The Geopolitics of Nuclear Weapons: A Primer
Understanding the Imperial Logic Behind Nuclear "Order"
📅 Key Nuclear Events Timeline
1945: US bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1946-1958: US conducts 67 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll
1968: Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signed
1998: India and Pakistan declare themselves nuclear powers
2017: Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) adopted
2021: TPNW enters into force
Ten days ago, the US joined the Israeli attack against Iran, bombing its nuclear installations. The stated purpose, according to President Trump, was to assure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. If something did not feel right to you about this, or about the way the talking heads on news programs rationalize this, you (along with the majority of people in the United States and around the world) are on to something. Today, I want to share with you some wider context that is missing from all the news coverage and editorials—pro and con.
I don't want to bury the lead, so let me state my conclusion at the outset. I believe that it is reckless and extremely dangerous for Iran to have access to nuclear weapons, and deeply unjust for Iran to sacrifice the needs of its citizens for education, food, and health in order to invest in developing those weapons. The same is true for every nuclear power: Israel, the United States, Russia, India, the UK, France, and China.
But here's what mainstream coverage misses: Nuclear weapons are dangerous regardless of whose hands they're in. As difficult as it may be to accept, the abolition of nuclear weapons is the only rational, moral, and safe solution.
🔍 Key Terms Defined
NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty): 1968 treaty recognizing five "legitimate" nuclear powers (US, Russia, China, France, UK) while prohibiting others from developing nuclear weapons.
IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency): UN agency that monitors nuclear programs to prevent weapons development while promoting peaceful nuclear energy.
TPNW (Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons): 2017 treaty that completely bans nuclear weapons, supported mainly by non-nuclear states and civil society.
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD): Cold War doctrine that nuclear peace comes from the threat of total retaliation.
The Logic of Nuclear Order
So let's back up and understand what all the fuss about Iran is about. It has to do with the legitimacy and logic of the nuclear order.
In his book, The World: A Brief Introduction, Ambassador Richard Haass, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and scion of the foreign policy establishment, sums up the position of those who subscribe to this logic:
"Nuclear weapons ...buttressed the traditional conventional balance of power.....If nuclear weapons had never been developed, one could make a plausible case that the Cold War would not have stayed cold....It is no exaggeration to say that absent nuclear weapons and the restraint they engendered, we might now be studying World War III rather than the Cold War."
This is the essence of the nuclear logic, a logic of fear of Mutually Assured Destruction. In this logic, the implicit but always present threat of violence on an apocalyptic scale is what ironically gave the world peace. The world owes its stability to nuclear weapons, the nuclear fist in the international institution glove.
Voices of Dissent
It's important to acknowledge that even in the US, many have not subscribed to the "commonsense" view of the nuclear establishment articulated by Haass here. In his book African Americans Against the Bomb (Stanford UP 2015), Vincent Intondi chronicles African Americans' deep opposition to nuclear weapons, almost immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—from the suspicion that racism played a part in the selection of targets in Japan rather than Europe, to concern about nuclear testing by France in its colony of Algeria—culminating in Martin Luther King's strong stance against nuclear weapons as a critical element of the US civil rights agenda.
The academic literature produced by members of what
referred to in our recent Substack Live last month as the “Foreign Policy Blob” tends to focus on what to do about nuclear proliferation. Originally there were five legitimate nuclear powers under the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—the US, Russia, China, France and the UK. Since then, Israel, Pakistan and India have been "added" to the recognized list, although all three have refused to sign onto the NPT. Then we have North Korea and Iran which have nuclear programs outside the NPT and are subject to significant sanctions. This double standard—where some non-NPT nuclear powers face sanctions while others receive tacit acceptance—has undermined the treaty's credibility worldwide.In her book Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order (U of Minnesota Press, 2014), Shampa Biswas exposes the bizarrely sexualized logic at the heart of the NPT regime's approach to limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It begins with an acknowledgment that the division between nuclear "haves" and "have-nots" (together with the translation of nuclear weapons into being taken seriously as a player on the international stage) creates "desire" for nuclear weapons by other states. Biswas traces how the NPT proceeds by treating non-nuclear states with an analogy to sexual abstinence among teenagers. It's "normal," but "sinful" to have a desire for nuclear weapons, in the NPT logic, complete with language of "nuclear restraint" and "nuclear abstinence." As she puts it, "Some states have the requisite maturity for selective ownership, but for others, the temptation must be eradicated." The result, then, is to reward states that agree to restraint by giving them a taste of things nuclear, in the form of access to the technology of nuclear energy. Just as 1950s parents might allow or even encourage their teenagers to go on a date, or engage in a first kiss, but explicitly forbid them from going any further, the NPT regime encourages access to nuclear energy, with the full understanding that there is always a temptation to take the "next step" on the slippery slope of plutonium refinement towards nuclear weapons. This is where the IAEA comes in, in much the way of a high school dance chaperone, to monitor for any hanky panky, and reassert the rules in a friendly but firm way.
So what is the logic of this nuclear order that now finds itself so threatened that the US is willing to put its 40,000 troops in the Middle East at risk, not to mention the lives of countless Iranian civilians? Why the panic?
I believe that what we are witnessing here is just one more step in the crumbling of nuclear imperialism.
The Pacific Testing Grounds: Imperialism's Nuclear Legacy
Imperialism? You're going too far, you say. That's something from the 19th century. Think British imperialism, the kind of imperialism Americans fought a revolution to overthrow. And it's definitely not American. As Haass quotes John Quincy Adams to say, the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own".
Were it so.
To see how this nuclear imperial system works in practice, we need to look beyond the familiar territories of US-Iran tensions to places that rarely make headlines: the Pacific Islands.
Selected Nuclear Testing Sites in the Pacific Ocean
BIKINI ATOLL (Marshall Islands) 🔴
- 67 US nuclear tests (1946-1958)
- Islanders never able to return
MORUROA (French Polynesia) 🔴
- French atmospheric & underground tests
- Ongoing health impacts
JOHNSTON ATOLL 🔴
- US atmospheric tests
- Chemical weapons disposal
TINIAN ISLAND ✈️
- Launch point for Hiroshima/Nagasaki missions
- Ongoing US military presence
The Pacific Ocean became a “nuclear playground”—a laboratory for nuclear testing, with indigenous communities bearing the costs of nuclear imperial power.
Here old fashioned colonialism is alive and well—France maintains sovereignty over Kanaky, which it terms New Caledonia, primarily, arguably, as a site for nuclear testing and for projecting its military power. Indeed, in his recent visit to Kanaky, President Emmanuel Macron thanked the Kanak people for their "sacrifice" to ensure the security of France. There is also Hawaii, a sovereign kingdom whose citizens fought hard and petitioned the US government against annexation by the US, and who continue to dream of independence. Hawaii is the site of the US Indo-Pacific Command and, together with Guam, and Tinian Island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where the flights that dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki originated, remain critical elements in the US nuclear strike capability.
And there are plenty of cases where nuclear powers have not acquired formal sovereignty over Pacific territories, but have nevertheless rendered them uninhabitable with their tests, treating the lands and the people who live there as essentially disposable. Much of the early atmospheric tests happened in the Pacific Islands under the auspices of the United Nations post-war Trust Territory System. The United Nations essentially gave free reign to a new generation of colonialism, newly called "trust territories" in which the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, South Africa and the United States took over as "trustees" for territories deemed too immature to function independently as nation states. Under this scheme, the Marshall Islands (including Bikini Atoll) became part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands administered by the United States. It was during these years as trust territories that the US tested in the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands (where the US demanded islanders sacrifice their lands and livelihood to US tests "for the good of mankind and to end all world wars"). From 1946 to 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. The Bikinians were never able to permanently return to their ancestral home due to radioactive contamination. They were relocated multiple times, and many continue to suffer from the displacement and loss of their traditional way of life.
As the Tahitian literary theorist Anais Maurer writes in her magnificent book, The Ocean on Fire, "Together, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France have detonated a blast equivalent to dozens of thousands of times that of Hiroshima in the skies and under the reefs of the great Pacific Ocean." (Maurer will be join us for a Substack Live on July 16. Watch this space for an exciting conversation!)
Cracks in the Foundation
This history reveals something uncomfortable about institutions many Americans see as forces for peace. The very architecture of global governance has been built around nuclear dominance.
This brings us to the United Nations. As we watch Trump threaten to pull out of the UN altogether, it's tempting for progressives to see the UN as a shining city on a hill, a beacon of world peace we need to defend. But to people in the Pacific, things look very different. I have already mentioned the Trusteeship system which enabled much nuclear testing. The five countries with a veto on the UN security council are also the five original nuclear powers sanctioned by the NPT. The key point is: From the beginning, the postwar machinery of international institutions has been inextricable from the nuclear imperial regime. From the beginning, its premise of the equality of all sovereign states has bumped up against the supremacy of the nuclear weapons states/security council veto holding states. Nuclear weapons are not a side show to the modern era. They are the main act. Fist in glove.
The extent to which the political dominance of the US and other nuclear powers is normalized and institutionalized in the structures of the United Nations is why the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, discussed in last month's post, is so subversive. It deploys the UN infrastructure against itself. Its proponents are not the the nuclear states, but the states that have been the victims of nuclear testing, or who have never had access to or wanted access to nuclear weapons. It not only calls out the nuclear states, demanding that they honor their vaguely stated commitment in the NPT to work towards a world without nuclear weapons but places obligations on all states—nuclear and non-nuclear—to address the harms of testing and bombing to their citizens. It pierces the state veil and recognizes both the positive agency of transnational NGOs and the harmful agency of transnational weapons manufacturers and financiers (the subject of next month's post). It's no surprise that the foreign policy blob—democratic or republican alike—react so defensively to this treaty that their responses seem to come from a place of deep, unexamined anxiety.
But the TPNW is only one indication that the old nuclear imperial regime is beginning to crumble, with no clear picture of what comes next. Here's another: In my conversations with people inside the foreign policy blob, I hear lots of consternation that young people in the US and in Russia are no longer interested in training to be nuclear experts—in joining the "epistemic community" of people who talk in nuclear acronyms or quote sections of treaties or geek out on the details of weapons systems. It used to be that the thrill of traveling business class to meet in palaces in Geneva or in the modernist elegance of UN headquarters was enough to seduce a generation. No more.
That is before we even get to the overt disdain for international institutions expressed by the Trump administration. Whatever one may think about the validity of efforts to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, it's important to note that the Israelis and later the Americans acted without the engagement of the UN security council, and that their actions elicited the condemnation of the IAEA. In Tel Aviv and in Washington, there is impatience with the genteel modernist gloved fist. They would rather punch first and negotiate later.
The thing is, the US took the gloved fist approach in the past because it was in US national interests. When you keep your fist in your glove, you don't have to have your actual strength tested. But if you're going to punch, you had better have the goods. And it turns out that the military option didn't even work in Iran. By every expert assessment, at most the US bombing only set Iran back a few months in its nuclear project. And along the way it rallied the Iranian public behind the regime and strengthened the legitimacy of Iranian subversive military action against the US and its allies under international law.
So to return to Haass' presentation of the nuclear regime as the guarantor of postwar peace, it is impossible to prove a counterfactual—what would have happened if the world had not had nuclear weapons. But certainly we can agree that even if this was true at one point it is not true today. Putin's attack on Ukraine arguably would have met with far more resistance from Europe and the United States without the ever-present threat of a Russian nuclear strike in the background, a threat Putin has at times explicitly invoked. Likewise, in the name of keeping the peace, the US has just gone to attack Iran, alongside Israel. In recent times, it seems that nuclear weapons have enabled, or provided the justification for, conventional military actions, rather than preventing these.
What Comes Next?
So what do US national interests look like now? I believe that we should not allow ourselves to be nostalgic for the passing nuclear empire. The cold war may have been "cold" for Richard Haass and colleagues in the foreign policy blob, but it was certainly very hot indeed for the people of the Marshall Islands. If it is time for we US citizens to feel some of our own nuclear-generated heat, so be it.
But let's not fool ourselves—this is an extremely dangerous time. A nuclear attack, accidental or purposeful, is more possible now than ever. Let's hope that this leads all of us to urgently demand the only sensible solution, which is a global movement, across ideological and national borders, demanding an end to nuclear weapons for all. In the words of Nelson Mandela, "It always seems impossible until it's done."
What would a post-imperial nuclear world order look like? That's the question we must grapple with since the technology is not going away—not just as Americans, but as global citizens facing an increasingly unstable nuclear system. The old certainties are crumbling. The question is whether we'll build something better in their place, or stumble into something far worse.
📚 Further Reading
• Vincent Intondi: African Americans Against the Bomb (UC Press, 2015)- Essential history of African-American anti-nuclear resistance
• Shampa Biswas: Nuclear Desire (Minnesota UP 2014)- Critical analysis of the NPT regime
• Anais Maurer: The Ocean on Fire (Duke UP 2024)- Pacific perspectives on nuclear testing
• ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons): Current advocacy and research
This post is part of the Nuclear-Free Future Initiative, exploring nuclear politics and peace advocacy from Nagasaki during the 80th anniversary year. Subscribe for more analysis, interviews, and personal reflections throughout the summer.