Description
Technological change may well be moving the world toward a third nuclear age. This communication proposes to study the effect of technological change in a specific field of nuclear weapons politics: their domestic governance in democratic states. The uneasy relation between democracy and nuclear weapons and, more generally, the undemocratic nature of nuclear weapons governance has been the topic of several studies (e.g Born et al. (eds.), 2010; Scarry, 2014; Cooke et al., 2018). At the same time, students of democracy have tackled the issue of new technologies as factor of domestic political transformation in democratic states – usually for the worse (e.g Fuchs, 2018; Moore, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). These studies have shown how new technology have the potential to challenge current power distribution inside democratic states and favor concentration of power in a minority’s hand. It begs the question: are such change also at work in the already democratically deficient field of nuclear weapons governance? Can the third nuclear age also introduce a new era of domestic governance? Focusing on the evolution of information technology, and its impact of the traditional boundaries of nuclear secrecy (Moric, 2022), this communication proposes to study how technological change may change nuclear weapons governance inside democratic states. It aims to argue that new technology, rather than simply bringing new threats, may also offer new opportunities for actors usually marginalized in nuclear weapons governance – that is, civil society – to act upon nuclear choices. Thinking about the third nuclear age might also imply thinking about how the inclusion of these actors might transforms nuclear weapons politics.
