Nuclear weapons are the most destructive instruments in human history. And yet they have not been used in combat since 1945. Every other category of weapon developed in the twentieth century has been used but they have not. The standard explanation provided in International Relation theory is deterrence: states do not use nuclear weapons because possession of nuclear weapons alone generates mutual restraint.
However, a consistent critique of this explanation has been its own circularity; it says nuclear weapons have not been used because they deter their own use, without accounting for the mechanism through which possession alone produces that restraint. Kenneth Waltz, the most rigorous spokesman for the rationalist position, argued in his 2012 Foreign Affairs piece that Iran should be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons because “where nuclear capabilities emerge, so too does stability” (Waltz 2).
His logic is only ever internally consistent. His foundational assumption has never been examined. That assumption is that nuclear weapons are military instruments whose value is determined by the rational calculus of their potential use. This essay argues that the assumption is false, and that correcting it requires an ontological reframing of the object of analysis itself.
Nuclear weapons are not weapons. They are something else entirely, and understanding what they are changes everything about how we understand nuclear politics in the multipolar twenty-first century.
What nuclear weapons actually do is not serve any credible military function, but rather declare. Every nuclear doctrine maintained by every active nuclear state contains a version of the following reservation: under conditions of existential threat, this state reserves the right to use nuclear weapons, unconstrained by international law or the laws of war. Carl Schmitt, in Political Theology, defined sovereignty not by who governs in normal conditions but by who decides when normal conditions are suspended: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 5).
The nuclear arsenal is the permanent materialised instantiation of that decision. It does not need to be aimed because its mere existence is the continuous declaration that this state belongs to the class of sovereigns who reserve the right to end the world. Nuclear weapons, therefore, operate at the level of political ontology rather than definitive military strategy.
They do not make nuclear states more powerful versions of non-nuclear states. They metamorphose them into categorically different kinds of political entities.
The philosopher J. L. Austin distinguished between utterances that describe a state of affairs and utterances that constitute one. When a judge sentences a defendant, the words are not a description of a pre-existing sentence. They are the sentencing (Austin 5). Nuclear possession works the same way. A state that acquires nuclear weapons does not describe its power. It performs a transformation of its sovereign identity.
The declaration is the reality, not a representation of it. Jean Baudrillard, writing directly about nuclear deterrence in Simulacra and Simulation, identified the structural consequences of this logic. The bomb is the first weapon whose entire operational logic requires its permanent non-use. The moment it is used, it ceases to deter, and deterrence was its only function (Baudrillard 3-5). It is therefore a representation of destruction whose power derives entirely from never becoming actual destruction.
Baudrillard called this a simulacrum, that which is a representation that has replaced the reality it was originally meant to represent (Baudrillard 1). Deterrence theory, which models nuclear weapons as instruments in a strategic game, has for eighty years been analysing the simulacrum as though it were a weapon. The empirical record makes clear why this matters. And why deterrence theory is faulty.
In May 1998, India conducted five nuclear tests under the code name Operation Shakti. India had possessed nuclear capability since its 1974 Pokhran test. Pakistan had possessed breakout capability since the late 1980s. Neither had declared it publicly. The tests in 1998 added nothing to the military balance between the two states. What they added was the declaration (Mian and Ramana). India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee announced that India was “now a nuclear-weapon state” (Mian and Ramana). Pakistan’s tests followed eleven days later, not in response to a new military threat, because none had materialised, but in response to a political performance that demanded an equally preposterous answering performance.
The international community responded accordingly with sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and emergency Security Council sessions. Yet none of these responses addressed a change in military capability. They addressed the meaning of the declaration. The world was responding to the mere performance of the nuclearisation of the subcontinent.
Pakistan’s new nuclear posture after the tests gave it, as strategic analyst Vipin Narang has documented, an asymmetric escalation posture, meaning the incentive and the cover to conduct limited military operations in Kashmir under a nuclear umbrella.
For instance, eleven months after mutual nuclearisation, Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control in the Kargil sector, initiating the first direct conventional conflict between two nuclear-armed states (Ibrahim). Waltz’s framework predicts that nuclear acquisition makes war hard to start, and yet Kargil starts. What nuclear weapons produced was not the prevention of conflict but its bounding.
When General Malik urged Prime Minister Vajpayee to open new fronts, Vajpayee refused, citing the presence of Pakistani nuclear weapons (Ibrahim). The conflict was fought within limits that both sides understood without negotiating them, not through rational deterrence calculation but through the theatrical logic of sovereign performance.
A state that actualises its nuclear exception destroys the very sovereignty the exception was meant to perform. Kargil was not a failure of deterrence; instead, it was a war fought within the constraints of a performance, on a stage that both sides had simultaneously erected and could not dismantle.
North Korea has extracted three decades of international attention, diplomatic summits with American presidents, and sustained geopolitical relevance from a position of extreme material and economic weakness. Its GDP is smaller than that of many mid-sized cities.
Its conventional military is technologically inferior to every significant adversary. Its nuclear weapons cannot be used for a first strike against a nuclear-armed power without guaranteeing the regime’s obliteration within hours. They have no plausible military utility. Eric J. Ballbach, writing in the Korean Journal of International Studies, documents that North Korea’s nuclear programme has become “the most crucial identity project of the North Korean state in the post-Cold War era,” with tests “intentionally designed as spectacles” constituting “a performative enactment of North Korea’s nuclear state identity” (Ballbach 392).
Following its first test in 2006, a North Korean foreign ministry spokesperson described it as “inevitable to physically demonstrate the North’s nuclear capacity to protect its national sovereignty and existence” (Ballbach 401). In 2012, North Korea amended its constitution to codify the state’s identity as “haekpoyuguk”, a nuclear state, before possessing a fully confirmed deployable arsenal (Ballbach 404).
The identity was constituted by the declaration, not by the capability of nuclear power. Kim Jong-un is not a Machiavellian military strategist with a nuclear arsenal. He is but a theatrical sovereign who has understood that in the contemporary international order, the performance of the sovereign exception is sufficient to command the stage.
Iran makes the same argument more radically. Waltz asked in 2012 whether Iran should acquire nuclear weapons. The question in my estimation was already obsolete. Iran’s former parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, told Japanese officials in 2010 that Iran was following the Japanese nuclear model: possessing capability without weaponisation (Salimi and Dareini 264). Iran’s former IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, observed that “if you are really smart, you don’t need to develop a weapon, you just develop a capability. And that is the best deterrence” (Salimi and Dareini 266).
In 2022, Iran’s nuclear chief stated publicly that Iran possessed the technical ability to build a bomb but had made no decision to do so (Rodgers). This is a deliberate performance of latent sovereign exceptionality, the declaration of potential exception without its enactment. For two decades, without a deployable weapon, Iran restructured Middle Eastern geopolitics, compelled great power negotiations through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, shaped Israeli strategic doctrine, and brought the United States to the negotiating table repeatedly. The political work of nuclear sovereignty was accomplished entirely in the register of performance.
The United States and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025 are the most contemporary and consequential confirmation of this thesis. Washington did not strike a military threat as Iran possessed no deployable weapon but rather it struck the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear performance, the enrichment cascades, the hardened facilities, (the physical apparatus of sovereign declaration). A state was subjected to military force for exercising sovereignty rather than for possessing a weapon. No framework within rationalist deterrence theory accounts for this.
Russia’s conduct throughout the war in Ukraine furthers the thesis and reveals its danger. A Center for Strategic and International Studies study of nearly 450 public statements across the first eighteen months of the conflict documents that Russian nuclear signalling was calibrated to battlefield conditions, meaning escalating when Russian forces faced collapse, moderating under international pressure, but never enacted (Williams et al.).
NATO’s restraint, its self-imposed limits on weapons supplied and targets authorised, was shaped entirely by the performance. Not a single warhead moved toward deployment. The performance governed the conduct of a major conventional war. But the Ukraine case also reveals what happens when multiple sovereign performers compete in the same space without a shared grammatological understanding and without any authority above them capable of arbitrating the declarations.
Russia’s nuclear threat constrained NATO and NATO’s constraint emboldened the Russian performance further. The compellence impact weakened as the signals continued, prompting Russia to lower its declared nuclear threshold (Williams et al.). This is the danger of the multipolar nuclear age: not that someone will use a weapon, but that the competition between performances will develop its own momentum, beyond the rational control of any single performer.
Waltz did not ask what the weapons were performing, for whom, or under what conditions the performance might spiral beyond any single state’s direction. “More may be better” is wrong because more performers produce more competing declarations of the sovereign exception in a system that has no authority capable of reading the stage. The proliferation crisis of the twenty-first century is not a crisis of destructive capability. It is a crisis of sovereignty: of multiple actors simultaneously claiming the right to stand outside all order, in a world that has no sovereign above the sovereigns to decide when the performance ends.
Author: Kumail Hasan
The author writes on international order, strategic competition, and the political economy of resource conflict. With particular emphasis on South and Central Asian politics.
Works Cited
Austin, J. L. How To Do Things With Words. Oxford University Press, 1962.
Ballbach, Eric J. “North Korea’s Emerging Nuclear State Identity: Discursive Construction and Performative Enactment.” The Korean Journal of International Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Dec. 2016, pp. 391-414.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Ibrahim, Ahmad. “Kargil Conflict from a Nuclear Perspective.” Strafasia, Sept. 2020.
Mian, Zia, and M. V. Ramana. “On the 20th Anniversary of the 1998 Nuclear Tests by India and Pakistan.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 2018.
Rodgers, Joseph. “Iran and the Changing Character of the Nonproliferation Regime.” Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 2025.
Salimi, Hossein, and Ali Akbar Dareini. “Scrutinizing Iran’s Strategy of ‘Latent Nuclear Deterrence’.” SCIREA Journal of Sociology, vol. 7, no. 4, Aug. 2023, pp. 257-276.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab, MIT Press, 1985.
Waltz, Kenneth N. “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 91, no. 4, July/Aug. 2012, pp. 2-5.
Williams, Heather, et al. “Russian Nuclear Calibration in the War in Ukraine.” Center for Strategic and International Studies, Feb. 2024.