Nuclear Weapons and the State System

Hugh Gusterson's article on the way the West conceptualizes the distribution of nuclear weapons, and by extension third-world countries, highlights the potential of divisive topics to further entrench states behind the boundaries of sovereignty and autonomy. This point has implications for the potential of the state system to undergo fundamental change: namely, if states' way of constructing ideological (and logical) arguments is informed exclusively by sovereignty and autonomy, then they will be less likely to change in situations where conflict arises.

Gusterson points out that, "It is often said that it is inappropriate for Third World countries to squander money on nuclear (or conventional) weapons" rather than focusing on problems like poverty and homelessness [1]. Criticisms such as this one not only run the risk of hypocrisy, as Gusterson mentions, but also emphasize the every-state-for-itself mentality that characterizes a competitive weapons environment. Wealthy, "developed" countries have earned the right to spend large sums of money on weapons programs, but it is unethical for less developed countries to do so. This conceptualization shows that it is the job of each state to fend for itself, without aid from other states. Though in practice that is not always the case, and certain states sometimes intentionally contribute to the welfare of other states through humanitarian and military aid, such action is far from being seen as an obligation. 

When states, especially "advanced" ones, wish to lay claim to a specific kind of action, they often fall back upon this logic—which is essentially a more nuanced version of "might makes right." It's the same kind of thinking that empires use to rationalize colonialism, and that the Security Council uses to justify the disproportionate diplomatic power of its permanent members. 

As Laffy and Weldes point out, terminology can be a way of creating convenient dichotomies where none need exist. Classifying countries as 'developed' and 'developing' is the first step to creating different standards for those states' behavior, as the case of nuclear weapons shows. To put it a different way, we can see classification as a way for powerful states to transform interests into ideas: the interest is in preventing more states from acquiring nuclear weapons, and it changes into an idea when non-nuclear states get classified as insufficiently 'developed' to merit—or be trusted with—nuclear weapons.

[1] Gusterson, Hugh. 1999. "Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination." Cultural Anthropology 14:1. 116.