scholarly journals Solving the nuclear dilemma: Is a world state necessary?

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Campbell Craig
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
World State ◽  
Nuclear Problem ◽  
Interstate System ◽  
Nuclear Warfare ◽  
Power Balancing

The unique dangers raised by the possibility of nuclear warfare have long prompted intensive debates about what political action is needed to avoid it. While most scholars contend that it is possible to prevent a nuclear war without fundamental political change, others argue that a substantial solution to the problem demands the abolition of the existing interstate system. Two such ‘radical’ positions are the ‘Weberian’ school, which insists that an authoritative world state is necessary, and Daniel Deudney’s alternative, a liberal order based upon republican traditions of mutual restraint, internal power balancing and powerful arms control institutions. In this essay, I argue, using both historical and theoretical analysis, that the regime Deudney envisions would amount to the establishment of a Pax Americana. This would be rejected by illiberal nuclear powers and therefore fail to solve the nuclear problem.

A Bifurcated Global Nuclear Order

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramesh Thakur
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The World ◽  
The United Nations

The very destructiveness of nuclear weapons makes them unusable for ethical and military reasons. The world has placed growing restrictions on the full range of nuclear programs and activities. But with the five NPT nuclear powers failing to eliminate nuclear arsenals, other countries acquiring the bomb, arms control efforts stalled, nuclear risks climbing, and growing awareness of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, the United Nations adopted a new treaty to ban the bomb. Some technical anomalies between the 1968 and 2017 treaties will need to be harmonized and the nuclear-armed states’ rejection of the ban treaty means it will not eliminate any nuclear warheads. However, it will have a significant normative impact in stigmatizing the possession, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons and serve as a tool for civil society to mobilize domestic and world public opinion against the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

scholarly journals Why Arms Control?

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-115
Author(s):  
Jon Brook Wolfsthal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

America survived the nuclear age through a complex combination of diplomatic and military decisions, and a good deal of luck. One of the tools that proved its value in both reducing the risks of nuclear use and setting rules for the ongoing nuclear competition were negotiated, legally binding, and verified arms control agreements. Such pacts between the United States and the Soviet Union arguably prevented the nuclear arms racing from getting worse and helped both sides climb off the Cold War nuclear precipice. Several important agreements remain in place between the United States and Russia, to the benefit of both states. Arms control is under threat, however, from domestic forces in the United States and from Russian actions that range from treaty violations to the broader weaponization of risk. But arms control can and should play a useful role in reducing the risk of nuclear war and forging a new agreement between Moscow and Washington on the new rules of the nuclear road.

Self-Undermining Rhetoric in the Past and Present

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Seth Levine
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Economic Insecurity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Broad Concept ◽  
The Face

This chapter considers the prospects for political change in the face of communicative barriers to collective action. It begins to address this question by identifying several of the most well-known historical and recent moments in which there was large-scale mobilization on some economic insecurity issues. This discussion, in concert with the empirical findings in this book, helps clarify the prospects for political action (and policy change) on these issues. The chapter then uses the findings from the book to identify three types of people that are most likely to become active. It also talks about the implications of having this (narrower) set of people active as opposed to the full range of people that find the issues to be important. It concludes by reiterating how self-undermining rhetoric is a broad concept that can apply in many different situations beyond those considered herein.

Tsuen Wan’s New Face

2019 ◽  
pp. 155-172
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Lominska Johnson ◽  
Graham E. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Standard Questionnaire ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Political Access ◽  
Post War ◽  
Two Populations

Some 91 leaders, both original inhabitants and immigrants, were interviewed using a standard questionnaire over a period of nine months in 1969. There were clear differences between village-based leaders and those representing immigrant groups. The gulf between the two kinds of leaders resulted from a colonial policy of granting political access to village representatives and their Rural Committee, which continued in a context that was industrial and much changed from the immediate post-war world when the system of access to government had been created. The gulf between the two populations suggested a need for political change. The ability to mobilize both groups and cooperate for political action was marked by a dispute and its resolution when changes were made to ferry schedules from Hong Kong to Tsuen Wan.

Postscript

2021 ◽  
pp. 273-284
Author(s):  
Sharath Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Political Experience

The book’s Postscript considers the monumental events in Sudan in 2019, from the deposing of President al-Bashir under the pressure of a popular uprising to citizen demands for civilian rule, from the vantage point of the arguments of this book. The Postscript allows for the Arendtian approach to politics, which anchors the peacemaking critique in this book, to explore a more generative terrain. The chapter observes that political action by citizens ‘in concert’, as Arendt would say, was manifest in the neighborhood popular resistance committees, sit-ins and marches that sought to reclaim politics as of and for the Sudanese in their plurality. The Postscript argues that, in navigating the treacherous waters of revolutionary political change, it is sustained and multitudinous civil political action that might be the ultimate guarantor of Sudan’s revolution. This counterfactual from Sudan’s own political experience is a lodestar that both illuminates and grounds the book’s arguments on the tragic shortcomings of means-end peacemaking.

The Great Debate

2018 ◽  
pp. 333-349
Author(s):  
Daniel Deudney
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
State System ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
World State ◽  
Great Debate ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Question

In the wake of the development of nuclear weapons, the survival of civilization, and perhaps humanity, hinges on answering the “nuclear political question”: Which political arrangements are needed to provide security from large-scale nuclear violence? Over the course of the nuclear era, a great debate on this question has occurred in three quite different rounds. In the first round, “nuclear one world” ideas about the obsolescence of the state-system and necessity of a world state predominated, but reached both conceptual and practical impasses. In the second round, across much of the Cold War, a trinity of deterrence-centered approaches, simple deterrence, war strategism, and arms control, prevailed. In the currently unfolding third round, proliferation and leakage have weakened confidence in nuclear deterrence, while both war strategism and arms control have become more radical, offering opposite “bombs away” answers of coercive counter-proliferation and preventive war, and deep arms control and nuclear abolition.

Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s

1985 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Seed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Radicalism

Conventional wisdom has long maintained that eighteenth-century religious dissent was a significant source of opposition to the Hanoverian status quo. For Trevelyan, for instance, dissenters were ‘vigilant champions of liberty and critics of government’. The high political visibility of rational dissenters in oppositional movements in the 1770s and 1780s – in opposition to the American war, the Test and Corporation Acts, slavery and the slave trade, the existing electoral system – has been particularly noted. However in recent years the political significance of religious dissent has been questioned. Roy Porter warns that the zeal for reform among dissenters should not be overestimated: ‘Not till the 1780s, and then only amongst a hothead minority, did Nonconformity show a potential for political radicalism.’ John Brewer has argued that the dissenting group associated with Hollis, Price, Priestley and ‘the small, snug, dissenting coterie of Newington Green’ marks one tradition of political opposition in the eighteenth century. But, largely confined to intellectual critique, remarkably uninvolved in the day-to-day cut-and-thrust of political action even evincing a patrician alarm at popular direct action, its contribution to political change was far less significant than the Wilkite movement.

Conflicting Conceptions of Deterrence

1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Shue
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Noncombatant Immunity ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Public Money ◽  
Nuclear Warfare ◽  
Time Away

The Baptism of the BombHere is a two-step plan to rescue nuclear war from immorality. First, the United States should build the most moral offensive nuclear weapons that money can buy and bring nuclear warfare into compliance with the principle of noncombatant immunity. Then it should build a defensive “shield” that will make offensive nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” and take the world “beyond deterrence.” In this second stage, called the “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI) by believers and “Star Wars” by doubters, antimissile technology will confront missile technology like a Hegelian antithesis confronting its thesis, and we will all be lifted up out of the age of nuclear war into a realm made safe for conventional war.1 Even according to believers in the SDI, however, intermediate deployment, not to mention full deployment, of a strategic defense is some time away, pending breakthroughs on technological problems at which public money is now being thrown.

Imagining Nuclear War in the British Army, 1945-1989

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon J. Moody
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
British Army ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Will ◽  
Nuclear Warfare ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Primary Mission ◽  
Comprehensive Study

The primary mission assigned to the British Army from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War was deterring Soviet aggression in Europe by demonstrating the will and capability to fight with nuclear weapons in defence of NATO territory. This ‘surreal’ mission was unlike any other in history, and raised a number of conceptual and practical difficulties. This book provides the first comprehensive study on how the British Army imagined the character of a future nuclear land warfare, and how it planned to fight it. Based on new archival evidence, the book analyses British thinking about the political and military utility of tactical nuclear weapons, the role of land forces within NATO strategy, the development of theories of tactical nuclear warfare, how nuclear war was taught at the Staff College, the Army’s use of operational research, and the evolution of the Army’s nuclear war-fighting doctrine. The book argues that the British Army was largely successful in adapting to its new nuclear mission in Germany, but that it displayed a cognitive dissonance when faced with some of the more uncomfortable realities of nuclear war.

scholarly journals Life beyond Arms Control: Moving toward a Global Regime of Nuclear Restraint & Responsibility

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-221
Author(s):  
Nina Tannenwald
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
International Community ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Global Regime ◽  
And Control

Today, we are on the verge of a world without nuclear restraint. In the absence of formal arms control, how do we proceed? What broad principles and norms would we want? What measures might nuclear-armed states take, even without formal agreement, that would reduce the risk of nuclear war and control the arms race? I suggest that nuclear-armed states move toward a global regime of nuclear restraint and responsibility. Restraint would primarily take the form of reciprocal commitments and unilateral measures to avoid an arms race and reduce nuclear dangers. Responsibility refers to the fact that nuclear-armed states must pursue limited forms of deterrence and are accountable to the international community. I suggest several steps that governments, with the help of civil society, could take, beginning with the most minimal, declaratory initiatives and unilateral measures, and proceeding to steps that require more action.

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