Abstract

Abstract ‘Who stole disarmament? History and nostalgia in nuclear abolition discourse’, By Kj⊘lv Egeland

Highlights

  • The decade that followed became a golden age for nuclear abolitionists, involving the adoption of a treaty banning nuclear explosive testing in all environments, the indefinite extension of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the beginning of an incremental process of reductions in nuclear weapons aimed at the eventual achievement of complete nuclear disarmament

  • Far from placing the world on course for abolition, the end of the Cold War saw the affirmation in key states of nuclear weapons as indispensable instruments of statecraft, even in the absence of the existential stand-off that had until justified their existence

  • According to the UN Secretary-General, the key to abolition lies in a ‘return’ to the international community’s bygone consensus on ‘a common path towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons’;5 and in the words of an international expert group established by the government of Japan, the elimination of nuclear weapons requires ‘bridge-building’ between nuclear and non-nuclear powers, aimed at both the ‘rebuilding’ of ‘civility and respect in discourse’ and the ‘restoring’ of arrested ‘practices of cooperation’

Read more

Summary

KJØLV EGELAND*

The history of nuclear weapons changed course in 1986. Navigating out of the Cold War, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev agreed ‘that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and began at Reykjavik to seek nuclear disarmament’.1 The decade that followed became a golden age for nuclear abolitionists, involving the adoption of a treaty banning nuclear explosive testing in all environments, the indefinite extension of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the beginning of an incremental process of reductions in nuclear weapons aimed at the eventual achievement of complete nuclear disarmament. A range of prominent observers within the disarmament community have in recent years made a much stronger claim by implying that the period in question saw significant progress towards disarmament in the second sense, namely, that the end of the Cold War set the world on course for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. This is the narrative this article investigates. As suggested above, the notion that the early post-Cold War period constituted a ‘golden age’ of arms control and disarmament is not ipso facto tantamount to a claim that those years produced significant steps towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. The following section investigates the extent to which the end of the Cold War did produce major strides towards elimination

Nuclear entrenchment after the Cold War
Nostalgia in nuclear disarmament discourse
Conclusion
Full Text
Paper version not known

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.