Innovations in Global Nuclear Governance: How Non-Nuclear-Weapon-States Banded Together and Banned the Bomb

• In Event: Citizen Bureaucraft - II

Abstract

“We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change.” When President Barack Obama spoke these words to a rapt audience on a chilly spring day in Prague in 2009, he had in mind the disruptors of an old status quo. But even as his speech paid tribute to an earlier generation’s revolution, the vision it laid out for how to achieve a world “free of nuclear weapons” closely resembled the well-trodden paths taken during the Cold War – piecemeal reductions initiated and implemented at the leisure of the nuclear superpowers, then framed, debated, and justified by Western defense intellectuals in the quasi-scientific discursive tradition of rational deterrence. Thus, in 2017, when 122 countries chose to ignore such voices – including those of all five permanent members of the Security Council – by voting to adopt a treaty banning the development, testing, acquisition, or use of nuclear weapons, their victory reformulated as dramatically as it interrupted the normal conduct of nuclear diplomacy, a tradition that these states argued had resulted only in a nonproliferation regime which functioned as a self-perpetuating artifact of the Cold War nuclear hierarchy. Drawing on interviews with the diplomats, activists, and scientists who pushed forward these negotiations, I examine how non-nuclear-weapon-states overcame the resistance of the P5 and destabilized long-dominant imaginaries of global nuclear governance by leveraging the institutional possibilities of the UN General Assembly and empowering a reframed technical discourse focused on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war.

Author

• Leyatt Betre, Princeton University