New Texts Out Now: Shampa Biswas, Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Shampa Biswas (SB): I am a nuclear abolitionist, and would like to see a world completely rid of nuclear weapons. There are countless other nuclear abolitionists, many of whom have advanced very concrete suggestions for how to move toward a nuclear-free world. In fact, there is a massive, complex, multi-billion dollar nuclear nonproliferation regime invested in reducing and/or eliminating nuclear weapons from the world. Yet we are nowhere near ridding the world of nuclear weapons, and despite all the fanfare that accompanies the negotiation of a treaty like the New START or attempts to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program, I am not at all sanguine that we are even moving in that direction.
My interest was in understanding how this global nuclear order works to keep us always hopeful about progress on nuclear weapons elimination, while deflecting away from the real drivers of nuclear desire and the real profiteers of nuclear pursuits. I wanted to use this book to draw attention to what this global nuclear order looks like—who it empowers and who it disempowers, who benefits from it and who is damaged by it, whose concerns get voiced and who is rendered marginal. I wrote the book because I wanted to make the case that thinking rigorously about the many forms of inequities embedded within the global nuclear order—considered largely peripheral to what are considered to be more serious questions of security and stability—will, ultimately, make the world more peaceful and its inhabitants more secure. To say it differently and more simply, I wrote the book out of a commitment to contribute in some small measure to making a world that is simultaneously more peaceful and more just.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
SB: I wrote the book such that it could be read both as one single narrative articulating an argument about the global nuclear order, or as several inflections of that argument as articulated in each of the chapters (each of which, in my view, can be read as a stand-alone piece). In other words, while there is a unifying argument about the inequities underlying the global nuclear order, the topics the book covers are pretty wide ranging and includes: a Foucauldian analysis of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime in terms of its effects rather than its intentions; a postcolonial critique of a debate around the description of the nuclear order as an Enlightenment order; a Marxist analysis of nuclear weapons as fetish commodities; a study of the political economy of nuclear power (both weapons and energy) with an attention to the corporate interests driving nuclear production and its effects on various vulnerable communities around the world; and an examination of the subaltern state as an effective vehicle for third world security.
As may be clear, I draw from an eclectic mix of theoretical works, and cover a vast International Relations literature that relates to state security, international political economy, development, and postcolonial hierarchies. While my empirical scope is global, there are parts of the book that pay closer attention to the nuclear programs of three very different kinds of nuclear states: the US (the longest established nuclear weapons states); India (a more recent nuclear weapons state that is only one of three states that has not signed the very important Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty); and Japan (the only victim of a nuclear weapons attack that has forsaken a nuclear weapons program but has invested heavily in a nuclear energy program that is now in some jeopardy because of the Fukushima nuclear disaster; Japan is also considered a nuclear “breakout” state that has the capability to develop nuclear weapons on relatively short notice, if it so chose). More specific topics covered are the US-India nuclear deal that effectively helped normalize India’s nuclear weapons status, the state-corporate connections in Japan’s nuclear weapons program, the costs of nuclear weapons programs more broadly, exploitation in the uranium mining industry and in nuclear testing, India’s use of the “nuclear apartheid” argument in its quest for nuclear weapons status, and a fairly extensive description of the huge numbers of treaties, organizations, agencies, NGOs, and activists that form the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime, with a particular focus on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
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