This volume brings together writings by Prof. Ramesh Thakur on
the challenge of nuclear weapons, covering more than three decades
of researching, thinking and writing on the topic.
The core problem of this work can be disaggregated into several
components. The essays approach the problem primarily as a
normative and political project, not as an analytical project.
Chapters 1 3 in Part One describe the scholar-practitioner
interface in trying to come to grips with the nature and magnitude
of the challenge, the main policy impact of the development of
nuclear weapons on security strategy, and the different collective
nuclear futures from among which policymakers must choose.
The bulk of the world s nuclear weapons are held by Russia and
the United States, who also conducted most of the nuclear testing.
But in the 1980s and 1990s, world attention was focused on nuclear
testing in the Pacific by France as an established NPT
nuclear-weapons-state (NWS), then India and Pakistan as they broke
through the NPT normative barrier to conduct nuclear tests in 1998
and consolidated their status as non-NPT nuclear-armed states,
followed finally by North Korea which became the first country to
defect from and break out of the NPT to conduct nuclear tests in
2006, 2009 and 2013. While the world is trying to figure out how to
coax North Korea back into the NPT bottle, it is simultaneously
struggling with the challenge of trying to keep Iran in the NPT
non-nuclear box. Meanwhile, India has been accommodated as a de
facto nuclear-armed state outside the NPT regime. The eight
chapters in Part Two address these regional nuclear challenges.
The various regional challenges have served to highlight serious
deficiencies in the normative architecture of the nuclear arms
control and disarmament regime. The five chapters in Part Three
deal with the international nuclear nonproliferation and
disarmament machinery and regime, including regional
nuclear-weapon-free zones. In addition, the nuclear proliferation
and terrorism agendas merged as a nightmare challenge in the minds
of policymakers after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. This
is discussed in chapter 15, while chapter 16 asks if the NPT
anomalies have become so many and so substantial that the treaty is
incapable of functioning much longer as the anchor of the global
nuclear arms control regime.
The concluding chapter brings together the various disparate
strands of the analysis to argue for moving towards a world of
progressively reduced nuclear weapons in numbers, reduced salience
of nuclear weapons in national security doctrines and deployments,
and an eventually denuclearized world.
This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear
proliferation, global governance, international organisations,
diplomacy and security studies.
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