This report was written by Dave Cullen and Anahita Parsa.
This Framework is the first publication from BASIC’s Scoping British Nuclear Weapons Harms project. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, this project continues previous work undertaken by BASIC and others on nuclear weapon harm reduction, using the United Kingdom as a case study of a nuclear-armed state. BASIC’s first initiative in this area was an expert briefing in June 2023, hosted at the Austrian Embassy in London. From October 2024 to June 2025, BASIC’s Emerging Voices Network (EVN) undertook a policy cycle on ‘Reducing Nuclear Harms’, culminating in an anthology publication at the end of the project. The Framework for nuclear weapon harm reduction presented in this publication builds upon this earlier work.
This introductory essay first gives an overview of how we developed the project. This is followed by a section on how our harm reduction approach relates to disarmament and attempts to seek legal redress for nuclear harms. We then provide an outline of the Framework, and how it is used. The next section explains why the Framework does not aspire to be exhaustive, why some harms are unquantifiable and the centrality of the human need. We then discuss how to address cross cutting and interrelated harms within the Framework and some harms that it cannot easily capture. We close by discussing our hopes for the future of this work. The Framework itself can be found in the second part of this publication.
Read the report here.
