How dawn turned into dusk: Scoping and closing possible nuclear futures after the Cold War

How was the scope of nuclear weapons policy change immediately after the Cold War determined? Nuclear learning and worst-case thinking are common but not satisfactory answers. On the basis of primary sources in multiple languages, we posit that a particular temporalization of nuclear events in the beginning of the 1990s took place: nonproliferation timescaping. The Iraqi case of opaque proliferation was treated as the harbinger of future nuclear danger, while the breakup of the nuclear-armed USSR was depicted as not repeatable or not to worry about, and South African nuclear disarmament was reframed as a non-proliferation success.