Aug 13, 2026 · 33 min · 10 segments
The international nuclear realm is under severe strain. Since the 1960s, the international community has constructed a dense web of laws to govern nuclear matters. However, over the past decade, a…
Annelise RilesGuest
Dan JoynerGuest
Anna HoodHost
This is a really interesting discussion and I think it raises an issue that is pervasive across nuclear law and that is that the way the laws are constructed often leave room for different interpretations, different views, whether or not international humanitarian law constrains the use and threat of nuclear weapons is something that international lawyers go round and round in circles on.
Some think that it clearly does in certain situations, some think it never possibly could.
I would say it's worth drawing attention to three buckets of problems with our international legal regime.
When the nuclear regime was constructed, I think there was an idea that You know, it was all going to be okay because most of the countries that had nuclear weapons, the vast majority were democracies.
They were under the control of the peoples of those countries that would make sure that their governments didn't do anything outlandish.
But we're now in a situation in which all but two of the nuclear states in the world have governments with rising authoritarian tendencies.
And in the case of France, it's possible that we may see a change of government.
So that raises a different challenge of the authority of singular leaders to take actions against the will and interests of their populations, which is a longstanding problem in international law, the problem that states may not be representative of their populations.
From the point of view of Washington and Paris, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency, all of this seems like a wonderful way to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
But things look very different from the perspective of bombed territories in the world, places like the Pacific, like the Sub-Sahara.
like the American Southwest, where people talk about living in a post-apocalyptic world, a world in which the apocalypse has already happened to them.
You know, the Pacific has endured the equivalent of one Hiroshima per day ever since 1945 in terms of the amount of atomic bombing that they've experienced.
And so theorists and thought leaders from those regions have begun to talk about this as a regime of what they call nuclear imperialism, a different kind of imperialism, which is based not on controlling territory, but having these spaces in the world in which populations are expendable.
This is a really interesting discussion and I think it raises an issue that is pervasive across nuclear law and that is that the way the laws are constructed often leave room for different interpretations, different views, whether or not international humanitarian law constrains the use and threat of nuclear weapons is something that international lawyers go round and round in circles on.
Some think that it clearly does in certain situations, some think it never possibly could.
I would say it's worth drawing attention to three buckets of problems with our international legal regime.
When the nuclear regime was constructed, I think there was an idea that You know, it was all going to be okay because most of the countries that had nuclear weapons, the vast majority were democracies.
They were under the control of the peoples of those countries that would make sure that their governments didn't do anything outlandish.
But we're now in a situation in which all but two of the nuclear states in the world have governments with rising authoritarian tendencies.
And in the case of France, it's possible that we may see a change of government.
So that raises a different challenge of the authority of singular leaders to take actions against the will and interests of their populations, which is a longstanding problem in international law, the problem that states may not be representative of their populations.
From the point of view of Washington and Paris, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency, all of this seems like a wonderful way to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
But things look very different from the perspective of bombed territories in the world, places like the Pacific, like the Sub-Sahara.
like the American Southwest, where people talk about living in a post-apocalyptic world, a world in which the apocalypse has already happened to them.
You know, the Pacific has endured the equivalent of one Hiroshima per day ever since 1945 in terms of the amount of atomic bombing that they've experienced.
And so theorists and thought leaders from those regions have begun to talk about this as a regime of what they call nuclear imperialism, a different kind of imperialism, which is based not on controlling territory, but having these spaces in the world in which populations are expendable.
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