in the media

Reexamining Disarmament Obligations

Disarmament obligations promise to be an important topic at the 2009 Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, says George Perkovich. Critics question the role of disarmament in discouraging would-be proliferators and disarmament negotiations need the imprimatur of high-level officials from both weapons and non-weapons states to move past this impasse.

by George Perkovich

published by

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

on April 1, 2009

Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Reexamining Disarmament ObligationsNext week, government officials and experts from around the world will gather in Washington, D.C., for the 2009 Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference. The meeting will focus on the health of the global nonproliferation regime and current nuclear disarmament efforts. A central, ongoing debate within these policy arenas, and one that is likely to feature prominently in the conference's proceedings, is the nature of nuclear-armed states' obligation to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

Late last year, my colleague at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, James M. Acton, and I cowrote an Adelphi Paper, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, which outlined the challenges to abolishing nuclear weapons. In the months since its publication, we solicited responses from experts and officials around the world. These responses are freely available in Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, which contains the original Adelphi Paper and 17 critiques by authors from 13 countries. Several of these responses suggested new ways of overcoming current debates about the role nuclear weapons states play in disarmament discussions.

Read the full article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.