Description
The concept of a “Third Nuclear Age” (3NA) is becoming popular in academic IR and security studies and beginning to infiltrate policy discourse. This paper critically examines the periodization practices of 3NA thinking, in conversation with conceptual critiques of mainstream periodization practices made by historiographers and allied humanities scholars. I argue that the 3NA concept periodizes nuclear history in a politically constitutive manner which forecloses the possibility of alternative nuclear weapons policies from future timelines. This takes place through three principal mechanisms. First, the breaking up of time in a way that emphasizes rupture at the expense of continuity; second; the imposition onto the entire world of a provincial account of history; and third, the invocation of a “race against time” in a “shrinking present”. When applied to nuclear politics, all three generate political conclusions which, taken together, (re)narrate a nuclear future which is still defined by concerns about and action against “proliferation”. This paper does not deny that destabilizing developments in world nuclear politics may be taking place. Rather, it argues that periodizing these developments via the concept of the 3NA does ideological work in service of (re)armament and against disarmament by the nuclear weapons states.
