Nuclear Diplomacy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The advent of nuclear technology disrupted the international order. Nuclear-weapon advocates promised that nuclear arsenals could deter war and promote development and industrialization at potentially lower costs. Skeptics feared that the failure to control the military uses of the atom could lead to nuclear catastrophes. The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 highlighted the inability of existing international law to prevent global destruction. The prospects of nuclear Armageddon created an ordering imperative. Governments around the world started to craft the necessary international arrangements to guarantee security from nuclear weapons. Conventional accounts of the origins of the global nuclear order emphasize the governance mechanisms that nuclear powers favored. They portray the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as the bedrock of this order, and usually describe it as a grand bargain that nuclear powers, especially the United States as the hegemon, presented to the rest of the international community. This panel brings together a group of scholars studying the politics of lawmaking and nuclear governance. This group questions conventional accounts by exploring the connections among efforts to control nuclear weapons, endeavors to govern nuclear risks beyond the NPT, shifts in understandings of nuclear deterrence and disarmament, and the role of the Global South in the emergence of the nuclear order.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• Bilateralism and Multilateralism in Nuclear Negotiations - Naomi Egel, University of Georgia

• Nuclear Ordering and Geographies of Nuclear Constraints - J. Luis Rodriguez, George Mason University

• Why Did the Superpowers Start Opposing the Spread of Nuclear Weapons? - Jonathan R Hunt, U.S. Air War College; Joseph Torigian, American University

• New Forum, New Framing: Shifting Approaches to Deterrence and Disarmament - Miriam Barnum, Purdue University

Chair

• Scott D. Sagan Stanford University

Discussant

• Stephen Herzog Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey