DAFF 27A04 - Dilemmas of a Nuclear-Armed World

This seminar explores the impact of nuclear weapons on the world we live in. It will allow students to better understand policy issues such as current investments in nuclear weapons “modernisation” worldwide and the politics of nuclear threat making and assessment in the war in Ukraine, nuclear deterrence, non-proliferation, disarmament and crisis management.

It addresses security issues but goes beyond them to address ethical and historical issues. It investigates nuclear weapons as techno-political objects which create new dilemmas for people living under their shadow: the “dilemmas of a nuclear-armed world”. By doing so, it allows students interested in international relations, history as well as sociology of science and technology to include the nuclear weapons factor in their thinking without limiting it to security issues and to get a better grasp of the historicity of those dilemmas.

This seminar will be divided in three parts described below. The first part questions the notion of “dilemmas of a nuclear-armed world” itself (it introduces students to nuclear weapons technologies and questions the existence of such dilemmas in contrast to the normalisation of nuclear weapons in the world), the second one focuses on a series of fundamental dilemmas (how to assign value to nuclear weapons if they cannot be used? How to assign value to fear in a nuclear-armed world? How to articulate democratic principles and nuclear weapons) and the third one focuses on a set of situated dilemmas. In other words, it investigates the dilemmas created by the presence of nuclear weapons in the world from the point of view of different roles and positions in a given society: the civilian citizen, the member of the military, the nuclear scientist and engineer, the public intellectual. It builds on the extensive and ongoing research of the instructor as well as his experience of the politics of nuclear weapons with policymaking elites and civil society.

It will help improve students analytical skills and research skills as well as clarity of oral expression.

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Lectures complémentaires / filmographie / discographie :

Akira Kurasawa’s movie I live in Fear (1954)

John Else’s documentary The Day after Trinity (1980)

NB: the role of imagination and art in making nuclear vulnerabilities conceivable will be central to this seminar