Redemption and Nutopia: The Scope of Nuclear Critique in International Studies
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Author | Columba Peoples |
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829815613051 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(2) 216 –235
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829815613051
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Redemption and Nutopia:
The Scope of Nuclear Critique
in International Studies
Columba Peoples
University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
What should the scope of nuclear critique within international studies be? This article addresses
that question by making two interrelated arguments. First that political programmes of international
nuclear order are crucially underpinned by what is termed here as ‘nutopianism’: a mode of
understanding nuclear power that is imbued with a spirit of technological optimism in relation
to ‘peaceful’ nuclear power, but simultaneously qualified by an awareness of the destructive
uses and catastrophic potentialities of nuclear weapons. Second, that such nutopianism is in turn
predicated on the ‘saving power’ of ‘the atom’: the assumption that nuclear power has redeeming
features crucial to human progress and economic prosperity, the development of which should be
facilitated within the structures of international order. The article makes the case that although
critical thought within international studies focuses on nuclear weapons within international order,
it has tended to remain largely silent on the issue of ‘civil’ nuclear power beyond nuclear weapons
and the complex imbrication between the two. On that basis the article considers whether a more
holistic and expansive form of nuclear critique is both possible and necessary.
Keywords
Nuclear, nuclearism, critique, nuclear weapons, international studies, international order
Introduction
I’m a scientist and an inventor, and it is absurd to reject nuclear energy […] It all comes from
the religious side. They feel guilty about dropping atom bombs on people. Here was this
extraordinary gift given to humans – a safe, cheap source of power – and it gets horribly abused
Corresponding author:
Columba Peoples, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, School of Sociology, Politics and International
Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, 11 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TU, UK.
Email: c.peoples@bristol.ac.uk
613051MIL0010.1177/0305829815613051MillenniumPeoples
research-article2015
Article
Peoples 217
1. James Lovelock, as quoted in Stephen Moss, ‘James Lovelock: “Instead of Robots Taking Over
the World, What If We Join with Them”?’, The Guardian, 30 March 2014, np. Available at:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/30/james-lovelock-robots-taking-over-
world. Last accessed May 6, 2015.
2. Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Fukushima and Hiroshima’, The New York Times, 15 April 2011, np.
Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/opinion/16iht-edlifton16.html?_r=1&.
Last accessed May 6, 2015.
3. Or ‘Gaia Theory’ – originally articulated in James Lovelock, Gaia: New Look at Life on Earth
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
4. World Nuclear Association, ‘Small Nuclear Power Reactors’, 30 April 2015. Available at:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Small-Nuclear-
Power-Reactors/. Last accessed May 6, 2015.
5. See Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. (CCFE) Available at: http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/. Last
accessed May 6, 2015.
6. As quoted in Moss, ‘James Lovelock’, np.
right at the start. We’re still playing out the guilt [sic] feelings about it. But it’s sad because we
in Britain could now be having cheap energy if we’d gone on building [nuclear power stations].
– James Lovelock (2015)1
We do better to overcome our denial and dissociation and to instead acknowledge that radiation
effects are one and the same no matter what their source, that the combination of nature and
human fallibility makes no technology completely safe, and the technology most dangerous to
us can hardly be relied upon to provide something ‘clean’ or pure, or to otherwise redeem us.
– Robert Jay Lifton (2011).2
The quotation above from James Lovelock – renowned as the originator of ‘Gaia Theory’3
– stands as a pertinent reminder that technological optimism still has a presence in con-
temporary debates on nuclear power. Elements of such optimism can still routinely be
found in the promotion of new ‘generations’ of nuclear power stations as a means (or as a
key component of the means) to combat global climate change; in arguments for ‘small
modular reactors’ as the future of household electrical provision;4 and in continuing hopes
for fusion technologies as the power source of the future.5 Lovelock’s characterisation,
however, suggests that the history of and prospects for nuclear power looks forever
damned by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the conse-
quent and ensuing ‘guilt’. The latter ‘feelings’, he asserts, lead to a continuing and mis-
guided rejection of nuclear power (‘this extraordinary gift to humans’), with the UK being
cited as a particular example of how such ‘religiosity’ has impeded the development of ‘a
safe, cheap source of power’.6 By way of contrast, the characterisation expressed by
Robert Jay Lifton, suggests a diametrically opposed caution towards the assumed ‘redeem-
ing’ aspects of nuclear power, and a refusal to make Lovelock’s strict distinction between
nuclear technologies as weapons of destruction, and providers of energy.
Despite the opposition of their views, both Lovelock and Lifton invoke notions of
‘guilt’ and ‘redemption’. The argument made below is that these notions are not only a
common thematic engaged by such broader reflections on the nature of the ‘nuclear age’,
but that they also crucially underpin attempts to construct and legitimate international
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