Reflections on complexity, nuclear ordering and disordering over time

Intensive development of a rule-based international nuclear order, with its multiple treaties and agreements, was crowded into a thirty-year period from the early-1960 to mid-1990. A tendency towards disorder has predominated since then, leading to today’s anxiety that nuclear affairs are becoming ‘beyond ordering’. The article examines the historical experience of ordering and disordering through the lens of complexity, and considers the parts that the nuclear field’s extraordinary and ever shifting technological, politico-military, politico-economic and moral complexities—and contentions—have played in affecting outcomes. Emphasis is placed on the concerted ‘political organisation of complexity’ or its absence, as practised by the US and USSR/Russia (increasingly joined by China), the dominant nuclear powers. They have been the primary creators, guardians and disruptors of the nuclear order. The article ends with a comment, looking to the long run, on Norbert Elias’s ‘end of the road?’ for hegemonic war or human survival in the nuclear age.