Facing nuclear danger in the modern world
As New Zealand’s nuclear free law reaches its 30th anniversary, the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Arts is hosting
leading French nuclear policy researcher Benoît Pelopidas for its Annual Chapman Public Lecture on 15 August.
Pelopidas is the foundation Junior Chair of Excellence in Security Studies at Sciences Po, Paris. With fellowships at Stanford and Princeton universities, he is also well connected in the worlds
of US, UK and French nuclear policy. In 2015, for example, former US Secretary of State George Shultz — the man who
officially declared the suspension of US-NZ alliance ties in 1986 — asked Pelopidas to write the opening chapter of the
book, The War that Must Never Be Fought.
“As Russia and the US slide back towards Cold War-style arms racing, Pelopidas provides a vital new voice offering
alternative pathways to achieving global security,” says lecture organiser Lyndon Burford, a PhD graduate of Auckland
and now non-resident Research Fellow at the Disarmament and Security Centre in Christchurch.
“Pelopidas’s visit is particularly timely with 122 non-nuclear weapon states — almost two-thirds of UN members — voting
last month in New York to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, rejecting the presence of nuclear weapons in any nation’s arsenal.”
Pelopidas’s lecture “Facing nuclear danger: from proliferation to global nuclear vulnerability” will propose the notion
of global nuclear vulnerability as a way of reconsidering the danger posed by existing nuclear arsenals, and will
reconnect nuclear weapons politics to issues of democracy, knowledge production and control versus luck.
Event details: 15 August 2017, 6:30pm
Venue: Fisher & Paykel Appliances Auditorium | Owen G Glenn Building (Building 260)
Registration essential | Register