Civilizational Discourses in Weapons Control

288 Pages·2020·2.874 MB·English

by  Ritu Mathur

Civilizational
Discourses in
Weapons Control
Ritu Mathur
Civilizational Discourses in Weapons Control
Ritu Mathur
Civilizational
Discourses in Weapons
Control
Ritu Mathur
Department of Political Science & Geography
University of Texas at San Antonio
San Antonio, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-44942-1 ISBN 978-3-030-44943-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44943-8
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F
oreword
A Middle Eastern country has a secret nuclear weapons program. It
acquired the means to develop weapons capability through legal, illegal
and illicit means, starting decades ago, beginning with a US Atoms for
Peace research reactor. Other means included stealing weapons-grade
nuclear fuel from a secure site in Pennsylvania and diverting a shipment of
uranium oxide carried by sea. It suborned corporate executives to acquire
centrifuge blueprints and relied on the active help of countries such as
France and apartheid South Africa to build an unsafeguarded power reac-
tor and reprocessing plant and to test early weapon designs.
This thumbnail sketch is not a description of Iran, Pakistan or North
Korea, but perpetual objects of fear and sanctions in the world of nuclear
proliferation: it refers to Israel. No international sanctions are applied
against Israel, no pressure put on it to change its wayward course. Israel’s
standing agreement with the US, the world power most set against nuclear
proliferation, is simply that it will not be the first to “introduce” nuclear
weapons into the region. This carefully crafted language means one thing
for Israel and something else for the US, keeping the latter, if not happy,
then at least free from too much public embarrassment. The contrasting
treatment of Israel and those other “rogue states” is just the most obvious
evidence that the international nuclear control regime is not intended nec-
essarily to lead to a safer world, rather it is a technology for not upsetting
an unequal one.
Language is key to unpacking the inherent contradictions of nuclear
power. Opacity, the term of art that describes Israel’s nuclear policy, is a
brilliant example of the power of language to shape reality, to materialize
v
vi FOREWORD
the world for worse, not better. Opacity’s discordant and contradictory
meanings enable Israel to possess nuclear weapons but still not be the first
to “introduce” them to the Middle East. The agency of nuclear discourse
enables the Middle East to be “nuclear free” in spite of the presence of an
Nuclear Weapon State (NWS) in its midst.
We sometimes forget the discourse of nuclear power is built upon an
immanent contradiction. Falsely glossed as ambiguity, the ambivalence of
nuclear power leaves us with a progression of ever more extreme binaries
that structure nuclear discourse: civilian and military uses, political weap-
ons and military weapons, “legal” nuclear weapons states and illegal
“rogue” states, Article IV and Article VI, peaceful nuclear explosions and
nuclear tests, nuclear fuel and atomic waste—these and other nuclear bina-
ries congeal into a single political truth: good and evil. The keyword here
is AND, not the referents on either end of the conjunction. The work of
dominant nuclear discourse is to efface the AND by privileging and polic-
ing the respective ends of apparent policy binaries. But the conjunction is
both material and permanent, and when acknowledged, enables us to
think beyond the Manichaean heresy. How do we break with this totalitar-
ian language and imagine “alternative visions of possible futures” as Carol
Cohn asked us so long ago?
An essential starting point is a thoroughgoing critique of the interna-
tional nuclear order, exposing its structural impediments to meaningful
change and identifying discursive and institutional practices maintaining
the nuclear status quo. While critical scholars from around the world have
long been engaged in this struggle, Dr. Ritu Mathur’s new book offers a
novel and theoretically informed view of the deep structure of nuclearity,
read through the lens of civilizational thinking.
Civilization-talk plays a central role in the establishment of nuclear
order, always invoking difference as well as universality. The “standard of
civilization” has long been a powerful discursive tool for the managers of
the modern international system, relegating the darker nations to the mar-
gins of international life and dismissing their concerns as always “not
quite” enough—symptomatically parochial and incomplete when set
against a shifting but always claimed-to-be-universal global standard. As
Dr. Mathur shows, race cannot be separated from this cathexis, going back
to the mission civilisatrice when corrupt trading companies remade them-
selves as civilizing empires. What never seems to be remembered, although
first expressed as early as the end of the eighteenth century, is that the
costs of colonial rule are never felt by the colonized alone but indict and
FOREWORD vii
engulf the colonizer too. Sleeping Beauty must awake, as Fanon pro-
claimed. So too it is with nuclear power: a global condition that leaves no
one spared when its power is expressed, as it has been, over and over.
Rejection, denial, willful ignorance and unevenness are the real stories
of the global nuclear regime as it has evolved from its optimistic and ideal-
ist beginnings in the post-Hiroshima era. After the shock of August 1945,
it was still possible to imagine the US giving up its miniscule arsenal and
the creation of a supranational agency controlling the world’s nuclear
materials, One World. This vision of renounced sovereignty would last
only as long as it took to debate the Baruch Plan in the Security Council.
Immediately after, competition and escalation would replace talk of disar-
mament and sequestering, in the process of establishing new thresholds
for international tension and fear. Postcolonial countries, not least Ireland,
would seek to moderate our rush toward a descending nuclear spiral, but
were stopped far short of allowing a general disarmament to become a
sensible and necessary end to mutual hatred and assured destruction.
When the Cold War moved to the tropics in the form of the Cuban Missile
Crisis, a new system of nuclear governance came into being. It was formed
not just through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and other
acronyms of nuclear weapons management, but generated an entirely new
lexicon that gripped the bodies and focused the minds of “defense intel-
lectuals” on a single overwhelming problem—Who’s Next?
How this false question reshaped the meanings and practices of global
nuclear control in our historical present is the story of this book. It should
be read in order to understand how the technologies of nuclear manage-
ment reinforce the hierarchies and exclusions of the prevailing global
order. This book shows all too clearly that what Dr. Mathur calls the
“architecture” of weapons control is a tragic symptom of our times, not a
redemptive path out of the disasters we have consciously and uncon-
sciously imposed on ourselves.
Singapore, Singapore Itty Abraham
C
ontents
1 T ime and Weapons Control 1
Doomsday Clock 1
Time and Civilization 4
Standardized Time and Race War 8
Nationalism and Race 13
Linear Time and Cyclical Time 18
Evolutionary Time 21
Civilizational Time 28
Postcolonial Time 34
Vulnerability of Time 40
2 The West and the Rest: A Civilizational Mantra 43
Introduction 43
Two Images of the West 45
Contemporary Civilizational Discourses 48
Civilizational Encounters in Africa 58
Civilizational Encounters in Asia 62
Reciprocity and Rights in Standards of Civilization 74
Critiques of Civilizational Discourses 78
Conclusion 82
3 Colonial Consciousness and Civilizing Therapy 85
Civilizational Consciousness 85
Martial Races 95
ix
x CONTENTS
Nationalism 100
Colonial Science and Heroic Scientists 109
Hybrid Scientists 114
Constitutional Order 118
War of Civilization 125
Conclusion 129
4 Sly Civility and Institutionalized Humiliation 133
Racial Etiquette 133
Nuclear Tests and Nuclear Blackmail 137
National Science and International Law 148
Amnesia, Denials and Abstractions 154
Security Culture and Decorative Savages 162
Taboos and Norms of Civilization 169
Nuclear Apartheid 173
Conclusion 184
5 Mimesis and Weapons Control 189
Introduction 189
Enlightened Nuclear Order 192
Compliance Discourse 195
Export Controls 201
National Scientists to Rogue Scientists 208
Remapping Nonproliferation 213
Conclusion 215
6 New Standards of Civilization 219
Introduction 219
Contestation of Rights 220
Production of Exceptionalism 225
Exceptional Exceptionalism 231
Revolt to Reconstellate 242
Bibliography 249
Index 267
I
ntroduCtIon
This book is a contribution in the contemporary scholarly efforts to decol-
onize the field of international relations. In an effort to advance such an
undertaking, it focuses particularly on civilizational discourses in the field
of arms control and disarmament. The need for such an undertaking can
be premised on the claim that while problems of modernity, ethnocen-
trism and universalism are now a central concern within the field of inter-
national relations these ideas are scarcely debated or contested within the
field of arms control and disarmament. The singular focus on technologi-
cal innovations and specific policy-oriented agreements in practices of
arms control and disarmament appears to stymie the need for such engage-
ments. This book is an invitation to explore such ideas embedded within a
historically grounded terrain of weapons control.
In Chap. 1, an exploration of civilizational discourses in weapons con-
trol is encouraged by initially drawing on the symbolism of the Doomsday
Clock as a remnant of war and a wish image to emphasize the significance
of time and temporality in practices of arms control and disarmament. The
temporality of the Doomsday clock serves as a helpful moniker to encour-
age reflexivity on how the problem of time and technology is associated
with modern understandings of state and military so central a premise in
addressing the problem of weapons. An effort here is made to problema-
tize different conceptualizations of time as an important tool for mapping
histories of arms control and disarmament. The Orientalists emphasized
linearity of time in their attempt to differentiate modern and archaic civi-
lizations. For analytical purposes this book seeks to make a distinction
between civilizational time and postcolonial time. It insists on pursuing a
xi