In a scene halfway through the 2023 film, Oppenheimer, a group of people sit in a room with Henry Stimson, President Truman’s Secretary of State. He holds a list of potential bombing targets and crosses off Kyoto. The reason is not definitively known. In the film, Stimson says it is because he honeymooned there (Nolan Reference Nolan2023). Stimson’s memoirs indicated Kyoto’s irreplaceable significance as a Japanese center of history, religion, and art (Sagan Reference Sagan, Cuno and Weiss2022). Nagasaki replaced Kyoto, thereby illustrating a primary argument of feminist scholars: “The personal is political” (Hanisch Reference Hanisch and Firestone1970). Everyone in the room with Stimson was white and male. The question this review seeks to answer is whether—in the intervening 80 years—the composition of voices in rooms and consideration for those outside of them have changed substantively.

An examination of the literature reveals three primary aspects of underrepresented voices in the nuclear debate. The first aspect comprises publications by people from minority groups. The second aspect is involvement and engagement by people from underrepresented groups at executive levels of policy making in government, non-governmental organizations, and think tanks.

In 2020, Women in International Security (WIIS) published a policy brief commissioned by the Ploughshares Fund that addressed gender disparity in international security and foreign policy. It considered two factors: the percentages of women in think tanks and those publishing articles in 16 peer-reviewed journals. The study found that in the 11 peer-reviewed international security journals, women authored 23% of articles and another 13% were authored by mixed-gender teams. In the five journals dedicated to arms control, women authored 19% of articles between 2014 and 2019; however, exact percentages may vary by journal (De Jonge Oudraat et al. Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Xue2020).

The same findings hold for think-tank representation. WIIS found that women led six of the 32 foreign-policy and international-security think tanks surveyed. Of the 10 think tanks dedicated to arms-control and nuclear-security issues, only one was led by a woman. Think-tank boards of directors and trustees averaged 27% (De Jonge Oudraat et al. Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Xue2020).

The Stimson Center (named for the same Henry Stimson in the film) is a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to issues of global peace. Several of its fellows, researchers, and staff members publish on issues of nuclear weapons and are vocal in the debate, including Sahar Khan and Sylvia Mishra. People in present or former government roles who publish on nuclear-weapons issues include Sneha Nair (formerly of the Stimson Center); former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Bonnie Jenkins; and Elayne Whyte Gómez, former Ambassador of Costa Rica to the United Nations.

Whereas these scholars are women, the world of nuclear science skewed male from the beginning. Few women were engaged in high-level scientific positions at facilities that were developing the atomic bomb. When chemists Lilli Hornig and Don Hornig arrived at Los Alamos, Lilli was asked how fast she could type (The Atlantic 2019). Positions in international politics and policy were similarly scarce. Of the 850 delegates who signed the United Nations Charter in 1945—when several countries had not enfranchised women with suffrage—only four signees were women (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2020).

Women in nuclear security tend to be concentrated within certain subfields. A 2021 Government Accountability Office survey estimated that less than 25% of nuclear-sector employees were women. A significantly smaller number of women (5%) worked to secure weapons-grade nuclear material (Nair and Roth Reference Nair and Roth2023). Even as more women enter the discourse, their influence is ambiguous. Ray Acheson, director of Reaching Critical Will, argues that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was achieved—in large part—due to the influence of women and other underrepresented groups (Acheson Reference Acheson2023). Some scholars and feminists argue that the presence of women in governmental and other roles of influence has not caused any noticeable shift in disarmament or nonproliferation. The fact of women entering these male-dominated, militarized spaces has proved insufficient to alter their structure (Egeland and Taha Reference Egeland and Taha2023).

The third aspect of underrepresented voices is the lived experience of people who historically have been impacted disproportionately by nuclear material and weapons. That lived experience provides insight into how issues such as weapons testing and uranium mining—due to economics or indifference—have been and continue to be those that have the most detrimental impact on marginalized communities.

The African American community’s opposition to nuclear weapons began in the immediate aftermath of the bombings in Japan. Although not monolithic, this support arose out of concern for how such weapons might be used against nonwhites. For many, it became tied to colonialism as an outgrowth of institutional racism (Intondi Reference Intondi2014). At its 1946 conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for nuclear disarmament and for nuclear power to be in civilian hands rather than under governmental control (Intondi Reference Intondi2014).

Another group negatively impacted by the production of nuclear materials includes Black African uranium miners. In Hecht’s (Reference Hecht2009) research on uranium mining, she noted that in South African mines, white foremen frequently stationed Black workers nearer the so-called hot spots—areas that are higher in temperature and levels of radioactive elements. The National Institutes of Health conducted a study in 1994 to reanalyze radon exposure and lung-cancer risks to miners in various countries; however, they were unable to include data from African countries because those exposures had never been collected (Hecht Reference Hecht2009).

Evacuated from their native lands beginning in 1946, Marshallese people cannot return due to extensive nuclear fallout from 50 years of testing (Keown Reference Keown2018). In 1954, the United States detonated Bravo bomb on Bikini Atoll—a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Islanders were not given advance notice, and inhabitants of nearby atolls were only evacuated days later (Keown Reference Keown2018). Some displaced Marshallese people have pursued paths of activism, seeking retribution for forced exile from their ancestral home (Keown Reference Keown2018).

The most impacted communities in the United States are indigenous peoples, especially in the Southwest. The taking of land—or materials mined from land without compensation—is a tactic that has been used against the Navajo Nation (Eichstaedt Reference Eichstaedt1994). The use of native land for nuclear testing has been practiced on land belonging to the Western Shoshone (Johnson Reference Johnson2018).

In the eight decades since the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the composition of scientists, ambassadors, and policy makers has come to resemble more closely the world population. The number of people opposed to nuclear weapons has increased. A Gallup poll in August 1945 asked Americans whether they approved of using nuclear weapons on the Japanese; 85% of respondents stated that they did. When the same poll was conducted 60 years later, only 57% of respondents answered in the affirmative (Moore Reference Moore2005). In 2019, the International Committee of the Red Cross surveyed more than 16,000 millennials, asking them, “In your opinion, is the use of nuclear weapons in wars or armed conflicts acceptable under some circumstances, or is it never acceptable?”; 84% replied “never acceptable.”

Today, the people in the room making these decisions likely would not be only white men. However, as Malik (Reference Malik2014) noted, President Obama launched airstrikes against Libya in 2011 with the advice of Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice. This confirms that underrepresented voices in the room do not necessarily change the outcome.

Cohn’s (Reference Cohn1987) article relating her experiences at a nuclear-weapons workshop informs this finding. The language of nuclear war, proliferation, and weapons is gendered and often sexual (e.g., penetration, thrust, and erectors). She described how immersion among this male-dominated world and its associated terminology (i.e., “technostrategic speech”) eventually led to her adoption of the vocabulary despite conscientious abstention. Enloe (Reference Enloe2014) noted, “Women are taught that international politics are too complex…for the so-called feminine mind to comprehend. If a Hilary Clinton…enters, it is presumably because she has learned to ‘think like a man.’”

Americans in November 2024 were given an opportunity to elect a female president. Would that outcome have altered the technostrategic language of nuclear weapons and war, likelihood of engagement, and disparity of representation? It is impossible to know. However, President Trump in 2017 spoke of unleashing “fire and fury” against North Korea and, in 2019, dismissed an offer by North Korea to dismantle a nuclear facility for sanctions relief (Kimball Reference Kimball2024). As Cohn (Reference Cohn1987) wrote almost 40 years ago, building a future absent nuclear warfare entails “diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent those futures.” May we all live to see such an age realized.