Maintaining a nonproliferation regime

1981 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Nye

Three-and-a-half decades have passed since the energy of the atom was used in warfare. Yet rather than nuclear doom, the world has seen a surprising nuclear stability thus far. Equally remarkable is the fact that over the same period nuclear technology has spread to more than two score nations, yet only a small fraction have chosen to develop nuclear weaponry. A third notable point has been the development of an international nonproliferation regime—a set of rules, norms, and institutions, which haltingly and albeit imperfectly, has discouraged the proliferation of nuclear weapons capability.The wrong policies in the 1980s—i.e., policies that put the United States in an overly rigid position on the nuclear fuel cycle or which lower the priority the United States gives to the issue in security terms—could still sacrifice the current modest success in regime maintenance. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to the political problem of proliferation. But given the difficulty of constructing international institutions in a world of sovereign states, and the risks attendant upon their collapse, political wisdom begins with efforts to maintain the existing regime with its presumption against proliferation.

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-173
Author(s):  
Wallace J. Thies

This chapter details how, like Colonel Qaddafi's Libya and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran under clerical rule was widely thought to be a difficult target for a strategy based on containment. With every year that passed, Iran seemed to draw closer to becoming a nuclear power and therefore harder to deter and to contain, or so the conventional wisdom proclaimed. The chapter considers the political–military rivalry between the United States and Iran between 1991 (the first Persian Gulf War) and 2016 (when Iran accepted strict limits on its use of the nuclear fuel cycle to produce fissionable materials). If containment pessimists are correct about Iran being undeterrable and uncontainable, then many of the events recounted in the chapter probably should not have occurred. But they did occur, which suggests that a closer look at the historical record will likely reveal some additional interesting twists and turns.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.


MRS Advances ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (19) ◽  
pp. 991-1003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evaristo J. Bonano ◽  
Elena A. Kalinina ◽  
Peter N. Swift

ABSTRACTCurrent practice for commercial spent nuclear fuel management in the United States of America (US) includes storage of spent fuel in both pools and dry storage cask systems at nuclear power plants. Most storage pools are filled to their operational capacity, and management of the approximately 2,200 metric tons of spent fuel newly discharged each year requires transferring older and cooler fuel from pools into dry storage. In the absence of a repository that can accept spent fuel for permanent disposal, projections indicate that the US will have approximately 134,000 metric tons of spent fuel in dry storage by mid-century when the last plants in the current reactor fleet are decommissioned. Current designs for storage systems rely on large dual-purpose (storage and transportation) canisters that are not optimized for disposal. Various options exist in the US for improving integration of management practices across the entire back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.


Author(s):  
David A. Hollinger

This chapter analyzes the consolidation in 1942 of the two major, religiously defined institutional forces of the entire period from World War II to the present. The Delaware Conference of March 3–5, 1942, was the first moment at which rival groups within the leadership of ecumenical Protestantism came together and agreed upon an agenda for the postwar world. The chapter addresses the following questions: Just what did the Delaware Conference agree upon and proclaim to the world? Which Protestant leaders were present at the conference and/or helped to bring it about and to endow it with the character of a summit meeting? In what respects did the new political orientation established at the conference affect the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism?


Author(s):  
W. W. Rostow

I have tried in this book to summarize where the world economy has come from in the past three centuries and to set out the core of the agenda that lies before us as we face the century ahead. This century, for the first time since the mid-18th century, will come to be dominated by stagnant or falling populations. The conclusions at which I have arrived can usefully be divided in two parts: one relates to what can be called the political economy of the 21st century; the other relates to the links between the problem of the United States playing steadily the role of critical margin on the world scene and moving at home toward a solution to the multiple facets of the urban problem. As for the political economy of the 21st century, the following points relate both to U.S. domestic policy and U.S. policy within the OECD, APEC, OAS, and other relevant international organizations. There is a good chance that the economic rise of China and Asia as well as Latin America, plus the convergence of economic stagnation and population increase in Africa, will raise for a time the relative prices of food and industrial materials, as well as lead to an increase in expen ditures in support of the environment. This should occur in the early part of the next century, If corrective action is taken in the private markets and the political process, these strains on the supply side should diminish with the passage of time, the advance of science and innovation, and the progressively reduced rate of population increase. The government, the universities, the private sector, and the professions might soon place on their common agenda the delicate balance of maintaining full employment with stagnant or falling populations. The existing literature, which largely stems from the 1930s, is quite illuminating but inadequate. And the experience with stagnant or falling population in the the world economy during post-Industrial Revolution times is extremely limited. This is a subject best approached in the United States on a bipartisan basis, abroad as an international problem. It is much too serious to be dealt with, as it is at present, as a domestic political football.


1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Bradley Thompson

John Adams was unique among the Founding Fathers in that he actually read and took seriously Machiavelli's ideas. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, Adams quoted extensively from Machiavelli and he openly acknowledged an intellectual debt to the Florentine statesman. Adams praised Machiavelli for having been “the first” to have “revived the ancient politics” and he insisted that the “world” was much indebted to Machiavelli for “the revival of reason in matters of government.” What could Adams have meant by these extraordinary statements? The following article examines the Machiavellian ideas and principles Adams incorporated into his political thought as well as those that he rejected. Drawing upon evidence found in an unpublished fragment, Part one argues that the political epistemology that Adams employed in the Defence can be traced to Machiavelli's new modes and orders. Part two presents Adams's critique of Machiavelli's constitutionalism.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 305-306
Author(s):  
Graciana del Castillo

This is a highly readable book that provides strong and rigorous arguments to prove a thesis that is intuitive to many but still denied by some—that the United States foreign policy of using military intervention, occupation, and reconstruction to establish liberal democracies across the world is more likely to fail than to succeed.


1932 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-715
Author(s):  
John A. Fairlie

It is safe to say that very few people in the United States have any appreciation of the importance of the Netherlands Indies to Holland, to the world at large, or to the United States. Yet they constitute a major part in the economic prosperity of Holland, furnish a large element in the international trade of the world, and are significant factors in the foreign trade of the United States. They are also the seat of political developments, resulting from the political awakening of Asia, which are worth attention.From west to east, these islands extend more than 3,000 miles, or as far as from San Francisco to the longitude of the eastern end of Maine; and from north to south, more than 1,000 miles.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Lance Taylor

A “global saving glut” was invented by Ben Bernanke in 2005 as a label for positive net lending (imports exceeding exports) to the American economy by the rest of the world. This trading situation had already emerged around 1980, and led to the Plaza Accord in 1985. One common explanation is based on the Mundell-Fleming IS/LM/BP model. But this model cannot be valid, since the “BP” equation is not independent of “IS.” Other champions of this saving glut hypothesis rely on loanable funds theory, which is institutionally inadequate. More plausible analyses of the persistent trade imbalance can be derived from a two-country IS/LM set-up devised by Wynne Godley, a Kaleckian description of the political economy of East Asia and the United States, and dissection of the terms of trade due to W. Arthur Lewis and Luigi Pasinetti.


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