The Ideology of Nuclear Order

The “global nuclear order” is commonly understood as an evolving set of institutions, norms, and practices governing the development and use of nuclear technology worldwide. The pursuit of nuclear order is often portrayed as a “pragmatic” or “practical” compromise between unconstrained nuclear anarchy, on the one hand, and prompt steps toward nuclear disarmament, on the other. In this article, I use the tools of ideology critique to conceptualize the discourse and practices of nuclear order as a political ideology that has entrenched extant power structures and constrained the space for political action. While the ideology is formally wedded to the pursuit of the “sublime object” of a world without nuclear weapons, its underlying assumptions imply that the grand vision of abolition can never be realized in practice. To overcome the status quo, agents of change must subvert the ideology and re-politicize the nonproliferation and disarmament regime.