First, the project has proposed a concept and a method to assess the role of “luck” – factors beyond control, including technical failure, disobedience or practices which do not match protocol and parameters not included in protocol – in past avoidance of unwanted nuclear explosions. It has documented it empirically and identified ways in which lessons from past cases of luck have not been learned.
A second major finding is the identification of a new and under-researched type of effect of nuclear weapons acquisition and policies: its impact on democracy and its possibility, via the production of obstacles to the accountability for such policy. The conceptualization of such effects has been articulated in the project’s PhD student’s dissertation and published in the forms documented above, in "Nuclearization and de-democratization: security, secrecy, and the French pursuit of nuclear weapons (1945–1974)", European Journal of International Relations 31(1), 2025 as well as Sterre van Buuren, “The Arsenal and the Ballot Box. Scoping the Incompatibility of Nuclear Weapons and Democracy”, Perspectives on Politics, online first and the survey-based demonstration in Repenser les choix nucléaires.
A third major finding of the project consists and proposing a method to assess the effects of funding of think tanks’ nuclear weapons policy analysis based on conflicts of interests on the outcome of the research, to conceptualize three types of such effects – direct censorship, self-censorship and perspective filtering – and to empirically document those effects based on a study of the top 45 nuclear weapons policy think tanks in the world. The outcome of this study has just been published as ““No Such Thing as a Free Donation. Research funding and conflicts of interest in nuclear weapons policy analysis”, International Relations, 39(1), 2025.
I would single out the creation of survey data about European publics knowledge about nuclear weapons history and policy and attitudes towards them as a fourth key contribution, for three reasons. Such questions were not asked before this project, so scholarship and policy were conducted on the basis of unverified assumptions about those attitudes. The data we have produced covers 9 countries: the two nuclear weapons-states, the five hosts, and two vocal non-hosts, Sweden and Poland. Finally, the fact that we were able to conduct the survey twice, in 2019 and 2024, opens the way towards a longitudinal study of the change in attitudes vis-à-vis nuclear weapons over time.
The project has also established the existence of very consequential assumptions about the climate nuclear nexus in the fields of nuclear security studies as well environmental policy studies and in the policy documents of four members of the UN Security Council and laid out a research agenda to assess their validity. This was done in “Armes nucléaires et environnement”, Raison Présente 2024/2, n°230, co-authored with Sterre van Buuren and Dr Thomas Fraise, two pieces by Dr Kjolv Egeland, “Climate security reversed: the implications of alternative security policies for global warming”, Environmental Politics 32(5), 2023 and “Disentangling the Nexus of Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change—A Research Agenda”, International Studies Review 27(1), March 2025.
As a result of those findings, we have become able to redefine how possible nuclear choices are scoped and to reconceptualize responsibility in the nuclear age in a context of nuclear vulnerabilities.
The main results of the project outlined above are presented in the video recording of the closing conference of the project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woJmmuSIGQw(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
