The course aims to provide the student with the essential tools to understand the nuclear issue as an international problem. To this end, it is crucial to go deeper in the analysis of how the exploitation of atomic energy has evolved since the 1930s and how it has progressively acquired a decisive political dimension, due to the absolute value of the destructive capacity of its military use. Moreover, students will examine the effects of the technology evolution and the inevitable diffusion of the related knowledge from a political-international perspective and they will try to understand to what extent the nuclear issue has influenced the thinking of the political and military theorists.