Elimination Of Nuclear Weapons Research Articles

Arms race in the 21st century: Consequences and mitigating measures

Historically, arms races generate a great deal of interest both in the academia and policy circles for a variety of reasons. They are widely believed to have significant consequences for states' security. In the debate over their consequences, one side holds that arms races increase the probability of war by undermining military stability and straining political relations. The opposing view holds that engaging in an arms race is often a state's best option for avoiding war when faced with an aggressive adversary. The 21st Century is witnessing the return of arms race amongst states. Coupling with the advancements in technology, the menace of arms race in the 21st Century, therefore, if not curtailed could lead to war more devastating than witnessed in the last century. Using basic content analysis the study revealed that the 21st Century arms races are mainly in the area of nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, missile defence, cyber-warfare, and space weaponisation. The arms races are prominently amongst the world‟s great powers such as the United States of America, Russia, and China as well as developing states like Iran and North Korea. This study discovered that nuclear weapons are still at the forefront of arms race in the 21st Century, despite efforts to reduce their role in global affairs and to negotiate further reductions in quantity. Also, states like the USA, China, and Russia are exploiting the advantage of speed and manoeuvrability to engage in arms race in hypersonic missiles. This has prompted nations to compete in the development of missile defences in order to counter the present missile threats. Furthermore, in anticipation for future warfare, nations such as the USA, China, and Russia are in arms race to weapon sise space by deploying space to space, earth to space and space to earth weapons, where appropriate. War in the 21st Century could in turn lead to more human, material, and environmental casualties due to the latest advancement in technologies and modernisation of existing weapons and associated equipments. Consequently, measures are needed to ensure that arms races in the 21st Century, if not eliminated, are reduced to the barest minimum in order to promote international peace and security. Renewed commitments on existing arms control measures, formulation of new arms control measures, and the complete elimination of nuclear weapons are the measures that could be considered.

Israel’s strategic interest in nuclear disarmament

Nuclear weapons are the most efficient means by which an adversary could annihilate the state of Israel. The elimination of nuclear weapons is therefore in Israel’s strategic interest. Israel should lead efforts to achieve a Middle East nuclear weapon–free zone (NWFZ) and accede to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non–nuclear weapon state (NNWS). Such a policy would reduce the risk of Iran and certain Arab states developing nuclear weapons. In place of nuclear deterrence, Israel can take assurance from its advantages in intelligence, missile defense, and superior conventional military power projection capabilities.

Which International Authority Should be Designated for Verifying the Irreversible Elimination of Nuclear Weapons under Article 4 of Nuclear Ban Treaty (TPNW)?

This paper analyses the most substantial gap of the Nuclear Ban Treaty (also known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, abbreviated TPNW), which touches upon the very aim of the treaty: the total and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons. The Treaty aims at achieving ‘a word free of nuclear weapons’, but how is such an ambitious goal going to be achieved? The Nuclear Ban Treaty lacks specificity exactly in the area of verification, namely, it fails to appoint an international competent authority to ensure the effectiveness of the treaty under article 4 TPNW. This paper analyses the best international alternatives to police the verification regime under the Treaty and provides a framework for the designation of the most suited institution, looking at their expertise, mandate, funding and degree of potential political backlogs.

The strategic elimination of nuclear weapons: an alternative global agenda for nuclear disarmament

ABSTRACTGlobal nuclear dangers have jumped since President Barack Obama’s 2009 Prague speech affirmed the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. Today’s nuclear dangers range from growing US–Russian political–military confrontation and the virtual collapse of bilateral nuclear arms control through the greatest divisions ever within the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to North Korea’s coming capability to attack the United States with nuclear-armed missiles. The Donald J. Trump administration has maintained that nuclear weapons are essential to US security, though it has also affirmed the US commitment to the goal of nuclear abolition. Frustrated by lack of progress on nuclear disarmament and energized by concerns about the risk of use of nuclear weapons, nearly 125 countries have now negotiated a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It was signed by fifty countries when it opened for signature in September 2017. None of the nuclear-weapon states will adhere to the treaty and it will not reduce today’s nuclear dangers. The interests of all of the key protagonists—the United States and its allies, the other NPT nuclear-weapon states, and the supporters of the new Prohibition Treaty—would best be served by rebuilding habits of cooperation among them to reduce global nuclear dangers and advance the NPT’s nuclear disarmament goal. One possible rallying point would be a vision of the strategic elimination of nuclear weapons as instruments of strategy, power, and security—not their complete physical elimination—by 2045, one hundred years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Strategic elimination would have specific dimensions in terms of policy, operations, numbers, institutions and planning, and transparency verification. Priorities for action now stand out both to reduce today’s global nuclear dangers and to put in place the building blocks for strategic elimination.

Group Dynamics and Interplay in un Disarmament Forums: In Search of Consensus

The elimination of nuclear weapons has been an objective of the United Nations (un) since 1946. Although addressed through multiple forums, including the un General Assembly’s First Committee, Conference on Disarmament and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the possession and renunciation of nuclear weapons nevertheless remains a topic beset by multilateral stalemate and frustration over the entrenchment of positions between nuclear- and non-nuclear weapon states. Yet within these forums, disarmament politics are taking a new turn, with the emergence of new, cross-regional, cross-factional political groups working alongside more established blocs. Focusing on these group dynamics, this article argues that the emergence of new political groups, and their interplay with others, is critical to the effective functioning of disarmament negotiations. Through cooperative information exchange, encouraging policy entrepreneurship and by challenging the rigidity of entrenched bloc positioning, these new group dynamics may make an important contribution in the search for consensus within the un.

Protecting humanity from the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons: Reframing the debate towards the humanitarian impact

AbstractThe international community has been struggling to reach agreement on the non-proliferation and elimination of nuclear weapons since they were first used in 1945. Encouragingly, recent global debate has, for the first time, focused on the devastating humanitarian consequences that the use of nuclear weapons will have not only for nuclear weapons States but for all humanity. The fact that the risks and overwhelming humanitarian consequences of a nuclear event are so high, combined with the inability of the global community to adequately respond to the needs of victims, has compelled policy-makers to consider new ways to work towards the prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons under international law. This article examines how the “humanitarian initiative” has reframed the nuclear weapons debate away from the traditional realm of State security, deterrence and military utility, and towards the grim reality of the humanitarian impacts that would confront humankind if nuclear weapons were ever used again.

Improving UN planning for a humanitarian response to a nuclear detonation

The United Nations has consistently supported the elimination of nuclear weapons, frequently referring to the effects of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Despite awareness of the severe effects of the use of nuclear weapons on targeted or adjacent populations, at a practical level the UN system has not specifically planned how it would respond to assist the victims of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the current humanitarian system is largely unprepared for the special challenges of such an event. This is significant for three reasons: First, the probability of the explosion of a nuclear weapon in populated areas may be low, but such an event is not impossible; there are many ways nuclear weapons might be detonated, either deliberately or inadvertently, with severe humanitarian consequences. Second, in assisting the victims, the UN-coordinated humanitarian system could put its own personnel at risk. Third, although any humanitarian response would at least in part be only palliative, and prevention remains the only adequate response, organizations within the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement have already begun considering these issues and the UN needs to be ready to work with them. There are many ways in which the humanitarian system could better prepare for the challenges that even a single nuclear explosion would pose, and such preparation is consistent with the UN’s mission and the secretary-general’s recent call for all feasible steps to be taken to avoid systemic humanitarian failures.

The Continuing Value of Nuclear Weapons: A Structural Realist Analysis

Changes in how we think about nuclear weapons cannot strip them of their strategic value. Only a transformation of the nature of international politics or the emergence of an alternative means of strategic deterrence can do that. The structural realist analysis that I present argues that there are two basic constraints on the role that nuclear weapons play in international politics. The first constraint stems from the anarchic and competitive nature of the international system, which leads to insecurity and encourages states to acquire the most effective weapons possible as part of their quest for security. The second constraint stems from the material characteristics of nuclear weapons; these characteristics, most notably their destructive power, mean that nuclear weapons can serve as, but are also limited to the role of, a strategic deterrent. Together, these constraints mean that nuclear weapons will continue to be valued as a strategic deterrent. Any devaluing that occurs in the foreseeable future will be limited and will not extend to ‘deep devaluing’ and the elimination of nuclear weapons. Two common counter-arguments – lessons from chemical and biological disarmament, and the imperative from disarmament thought to stem from nuclear proliferation – do not challenge this conclusion. The key question we face is not how to devalue and eliminate nuclear weapons, but what sort of nuclear world maintains sufficient deterrence while minimizing the possibility of nuclear use.

Review: Getting to Zero The Path to Nuclear Disarmament

GETTING TO ZERO Path to Nuclear Disarmament Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Judith Reppy, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. 404pp. US$27.95 (PaPer)When a friend noticed me reading this book, he tartly observed, The Americans will never give up their nuclear This received wisdom, no matter how uninformed, may well be the summation of the global debate now taking shape on the elimination of nuclear weapons. But it might not be. For as we have learned through history, what at one time seems utterly impossible (abolishing slavery?) becomes not only possible but achievable when enough people demand changes in political decision-making.US President Barack Obama set off the present debate with his nowfamous speech in Prague in 2009 (for which he won the Nobel peace prize) when he proclaimed America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear speech was foreshadowed by a series of op-ed pieces by four highly experienced practitioners in the American political establishment - Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry - who have endorsed the value of a nuclearweapons-free world. There is now no doubt that the nuclear disarmament debate has not only been legitimized but has already shifted from whether to pursue a world without nuclear weapons to defining the structure ofthat secure world and the means through which it can be built.Immense contradictions persist. nine nuclear weapons states (the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea), which together possess 20,000 nuclear weapons, most of them many times more powerful than the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, are all in the duplicitous state of professing elimination while modernizing their arsenals. US, the lynchpin of the nuclear club, insists on maintaining global military dominance, a policy that seems guaranteed to ensure its rivals will not give up their nuclear strength. Thus the political debate goes around in circles.Enter an intellectual assessment of the case for actually achieving a nuclear-weapons-free world. Catherine McArdle Kelleher, senior fellow at the Watson Institute, Brown University, who worked in the Clinton administration, and Judith Reppy, professor emerita at Cornell University, have assembled an engaging series of essays, mostly by fellow academics, but also including Alexei Arbatov, who at one time was responsible for Russia's defence budget and arms control treaties, and Randy Rydell, a highly placed official in the UN department of disarmament affairs.The book surveys all of the reasons why it is absolutely necessary to rid the world of nuclear weapons and all of the reasons why the nuclear states, particularly France and Israel, shun serious discussion of negotiating such an eventuality. It is framed by David Holloway, an arms-control specialist and historian at Stanford University, in an opening chapter on the political space that Obama opened up and in a closing piece pointing out the obstacles to genuine progress. reduction of nuclear weapons to zero, he says, goes hand-in-hand with controlled and guaranteed access to nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes and international arrangements to prevent states from breaking out of a non-nuclear weapons regime. …

THE NUCLEAR PIVOT

The current US government inherited a complex strategic landscape that included weak American commitment to arms control. Following a flurry of agreements and reviews, the Obama administration's nuclear posture now pivots on its declared pledge to the permanent reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Taking on critics of the new policy, Joseph Cirincione and Alexandra Bell argue that, though there is a long way to go, this is the moment nuclear disarmament has been waiting for.

THE ADVOCACY STATES

While the current momentum for the elimination of nuclear weapons can be traced in part to the highly influential 2007 and 2008 Wall Street Journal opinion articles by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, a more accurate picture of this momentum must take into account the role played by what are called here the “advocacy states.” Motivated by a combination of humanitarian and strategic concerns, and mindful of the dangers of deterrence as well as proliferation, accidental use, and terrorist acquisition of nuclear material, these states have, for the past fifteen years, mounted a steady and repeated call for nuclear disarmament. Their activities have taken two main forms: the preparation of various state-sponsored reports investigating the utility and attendant dangers of nuclear weapons and making a strong case for nuclear disarmament; and the formation of like-minded groupings of states, namely in the New Agenda Coalition and the Seven-Nation Initiative, that are active in diplomatic forums and in practical projects. This article assesses the advocacy states' activities and shows that the states' reports and groupings increasingly focus on providing research, expertise, and technical assistance for the challenges facing disarmament. The article examines briefly the question of extended nuclear deterrence and disarmament (given that many of the advocacy states are Western allies) and considers the likely future role and activities for advocacy states. The author argues that these states have played a vital role in creating a climate in which the Obama administration can engage the movement toward disarmament.

Obama to Urge Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

Obama to Urge Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

Disarmament without Agreements?

AbstractThe literature on arms control and disarmament is replete with studies demonstrating the numerous difficulties in negotiating agreements for the control or elimination of nuclear weapons. These studies stress the time consumed during negotiations, the complexity of the emerging agreements, the trade-offs required to achieve agreement, the political difficulties of treaty ratification, and the alleged advantages of alternative approaches to arms control and disarmament not involving treaties. This essay examines whether treaties and negotiations are in fact dispensable in achieving agreed multilateral disarmament objectives. It surveys recent multilateral efforts in the field of nuclear disarmament and identifies six basic criteria that enjoy broad international support as standards for assessing the merits of disarmament agreements. The essay concludes that tacit understandings and other informal political arrangements offer no substitute for legally-binding treaty obligations. This conclusion leads to several implications affecting the conduct of multilateral negotiations, and the kinds of institutional support required in the negotiating process and for the maintenance of key commitments by the relevant multilateral regimes.

Japan's anti‐nuclear weapons policy misses its target, even in the war on terrorism

While actively working to promote the abolition of all nuclear weapons from the world since the end of the cold war, Japan's disarmament policies are not without problems. Promoting the elimination of nuclear weapons as Japan remains under the US nuclear umbrella creates a major credibility problem for Tokyo, since this decision maintains a Japanese deterrence policy at the same time that officials push for disarmament. Tokyo also advocates a gradual approach to the abolition of nuclear weapons, a decision that has had no effect on those countries that have been conducting sub‐critical nuclear testing, nor stopped India and Pakistan from carrying out nuclear tests. Consistent with Article 9 of the Constitution, the Japanese war‐renouncing constitutional clause, Tokyo toughened Japan's sizeable Official Development Assistance (ODA) programme in the early 1990s. Because of the anti‐military guidelines included in Japan's ODA programme, Tokyo stopped new grant and loan aid to India and Pakistan in 1998 after these countries conducted nuclear tests. However, because of the criticism Japan faced from its failure to participate in the 1991 Gulf War, Tokyo has been seeking a new Japanese role in international security during the post‐cold war period. Deepening its commitment to the security alliance with the US, Tokyo has become increasingly influenced by Washington's global polices, including the American war on terrorism. After Washington decided that Pakistan would be a key player in the US war on terrorism, Tokyo restored grant and loan aid to both Islamabad and New Delhi, despite the unequivocal restrictions of Japan's ODA programme.

The nuclear issue: Where do we go from here?*

The drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons is going badly and there is currently little support from the general public. The United States Nuclear Posture Review incorporates nuclear capability into conventional war planning. The Stockpile Stewardship Program is designed to maintain nuclear weapon capability. The US is planning an essentially new earth‐penetrating nuclear weapon and is prepared to test this in the national interest if thought necessary. These policies could stimulate nuclear proliferation by others, do nothing to deter terrorism, promote persisting polarization of the world, are a clear breach of the Non‐Proliferation Treaty and rest world security on a continued balance of terror. A renewed mass campaign to counteract all this, on legal and moral grounds in particular, is urgently needed. IPPNW and kindred organizations must restore sanity in our policies and humanity to our actions.

Containing Shiva? India, non-proliferation, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

This article examines the Indian nuclear tests of May 1998 and accounts for the events by locating them at the centre of a dynamic interaction between domestic and international change. Since the late 1980s, a change in Indian domestic opinion towards the utility of nuclear weapons occurred against a serious hiatus in the emergent international regime established to prevent horizontal nuclear proliferation. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their assertion of a more realist version of power, premised on the symbolic power of nuclear weapons, made it vital for India to claim the right for a limited nuclear deterrence before international opinion hardened around US President Bill Clinton's sponsored Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Though the BJP lay claim to previously established Indian critiques of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the CTBT, they sought to take advantage of the deliberate hypocrisy between nuclear arms control and arms reduction in a way distinct from both Congress and former United Front governments. They sought not to further disarmament, but to create the context in which they could weaponise with impunity. The article believes that the only way the BJP's growing affinity with nuclear weapons can be undermined is for the current nuclear weapon states to, ironically, take seriously earlier Indian thinking on the need to address the global elimination of nuclear weapons.

A fast track to zero nuclear weapons: The middle powers initiative and the new agenda coalition

The Middle Powers Initiative is a network of international citizen organizations working to encourage the nuclear weapon states and their influential allies to move rapidly to eliminate nuclear weapons via practical steps including a Nuclear Weapons Convention. The New Agenda Coalition is a group of middle‐ranking nations whose governments have also called for the early elimination of nuclear weapons via similar steps. The work of MPI and NAC at the United Nations and elsewhere is described, and their impact on NATO nuclear weapons policy discussed.

The debate over abolition of nuclear weapons

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, there has been interest in putting the nuclear genie back into the bottle. In the intervening decades there have been persistent efforts to promote the elimination of nuclear weapons. The International Pugwash Movement, for example, has struggled for more than 40 years to establish zero as the proper goal of nuclear arms control and to examine seriously the prerequisites and conditions that would permit nuclear elimination to become a plausible policy option. But such voices were always very much in the minority, and their preferred course was always distant from the main lines of debate about nuclear weapons policy and nuclear arms control. Indeed, as is quite evident, during the Cold War the superpower protagonists built vast nuclear arsenals, numbering tens of thousands on each side, and enshrined nuclear weapons at the centre of their defence strategies. The notion of eliminating nuclear weapons did not stir wide interest or support. In the last few years, this has begun to change rather dramatically. There has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in, and support for, the abolition of nuclear weapons. This upsurge has included a series of high profile studies examining the prospects for nuclear elimination as well as a widening web of prominent supporters of the idea of abolition. The mid and late 1990s have witnessed an unprecedented focus on nuclear abolition as a desirable objective worthy of serious policy consideration.

Promoting an Agenda for Nuclear Weapons Elimination: The Canberra Commission and Dilemmas of Disarmament

This paper examines the role of the Canberra Commission in terms of consolidating and influencing the agenda on international negotiations towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. The Commission’s Report is significant for two main reasons. First, it represents a unique form of disarmament diplomacy by the Australian Government which combined the post‐Cold War international climate of security cooperation with the foreign policy aspirations of an activist middle power. Second, the Report refutes the strategic, technological and political arguments against nuclear elimination in a comprehensive and convincing manner, arguing that without elimination, the world faces increased threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. This paper thus concludes that the Canberra Commission has been instrumental in strengthening the taboo against the possession, testing or use of nuclear weapons.

Plain Speaking about Indian Nuclear Testing

From India's point of view, its 1998 nuclear test programme was a response to a failure to secure a commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons within a specified time during both multi‐ and bi‐lateral negotiations. That India possessed nuclear weapons technology had been known since 1974 and, as a signatory neither of the Non‐Proliferation Treaty nor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, its detonation of a number of devices in 1998 was not in violation of either. To build a nuclear weapons capability while seeking their elimination internationally might seem disingenuous, but India has seen the acquisition of nuclear weapons technology by two aggressors—Pakistan and China—while the West stood by. The Indian government lost the public relations battle after the tests, but the Western response, including sanctions, can only serve the interests of Indian nationalists.