.
To address the COVID-19 pandemic, states around the world adopted a range of unprecedented and far-reaching policy measures, which had for a long time been presented as impossible. In this article, we argue that such actions suggest not only present but also past political possibilities and that these possibilities have been overlooked or denied by policymakers and scholars alike. We focus on two existential challenges about which pledges for transformative actions have been continuously made throughout the previous decades: climate change and the danger from nuclear weapons.
How can one organize secrecy around an activity as remarkable, and as sensitive, as atmospheric nuclear testing? How can one control information that is –literally– carried on the wind? Based on primary sources, this article examines the original regime of secrecy organized around the French test sites between 1957 and 1974, and the issues it raises in terms of information control and democracy.
What do people really think about nuclear weapons? Responding to Dill, Sagan, and Valentino's “Kettles of Hawks” in Security Studies 31, we examine the inconsistency between different surveys of public attitudes toward nuclear weapons use. We maintain that different survey techniques tap into disparate layers of opinion—each of which is “real” in their own way and of analytical value depending on the research question being asked. We conclude by reflecting on scholarly responsibility and the dilemmas associated with researching and communicating about potentially sensitive knowledge.
Since 2005, European and French foreign policy towards Iran have been caught between the change of Iran policy under Republican and Democrat administrations, on the one hand, and the Islamic Republic nuclear diplomacy on the other hand. To illustrate this argument, the article will provide a detailed history of Iranian-French relations, particularly pertaining to nuclear technology. The French discourse on a future nuclear Iranian threat reflects the dominant discourse within Western nuclear-weapon states on the nuclear ‘other’.
Able Archer 83, a NATO nuclear exercise conducted in the fall of 1983, has been the subject of considerable debate in recent decades. While some analysts have argued that the superpowers came close to blows due to Soviet fears that the exercise was a ruse meant to disguise a NATO attack, revisionists have maintained that the danger associated with Able Archer 83 has been seriously overstated. In this article, the authors review the scholarship, take stock of the evidence, and discuss some of the challenges of studying nuclear history and close calls.
Having long been regarded as irrelevant to the high politics of foreign affairs, feminism and gender equality have in recent years gained increased attention in international security debates, including discussions about nuclear weapons policy. Several governments have adopted official feminist foreign policy postures, international security institutions have launched inquiries into gender equity and representation, and a myriad of security actors have enthusiastically embraced the language of women’s empowerment.
This article examines nuclear imaginaries in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. It situates people from the Arab world into nuclear thought, looking at how the atomic age rapidly became part of everyday lives. Embracing the idea that reality and fiction are not only deeply intertwined but also co-constitutive, it analyses everyday engagements with the nuclear condition in the aftermath of the bombing of Japan, across a wide range of sources.
How was the scope of nuclear weapons policy change immediately after the Cold War determined? Nuclear learning and worst-case thinking are common but not satisfactory answers. On the basis of primary sources in multiple languages, we posit that a particular temporalization of nuclear events in the beginning of the 1990s took place: nonproliferation timescaping.
