On 21st May 2025 Professor Nick Ritchie joined BASIC’s Emerging Voices Network (EVN) to deliver an Expert Masterclass on ‘Irreversible Nuclear Disarmament and Nuclear Weapons Complexes’. The event was chaired by Dave Cullen, Programme Manager of the EVN.
In this Masterclass, Professor Ritchie sets out the possibilities and prospects for irreversible nuclear disarmament by examining nuclear weapons complexes as large socio-technical systems that have to be reproduced over time and the challenges of putting such systems back together again once they start to come apart. The research is based on a 2-year project on Irreversibility in Nuclear Disarmament with King’s College London and VERTIC and funded by the UK FCDO.
More about the Speaker:
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 US and UK national security. 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. He has published widely on nuclear weapons policy, disarmament and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. His work has been funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
More about EVN Masterclasses:
Expert Masterclasses enable BASIC’s fantastic network of senior nuclear policy experts to share their knowledge with the EVN. Masterclasses are both skills and content-based and are delivered online to make access to expertise more equitable for the EVN’s diverse global membership.