Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-357
Author(s):  
Melina Lito
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Populated Area ◽  
The Past ◽  
Severe Burns ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Blunt Force Trauma ◽  
Blast Effects

Those who have been following international headlines for the past year can observe the increased prevalence of discussions on nuclear weapons, including between the United States and North Korea. In the margins of the discussions, the law and policy discussions around nuclear non-proliferation become very relevant. After all, the devastating humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons are very clear. “Studies have shown that the detonation of nuclear weapons would cause widespread death, injury and damage, especially if it occurred in or near a populated area.” There would be extensive casualties from severe burns and blunt force trauma that would occur in the moments after the detonation, as a result of blast effects and the release of thermal radiation. As such, most communities would not necessarily have the capacity to enact appropriate response mechanisms. “[A]ssessments undertaken by the ICRC have highlighted that there is a lack of capacity in most countries and at the international level to adequately respond to a nuclear detonation, and to provide assistance that would benefit a substantial portion of survivors in the aftermath.” Amid these considerations, the first-ever nuclear ban treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (Treaty), was negotiated in the halls of the UN headquarters in New York. Before analyzing the Treaty itself, a word on how it came about and the legal framework that preceded it.

scholarly journals 'The Full Monty'

M/C Journal ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Wolffram
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Political Act

The 'scholarly striptease', particularly as it is manifested in the United States, has attracted an increasing number of participants during the past decade. Unbeknownst to many, some academics have been getting their gear off in public; that is, publicly and provocatively showcasing their identities in order to promote their politics. While you might imagine that confessions about sexual orientation, ethnicity and pet hates could only serve to undermine academic authority, some American feminists -- and a small number of their male colleagues -- have nevertheless attempted to enhance their authority with such racy revelations. Nancy Miller's admission of a strained relationship with her father (Miller 143-147), or Jane Gallop's homage to the three 36-year-old men she had affairs with (Gallop 41), might make interesting reading for the academic voyeur (or the psychoanalyst), but what is their purpose beyond spectacle? The cynic might argue that self-promotion and intellectual celebrity or notoriety are the motivators -- and certainly he or she would have a point -- but within such performances of identity, and the metacriticism that clings to them, other reasons are cited. Apparently it is all to do with identity politics, that is, the use of your personal experience as the basis of your political stance. But while experience and the personal (remember "the personal is the political"?) have been important categories in feminist writing, the identity of the intellectual in academic discourse has traditionally been masked by a requisite objectivity. In a very real sense the foregrounding of academic identity by American feminists and those other brave souls who see fit to expose themselves, is a rejection of objectivity as the basis of intellectual authority. In the past, and also contemporaneously, intellectuals have gained and retained authority by subsuming their identity and their biases, and assuming an "objective" position. This new bid for authority, on the other hand, is based on a revelation of identity and biases. An example is Adrienne Rich's confession: "I have been for ten years a very public and visible lesbian. I have been identified as a lesbian in print both by myself and others" (Rich 199). This admission, which is not without risk, reveals possible biases and blindspots, but also allows Rich to speak with an authority which is grounded in experience of, and knowledge about lesbianism. Beyond the epistemological rejection of objectivity there appear to be other reasons for exposing one's "I", and its particular foibles, in scholarly writing. Some of these reasons may be considered a little more altruistic than others. For example, some intellectuals have used this practice, also known as "the personal mode", in a radical attempt to mark their culturally or critically marginal subjectivities. By straddling their vantage points within the marginalised subjectivity with which they identify, and their position in academia, these people can make visible the inequities they, and others like them, experience. Such performances are instances of both identity politics at work and the intellectual as activist. On the other hand, while this politically motivated use of "the personal mode" clearly has merit, cultural critics such as Elspeth Probyn have reminded us that in some cases the risks entailed by self-exposition are minimal (141), and that the discursive striptease is often little more than a vehicle for self-promotion. Certainly there is something of the tabloid in some of this writing, and even a tentative linking of the concepts of "academic" and "celebrity" -- Camille Paglia being the obvious example. While Paglia is among the few academics who are public celebrities, there are plenty of intellectuals who are famous within the academic community. It is often these people who can expose aspects of their identity without risking tenure, and it is often these same individuals who choose to confess what they had for breakfast, rather than their links with or concerns for something like a minority. For some, the advent of "the personal mode" particularly when it appears to contain a bid for academic or public fame signifies the denigration of academic discourse, its slow decline into journalistic gossip and ruin. For others, it is a truly political act allowing the participant to combine their roles as intellectual and activist. For me, it is a critical practice that fascinates and demands consideration in all its incarnations: as a bid for a new basis for academic authority, as a political act, and as a vehicle for self-promotion and fame. References Gallop, Jane. Thinking through the Body. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Probyn, Elspeth. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1993. Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: W.W Norton, 1986. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Heather Wolffram. "'The Full Monty': Academics, Identity and the 'Personal Mode'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.3 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/full.php>. Chicago style: Heather Wolffram, "'The Full Monty': Academics, Identity and the 'Personal Mode'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 3 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/full.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Heather Wolffram. (1998) 'The full monty': academics, identity and the 'personal mode'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/full.php> ([your date of access])

Since 1945: New Amenities, New Hazards

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
World History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Society ◽  
Service Employment

If the average citizen's surroundings defined the national climate, then the United States grew markedly warmer and drier in the postwar decades. Migration continued to carry the center of population west and began pulling it southward as well. The growth of what came to be called the Sunbelt at the "Snowbelt's" expense passed a landmark in the early 1960s when California replaced New York as the most populous state. Another landmark was established in the early 1990s when Texas moved ahead of New York. In popular discussion, it was taken for granted that finding a change of climate was one of the motives for relocating as well as one of the results. It was not until 1954, though, that an American social scientist first seriously considered the possibility. The twentieth-century flow of Americans to the West Coast, the geographer Edward L. Ullman observed in that year, had no precedent in world history. It could not be explained by the theories of settlement that had worked well in the past, for a substantial share of it represented something entirely new, "the first large-scale in-migration to be drawn by the lure of a pleasant climate." If it was the first of its kind, it was unlikely to be the last. For a set of changes in American society, Ullman suggested, had transformed the economic role of climate. The key changes included a growth in the numbers of pensioned retirees; an increase in trade and service employment, much more "footloose" than agriculture or manufacturing was; developments in technology making manufacturing itself more footloose; and a great increase in mobility brought about by the automobile and the highway. All in one way or another had weakened the bonds of place and made Americans far freer than before to choose where to live. Whatever qualities made life in any spot particularly pleasant thus attracted migration more than in the past. Ullman grouped such qualities together as "amenities." They ranged from mountains to beaches to cultural attractions, but climate appeared to be the most important, not least because it was key to the enjoyment of many of the rest. Ullman did not suppose that all Americans desired the same climate. For most people, in this as in other respects, "where one was born and lives is the best place in the world, no matter how forsaken a hole it may appear to an outsider."

The Many Lives of Chief Kisco

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Madeline Bourque Kearin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Communal Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Object ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Village

This paper deconstructs the folklore surrounding an early twentieth-century zinc figure of an American Indian that stands in the center of the village of Mount Kisco, New York. The identity that “Chief Kisco” has assumed over the past hundred years elides the nature of the origins of the statue, which was intended not as a statement of communal identity, but rather as the exact opposite. As a ready-made art object, the statue was emblematic of a new network of commodified goods that transformed the cultural geography of the United States; as it was utilized in Mount Kisco, the statue was a piece of temperance propaganda with strong nativist undertones that tapped directly into the class, religious, and ethnic divisions running through the turn-of-the-century village.

Discussants' Reactions

1962 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-129
Author(s):  
James Bowen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Way

The past few years have been particularly troublesome for the American people, not the least of the worries being a concern with the Russian challenge to the American way of life. The incredible successes of the Russians in orbiting satellites and exploding nuclear weapons has been both a disturbing and a sobering thought to the United States, long secure in its isolation and power, and in the belief that it was the best society on earth. More than a decade ago an enduring Pax Americana based upon the unilateral possession of the atomic bomb disappeared; with the launching of various Sputniki since 1958 morale has dropped even lower.

Introduction: Immigration and Incorporation

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén G. Rumbaut
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immigrant Settlement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Society

In at least one sense the “American century” is ending much as it had begun: the United States has again become a nation of immigrants, and it is again being transformed in the process. But the diversity of the “new immigration” to the United States over the past three decades differs in many respects from that of the last period of mass immigration in the first three decades of the century. The immigrants themselves differ greatly in their social class and national origins, and so does the American society, polity, and economy that receives them—raising questions about their modes of incorporation, and challenging conventional accounts of assimilation processes that were framed during that previous epoch. The dynamics and future course of their adaptation are open empirical questions—as well as major questions for public policy, since the outcome will shape the future contours of American society. Indeed, as the United States undergoes its most profound demographic transformation in a century; as inexorable processes of globalization, especially international migrations from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, diversify still further the polyethnic composition of its population; and as issues of immigration, race and ethnicity become the subject of heated public debate, the question of incorporation, and its serious study, becomes all the more exigent. The essays in this special issue of Sociological Perspectives tackle that subject from a variety of analytical vantages and innovative approaches, covering a wide range of groups in major areas of immigrant settlement. Several of the papers focus specifically on Los Angeles and New York City, where, remarkably, fully a quarter of the total U.S. immigrant population resides.

The future unlike the past: nuclear proliferation and American security policy

1981 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nacht
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nuclear Arms Control

An examination of the past relationships between nuclear proliferation and American security policy substantiates several propositions. First, the political relationship between the United States and each new nuclear weapon state was not fundamentally transformed as a result of nuclear proliferation. Second, with the exception of the Soviet Union, no new nuclear state significantly affected U.S. defense programs or policies. Third, American interest in bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations has been confined to the Soviet Union. Fourth, a conventional conflict involving a nonnuclear ally prompted the United States to intervene in ways it otherwise might not have in order to forestall the use of nuclear weapons.In all respects, however, the relationship between nuclear proliferation and American security policy is changing. The intensification of the superpower rivalry and specific developments in their nuclear weapons and doctrines, the decline of American power more generally, and the characteristics of nuclear threshold states all serve to stimulate nuclear proliferation. It will be increasingly difficult in the future for American security policy to be as insulated from this process as it has been in the past.

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