Covenants and Swords: NPT and Post-Soviet Denuclearization

• In Event: Arms Control

Abstract

There is a lingering disagreement among scholars on how the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) affects nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. Drawing on norms scholarship, this paper theorizes a range of causal mechanisms through which the international nonproliferation norm could affect outcomes of nuclear restraint. It then considers these mechanisms in the cases of nuclear disarmament of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, these newly independent states inherited parts of world’s largest nuclear arsenal yet by 1994 decided to disarm and join the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states. Insights from the in-depth empirical examination of these cases reveal that a range of domestic and international factors influenced their decision to forgo nuclear weapons. At the same time, the NPT shaped their nuclear deliberations through a range of normative mechanisms by guarding a separate normative space for nuclear possession, allocating the burden of proof, providing the normative grammar of denuclearization, and legitimizing the pressure exerted by their interlocutors to conform with the nonproliferation regime.

Author

• Mariana Budjeryn, HKS Belfer Center