Description
On 27 April 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron stopped short of apologising to Polynesians over the underground and atmospheric nuclear tests conducted from 1966 to 1996. To date, none of the nuclear-armed states has ever formally apologised for the harm caused by nuclear weapons, with leaders acknowledging a “debt”, as the French Polynesia case shows, but refusing to say, “we are sorry”. This article examines cases where nuclear-armed states stopped short of apologising for using and testing nuclear weapons, theorising how these speech acts contribute to sustaining the nuclear status quo. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, our argument is twofold. First, we will argue that using affective language works to produce a particular kind of possessor, reducing the horrors of misdeeds and thus obscuring the purported necessity of apologising. Second, we will argue that the absence of a formal apology mobilises existing expectations about what an apology is and what it is for that works to reiterate a continuum of responsibility that legitimises nuclear possession and helps sustain the dominant relations of power in nuclear politics.
