Scoping Nuclear Weapons Choices in an Age of Existential Threats

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is hosting a public lecture by Professor Benoît Pelopidas (Founding director of the Nuclear Knowledges program at Sciences Po) on 14th June at 5.30pm in the Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity.

Professor Benoît Pelopidas is the founding director of the Nuclear Knowledges program (formerly chair of excellence in security studies) at Sciences Po (CERI). His program, “Nuclear Knowledges”, is the first independent scholarly research program on the nuclear phenomenon in France. He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.

His research has received four international prizes and the most prestigious European grants based on scholarly assessment by peers, most notably an ERC Starting Grant. This interdisciplinary effort of independent scholarship has led to the following discoveries over the last five years: the lack of credibility and rationality of the French nuclear arsenal at least until 1974; the underestimation of the effects of French nuclear weapons tests in Polynesia; the role of luck in the past avoidance of unwanted nuclear explosions; the limits of popular support for nuclear weapons policy, the role of nostalgia and imagined futures in shaping nuclear weapons politics and the effects of funding carrying conflicts of interests on nuclear weapons policy analysis.