Episode 9: Sir Michael Quinlan and British Nuclear Strategy

Sir Michael was both a strategic analyst and, as a key British civil servant, a practitioner in so far as his analysis formed the British nuclear strategy. That he was a Jesuit-educated Catholic and an Oxford-educated Classicist explains much about his approach to nuclear strategy: throughout his adult life, he grappled with the nuclear paradox that peace could be the result of the mutual threat of unbearable nuclear conflagration. He sought serious debate with all and sundry, replacing secrecy with transparency and persuasion where at all possible.

Dr Tanya Ogilvie-White and Dr Kristan Stoddart join Beatrice and Paul for this week’s episode. Both Tanya and Kristan knew Sir Michael and his writings at first hand: Tanya posthumously published his correspondence under the title On Nuclear Deterrence. She is Senior Research Adviser at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network and a member of the International Group of Eminent Persons – an initiative working to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. Previously, she was research director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Crawford School of Public Policy (Australian National University) and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and she has held positions at several think tanks.

Dr Kristan Stoddart is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Swansea University. He was previously a Reader in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth, and he is the author of Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1964-70 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

The views or statements expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by RUSI employees are those of the employees and do not necessarily reflect the view of RUSI.

Ogilvie-White, Tanya: On Nuclear Deterrence: The Correspondence of Sir Michael Quinlan (London: The IISS, 2011).

Quinlan, Michael: ‘Thinking about Nuclear Weapons’ (RUSI Whitehall Papers Series, 1997).

Guthrie, Charles and Michael Quinlan: Just War - The Just War Tradition: Ethics in Modern Warfare (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).

Quinlan, Michael: ‘The Ethics of Nuclear Deterrence’, Theological Studies 48 (1987), 3-24.

Quinlan, Michael: ‘British Nuclear Policy’, in John Hopkins and Wixing Hu (eds): Strategic Views from the Second Tier (La Jolla: University of California IGCC, 1994).

Michael Quinlan, ‘Abolishing Nuclear Weapons’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 22 September 2008, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/0922carnegie-nuclearweapons.pdf

Stoddart, Kristan and John Baylis: The British Nuclear Experience: The Roles of Beliefs, Culture and Identity (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Ogilvie-White, Tanya, Gareth Evans and Ramesh Thakur, Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play (with Australian National University, 2015).