About the event: Nuclear weapons have long been considered as one of international society’s most preeminent status symbols. That is, nuclear weapons have long been viewed as signaling a state’s military strength, technological prowess, and their association with the highest status actors in the world. This idea of “nuclear prestige” has shaped how academics and policymakers think about the causes of proliferation, nonproliferation strategies, and the utility of nuclear modernization. In this article, I argue that nuclear weapons have never been collectively recognized by the international community as a status symbol. Drawing on the sociology of fashion, I offer a theory of status symbol emergence and collapse. I demonstrate that nuclear weapons failed to emerge as a status symbol because of global opposition and divided superpower messaging over the meaning of the bomb. I test my argument with a case study of contestation over the meaning of the bomb between 1945 and 1968 and pair it with a sentiment text analysis of how the international community has spoken about the bomb in United Nations General Debate speeches (1946 – 2020). This article has implications for how we think about the effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime, racialized dynamics in international politics, and the nature of status symbols.

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.