| 书目名称 | Performing Nuclear Weapons | | 副标题 | How Britain Made Tri | | 编辑 | Paul Beaumont | | 视频video | | | 概述 | Conducts a discourse analysis of the UK’s nuclear weapons policy between 1980 and 2010.Historicizes and deconstructs the moving parts of the UK’s nuclear common sense.Provides the theoretical groundwo | | 丛书名称 | Palgrave Studies in International Relations | | 图书封面 |  | | 描述 | This book investigates the UK’s nuclear weapon policy, focusing in particular on how consecutive governments have managed to maintain the Trident weapon system. The question of why states maintain nuclear weapons typically receives short shrift: its security, .of course.. The international is a perilous place, and nuclear weapons represent the ultimate self-help device. This book seeks to unsettle this complacency by re-conceptualizing nuclear weapon-armed states as nuclear regimes of truth and refocusing on the processes through which governments produce and maintain country-specific discourses that enable their continued possession of nuclear weapons. Illustrating the value of studying nuclear regimes of truth, the book conducts a discourse analysis of the UK’s nuclear weapons policy between 1980 and 2010. In so doing, it documents the sheer imagination and discursive labour required to sustain the positive value of nuclear weapons within British politics, as well as providing grounds for optimism regarding the value of the recent treaty banning nuclear weapons.. | | 出版日期 | Book 2021 | | 关键词 | nuclear weapons; deterence; British Foreign Policy; discourse analysis; critical security studies; disarm | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67576-9 | | isbn_softcover | 978-3-030-67578-3 | | isbn_ebook | 978-3-030-67576-9Series ISSN 2946-2673 Series E-ISSN 2946-2681 | | issn_series | 2946-2673 | | copyright | The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerl |
| 1 |
,Introduction: Problematising the Maintenance of Nuclear Weapons, |
Paul Beaumont |
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Abstract
The nuclear era has prompted a great deal of investigation into how best to . nuclear weapons, but far less on how states maintain them. Indeed, Security Studies was for a long time mainly concerned with studying nuclear weapons management strategies: deterrence, arms control, and addressing the security challenges related to new nuclear technology. Amidst this, the question of . states maintain nuclear weapons typically receives short shrift: it’s security .. Yet, only nine nuclear weapon-armed states exist, while 186 get by without nuclear weapons, and most seem content with non-nuclear status. Thus, it makes sense to consider the few states that maintain such unpopular, yet expensive weapons to be a puzzle. Indeed, picking up and running with Nick Ritchie’s notion of “nuclear regimes of truth”, this chapter proposes a research agenda studying the discursive . of nuclear weapons. That is, how governments manage to (re)produce foreign policy discourses that constitute nuclear weapons as legitimate and desirable. In short, such an approach aims to make nuclear weapon states .. Thus, while the rest of the book explores Britain’s nuclear regime of truth, this introductory chapter lays the groundwork for post-positivist scholars to investigate and unsettle other societies’ . too.
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| 2 |
,Explaining Britain’s Bombs, |
Paul Beaumont |
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Abstract
Discourse analysis has over the last two decades become established in international relations scholarship, yet it is also true that discourse . have not always taken due care to speak to sceptics among the “mainstream”. Thus, this chapter aims to show—in plain language—how and why discourse analysis can offer additional insight into nuclear politics. The opening section evaluates the various explanations usually provided for why the UK has nuclear weapons. It is structured by Scott Sagan’s (.) three general explanations—all found in varying degrees in the literature about UK nuclear weapon policy—for why states acquire nuclear weapons: (a) security; (b) status; and, (c) domestic political interests. It then discusses a fourth more contemporary explanation, also found in the UK literature: (d) identity explanations. Along the way, this section discusses the limitations of these explanations and aims to show how a discourse approach can augment these analyses by asking questions that conventional analysts are not equipped, nor inclined to answer, in this case: how nuclear weapons states . their nuclear weapons. The second half of the chapter reviews the post-positivist nuclear weapons literature that provides the theoretical foundations and some helpful pointers for this book’s analysis.
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| 3 |
,Nuclear Regimes of Truth, |
Paul Beaumont |
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Abstract
This chapter elaborates the discursive ontology, epistemology, and analytical framework that animates the analysis chapters. The first section briefly elaborates the conception of discourse that underpins the book: how it works and why it matters. The chapter then reconceptualises nuclear-armed states as “nuclear regimes of truth” and discusses the specific conceptual apparatus used to structure the analysis: a modified version of Lene Hansen’s Foreign Policy/Identity analytical framework. Indeed, rather than merely . Hansen’s framework, the chapter expands Hansen’s conceptual apparatus by theorising representations of policies, their effects, and the logic of legitimacy at work within them. I will also discuss how Hansen’s framework can be used to shed light on state .-. policies, without defining what constitutes status .. The chapter concludes by arguing that owing to the “fabulously textual” nature of the empirics, a discursive approach is particularly apt for conducting research into nuclear weapons.
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| 4 |
,Constructing the Nuclear Weapon Problem, |
Paul Beaumont |
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Abstract
To analyse the UK’s nuclear regime of truth, it is necessary to understand the international discourse within which it operates. This chapter thus begins by sketching out the key representations of the “nuclearist” and “anti-nuclear” positions that have long structured the policy debate and informed the international institutional architecture that has emerged to cope with the nuclear era. These discourses share a common understanding of nuclear weapons’ destructive capacity; however, they produce very different versions of the world’s nuclear reality. Instead, these discourses produce internally coherent but rival depictions of the world’s ., which leads them to opposite policy recommendations: nuclear abolition and nuclear proliferation. The chapter then discusses how these points of contention provide discursive opportunities and obstacles for any state wishing to represent nuclear weapons as legitimate and desirable. In particular, the chapter contends that the hypothetical nature of deterrence requires that states undertake considerable discursive labour to sustain the idea that their nuclear weapons have “worked”. In addition, I show how the tendency for nuclear-armed states—including the UK—to draw from . nuclearist and anti-nuclearist discourses, generates logical inconsistency in their nuclear policies, which current international nuclear institutions can only partially stabilise.
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| 5 |
,Thatcher’s Nuclear Regime of Truth, |
Paul Beaumont |
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Abstract
This chapter conducts a discourse analysis of how, between 1979 and 1987, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government successfully legitimated the acquisition of the Trident weapon system and warded off the anti-nuclearist attacks from the Labour Party. Unsurprisingly, the Conservative government’s representation of the Soviet Union’s aggressive identity underpinned several aspects of the UK’s nuclear discourse. Crucially, the government’s performance of the Soviet’s threatening identity in the past, allowed the government to constitute the . of nuclear weapons real, and thus represent Trident as necessary. Successfully securitising the Soviet Union in this way allowed the UK to flesh out and present the nuclear peace correlation as commonsensical. This reification of the nuclear peace correlation further helped marginalise Labour’s preferred policy of non-nuclear security and thus enabled the government to present their opponents as not only naïve, but dangerous. Ultimately, not only did Thatcher succeed in presenting the renewal of Trident as legitimate, but her foreign policy performances would provide considerable discursive resources for the UK’s nuclear foreign policy following the end of the Cold War.
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| 6 |
,Blair’s Nuclear Regime of Truth, |
Paul Beaumont |
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Abstract
The end of the Cold War and the new international acceptance of the goal of a nuclear weapons free world provided the British government with quite broad bandwidth of possible policies; however none of them were straightforward. Renewing Trident would require a new security rationale to replace the Soviet threat, and this would need to be squared with the global disarmament agenda. Conversely, disarmament would be easy to legitimise internationally, but would face considerable domestic opposition. Labour chose the former option: renewing nuclear weapons despite the lack of an identifiable threat, while at the same time ostensibly claiming to lead global disarmament. This chapter analyses how the UK managed to make this unlikely policy position tenable. As the chapter documents, this required considerable imagination and discursive labour.
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| 7 |
,Conclusion, |
Paul Beaumont |
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Abstract
Zooming in upon the workings of the UK’s nuclear regime of truth—from Thatcher to Blair—the previous chapters have documented the considerable imagination and discursive labour that was required to keep Britain’s nuclear weapons in motion. This chapter discusses the main continuities and changes across the periods. First, a common theme has been the consistent (buck) passing of ethical responsibility for the world’s nuclear weapons problem onto other states. Second, the UK’s lack of empathy for how its nuclear weapons are perceived by other states is consistent across both periods. Third, nuclear weapons have enabled the UK to perform privileged international status: as protector of Europe during the 1980s and counter-intuitively, as a “leader” of disarmament from the early 2000s. Fourth, Thatcher’s successful securitisation of the Soviet Union has led to the nuclear peace correlation to become reified in British politics, such that it is even reproduced by British anti-nuclearists in the twenty-first century. Finally, Thatcher’s victories in the 1983 and 1987 elections have become an important discursive resource for marginalising non-nuclear security as viable policy option in domestic politics. The chapter ends by elaborating the implications of the findings for the resurgent global movement aiming to abolish nuclear weapons
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发表于 2025-3-21 16:08:56
