Abstract
Discourse analysis has over the last two decades become established in international relations scholarship, yet it is also true that discourse analysts 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 (1996) 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 maintain 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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Notes
- 1.
In a quote I once found empowering, but now find problematic, David Campbell (1998, p. 215) describes the attitude of post-structuralists towards conventional IR scholarship: “Where once we were all caught in the headlights of the large North American car of international relations theory, now the continental sportster of critical theories has long since left behind the border guards and toll collectors of the mainstream - who can be served in the rear view mirror waving their arms wildly still demanding paper and the price of admission as occupants go on their way in search of another political problem to explore”.
- 2.
However, it must be recognised that the four sections this structure leads to, divided according to security, prestige, identity and domestic political explanations, represent analytical constructs rather than empirically exhaustive account of the debate. Few of the texts suggest that their explanation is final or perfectly distinct from the others. Indeed, some do not pose and answer the question explicitly, but provide an answer via their more historical accounts or security analysis.
- 3.
There was a surge in such analysis around the period when New Labour sought to legitimate renewal of the UK’s nuclear weapons. Notable examples from this genre include: Booth (1999a, 1999b), which argues that the UK’s nuclear weapons policy is incompatible with human rights; Ritchie (2008) who argues that the UK renewing its nuclear weapons can only undermine the NPT; Rogers (2006) which argues that the renewing the UK’s nuclear weapons ties the UK unhelpfully close to the US’s global interventionist agenda; Ritchie (2011) which draws on critical security studies to suggest that the UK’s nuclear weapons policy is symptomatic of the UK’s outdated statist security priorities; Ritchie (2009a, 2009b) and Beach (2009) which argue that the UK’s twenty-first-century rationale for Trident laid out in the White Paper does not make sense in the post-cold war era; MccGwire (1986a, 1986b, 2001, 2002), who argues that the UK’s nuclear weapons do not make the UK safer, but perpetuate animosity in international relations; MccGwire (2005) which argues that unilateral disarmament offers an obvious opportunity for the UK to improve its standing in the world; the various anti-nuclear movement texts arguing that UK nuclear weapons are an immoral waste of money. Finally, there was of course also several the conventional security analyses, puzzling about what sort of nuclear force the UK should aquire (e.g. Clarke, 2004; Ritchie & Ingram, 2010; Willett, 2010).
- 4.
See Freedman (1980) for a detailed account of the low political dilemmas the UK faced in maintaining its nuclear weapons.
- 5.
As Tannenwald (1999, p. 434) points out “Most non-nuclear states do not live daily in a nuclear security dilemma. Finally, if deterrence is all that matters, then why have so many states not developed nuclear weapons when they could have done so”? In particular, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand are good examples of states that made the choice to reject nuclear security. Meanwhile, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan all gave up nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union (despite notable realists [Mearsheimer, 1992] suggesting they do otherwise), South Africa gave up their “bombs in the basement”, and both Brazil and Argentina stepped down the nuclear ladder even once they had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle (the most challenging part of the process involved in making a nuclear weapon) (Beaumont & Rubinsky, 2012).
- 6.
That is not to say British nuclear weapons policy has not been the source of much attention, but most conventional histories seek to describe chronologically the various factors that led to policymakers making the decisions they did. See for example, Stoddart (2008) documenting with newly declassified material the internal disagreements over how much was needed to fulfil the “Moscow Criterion” (to deter Russia), or the decision-making process that led to the Chevaline upgrade (Baylis & Stoddart, 2003).
- 7.
Thus, the authors go further than Croft and Williams by giving “realism” its name, however that they do fail to explore the link any further.
- 8.
Many scholars have suggested a direct the link between realism and practice in the nuclear field. Firstly, the hiring practices of the MoD in the UK seem likely to have influenced the collective nuclear position of the MoD. Booth and Wheeler (1992) complain that the academic hegemony of realism during the Cold War affected the career prospects of security professionals. Elsewhere, Booth recalled “the nuclear debate in the 1980s, the vitriol levelled against those of us [academics] who did not share Whitehall’s pro-nuclear norms” (Booth, 1997, p. 372). If they disliked academics who questioned nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely they would employ people sceptical about nuclear weapons. One anonymous employee of the MoD offers support for this view describing it as “a huge organization, but one which is precisely designed not to challenge the underlying assumptions, to take them as your starting point, the water in which you swim” (Hamwee, Miall, & Elworthy, 1990, pp. 359–360).
- 9.
- 10.
See Wittgenstein (1955, §150–155) for a famous articulation of this problem.
- 11.
Croft and Williams (1991) acknowledge to a certain extent the problems inherent in their task; in their footnotes, they write that “Official publications are noticeable for their scarcity and blandness when examining underlying attitudes concerning security policy” and go on to bemoan that “retired politicians and civil servants rarely write memoirs that are of significant help” (note 6, p147). However, the authors do not go far enough in acknowledging the unsuitability of their methodology for their task. Attempting to weigh up the relative importance of status contra security concerns with a methodology that relies largely on looking for their articulation in official quotes is likely to go only one way.
- 12.
Even on a personal level, admitting one does anything because of concerns about status is socially awkward, both for other people and oneself.
- 13.
Freedman (1980, p. xv) ends his introduction that the goal of his book is to provide “a book of description and analysis rather than advocacy”.
- 14.
This has been addressed in the last decade. Major works include: de Carvalho and Neumann (2015), Wohlforth, De Carvalho, Leira, and Neumann (2018), Wohlforth (2009), Paul, Larson, and Wohlforth (2014), Larson and Shevchenko (2003, 2019), Volgy, Corbetta, Grant, and Baird (2011), Duque (2018), Onea (2014), Wolf (2019), Gotz (2020), Barnhart (2016, 2020), Røren (2019, 2020), Røren and Beaumont (2019), Freedman (2016, 2020), Clunan (2009); Gilady (2018), and Murray (2018). Moreover, a nascent strand of this research agenda has recognised the potential of taking a discursive approach to status and/or begun to theorise the domestic audience as a crucial audience for “international” status seeking (Beaumont, 2017, 2020; Lin & Katada, 2020; Pu, 2019; Ward, 2013, 2017).
- 15.
10 years later Croft and Williams (1991) cite Freedman’s argument uncritiqued.
- 16.
Quinlan, the leading Ministry of Defence nuclear weapons specialist, was given this nickname post-humously in an article in the Journal of Catholic Thought (Jones, 2013) Given the journal, it seems this was meant as a compliment, however it may also be a nod to the common anti-nuclearist attack on nuclear weapons advocates that subscribing to nuclear deterrence has more in common with religious faith rather than science.
- 17.
While there is nothing inevitable about the 40-year period of antagonism that received the misnomer of The Cold War, it would appear unlikely that in the aftermath of the Second World War, and within three years of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that British nuclear-acquisition could be seen as just a solution looking for a problem. Nobody knew what the nuclear era would entail and Croft and Williams’ (1991) analysis that security consideration weighed heaviest, is thus probably at its strongest here.
- 18.
- 19.
Hymans (2006b, p. 8) argues that “going nuclear” is an ideal type “big decision” with so much uncertainty involved that “the consequences of going nuclear are simply too vast to allow for a reasonable cost-benefit analysis”. I would suggest that going non-nuclear after 50 years of ostensibly relying on the invisible effects of deterrence is similarly revolutionary.
- 20.
Gerald Kaufman infamously described Labour’s manifesto in the 1983 election as “the longest suicide note in history” (Cited in Lilleker, 2000, p. 221). Although the scale of the defeat could be attributed to other causes—Thatcher’s nationalist bounce following the recapture of the Falklands/Los Malvinas is an obvious one, the anti-nuclear policy has since been closely associated with electoral disaster for Labour.
- 21.
Certainly this toxicity is not quite as timeless as Lewis suggests. After all, Harold Wilson campaigned successfully on a disarmament in the 1964 election using the slogan It will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not deter” Although Labour reneged on the promise once in office (Freedman, 1980; Scott, 2006), opposing nuclear weapons at the very least did not stop Labour from winning in the election (even if it is difficult to say whether it helped).
- 22.
According to Ritchie his analysis aims to extend the area for investigation beyond the “strategic security framework that privileges political military drivers and apparently rational cost benefit analysis of nuclear threats and nuclear deterrence and nuclear delivery platforms” in order to “augment” it without necessarily intending to supplant it (Ritchie, 2010, p. 467).
- 23.
This statement is not unproblematic. It is based on a Ritchie (2009a) critique of the White Paper (2006)—the official rationale—for renewal, as many historians have argued rarely tells the whole story.
- 24.
Indeed, Hansen (2006) argues the two are mutually constitutive and linked through discourse.
- 25.
I focus on Ritchie (2013) here because it is the more theoretically sophisticated of the two and include an analysis that is more salient to this book’s research question. Ritchie (2016) also uses the term regime of truth, but operationalises it by running through counterarguments about why the UK’s nuclear discourse includes several empirically dubious claims. This is useful for this book insofar as it supports the general warrant that underpins the empirical analysis: that the conventional wisdom about Britain’s nuclear weapons is highly contestable and it is worth investigating how one nuclear truth triumphed over other possible “truths” available. The empirical analysis of Ritchie (2016) is less relevant: it argues that, contra the UK governments’ regime of truth, its nuclear weapons are unhelpful for dealing with the threat from Russia, following the annexation of Crimea.
- 26.
As Chapter 3 discusses, this book is theoretically grounded in (and indebted to) the burgeoning works of post-positivists scholarship, particularly, Iver Neumann, Richard Ashley, Ole Waever, David Campbell, Thaddeus Jackson, Hugh Gusterson, and obviously Nick Ritchie and Lene Hansen.
- 27.
- 28.
This is the term that non-nuclear weapons states have used to describe the unfairness of the NPT’s division of the world into “legal” nuclear weapons states (NWS) and non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) who under the NPT can never become NWS.
- 29.
See for example Sagan (2004).
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Beaumont, P. (2021). Explaining Britain’s Bombs. In: Performing Nuclear Weapons. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67576-9_2
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