What status, if any, do national boundaries hold within the functions of global nuclear politics ? Adopting methodological insights for studying Large Technical Systems (LTS) from Science and Technology Studies, the framework developed in this paper reconceptualises the Global Nuclear Arsenal (GNA) as a single LTS, rather than as discrete national stockpiles. The immediate scholarly goal of the paper is to produce an understanding of the relationship between the social construction of the GNA’s function and the technical outputs of the system regardless of the claims of its managers. In practical terms, this means tracing the socio-technical connections between the components and asking how it is calibrated towards the realisation of certain futures more than others. 

The paper concludes that the GNA is a threat to modernity itself, following Edwards’ conceptualisation that it is an age where the possibility of life is dependent on infrastructure. Consequently, when elites claim nuclear war will end ‘life as we know it’, they specifically mean the end of Western-style, infrastructural modernity. However, this analysis produces important insights for understanding what kinds of post- nuclear war worlds can exist and the status of agency for those affected. These findings are especially important for discerning the de facto ethics of the GNA through its threat to the rights of people living under its sway, even in nuclear-free zones. 

Empirically, the analysis presented challenges claims of deterrence advocates that they exert control over their own and their adversaries’ arsenals. As an international LTS, such as the internet or transport networks, the web of socio-technical connections is too complex that any one group, or collection of groups, can be said to be in control. Democracy and justice in global nuclear politics therefore demands the dismantling of the GNA.