Abstract

William Walker's article, Nuclear enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, raises fundamental questions about the history of efforts to construct order in international politics in relation to nuclear arms and weapons-related capabilities. However, Walker's enlightenment and counter-enlightenment tropes are clumsy and unsatisfactory tools for analyzing contemporary policies concerning nuclear deterrence, non-proliferation and disarmament. Walker holds that in the 1960s and 1970s most of the governments of the world came together in pursuit of a grand enlightenment project. This thesis cannot withstand empirical scrutiny with regard to its three main themes supposed US-Soviet consensus on doctrines of stabilizing nuclear deterrence through mutual vulnerability, a notion that the NPT derived from concerted efforts to construct an international nuclear order meriting that title, and the view that the NPT embodied a commitment to achieve nuclear disarmament. Walker's criticisms of US nuclear policies since the late 1990s are in several cases overstated or ill-founded. Walker also exaggerates the potential influence of the United States over the policies of other countries. It is partly for this reason that the challenges at hand both analytical and practical are more complicated and difficult than his article implies. His work nonetheless has the great merit of raising fundamental questions about international political order.