If You Want Non-Proliferation, Prepare for Disarmament

Abstract

danger of nuclear weapon usage. January this year, the well known doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was set at 11.55 the closest to doomsday since the end of the cold war. The rising anxieties about nuclear weapons are rooted in two major and parallel developments in recent years: the so-called renaissance of nuclear power and a resurgence of oldfashioned national security threats that supposedly had ebbed with the end of the cold war. After the well publicised accidents at Three Mile Island (us 1979) and Chernobyl (Ukraine but at the time of the former Soviet Union 1986), public and political opposition to nuclear power was so strong that many existing reactor plants were shut down, plans for new ones were cancelled, and virtually no new reactor was built over the last decade. With the spiralling price of oil, caused by a spike in demand from booming major economies like China and India and disruptions to supply because of conflicts in west Asia, the economics of even risk-discounted nuclear