| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article surveys the emerging field of meaning represented by 'nuclear devaluation', and the arguments likely to be publicly or privately articulated against it by the elites of nuclear capable states, reaching judgements through the prism of their own strategic cultures in relation to their own national and regime interests. These judgements will be informed by different, often unstated, assumptions about the value of nuclear weapons, particularly the intangible, strategically shaping effects of nuclear capabilities on the peacetime strategic landscape. Political pressures for some form of devaluation will continue, especially within nuclear weapon states concerned to limit further damage to the NPT regime. But devaluation falling short of disarmament will be hard to prove, difficult for other states to rely upon, particularly unappealing to authoritarian regimes, and potentially reversible, while its essential appeal to strategically influential constituencies will be circumscribed by cultural and geostrategic factors. Managing the consequences of unevenly distributed aspirations towards devaluation will nevertheless represent a growing complexity for Western nuclear diplomacy.
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