Twenty-First Century Weapons Proliferation by James M. Ludes Henry Sokolski

Author:James M. Ludes, Henry Sokolski [James M. Ludes, Henry Sokolski]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135308216
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

The collapse of the Soviet Union has created both problems and opportunities for nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. One opportunity created by Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ is that Russia is willing, in principle, to accept on-site inspections. This means that the whole panoply of techniques that have been developed by the IAEA to verify that non-nuclear-weapon states are not diverting fissile material to weapons can now be applied to nuclear arms reductions. We can negotiate verifiable agreements to:

• exchange information on the stockpiles of nuclear warheads and the total quantities of fissile materials that they contain and negotiate reductions in these stockpiles;

• reduce the huge stockpiles of excess military and civilian fissile material; and

• end the production of further weapons-usable fissile material.

Such agreements will not be easy to achieve. Even if Russia had another Gorbachev, who embraced nuclear disarmament as an end in itself, his power to force Russia’s nuclear bureaucracy to act in conformance with his vision would be much diminished. Multilateral negotiations would be complicated by the commercial interests in spent-fuel reprocessing in Britain and France and the volatile situations with regard to proliferation in the Middle East and south Asia. And, the further reductions proceeded, the greater the inevitable uncertainties in verification would loom. More buffers would be required in the forms of monitored excess but-not-yet-eliminated national stockpiles and stretched-out time scales to allow confidence in the process to grow.

US leadership will be required to move this process forward. The United States has thus far nibbled at this agenda but has been unable to mobilize the sustained high-level engagement required actually to achieve results. What is needed is an administration with both the understanding and the commitment at the presidential level to a comprehensive strategy to contain and shrink the world’s huge stockpiles of fissile materials.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.