British Approach to the Nuclear Weapons Disarmament

Beyond strategic thinking, scholars have highlighted the necessity of a sociological examination of barriers to UK disarmament including the collective identities of Britain’s policymaking elite (Van Wyk, 2007; Ritchie and Pelopidas, 2015). This is pertinent as realist scholars have long neglected nuclear disarmament despite recent attempts to reconcile them (Tagma, 2010). A constructivist lens can be employed to privilege the identities and interests of actors as opposed to treating them as an a priori positions (Bloomfield, 2016). Indeed, nuclear weapons are not only embedded “in strategic thinking and force postures, but also in our political cultures”, with the bomb ascribed socio-political values (Ritchie, 2013: 146)

Collective identities are social constructions underpinned by expectations, values and images the UK has of itself and other states. These are both normalized and institutionalized, but notably national identity is not static but continuously fabricated. In turn, national interests represent a series of objectives which must be satisfied through appropriate modes of action in order to reproduce this core national identity (Wendt, 1994). Constructivists posit policymaking elites as guided not purely by rationalist calculations but rather “by a sense of what is ‘appropriate’ according to dominant collective national identities…and the national interests that follow” (Ritchie, 2012: 75-6; Checkel, 1998).

For the UK, constructions of identity and interests in relation to nuclear weapons’ values have framed nuclear retention as appropriate and thus nuclear abolition as inappropriate. Constructivists assert that nuclear weapons have neither a pre-determined nor objective value, as these are shaped by socio-historical context and a nation’s strategic culture. Nuclear weapons have long been a core facet of Britain’s identity, associated with a desire to retain a position of major powerdom despite the demise of its colonial empire (Smith, 2005). Within the UK, Ritchie (2013) identified six domains of value, including ontological and institutional/governance domains, which are key to asserting Britain’s need for nuclear retention and discrediting proposals for nuclear disarmament. Notably, a hierarchy of values operates as some of these socio-political domains are formal possession rationales whilst others are hidden and silenced, instead representing implicit values but nevertheless significant (ibid).

Ontological value predominantly derives from two components: the UK positioning itself as a ‘force for good’ and the United States’ (US) primary military ally. The former identity has been reproduced post-Cold War, framing the UK’s collective identity as an “interventionist, pivotal power and defender of the international community” (Ritchie, 2012: 79). Walker (2010) coined this as ‘responsible nuclear sovereignty’ whereby Britain positions itself as a nuclear sovereign who is responsible to members of international society and thus humankind: through nuclear retention the UK considers itself a defender of threats not only to the UK and its citizens, but also to Europe (Baylist and Stoddart, 2014).

The latter component represents the UK’s strong Atlanticist identity, premised on the ‘special’ UK-US relationship which implicitly indicates that nuclear abolition would symbolically signal that Britain is no longer a close and valuable US ally. Nuclear weapons also have powerful institutional/governance values due to conferring prestige and influence, pertinent as the UK’s P5/N5 status is highly valued (Ritchie, 2013). This value is evidenced by Harrington de Santana’s analysis of nuclear weapons as fetishized objects, representing “a currency of international power” (2009: 341). As nuclear weapons are interconnected with political privileges and legitimate authority, such as Security Council veto power, their power is not reducible to their explosive capacity. Indeed, for strategic policymakers, in order to be Britain, nuclear weapons must be possessed as nuclear abolition would downgrade its rank in the global state hierarchy (ibid).

When conceptualizing nuclear weapons in relation to socio-technological identities, feasibility of nuclear weapon abolition is interconnected to the need to disassemble the societal systems which produce nuclear weapon value. Indeed, constructivists claim that nuclear abolition requires a transformation of identities and interests, through “peeling away the layers of value to the point where it becomes politically, strategically and socially acceptable to permanently relinquish nuclear capability” (Ritchie, 2012: 146).

As such, UK nuclear abolition is feasible if policies are designed to diminish and/or transform nuclear weapons’ values, specifically in the eyes of the UK’s security policy-making elite. This will simultaneously involve deep, as opposed to merely surface, devaluation. Deep devaluation involves modifications in nuclear discourse and long-term contextual shifts. For example, the former may include overcoming feminine tropes of disarmament (e.g. disarmament as emasculation/weakness) whilst the latter reform of UN disarmament structures (ibid; Caldicott, 1985).

Notably, this paper does not wish to portray the process of devaluation as easy in practice despite its theoretical feasibility, as Schulte pertinently questioned how many “sufficiently strategically influential constituencies…will be persuaded to do so [see nuclear weapons in a different way]?” (2013: 216). Overall, this section has demonstrated that even with a weak strategic case, the feasibility of achieving nuclear zero in the UK is contingent on a recognition of the importance of political-defence identities and the use of strategies of de-valuing (Ritchie, 2010).