Nuclear Diplomacy Research Articles

Russia, the Global South and the Mechanics of the Nuclear Order

Russia’s war against Ukraine has reverberated across the global nuclear order. The heightened tensions between Russia and Western states have paralysed and politicised processes in various multilateral nuclear forums and governance bodies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the United Nations First Committee. The earthquake in procedure has further exacerbated frustrations with the state of the nuclear order, particularly among the non-nuclear-weapons states of the Global South. These states have long lamented insufficient progress towards nuclear disarmament, the prospects for which were rendered even more remote by the war. Russia, for its part, has pursued a dual strategy in multilateral nuclear diplomacy: it has undermined non-proliferation efforts and chipped away at trust in the legacy forums on the one hand, while leveraging them in pursuit of greater alignment with the Global South on the other. These dynamics have combined to drive the further fragmentation of the nuclear order in ways that, while taking time to fully play out, promise to be profound.

Timing bombs and the temporal dynamics of Iranian nuclear security

Abstract For more than two decades, Iran’s nuclear programme has concerned policymakers and scholars alike. Whether speeding up uranium enrichment, slowing down international negotiations, or disrupting the timing of key initiatives, actions around Iran’s nuclear programme bear a clear time signature. Yet systematic accounts of the importance of time in shaping foreign and security policymaking have been largely neglected. Through foreign policy timing theory’s (FP4D) reconceptualisation of time we show how actors both constructed and then used time to pursue their strategic interests, creating, altering, and sabotaging the timing mechanism linking Iranian nuclear technology and international sanctions. These manipulations of time by both domestic and international actors resulted in prolonged international negotiations and fluctuating periods of crisis and produced a temporally flawed agreement frozen in time. We consider time’s impact on the current challenges and future direction of nuclear diplomacy with Iran as well as its importance for broader nuclear security issues.

Halban’s ‘Diplomatic Flu’: A Case Study in Nuclear Diplomacy in World War II

ABSTRACT This article recounts an incident in Anglo-American nuclear diplomacy during the Second World War, in which Hans Halban – a French physicist researching nuclear fission on behalf of the British government at a joint Anglo-Canadian research facility in Montreal – was forbidden to participate in technical discussions with his American counterparts. This previously neglected incident usefully highlights the complex and contested nature of Anglo-American nuclear diplomacy during the Second World War. In February 1943 Halban had been invited to participate in a discussion concerning his work on heavy water, a topic with immense potential significance to the American nuclear programme. The invite came at a low point in Anglo-American nuclear relations. Interchange between the two states had effectively ceased. Fearing that allowing the trip might weaken the British negotiating position, Halban’s superiors sought to forbid the discussion, and at first instructed Halban to fake an illness to excuse his non-attendance. This ruse was eventually abandoned, but the trip was nevertheless cancelled. The article provides a granular contextualised account of these events and the British rationale throughout. Focussing on the perspectives of scientists and administrators in this period directs attention away from the interpersonal diplomacy of Churchill and Roosevelt towards a more nuanced understanding of the drivers of wartime nuclear diplomacy. The inter-connection of the various tiers of relationships within the allied nuclear programmes is emphasised and the importance of technical considerations in the overall construction of allied nuclear policy demonstrated. Canada’s significance in wartime nuclear diplomacy is also highlighted.

Голубь Курчатова: фигурации (пост)советского ядерного миролюбия

The article discusses the rhetorical, political and ethical entanglements of the atomic age, embodied into a new understanding of the world, as well as into new fragilities and responsibilities. The author notes the episte-mological challenges of exploring the discursive production of the peace in the USSR, which is identified as one of the most indoctrinated practices of late socialism. Through the lens of a single slogan, the author analyzes the indirect transitions between ethics and propaganda. The statement “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier”, which appeared on the banners of demonstrators in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was attributed to the atomic supervisor Igor Kurchatov, became a Soviet atomic imperative and a key figure in the discourse of (post)Soviet atomic peacefulness. The author describes the figuration of the slogan in the context of the confron-tation between two systems, nuclear diplomacy and the establishment of a global agenda for the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The USSR participated in this struggle by promoting the significance of the peace-ful atom and defending its moral priority in the propaganda of this brand. The author focuses on the authorship of the statement and reveals its entanglement with the genealogy of morality and the development of an ethical position for a Soviet nuclear scientist between nuclear war and the peaceful atom. The article pays attention to the contribution of the science journalist Vladimir Gubarev to the retrospective restoration of the authorship of the Soviet atomic imperative. By creating this discursive fiction, one of the main chroniclers of the Sredmash project simultaneously engaged in both propaganda and ethical work.

The Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) and Implications for the North Korean Nuclear Crisis

This article addresses the question of whether there is a peaceful way to defuse the North Korean nuclear crisis by examining the process leading to the Iran nuclear deal. The European approach to resolve security crises based on its principles of multilateralism and the rule of law provides valuable insights for nuclear diplomacy with North Korea: (1) a nuclear-focus approach that dissociates nuclear negotiations from Iran’s other troublesome issues helps the country continue with discussions preventing a military conflict and (2) a multilateral framework with a mediator can guarantee that deals remain alive even if one party breaks away.

What Drives Nuclear-Aspiring States? The Cases of Iran and North Korea

What Drives Nuclear-Aspiring States? The Cases of Iran and North Korea

Discursive delegitimization of Rouhani's nuclear diplomacy and the Iran nuclear deal by Iranian conservatives on Twitter

AbstractThe reformist‐moderate and the conservative discourses have co‐existed and contended for primacy in the Iranian foreign policy since the 1979 revolution. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, has been at the core of this discursive contest in recent years. This article investigates how Iranian conservative tweeters delegitimized the JCPOA and President Rouhani's nuclear diplomacy. We use Van Leeuwen's discursive construction of legitimacy (2008) to analyze three popular conservative Twitter accounts. Findings show that the Iranian conservatives used the strategies of authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization for legal and political criticism of the JCPOA, offending Rouhani's administration and allies, and questioning their political competence. This research partly reveals the conservatives' anti‐negotiation and anti‐West logic and their refusal to offer a diplomatic alternative to the JCPOA.

French Nuclear Policy Towards Iran: From the Shah to the Islamic Republic

ABSTRACT Since 2005, European and French foreign policy towards Iran have been caught between the change of Iran policy under Republican and Democrat administrations, on the one hand, and the Islamic Republic nuclear diplomacy on the other hand. To illustrate this argument, the article will provide a detailed history of Iranian-French relations, particularly pertaining to nuclear technology. The French discourse on a future nuclear Iranian threat reflects the dominant discourse within Western nuclear-weapon states on the nuclear ‘other’. Therefore, this article aims to shed light on the growing gap between France’s official nuclear ideology and the reality of internal and diplomatic developments of the Iranian nuclear program. I will deconstruct the official discourse produced in France on the Iranian quest for nuclear power to explore the complexity of the factors determining Iran’s nuclear choices and the conclusion of the 2015 Nuclear Deal.

Politicization, Foreign Policy and Nuclear Diplomacy

According to the current literature, since the redemocratization, Brazilian foreign policy has been marked by a process of politicization. This article’s main objective is to verify the relation between administrative shifts and Brazilian nuclear diplomacy. Accordingly, the question dealt with in the article is: since Brazil joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), have administration variations interfered with the formulation ofBrazilian nuclear diplomacy? This article argues that Brazilian nuclear diplomacy has been an exception to this trend. No matter how innovative some administrations have been in foreign policy, nuclear diplomacy has been insulated from governmental changes, havingconsolidated a coherent and stable rhetoric internationally. The research was carried out by analyzing the Brazilian rhetoric between 1998 and 2019 in the NPT Review Conferences and Preparatory Committees, vis-à-vis different administrations, through the method of substantive content analysis. The result was the verification that the majority of the rhetorical issues used were present in all studied administrations, indicating the absence of correlation between administration shifts and the Brazilian stance in the Global Nonproliferation Regime.

India and Nuclear Disarmament: A Quest Rooted in National Security Considerations

India has been a long-time supporter of nuclear disarmament. Much before other countries supported these measures, India had proposed universal nuclear disarmament, a nuclear test ban treaty as well as a freeze on the production of fissile material. Opinion is however divided on India’s approach and rationale behind pursuing disarmament. Some call it utopian while others describe it as a pragmatic approach that suited India’s national security needs at that time. India has always had a peculiar relationship with the nuclear non-proliferation regimes. India stressed disarmament as a solution for nuclear proliferation and has viewed nuclear disarmament as enhancing its security interests. This article divides India’s advocacy of global nuclear disarmament into six phases beginning from India’s independence in 1947 to the current period when two parallel tracks have emerged in India’s nuclear diplomacy—one track has continued with its traditional advocacy of universal nuclear disarmament, while the second track where it has engaged with the prevailing non-proliferation regime. India’s nuclear disarmament diplomacy has moved away from moral and ethical considerations to highlighting national security considerations. It is no longer anchored on the ‘disarmament or no disarmament’ question as the traditional disarmament advocacy of India often posed. Instead, the current Indian diplomacy is focused on the emerging rules and frameworks of governance in international security matters and how India can be part of it—multilaterally or through coalition of like-minded partners.

A New Israeli Approach to Iran?

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s cordial relations with the Biden administration and relatively muted posture during nuclear negotiations in Vienna raise questions about whether his government is pursuing a different strategy towards Iran than did his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu. This article argues that it is not. Despite reinvigorated Israeli debates critical of Netanyahu’s policies and improved atmospherics with the American government, official Israeli policy remains essentially unchanged. The Israeli government is still wary of nuclear diplomacy, offers few alternatives to continued diplomatic and economic pressure, and views military options as viable even if they can only set back Iran’s nuclear programme temporarily. While Bennett wants to avoid open confrontation with Washington, Israel will not relax tensions with Iran, particularly in non-nuclear arenas like Syria. In the past, Israeli sabotage against Iran’s nuclear assets subsided in the run-up to and after the nuclear agreement; this time around, Israel may not feel so constrained.

The material culture and politics of artifacts in nuclear diplomacy

This special issue stresses the importance of material culture in diplomatic studies of science and technology. In our studies, objects are considered powerful tokens of complexity in diplomatic encounters and of asymmetry in international relations. The contributors are committed to theorizing about the role of objects in diplomatic exchanges during the postwar period and, at the same time, the role of diplomacy in constituting the materiality of nuclear things. Our approach combines attention to the political and diplomatic nuclear history with recognition of the roles played by nuclear artifacts throughout the whole spectrum of diplomatic activities. On the whole, we argue that the material approach should be located at the center of the study of nuclear history and the diplomatic exchanges that made it possible.

The seismograph as a diplomatic object: The S oviet– A merican exchange of instruments, 1958–1964

Scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain met in Geneva in 1958 and 1959 to create the technical basis for monitoring a future nuclear test ban treaty. Despite their scientific veneer, these meetings were politically motivated and the scientists tried to forward U.S. or Soviet objectives through their technical discussions. Seismographic data was a cornerstone of the proposed monitoring regime, but when the discussions became political, so too did the instruments that produced the scientific data. Thus, seismographs became diplomatic objects used to support or challenge foreign policy objectives. After the collapse of the scientific meetings, the US distributed seismographs as diplomatic gifts to create a worldwide, U.S.-controlled nuclear-detection network in 1960. To exploit data from the network without supporting U.S. policy objectives, the USSR in 1961 proposed to exchange U.S. seismographs for Soviet ones, as two objects of equal value. That allowed each superpower to access the other's technology without creating bonds of mutual obligations. However, this type of inverted, object-based diplomacy also gave scientists from international scientific organisations or small, non-nuclear nations like Denmark a way to engage in nuclear diplomacy. When Danish scientists offered to create a connection station between the U.S. and Soviet seismic networks, they did so in full agreement with the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to strengthen their policy of nuclear disarmament independently of U.S. objectives.

Orienting the 2021 Nuclear Posture Review

With its March 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, the Biden administration set down its first markers on nuclear policy. On international nuclear diplomacy, it committed to “head of...

Materialized internationalism: How the IAEA made the Vinča Dosimetry Experiment , and how the experiment made the IAEA

After a deadly 1958 nuclear reactor accident in Vinča, Yugoslavia, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) engaged in intensive nuclear diplomacy to assemble a major international scientific experiment on radiation dosimetry at the accident site. The 1960 Vinča Dosimetry Experiment made history as the first multinational “big science” project in this field. It was also a significant political victory for the young IAEA, which had been struggling to prove its value in the international community. The story of the successful mounting of the Vinča Dosimetry Experiment highlights the complex interplay between the material culture of science and diplomacy and internationalist ideas. The experiment can therefore be described as a case of "materialized internationalism," whose material and political dimensions were mutually constitutive.

Diplomacy Beyond History: Analytic-Violence, Producer-Centred Research, India

The history of Indian diplomacy conceptualises diplomacy racially—as invented by the West—and restrictively—to offence. This is ‘analytic-violence’ and it explains the berating of Indians for mimicking diplomacy incorrectly or unthinkingly, and the deleting, dismissing, or denigrating, of diplomatic practices contradicting history’s conception. To relieve history from these offences, a new method is presented, ‘Producer-Centred Research’ (PCR). Initiating with abduction, an insight into a problem—in this case Indian diplomacy’s compromised historicisation—PCR solves it by converting history’s racist rationality into ‘rationalities’. The plurality renders rationality one of many, permitting PCR’s searching for rationalities not as a function of rationality but robust practices explicable in producer’s terms. Doing so is exegesis. It reveals India’s nuclear diplomacy as unique, for being organised by defence, not offence. Moreover, offence’s premise of security as exceeding opponent’s hostility renders it chimerical for such a security is, paradoxically, reliant on expanding arsenals. Additionally, doing so is a response to opponents. This fragments sovereignty and abdicates control for one is dependent on opponent’s choices. Defence, however, does not instigate opponents and so really delivers security by minimising arsenals since offence is eschewed. Doing so is not a response to opponents and so maintains sovereignty and retains control by denying others the right to offense. The cost of defence is courage, for instance, choosing to live in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Exegesis discloses Balakot as a shift from defence to offence, so to relieve the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leadership of having to be courageous. The intensity of the intention to discard courage is apparent in the price the BJP paid. This included equating India with Pakistan, permitting it to escalate the conflict, and so imperiling all humanity in a manner beyond history.

U.S. Coercive Diplomacy toward Pyongyang: Obama vs. Trump

Since the first nuclear crisis of the early 1990s, the United States has engaged in coercive diplomacy toward North Korea for its denuclearization. From Clinton to Trump, it has consumed four U.S. administrations without much success so far. Meanwhile, North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests and tested intercontinental ballistic missiles, each of which created serious tensions on the Korean Peninsula, with potential military actions. After a war of words with military threats in much of 2017, Kim Jong Un and President Trump had their first historic meeting in Singapore in June 2018 followed by two more in Hanoi and Panmunjom in 2019. Although no one is sure about their final negotiation outcome, the U.S. nuclear negotiation with North Korea presents an interesting case of coercive diplomacy spanning over a quarter century. The puzzle is, despite its willingness to engage North Korea from early on, the Obama administration did not have meaningful success in nuclear diplomacy while the Trump administration did have at least a first-ever summit with the North Korean leader. Why, then, has Obama’s diplomatic efforts failed to achieve major nuclear agreement with Pyongyang? Can the Trump administration’s coercive diplomacy finally succeed in getting Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons? What are the conditions for the effective use of pressure? Are appropriate rewards needed alongside pressure? Using the works of Alexander George and Bruce Jentleson on coercive diplomacy theory, this paper draws on analyses and lessons from U.S. efforts to persuade North Korea to denuclearize its weapons program by the Obama and the Trump administrations.

From lobbyists to backstage diplomats: how insurers in the field of third party liability shaped nuclear diplomacy

ABSTRACT Third party liability insurance in the event of nuclear accidents emerged as a pressing issue in the 1950s, triggered to a great extent by the activities of international organizations and major nuclear accidents. By the mid-1960s a tight international network of negotiators comprising insurers, lawyers, scientists, engineers, businessmen, and government officials made its appearance along with nuclear insurance pools. Experts, functionaries, diplomats and politicians with often diverging views and expertise were involved in negotiations over the newly emerging legal and regulatory problems related to radiation protection and third party liability in the event of severe accidents. This paper argues that insurers transformed their identities from lobbyists to backstage nuclear diplomats, making their role explicitly political and profoundly diplomatic in an emerging international nuclear order. Within this novel multilayered context of negotiations the nuclear insurance pools developed a unique form of nuclear diplomacy, altering both terms of ‘nuclear’ and ‘diplomacy’.

Europe’s Defence of the Iran Nuclear Deal: Less than a Success, More than a Failure

ABSTRACT For Europe, the Iran nuclear deal is a bittersweet story. Between 2003 and 2015, the Europeans played an important role in facilitating US-Iran nuclear diplomacy and eventually the agreement itself. After former US President Trump decided to exit the deal and revert to maximum economic pressure in 2018, the Europeans tried to recreate room for US-Iran engagement. While unsuccessful, they have nonetheless managed to remain relevant for both sides. The prospect of normalised economic relations with Europe has provided Iran with an incentive not to pursue nuclear weapons. As for the US, the nuclear deal – which still exists formally thanks to Europe – is the only framework available for re-engaging Iran in nuclear diplomacy, a prospect the new administration of Joe Biden has pledged to consider. Dismissing Europe’s efforts as ineffectual is therefore inaccurate since, in defending the nuclear deal, the Europeans have preserved a diplomatic bridge for US-Iranian re-engagement.

Three tons of uranium from the International Atomic Energy Agency: diplomacy over nuclear fuel for the Japan Research Reactor-3 at the Board of Governors’ meetings, 1958–1959

ABSTRACT This paper combines renewed attention to science diplomacy with the rising interest in material and ontological aspects of science studies. It examines nuclear diplomacy by reviewing negotiations over three tons of natural uranium that the Japanese government requested from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1958. The uranium was half the amount required for the Japan Research Reactor-3, which reached criticality in 1962 and became Japan’s first domestically developed nuclear reactor. Japan’s request provided an opportunity to reaffirm the IAEA’s raison d’être and set in motion the process of establishing a safeguarding system against the military use of atomic energy. The IAEA Board of Governors deliberated on the issue from October 1958 to April 1959. Although Japan’s request was generally welcomed, it sparked confrontations between countries that accepted IAEA safeguards and those against them. By analysing the IAEA Board’s official records, this paper shows how the negotiations transformed the uranium into a ‘diplomatic object’.