n May 2025 Professor Nick Ritchie delivered a masterclass for BASIC’s Emerging voices Network entitled Irreversible Nuclear Disarmament and Nuclear Weapons Complexes.
The class assessed what happens if nuclear-armed states embark on a nuclear disarmament process.
Can the process become “irreversible” in a meaningful way, as demanded by Non-Proliferation Treaty?
Prof Ritchie’s talk set out the possibilities and prospects for irreversible nuclear disarmament by likening nuclear weapons complexes to large socio-technical systems that have to be reproduced over time.
He looked at the challenges of putting such systems back together again once they start to come apart.
The research is based on a two-year project on Irreversibility in Nuclear Disarmament with King’s College London and VERTIC, funded by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO.).
Nick Ritchie is a Professor of International Security at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York.
His research and teaching focus on global nuclear politics and national security in the US and UK.
He previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as a researcher on nuclear disarmament at the Oxford Research Group, a UK NGO.
His work on nuclear weapons policy, disarmament and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been widely published.
Prof Ritchie’s work has been funded by the FCDO, the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
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