On Tuesday 16 September 2008, the IISS hosted the London press launch of its latest Adelphi Paper, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons from 1-2pm.
The study has been the focus of considerable attention, and was referred to by both Defence Secretary Des Browne in a speech earlier this year and by then-Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett last year.
Nuclear disarmament is firmly back on the international agenda. But almost all current thinking on the subject is focused on the process of reducing the number of weapons from thousands to hundreds. In this Adelphi Paper George Perkovich and James M. Acton look at the challenges that exist to abolishing nuclear weapons completely, and suggest what can be done now to start overcoming them.
The paper argues that the difficulties of ‘getting to zero’ must not preclude many steps being taken in that direction. It thus begins by examining steps that nuclear-armed states could take in cooperation with others to move towards a world in which the task of prohibiting nuclear weapons could be realistically envisaged.
The remainder of the paper focuses on the more distant prospect of prohibiting nuclear weapons, beginning with the challenge of verifying the transition from low numbers to zero. It moves on to examine how the civilian nuclear industry could be managed in a nuclear-weapons-free world so as to prevent rearmament. The paper then considers what political–security conditions would be required to make a nuclear-weapons ban enforceable and explores how enforcement might work in practice. Finally, it addresses the latent capability to produce nuclear weapons that would inevitably exist after abolition, and asks whether this is a barrier to disarmament, or whether it can be managed to meet the security needs of a world newly free of the bomb.
The Adelphi Papers monograph series is the Institute’s principal contribution to policy-relevant, original academic research. Eight papers are published each year, designed to provide rigorous analysis of strategic and defence topics that will prove useful to academics, researchers, politicians and diplomats, as well as foreign-affairs analysts, defence commentators and journalists.
The press launch was chaired by Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow for Nonproliferation.
The Launch and the Q&A session are available to watch
AP 396 Abolishing Nuclear Weapons - US Launch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
In a new Adephi Paper published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), George Perkovich and James M. Acton explore in unprecedented detail whether and how the elimination of all nuclear arsenals could be verified and enforced. George Perkovich was joined by Sir Michael Quinlan, a consulting fellow at IISS, in a discussion about the paper at the Carnegie Endowment on September 22, 2008. A stream of the discussion is available.
