The 2000 NPT Review Conference agreed as one of 13 steps towards disarmament that the principle of irreversibility should apply to nuclear disarmament and other related arms control and reduction measures. This raises important and interesting questions about what irreversibility might mean in such a context. This presentation offers a perspective drawn from science and technology studies to examine nuclear weapons as both social and ideological objects and as artefacts and material technology, and a nuclear weapons complex as a large socio-technical system. It suggests the irreversibility of nuclear disarmament is about the unmaking of this socio-technical system within a society, that is irreversibility as social change and not simply dismantling weapons and shutting down and demolishing facilities. It aims to demonstrate that a state in which the nuclear weapons system has to all intents and purposes completely come apart and in which the unacceptability of nuclear weapons has been normalized within society may not easily reverse the disarmament process.
About the speaker: Nick Ritchie is a Professor of International Security at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York, in Britain. His research and teaching focuses on global nuclear politics and US and British national security. He previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as a researcher on nuclear disarmament at the Oxford Research Group.