How does Vigil present responsibility for the use of nuclear weapons?

In Vigil, the idea that men are responsible for the use of nuclear weapons is presented not only in principle but in practice: if necessary, it would be men operating the UK’s nuclear arsenal. In Episode One,Footnote ²⁸ the gender imbalance onboard Vigil is explicitly communicated to viewers when Chief Petty Officer Elliot Glover (Shaun Evans) states ‘We’re eight women, 140 men’. While the demographics of military personnel stationed on the real Trident submarines is a state secret, in an interview with the Metro former lieutenant commander David Lovell described this as ‘a pretty realistic number’.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, women make up just 10.9% of the British Forces, and 9.8% of the Royal Navy and Marines, with such disparities even more pronounced in leadership positions.Footnote ³⁰ The fictional crew onboard Vigil is therefore structured in a way that brings attention to the hegemonic forces of masculinity that continue to shape the nuclear realm in ‘reality’. Drawing the audience’s attention to this stark gender imbalance could encourage welcomed consideration of injustice and gender discrimination. Alternatively, it may simply bring military masculinity from ‘real-world’ politics into our living rooms. As Carol Cohn put it, ‘white men in ties discussing missile size’.Footnote ³¹

Beyond gender imbalances, more covert gendered norms are communicated in Vigil’s script and storyline. Investigating Hollywood’s depiction of female soldiers, Yvonne Tasker argues that women are presented as a disruptive presence that must be incorporated into the masculine hegemony, managed, or contained.Footnote ³² These ideas translate into the BBC’s depiction of women onboard Vigil. In Episode Two,Footnote ³³ DCI Silva is challenged by Commanding Officer Neil Newsome (Paterson Joseph) who asks her, ‘Can you even begin to imagine the tactical challenge?’, before immediately answering his own question: ‘No, no, didn’t think so’. The female lead (bestowed with high rank and authority within the police force) is denied words by the male commander. Military and strategic tactics are deemed beyond her imagination as she is belittled by the commander’s derogatory and mocking answer. This communicates a very particular meaning: nuclear decision-making is a man’s work. In line with Tasker’s observations,Footnote ³⁴ DCI Silva is first managed (silenced and denied legitimacy of opinion) then contained. The commander orders his officers to ‘confine her to quarters’. DCI Silva is excluded from the space, rendering her literally and metaphorically unfit for the room. The paternalistic overtones (parallel to sending a misbehaving child to their room) communicate the notion that this could be for her own good – that perhaps she needs disciplining in order to learn how to behave in this space. Importantly, the use of military jargon (calling the room where she sleeps her ‘quarters’) further reinforces the commander’s ease in navigating the military realm while creating a powerful interpersonal meaning with viewers at home. Alongside DCI Silva, the audience is left with a sense of exclusion by the use of jargon that is abnormal in their everyday life. In a few short sentences, DCI Silva (and vicariously, the audience) has been rendered childlike and out of her depth within the military setting.

The treatment of DCI Silva in Vigil is illustrative of the gendered logics that are deeply embedded in nuclear discourse. If men are responsible for nuclear weapons, then women are not responsible for them. According to feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe, one of the core militaristic beliefs is the belief that ‘in times of crisis those who are feminine need armed protection’.Footnote ³⁵ Thinking specifically about nuclear militarism, feminist scholar Catherine Eschle highlights the continuation of this belief, showing how nuclear security discourse highlights the heroic male and imagines women as in need of protection.Footnote ³⁶ Even in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), women are constructed as a homogeneous category of ‘outsiders’.Footnote ³⁷ Vigil demonstrates the continuation of this narrative beyond high politics and into popular culture and the everyday. The exclusion of DCI Silva reinforces feminine incompatibility with rational decision-making and military spaces. The paternalistic treatment of DCI Silva reproduces the narrative of male military protection.

Figure 1.

DCI Silva enters Vigil. Copyright © 2023 BBC, reproduced in accordance with fair use.

These ideas can also be seen in Vigil’s visual communication. A scene of great importance to the series occurs when DCI Silva first enters the nuclear submarine in Episode One.Footnote ³⁸ In literally depicting DCI Silva entering the space, the scene is an important semiotic resource for the analysis of her relationship with that space. DCI Silva is lowered from a helicopter into the submarine (see Figure 1). Descent is a powerful visual tool. Shared cultural conventions connect the act of going down with decline, danger, and failure. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe this metaphorical convention as ‘up-down spatialization’,Footnote ³⁹ whereby virtue is signified as up and depravity signified as down. A clear example of this convention is the physical locations of Heaven and Hell. By showing DCI Silva in descent, her journey onboard Vigil is metaphorically foreshadowed. The nuclear submarine below her can be understood as a place of moral disturbance, scrutiny, and danger. This accurately foreshadows the unfolding of the series while presenting the physical manifestation of nuclear weapons as a site of great risk. Ideas of danger are also communicated through the mise en scène (the staging of the scene and everything that appears before the camera). Here, semiotic resources have been selected for their connotations of danger; the red boilersuit, the choppy grey waves, the cold and dark metallic body of the submarine. Using setting, Vigil constructs an aura of fear around nuclear weapons without showing a weapon itself, instead, rendering their physical location unpredictable and precarious. In the script, it is communicated that the presence of a civilian, as well as the surfacing of the submarine to board her, is strictly against military protocol. This forbidden context makes it clear that, after her descent into this space, DCI Silva must learn to adapt to life onboard or become a dangerous disturbance herself. Just as Tasker observed,Footnote ⁴⁰ the presence of female characters is shown to disrupt military spaces. The gendered discourses observed in high politics penetrate spaces of popular culture and the everyday. At best, women may be able to be incorporated into the masculine hegemony, at worst, they must be contained.

This hierarchy, wherein militaristic masculinity is presented in opposition to a passive femininity, is also observable in Vigil’s representation of an anti-nuclear peace camp. Dunloch Peace Camp (est. 1982) is based upon the real Faslane peace camp (est. 1982) which claims to be the ‘longest running permanent peace camp in the world’.Footnote ⁴¹ Researching activist identity at Faslane, Catherine Eschle identified gendered articulations of the male and female activist.Footnote ⁴² Male activists were constructed as ‘Peace Warriors’ whose identity ‘resonated with the hierarchical military masculinity from which the campers had previously asserted their difference’.Footnote ⁴³ Female activists were imagined as ‘Earth Goddesses’, an identity shift ‘caused by the declining influence of feminism and the rise of radical environmentalism’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This gendered articulation of activism is reproduced in Vigil, wherein the leader of the peace camp, Ben Oakley (Cal MacAninch), is depicted in military khaki while his female counterpart, Jade Antoniak (Lauren Lyle), is more frequently seen in earthy tones (see Figure 2). While the ‘warrior’ fights for change, the ‘goddess’ inspires others’ agency through her being rather than doing.Footnote ⁴⁵ Where the character of Ben Oakley shares intelligence with Russia that will discredit Britain’s nuclear programme, the character of Jade Antoniak is the girlfriend of a threatening whistle-blower and is later drowned.

However, despite these internal hierarchies, all characters associated with the peace camp are ultimately presented as outsiders. Shots of Dunloch are filtered with a rustic, sepia-toned hue that dampens the colourfully painted set (see Figure 2). This aesthetic decision connects the activist characters to their peace-camp setting, where bright paints would otherwise have created contrast. Whether a Peace Warrior or an Earth Goddess, the campers are perfectly in tune with their world. However, the world of peace and activism exists in stark contrast to the technocratic settings of policing, government, and militarism in the rest of the BBC series. In the real Faslane camp, male and female identities converge though visual representations which differentiate them as subcultural: ‘anarchist, feminist, punk, hippy’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Reproducing this in the fictional realm, Vigil presents the anti-nuclear fight as a subcultural commitment, out of touch with the realism afforded to the sets of the police, politicians, and navy. Peace is constructed as outside of normalcy, relatability, and even reality, incompatible with social and political authority.

Figure 2.

Dunloch peace cam. Copyright © 2023 BBC, reproduced in accordance with fair use.

Does Vigil present humans and/or nuclear weapons as agents for peace and/or destruction?

Throughout Vigil, the nuclear submarine is referred to as ‘the UK’s deterrent’, ‘the nuclear deterrent’, or ‘the deterrent’. Nuclear deterrence theory argues that the possession of nuclear weapons would deter an adversary from making a conventional or nuclear attack because of fear of retaliation. Under this theory, the bomb is a protective agent acting as a source of safety and security. Coining the term ‘nukespeak’ (a play on ‘newspeak’ to emphasise the Orwellian ability of those in power to limit the realm of nuclear debate), Paul Chilton demonstrated that deterrence is presented as a factual description rather than a theory.Footnote ⁴⁷ In fact, he argues that deterrence should not even be viewed as possessing the same authority as a theory since it does not meet the scientific rigour required of theories. Deterrence is neither verifiable (since we cannot know that an absence of aggression is caused by the possession of nuclear weapons) nor falsifiable (since we also cannot know that it is not). Rather, Chilton understands deterrence as a ‘socio-cultural product’ capable of performing powerful political work.Footnote ⁴⁸ For instance, to ‘deter’ an enemy does not bestow that enemy with any rationality or agency: one cannot ‘dissuade’ a shark, but one may ‘deter’ it. Adversaries are thus not endowed any traits that would merit diplomacy or cooperation. Following, describing nuclear weapons as ‘the deterrent’ is often reserved for ‘our’ weaponry. In Western discourses, the United States ‘deter’ while Russia ‘threatens’.

The ‘deterrent’ is an example of nominalisation; a process has been transformed into a noun. ‘Deterrent’ becomes a synonym for nuclear weapons, claiming fact of their ability to deter conflict and limiting alternative thought.Footnote ⁴⁹ Naming the bomb itself ‘the deterrent’ makes opposing voices that speak to the danger of the bomb seem irrational. Presenting deterrence as common sense delegitimises alternative narratives and sets the boundaries of possible thought. If deterrence is presented as fact in popular culture, it is likely that public consciousness will also be uncritical of the notion. Rather than possessing the potential ability ‘to deter’, the submarine is a ‘deterrent’. The nominalised language used in Vigil (re)produces certainty around the idea of deterrence, predefining rather than describing. The normalisation and depoliticisation of this language minimises, rather than encouraging, the audience’s interrogation of nuclear weapons as a form of deterrence. This simple choice of language ideationally communicates that the UK’s nuclear submarine is both safe and necessary. In doing so, Vigil reproduces official narratives about Britain’s nuclear arsenal – that it exists as a protective measure, which deters aggression and ensures national safety and security; the weapons become agents of peace. Vigil presupposes that the UK deterrent is ‘good’.

In Episode One,Footnote ⁵⁰ we are given an outline of the logic of deterrence from Commanding Officer Newsome:

This description relies upon the existence of a discursively constructed enemy as well as the centrality of secrecy to nuclear weapon policy. The commander repeatedly refers to ‘your enemy’ without ever clarifying who that may be. Such ambiguity serves nuclear deterrence ideology, since the enemy can be a defined aggressor or simply the presence of an Other.Footnote ⁵¹ This description also relies on a common visual metaphor: that invisibility is security. Ideas of invisibility are intertwined with cultures of secrecy and security.Footnote ⁵² Something that cannot be seen is either articulated as safer, meaning it needs to be kept secret and concealed, or more threatening, meaning it must be revealed. This outline reveals a paradox at the heart of nuclear politics: one must understand ‘our’ nuclear weapons as safe and needing to be ‘hidden’, while nuclear weapons are inherently threatening and need to be revealed in the hands of the Other.Footnote ⁵³ Vigil’s script plays on and reinforces these ideas, creating tension through the idea of a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek. Nuclear weapons are presented as agents of peace in our hands, and agents of destruction in the enemy’s. Understandings of enemies and secrecy are thus interrelated with the ability to justify and legitimise ‘our’ weapons through deterrence theory, while discrediting the weapons of the Other.

Ultimately, in Vigil, deterrence is not challenged by activism but by weaknesses within the military itself. Throughout the series, the audience is repeatedly reminded that the nuclear arsenal is vulnerable to human interference and error. The centring of human agency exists in direct juxtaposition to the narrative of safety and security promoted by ideas of deterrence. Indeed, human action is central to Vigil’s plot and climax, which follows various threats caused by people onboard the boat. In Episode Four,Footnote ⁵⁴ two Navy Officers question the investigating police:

The UK’s nuclear deterrent becomes a site of danger and insecurity when foreign presence becomes a possibility. The script transforms ‘asset’ into ‘people’, removing the obscurity of techno-strategic language and humanising the threat. The notion of slippage suggests a clumsiness within the military that would not have been implicit had the decision been made to suggest that people can ‘infiltrate’ or ‘invade’. This simple linguistic choice has social and political implications, presenting the possibility of a vulnerable, exposed, and even clumsy, military – very different to the usual connotations of military power. The presence of a single person is presented as a security threat to millions.

Military vulnerability is thus represented in individual, humanised, and personal ways, as well as in national, existential, and unprecedented ways. In Episode Five,Footnote ⁵⁵ nuclear peace camp leader Ben Oakley confirms that ‘We have no viable deterrent if it can be infiltrated by a foreign power’ (restating his militaristic knowledge as ‘Peace Warrior’). This becomes the high point of tension in the series. Finding the person who has infiltrated Vigil becomes the central focus of plot. In constructing this tension, a more traditionally militaristic lexical field has been chosen: ‘viable’, ‘deterrent’, ‘infiltrated’, ‘power’. Such choices communicate threat on a national security level. What was a single person, able to ‘slip through’, is now infiltration by ‘a foreign power’. Too often, nuclear weapons are presented as an infallible gift of technology, rendered safe and secure. However, throughout all the weapons’ existence, human miscalculation has accounted for more error than mechanical or technical failure.Footnote ⁵⁶ Alarmingly, their use is most likely to be in miscalculation or accident, past incidences of which are vastly documented but little known.Footnote ⁵⁷ Vigil presents this vulnerability in a refreshing questioning of the idea that nuclear weapons inherently ensure security and deter threat. This dismantles the myth of infallible power that is too often bestowed upon nuclear weapons, instead presenting the deterrent as vulnerable to the actions of a single person as well as entire states. In doing so, Vigil provides audiences with a narrative that is little heard: nuclear weapons are not innately safe, they do not inherently provide security, and they are not integral to peace.

Navigating whether nuclear weapons are presented as agents for peace or destruction has revealed paradoxical ideas. On the one hand, ‘the deterrent’ suggests a matter-of-fact nature to the security provided by nuclear weapons. This grants the weapons an agency that is unconditional to human action and affords them guarantee in their ability to grant security and ensure peace. On the other hand, human agency is centred as the driving force of Vigil’s plot, with foreign infiltration forming the series climax. In presenting both narratives concurrently, Vigil communicates the complex reality of nuclear weapons and provides the audience with arguments both for and against their continued existence. This constructs a middle ground, or ‘thinking space’, for the audience – encouraging critical engagement with issues of nuclear policy, which all too often are kept out of public consciousness. However, threat remains conditional: whether nuclear weapons are agents of peace or destruction depends upon an Orientalist narrative about their owners.

Though it is refreshing to see this narrative counter mainstream assurances of nuclear security and highlight their risks, in Vigil it functions as part of a larger problematic discourse: Nuclear Orientalism. Post-colonial scholar Edward Said demonstrated how Orientalist discourses construct the Orient in opposition to the West (the Occident).Footnote ⁵⁸ These discourses function along binaries, wherein the West is constructed as fundamentally different and superior to its Other. Hugh Gusterson (1999) noted a specific operation of this discourse within the nuclear realm, which he termed ‘Nuclear Orientalism’. Nuclear Orientalism divides the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ based on whether or not that state is to be trusted with nuclear weapons. ‘Good’ nuclear states can be trusted to be rational decision-makers and use nuclear weapons to deter aggression and ensure international security. However, if nuclear weapons get into the wrong hands, these ‘rogue’ states cannot be trusted to be rational, and their weapons represent global threat and instability. Nuclear Orientalism functions as an ideology so often and subtly invoked that it seems natural and reasonable.Footnote ⁵⁹ Post-colonial feminist Shampa Biswas notes how this ideology presents certain states as responsible stewards of international security, while other states are cast as fundamentally irresponsible and denied the same autonomy.Footnote ⁶⁰ Decisions made by the United States and its allies are assumed rational by default, while decisions made by non-Western states are continuously labelled as ideological rather than strategic – delegitimised through reference to religion or culture.Footnote ⁶¹ Nuclear weapons possess the material capabilities no matter their state ownership, yet time and time again nuclear discourse constructs Western weapons as rational, modern, and safe while non-Western weapons are constructed as impulsive, backwards, and dangerous. Nuclear weapons can be understood as safe and secure in ‘our’ hands, while being dangerous threats in the hands of another. Continuing this narrative into spaces of the everyday, in the BBC’s Vigil, whether nuclear weapons are presented as agents of peace or destruction is conditional to their ownership – to whether they are controlled by ‘us’ or ‘Other’.

In Vigil, this Other is defined as Russian. Vigil presupposes that Russia would have an incentive to compromise Britain’s deterrent; perhaps reflecting an inflated or disproportionate sense of self-importance in British national identity. Historian Margaret Gowing argued that the Attlee government’s pursuit of an independent nuclear arms programme was irrational and emotionally motivated to make up for Britain’s loss of empire and world power status.Footnote ⁶² Vigil continues the binding of Britain’s nuclear weapons with a belief in global power status, cementing the relationship between Britain’s independent arsenal and Britain’s yearning for a sense of global independence and power.

Figure 3.

The spy is unmasked. Copyright © 2023 BBC, reproduced in accordance with fair use.

In the penultimate episode,Footnote ⁶³ Vigil’s plot reaches climax when DCI Silva is knocked to the floor moments before Chief Petty Officer Matthew Doward (Lorne MacFadyen) reveals his face from behind a visor. The audience realises alongside DCI Silva that Doward, an ordinary navy officer, is actually the Russian asset (Figure 3). This scene is the big reveal that the whodunnit mystery builds up to. In a literal unmasking of the villain, viewers are given a resolution comparable to that of an episode of Scooby-Doo. In Vigil, the Russian spy operates as a specific version of a common trope in popular culture: the Russian enemy. Here, interpersonal meaning is ‘dynamicized’, and the relation between participants and audience is enhanced by the shared experience of time.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this important scene, Doward is bestowed with power, seen towering over DCI Silva, who looks up to him from the floor in fear and shock. The camera angle places the audience, alongside Silva, in a position of vulnerability at the mercy of the Russian spy. Since the Cold War, there has been a common trope in fiction (across all genres and subject matters) wherein Russia and Russians are depicted as a principal threat to world peace. Characters of spies and/or traitors are classic archetypes of the Cold War popular culture, reflecting a paranoia in the United States about Communist infiltration known as ‘McCarthyism’.Footnote ⁶⁵

However, not all spies are presented equally. There is a clear trend in Western popular culture whereby Western agents are presented as the ‘good guy’ who will prevail while Eastern spies are presented as the ‘bad guy’ who will ultimately be defeated.Footnote ⁶⁶ Vigil marks a continuation of this trend, reinforcing a Nuclear Orientalist logic whereby Russia is defined as threatening while the UK is cast as an innocent victim. This frame preserves British (and, vicariously, Western) nuclear weapons as necessary for protection (‘deterrence’) while suggesting Russian nuclear weapons are solely objects of aggression. Britain is thereby imagined only as a nuclear victim, not a nuclear perpetrator. This simplistic binary is in many ways a Cold War narrative for modern times. Vigil’s viewers are given a simplistic narration of nuclear security and threat reliant on the redeployment of the archetypal Cold War enemy. It should come as no surprise that a drama portraying nuclear security relies on Cold War narratives of the Russian threat to the West. Threats (real and imagined) to the United States have long been vicariously experienced as threats to ‘the world’, ‘the West’, or the ‘anglosphere’. This is most pronounced in the USA–UK ‘special relationship’, whose shared identity exists across personal, ideational, and material levels.Footnote ⁶⁷ Navigating nuclear threat to the UK, it is unsurprising that writers defined threat as Russian. In choosing to continue the Russian enemy trope, Vigil does not surprise or confuse its audience but rather naturalises and normalises perceptions of Russia(ns) as Other. Vigil was written and broadcast six months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The casting of Russian villains is thus unlikely to leave our screens anytime soon.

Ultimately, does Vigil present the bomb as a power for good?

Interestingly, viewers are never actually shown a nuclear weapon in Vigil. In Episode One,Footnote ⁶⁸ Officer Glover is giving DCI Silva (and the audience) a tour of the boat. Here he says, ‘welcome to the bomb shop’, which is the name given to the space where armaments, torpedoes, and missiles are stored (see Figure 4). The set is visually complex, the frame filled at the back and sides with technical machinery. The technical scene performs visually what technical jargon does linguistically: bureaucratisation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bureaucratisation is a rhetorical strategy common in ‘nukespeak’, wherein the deployment of technical jargon and acronyms constructs insiders and outsiders, defining who can be heard and what can be.Footnote ⁷⁰ The space is defined by highly visual cues of technicality and specialist knowledge, suggesting that ‘the realm of nuclear weapons [is] one reserved for experts’.Footnote ⁷¹ In this set, the presence of the missiles is visually represented elongated cyclical shapes. The shape of nuclear weapons has been noted by feminists as part of their appeal to hyper masculinities. The phallic properties of nuclear weapons has ‘proved seductive to many governments across time and space’.Footnote ⁷² Carol Cohn documented the phallic images and sexualised metaphors in the language used by American Cold War defence policymakers.Footnote ⁷³ Cynthia Cockburn described how during the Cold War, both superpowers ‘wheeled out [their missiles] like monumental phalluses’.Footnote ⁷⁴ More recently, former US president Donald Trump tweeted, ‘I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than [Kim Jong Un’s], and my Button works!’Footnote ⁷⁵ Carol Cohn frankly described the exchange as ‘penis-measuring’Footnote ⁷⁶ and Anoosh Chakelian situated the tweet amid a ‘long history of nuclear dick-waving’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This language does not highlight destructive power: men, women, and children are substituted with ‘collateral damage’, the weapons are imagined as newborns ‘fathered’ by man, and phallic imagery and sexual metaphors make nuclear weapons referents of masculinity.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such gendered sexual metaphors create excitement and support for nuclear weapons.Footnote ⁷⁹

Figure 4.

‘Welcome to the bomb shop’. Copyright © 2023 BBC, reproduced in accordance with fair use.

Rather than overtly sexualised imagery and metaphors, the connection between masculine sexuality and nuclear weapons in Vigil is subtle but important. The nuclear weapons onboard Vigil are only an suggest presence: the torpedo tubes are empty, and the missiles are encased. The audience (much like the officers onboard a real nuclear submarine) are made aware of the weapons’ presence without ever actually seeing one. Their hidden nature plays into powerful narratives connecting invisibility and secrecy with safety and security.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this subtlest of images, we see the convergence of masculinity and otherworldliness that comes to mystify and celebrate nuclear weapons.

In the final episode,Footnote ⁸¹ the audience is given an explanation for the continued possession of nuclear weapons, despite arguments against their utility.

Here, the Admiral admits that nuclear weapons are not a safe way to conduct international relations. This point is expressed as an international agreement, citing consensus among three other nuclear weapon states. Notably, the script chooses to include both non-Western nuclear-armed states (China and Russia), suggesting agreement even among those typically labelled ‘enemy’, regardless of political regime. However, despite such agreement, there remains a stalemate. In a global security environment that relies on mutual distrust, it is impossible to be sure of another’s intensions – it is impossible to ‘move’.Footnote ⁸² The chess metaphor of the stalemate, as used here in Vigil, has been used across political discourse to denote a problem with no solution – expressing ‘political immobility’.Footnote ⁸³ Deploying the stalemate metaphor, Vigil communicates the fundamental security challenge: although nuclear weapons are not desirable, we cannot get rid of them. The audience is afforded a sense of hopelessness, discouraging political engagement or action by suggesting that disarmament is a hopeless cause. In this scenario, continuation of the status quo is the best possible outcome.

Writing about the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Laura Considine identifies three nuclear narratives and their political implications.Footnote ⁸⁴ In Vigil’s presentation of disarmament as a hopeless cause, we see these same narratives reproduced in popular culture. First, the stalemate metaphor suggests a permanent nature that performs unseen political work that reinforces the status quo. Second, the stalemate permits an ongoing public acceptance of the injustice and unsuitability of nuclear weapons. Finally, the stalemate situates nuclear politics in a place of continuous crisis, constructing it as disturbingly fragile and certainly not fit for change. In the same way as the political narratives that are deeply embedded into the language of the NPT shape the boundaries of possible political debate, Vigil too constructs a narrative ‘that justifies continually lowered expectations, that is status quo-oriented and that is unfavourable to initiatives based on a vision of the future’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ultimately, although Vigil does not nuclear weapons as inherently good, they are presented as unchangeable – discouraging a politicised public.

While disarmament is presented as a military impossibility, public opinion becomes a site of possible change. In the last 15 minutes of the series,Footnote ⁸⁶ the audience is given closure through the police’s explanation of the Russian spy’s motive:

This short extract presents nuclear weapons as political objects, more so than military ones. As the defining motive behind the actions that centre Vigil’s plot, this representation is very significant. Rather than focusing on the instability of the weapons in and of themselves – susceptible to human error, attack, and computer failure – Vigil focuses on the weapons as a source of political tensions. Russia’s aim was not to destroy a military target, but to tarnish the reputation of British nuclear weapons: ‘to make the deterrent look bad’. Britain’s nuclear ‘deterrent’ is presented as extremely fragile and susceptible to public scrutiny: if Russia can make the British public think their nuclear weapons are unsafe, then Britain’s own democracy will lead to their disarmament.

There is critical nuance in this representation: nuclear weapons are moved out of the military strategic realm and into the political one. This move contradicts the stalemate communicated by Rear Admiral Shaw and MP Patrick Cruden, instead suggesting that public opinion is a powerful tool for change. Interestingly, while the military problem (conceptualised as a metaphorical stalemate) is debated between men, two women are left to discuss the political implications of the deterrent looking ‘bad’ and MPs looking ‘soft’, presenting the political realm as more palatably feminine than the military realm. As nuclear weapons continue to be deliberately kept out of conscious politics and public debate,Footnote ⁸⁷ this is emphasis on the power of public opinion is incredibly important. Through Vigil, the British public can gain consciousness about nuclear weapons – surely the first step towards a more democratic nuclear policy.