Nuclear futures: anticipatory knowledge, expert judgment, and the lack that cannot be filled

After the cold war the USA and other nuclear weapons states were forced by treaty to stop testing nuclear weapons. The end of testing has produced an irremediable lack, a fundamental instability, in nuclear weapons science. Some scientists have proposed to resolve this instability by deploying an untested but assumedly super-reliable nuclear weapon (the Reliable Replacement Warhead), while others have argued that this weapon would be less reliable than what it replaced. For the new warhead to be built, its backers will have to align geopolitical, environmental and technoscientific discourses about nuclear weapons.