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.
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Programme
This course aims to equip students with the essential tools for understanding the importance of nuclear technology and its proliferation in the context of international relations. Adopting a historical approach ensures an understanding of how this phenomenon has evolved across its many facets, including great power politics, alliance relations, and international stability and instability more generally. The course begins with an introductory section designed to help students acquire a basic understanding of the key processes in this technological field, followed by a much more detailed historical overview. This overview ranges from the discovery of the knowledge required for the military exploitation of atomic energy to the subsequent spread of the technology for peaceful purposes. A series of national nuclear programmes are analysed alongside their relevance to the emergence of non-proliferation policy in order to understand the logic of arms control. The historical overview then traces the stages of nuclear technology's presence in the international system, even after the end of the Cold War.Core Documentation
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Attendance is no mandatory but strongly recommended