About the event: Nuclear weapons are considered a prominent international status symbol that signal military strength, technological prowess, and a state’s association with the great power club. This idea of “nuclear prestige” has affected our understanding of proliferation, nonproliferation, and nuclear modernization. Debate rages on whether nuclear prestige still exists. I contribute to this debate by arguing that nuclear prestige has never been symbolically dominant in the international community’s understanding of the bomb. I offer a theory of status symbols and demonstrate that global opposition and divided superpower messaging prevented the rise of nuclear prestige. I test my argument with a case study of contestation over the meaning of the bomb and pair it with a discourse analysis of 10,000 hand-coded observations of nuclear mentions in United Nations General Debate speeches (1946 – 2025). I contribute to our understanding of nuclear symbolism, the effectiveness of the NPT, and to our understanding of international status.

About the speaker: Kevin Bustamante is the Macarthur Hennessey Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame where he earned his PhD in August 2024. His research agenda centers around questions of international security and racism, with a focus on nuclear politics. His work has been published in Security Studies and his book project examines the transformation of dominant racial ideas over the last two centuries.

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