Explaining Our Nuclear-Armed World with Prof. Benoît Pelopidas

When activists, diplomats, nuclear war planners, and religious actors use similar words when talking about nuclear weapons, do they mean the same thing? Do the citizens of the world know the demands that nuclear weapons are making of them? What are the actual drivers behind increasing nuclear weapons packages? And what assumptions do we carry with us while thinking about nuclear weapons that we should be questioning?

The ANU International Relations Society’s Kaitie Wickham will be talking to Science Po’s Professor Benoît Pelopidas, one of France’s premier experts on nuclear weapons.

Benoît runs the Nuclear Knowledges program, which is the first independent research program on the nuclear phenomenon in France. I won’t go through all of the accolades to his name, but the highlights include: previously having held the Chair of Excellence in security studies at Sciences Po (France’s most highly ranked and prestigious social sciences university); being an affiliate of the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford; and he has been awarded three international prizes for his research, as well as a grant by the European Research Council.

If you have any questions or comments about the podcast, you can get in touch with Benoît at: benoit.pelopidas@sciencespo.fr. You can also learn more about the Nuclear Knowledges program on Twitter (@NKowledges) or online: https://www.sciencespo.fr/nk/en.

The book recommendations mentioned is The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg.

And Kaitie’s recommendation of where to start if you want to read some of Benoît’s papers: “The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises,” by Benoît Pelopidas in the European Journal of International Security. If you want a link to a free copy of the paper, click here, and for a forthcoming follow-up on luck click here. Finally, for a 16-minute exposé on the dilemma of the public intellectual, click here.

We hope you enjoy the discussion!