This book is a heartfully rendered, powerfully argued, and intricately crafted deconstruction of the global nuclear order. Broad in scope and sympathetic in outlook, the book is as enjoyable to read as its subject matter is challenging. Coming to the topic as an international political sociologist interested in nuclear politics, but without scholarly investments in the area, I was struck by the book’s accessibility. The work should command the interest of both specialists and newcomers, including the broader public in the current context of concern over North Korean nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Desire covers a good deal of ground, but its central argument is admirably straightforward: The nuclear nonproliferation (NNP) regime, rather than representing a structure aimed at ridding the world of nuclear weapons, “helps produce and maintain a complex but hierarchical global order by effectively depoliticizing the problem of nuclear proliferation” (p. 11). Adopting a postcolonial perspective, Shampa Biswas seeks to shift the main paradigm of nuclear proliferation studies from what the regime and its main agents claim it does—limit the spread of nuclear weapons while facilitating access to civil nuclear power—to what it actually does. Here, disarmament “always remains asymptotic, a constantly receding future never quite at hand and hardly invoking much political anxiety” (p. 99; emphasis in original). The NNP regime is thereby rendered a complex discursive apparatus that keeps in place a strict ordering of states between those that can be trusted to have nuclear weapons, whether they choose to or not, and those deemed too immature or irrational.

In making this argument, the book can be placed within a new trend in international relations theory that rejects the anarchy problematic and sees the global system as naturally hierarchical (for an overview, see Ayse Zarakol, Hierarchies in World Politics, 2017). The author argues that even states allowed to join the nuclear club, like India, are coopted to uphold an unjust and unequal international system (pp. 193–94). The main question scholars should ask, therefore, is not whether we can get to nuclear zero but, rather, what nuclear justice for those affected by nuclear weapons would look like. Here, Biswas focuses on the problem of the subaltern: How can the least powerful speak on a topic dominated by a small club of powerful states?

The author signals the need for an epistemic shift in studies of nuclear proliferation early in the book, but takes the reader to the destination methodically, opening with a tour of the NNP regime that is at once concise yet giving a sense of its staggering size. Biswas brings home the sheer scale of effort involved in monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and debating the problem of nuclear weapons, all to such little effect. This tour is an important contribution in its own right, as the NNP regime is shown to be so much more than the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) itself.

Much of the journey takes the reader through insightful discussions of the work of others. Some might criticize the book on these grounds, but in an age of clickbait and a never-ending search for the new, it should be considered a strength. The work of scholars like William Walker (e.g., “Nuclear Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment,” International Affairs, 83(3), 2007), who sees the NNP regime as an example of Enlightenment reason at work, meets a sympathetic but forceful rebuttal, revealing a regime driven by an exclusionary logic buried deep in the liberal project (pp. 97, 107). This argument is similar to that of Iver Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending (Governing the Global Polity, 2010) and Ayse Zarakol (After Defeat 2013), among others, who redirect our gaze to the presuppositions of Western politics. As Biswas notes, “Rather than help make friends and enemies . . . [the NNP regime] helps us recognize our friends, rivals, and enemies through their location within its architecture” (p. 96). For this reason, foreign policy-makers in the West can have such conviction that only they are sufficiently rational to control nuclear weapons, and why at the same time the use of these weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has had such little impact on the public psyche (p. 14).

Rather than give over the terrain to realist security scholars after rejecting Walker’s liberalism, Nuclear Desire rejects the very division of academic labor that separates the study of cooperation (liberalism/economics) from conflict (security/realism) (pp. 28–29). Drawing on Marxist political economy—which has never accepted such a division of labor, and which has been marginalized in American political science as a result—Biswas suggests that nuclear weapons, which nuclear weapons states (NWSs) assert cannot be used, come to have value precisely because of this unusability. As a particular form of “luxury fetish commodity,” nuclear weapons are central to a process of deterrence that acts as a medium of exchange that maintains their value. Only in this way can we explain Russia and America maintaining nuclear arsenals totaling 15,000 unusable weapons, at a staggering cost (the United States spent $55.6 billion in 2010 and $61.3 billion in 2011, respectively [p. 139]).

At this point, some readers might recoil from the author’s case: Is it not true that nuclear weapons are valuable as a deterrent because they can kill a lot of people? In relation to North Korea, it might seem a stretch to argue that nuclear weapons are powerful because we treat them as powerful (p. 124). Is Kim Jong-Un’s ability to hit America’s West Coast with a nuclear warhead a function of language?

While sympathetic to the argument, indeed, I found myself contemplating what a mainstream U.S. scholar of nuclear power would make of it—someone like Stanford’s Scott Sagan or the late Kenneth Waltz—who, along with others, presumably hold “a generally dismissive attitude toward questions of inequality, powerlessness, and exploitation, seen as marginal to the more ‘serious’ dangers of nuclear security” (p. 15). Biswas does herself no favors with them, referring to the United States as “aggressive” and “megalomaniacal” (p. 20) and stating, with Gabrielle Hecht, Professor of Nuclear Security at Stanford University, “that the ‘nuclearity’ of an object—whether that be a nation, a technology, particular materials or processes, or a workplace—is not given in nature as a stable ontological fact but is rather established through a process of contestation with different interests at play” (p. 137) Assuming such scholars took the book seriously, and one hopes they would, they would want to know what they should do with it. In some ways, this book ends where many might hope it began. Assuming that they agree that “letting the subaltern speak” is worthwhile, how is that possible outside of state and intergovernmental structures? Could Biswas have done more to lay out the concrete steps for empowering the subaltern?

The answer, in my view, is no. The book’s lack of practical advice is telling; reading it is the action needed to let the subaltern speak. Commentators—academic and popular—are part of the unequal world that the NNP regime instantiates, as they make a nice living while the effects of nuclear weapons—physical waste, fallout, and the deprivation the money spent on nuclear weapons could prevent—are felt unequally across lines of race, class, and gender. Debate is not required; a change in mind-set is required, and the journey on which the reader is taken through Nuclear Desire should go a long way toward engendering it.