Nuclear Weapons and Containment

Abstract

In the forty or so years since the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into effect a large literature has developed in which two persistent themes resonate. One theme, perhaps dominant, is that the Treaty is good thing, a boon to mankind. The other is that the Treaty is inequitable, creating an invidious division between nations that have nuclear privileges and those that do not. The Treaty seems to pit utility against justice; that remains the ongoing issue. The general problem of policies that maximize utility but distribute utility inequitably, or ofpolicies that maximize utility but violate the rights of individuals, or of policies that maximize utility but require intuitively repugnant acts, has been intensely studied by philosophers over the last 250 years. Utilitarians like Bentham, Godwin, Mill and Russell have pressed the claims of utility, while anti-utilitarians like Kant, Whewell, Bradley, Ross and Rawls have asserted opposing claims of rights and justice. The considerations raised in these disputes have not been systematically applied to international affairs, in which moral debates have typically been dominated either by realists who hold ethics in contempt or by idealists who prize utopian futures over contemporary moral details. What follows is an attempt to adjudicate the balance of utility and justice in the NPT, in hopes that political scientists and international affairs theorists can learn something from intellectual struggles inside moral philosophy.