22. Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation The

Transcript:22. Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation The:
22. Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation The international regime for the disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons faces three main contemporary challenges: Those posed by states within the existing regime. Those from states outside the present regime. Those from nonstate actors. These challenges have generated at least three different approaches: efforts to strengthen the traditional multilateral institutional approach anchored in treaty-based regimes; efforts through non-treaty based multilateral approaches initiated within the UN system; efforts to build a set of ad-hoc, non-institutional, non-conventional approaches outside the UN to address the immediate challenges of proliferation. The Nuclear Order Soon after nuclear weapons first appeared in 1945, they came to be viewed as the principal guarantors of peace between the superpowers during the Cold War. Early efforts, such as the Baruch and Gromyko plans (1946), to control and eliminate them failed. Even after the Cold War, the possession of nuclear weapons is still perceived by some states as the fundamental basis for international order and a crucial part of ensuring their national security. Scholars debate whether nuclear weapons are a source of international stability (because of the concept of ‘mutually assured destruction’) or a threat (because of questionable assumptions of rationality, dangers of accidental use or misperception, potential for proliferation to rogue regimes or nonstate actors, and their destructive capacity). The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty By 1 July 1968, when negotiations for the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) were completed, only five states (the United States, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, and the People’s Republic of China) had tested nuclear weapons. The NPT’s ambitious goal was to prevent other states from acquiring nuclear weapons, curb the unfettered build-up of these weapons among possessor states, and, ultimately, eliminate all of them. The existing global nuclear arsenal is around 13,000 weapons, down from a peak of around 80,000 in the late 1980s. The number of known nuclear weapons states has risen from five in 1968 to nine by 2006, including Israel, India, Pakistan, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Several states, including Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain, did not pursue a nuclear weapons programme despite having the technical wherewithal to do so. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Poland, Romania, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia had nuclear weapons programmes during the Cold War but abandoned them. Libya, suspected of having started a clandestine nuclear weapons programme at the