Description

Nuclear disarmament is one of those phrases that can still sound faintly ridiculous – until it is used to justify a bombing campaign. Treated one moment as the residue of a naïve politics of peace, and the next as the legal-political rationale for disciplining dangerous states, nuclear disarmament has acquired two public faces: sentimental and muscular. The trouble is that neither captures its real significance. This lecture reflects on the idea of the bomb as a constitutional artefact: not simply a weapon of unique destructive force, but one that has helped to structure world order. It argues that the status of nuclear weapons has been sustained through two dominant routes of justification. The first shelters the bomb under the grammar of self-defence and protects it as a sovereign right. The second defers to the logic of deterrence, recognising the bomb as a form of strategic control. In different ways, both routes embed nuclear weapons within the structures of legal and political authority. Against both fatalism and nostalgia, the lecture revisits these justifications through legal and political theories of authority, fear, non-domination, and public reason. It asks how nuclear weapons shape the conditions of constitutional order, what forms of domination they sustain, and why disarmament should be understood not as utopian aspiration, but as a constitutional imperative.