The question of what happens to democratic societies and states as they pursue nuclear weapons has not attracted much interest since the mid-1950s. Scholars have explored the effects of domestic politics on nuclear weapons not the effects of nuclear weapons on domestic democratic processes. This presentation suggests that in democracies the pursuit of nuclear weapons, or nuclearization, includes a process of anti-democratic political change as technology imposes its constraints on political actors and state structures, driving actors, institutions and practices to adapt to new and unprecedented challenges, restricting the field of democratically decidable choices. It argues that nuclear secrecy in particular has direct implications for democratic governance.
About the speaker: Thomas Fraise is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He is part of the ERC funded Ritual Deterrence Project. He is also affiliated with the Nuclear Knowledges Program at Sciences Po (CERI-CNRS). In 2023-2024, he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program. His research is related to the practice of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. He is also working on a book manuscript on nuclear secrecy and the impact of nuclear weapons acquisition on democratic states.