Articles

309 Items

Dr. Henry Kissinger, foreground, at a White House strategy session. Pictured from the left are: Secretary of State William P. Rogers. U.S. President Richard Nixon, and Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird.

AP/Bob Daugherty

Journal Article - H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Miller on Trachtenberg and Jervis on SALT

| Sep. 27, 2023

At a moment when arms control is deeply troubled and may be dying, two eminent scholars, Marc Trachtenberg and the late Robert Jervis, have taken a fresh look at the beginnings of strategic arms control fifty years after the signing in Moscow of the SALT I agreements in May of 1972. They do so from different vantage points, writes Steven E. Miller.

A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile system in Moscow, May 2023

Gavriil Grigorov / Sputnik / Reuters

Magazine Article - Foreign Affairs

A New Approach to Arms Control

| June 14, 2023
With Russia’s war against Ukraine in its second year and tensions growing in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, nuclear weapons are back on the global political agenda. At a summit in Hiroshima on May 19, G-7 leaders committed to promoting “responsible nuclear behavior,” including risk reduction measures and greater transparency about states’ nuclear arsenals. Despite this renewed attention to the danger of nuclear weapons, traditional arms control—in which nuclear powers formally agree to take steps to reduce their arsenals—has broken down altogether.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy, seen here meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961

Stanley Tretick via National Archives and Records Administration

Journal Article - Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament

Review of The Hegemon’s Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime.

| June 13, 2023

Rebecca Davis Gibbons has published several notable articles examining the role of great powers in the global nuclear order over the past few years (e.g. Gibbons 2019, 2020). Her work has included scholarly research on supply-side nuclear restrictions, promotion of nonproliferation agreements and institutions, and interaction with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). In her first book, Gibbons puts all of these pieces of the puzzle together. The Hegemon’s Tool Kit offers a broad and elegant theory of international nuclear politics that should be of great interest to readers of this journal.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, IAEA Director General, met Faizan Mansoor, Chairman, Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority during his official visit to the Agency headquarters in Vienna, Austria. 24 March 2023.

IAEA

Journal Article - International Journal of Nuclear Security

Assessing Nuclear Security Risks in Pakistan

| June 2023

Pakistan’s nuclear program and perceived nuclear security concerns have attracted global attention. The varying concerns range from the potential theft of nuclear weapons or materials to the unauthorized use of a nuclear device to terrorist groups taking control of the Pakistani government. The enduring debate, however, has oscillated between these doomsday scenarios and some optimistic considerations, where various quarters have shared their satisfaction over Pakistan’s nuclear security regime and its ability to deal with the emerging challenges. To address the evolving nature of these threats, Pakistan is constantly improving its nuclear security infrastructure. It has established a comprehensive legislative and institutional structure, nuclear security systems, and has also undertaken various international obligations. To further improve nuclear security perceptions, Pakistan should adopt a more transparent approach and learn from international best practices.

Journal Article - Middle East Policy

Iran and the SCO: The Quest For Legitimacy and Regime Preservation

| 2023

At the 2021 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the bloc announced the approval of Iran's longstanding bid for membership. The Islamic Republic has viewed its involvement in the organization as a means of bolstering external legitimacy, fostering security-oriented regionalism, and promoting the transition toward the so-called multipolar world order. The SCO, led by Russia and China, has served as a regime-preservation network by providing Iran with a source of solidarity against external pressure. Tehran's commitment to the normative order, sustained by the SCO's discourse of noninterference, sovereignty, and countering the “three evils”—terrorism, extremism, and separatism—has galvanized the organization's role as a common front against the imposition of liberal norms and challenges to regime security.

The Ghauri–I (first on right) display at the IDEAS exhibition held in Karachi, mounted in its TEL launch mechanism. c. 2008.

Wikimedia Commons

Journal Article - International Affairs

Book Review: Pakistan's pathway to the bomb: ambitions, politics, and rivalries

| May 02, 2023

Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme has largely remained shrouded in mystery, despite numerous scholars’ efforts to uncover various aspects of the country's nuclear odyssey. In the absence of complete and credible information, such as declassified official documents on the programme's various dimensions, most of the available literature offers an incomplete picture. Indeed, the existing narratives lack a detailed explanation of the competing motives of the various personalities, and the role of the organizations that shaped the country's nuclear trajectory. In this context, Mansoor Ahmed's Pakistan's pathway to the bomb offers a riveting new account that puts together some of the missing pieces in Pakistan's nuclear journey. Based on untapped primary sources, namely an interview with Munir Ahmed Khan, the long-serving chair of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), Ahmed's work provides a compelling counter-narrative to various popular yet inaccurate beliefs.

Ukrainian Armed Forces use M777 howitzers donated due to the 2022 Russian invasion

Ukrainian Ground Forces via Wikimedia Commons

Journal Article - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Distressing a system in distress: global nuclear order and Russia’s war against Ukraine

| Nov. 08, 2022

While prosecuting its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has relied heavily on nuclear threats, turning the war in Ukraine into a dangerous nuclear crisis with profound implications for the global nuclear order and its two constitutive systems of nuclear deterrence and nuclear restraint. These two interconnected systems, each aiming to manage nuclear possession and reduce the risk of nuclear use, are at once complimentary and contradictory. While tensions between these systems are not new, the war in Ukraine exacerbates them in unprecedented ways. The system of nuclear deterrence seems to be proving its worth by inducing restraint on Russia and NATO, while the system of restraint is undermined by demonstrating what happens to a country not protected by nuclear deterrence. The latter lesson is particularly vivid given Ukraine’s decision to forgo a nuclear option in 1994 in exchange for security assurances from nuclear powers. Russia’s use of nuclear threats as an enabler for escalation and the specter of Russian tactical nuclear use against Ukraine goes well beyond its declared nuclear doctrine. The outcome of the war in Ukraine thus has critical importance for deciding the value of nuclear weapons in global security architecture and for resolving the conundrum between the systems of deterrence and restraint.

On January 22, 2021, Foreign Minister of Austria Alexander Schallenberg gave a press conference on the entry into force of the TPNW at the Foreign Ministry in Vienna.

Austrian Foreign Ministry via Wikimedia Commons

Magazine Article - Arms Control Today

The First TPNW Meeting and the Future of the Nuclear Ban Treaty

| September 2022

As diplomats, activists, and researchers converged on Vienna in June for the first meeting of states-parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), recent tragic world events highlighted how critical it was to convene this multilateral forum on nuclear disarmament.

Since February, Russia’s war against Ukraine has epitomized the grave dangers of a world where nine states possess approximately 12,700 nuclear weapons.1 That Russia could invade a sovereign state and indiscriminately target its civilian population, while using nuclear threats to deter NATO from intervening, has stunned the world. It offers a stark reminder that possessing nuclear arms can enable abhorrent violations of international law

Solar Panels in Israel

Courtesy of the Author, Michael Roth

Journal Article - Energy and Climate Change

Policy Spillovers, Technological Lock-In, and Efficiency Gains from Regional Pollution Taxes in the U.S.

| December 2022

We used the US-TIMES energy-system model in conjunction with integrated assessment models for air pollution (AP3, EASIUR, InMAP) to estimate the consequences of local air pollutant (LAP) and carbon dioxide (CO2) policy on technology-choice, energy-system costs, emissions, and pollution damages in the United States. We report substantial policy spillover: Both LAP and CO2 taxes cause similar levels of decarbonization. Under LAP taxes, decarbonization was a result of an increase in natural gas generation and a near-complete phaseout of coal generation in the electric sector. Under a CO2 tax, the majority of simulated decarbonization was a result of increased electric generation from wind and solar. We also found that the timing of the CO2 and LAP taxes was important. When we simulated a LAP tax beginning in 2015 and waited until 2025 to introduce a CO2 tax, the electric sector was locked into higher levels of natural gas generation and cumulative 2010–2035 energy system CO2 emissions were 8.8 billion tons higher than when the taxes were implemented simultaneously. A scenario taxing CO2 and LAPs simultaneously beginning in 2015 produced the highest net benefits, as opposed to scenarios that target either CO2 or LAPs, or scenarios that delayed either LAP or CO2 taxes until 2025. Lastly, we found that net benefits compared to business as usual are higher under a regional versus a national LAP-tax regime, but that efficiency gains under the regional tax are not substantially higher than those under the national LAP-tax policy.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin at a meeting Federal Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz in the Kremlin in Moscow

Wikimedia Commons via Presidential Executive Office of Russia

Journal Article - Survival

The War in Ukraine and Global Nuclear Order

| Aug. 02, 2022

The global nuclear order had been challenged in recent years by individual proliferators, the moribund US–Russian arms-control process and resultant frustration over stalled progress towards disarmament. Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine under cover of nuclear threats against NATO. This has neither exposed the international nuclear-governance regime as toothless nor brought it to the verge of collapse. The global nuclear order’s history shows its resilience to rogue acts by great powers. It will continue to serve key nuclear-capable states’ security and energy interests in the non-proliferation domain. Arms control between Washington and Moscow has always been sensitive to their strategic whims and can be reconstituted. The main consequence of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war is renewed public awareness of the often unpalatable role nuclear weapons play in international politics. Nuclear targeting, deterrent threats and associated risk-reduction efforts are hardly new phenomena.