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This chapter discusses the origins of the nuclear Nnon-proliferation regime. The NPT was opened for signature on July 1, 1968 at Washington, London, and Moscow. It was signed that first day by the three depository governments and by more than fifty other states. The treaty entered into force on March 5, 1970. In 2007, the membership of the NPT stands at 187 states, and the treaty continues to serve as the cornerstone legal instrument of the nuclear non-proliferation system. Articles I, II, III, and VI of the NPT are discussed.

This chapter examines the nuclear policy and interpretations of the NPT by nuclear weapons states (NWS) during the target decade of this study. It offers as primary evidence a review of the statements made by states parties to the various formal meetings held under the banner of the NPT — i.e., the NPT Review Conferences (or ‘RevCons’) which occur once every five years, and the NPT Preparatory Committee meetings (or ‘PrepComs’), which typically occur for three consecutive years preceding a Review Conference. These statements provide solid source material for analysis and evaluation of trends in states' policies toward the NPT, and legal interpretations of the NPT, as they are single subject documents (i.e., on the subject of the NPT) and are given on a recurring basis by the same governments.

Having reviewed nuclear policies of nuclear weapons states (NWS) and legal interpretations of the NPT during the target decade of this study, this chapter provides a legal analysis of these interpretations and the policies which have been justified by reference thereto. It undertakes this analysis by reference to the guiding principles of interpretation of the NPT, produced through the consideration in Chapter 2 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties rules of treaty interpretation, and in particular the concepts of context and object and purpose. It is argued that many of the interpretations of the NPT by NWS during the target decade were legally incorrect by reference to these guiding principles of interpretation. Essentially, these are cases of NWS officials failing to interpret the provisions of the NPT in their context and in the light of the treaty's object and purpose. These misinterpretations have in turn formed the legal basis for policies and actions which have prejudiced the legitimate legal interests of NNWS pursuant to the NPT's grand bargain.

After more than three years of diplomatic negotiations, India and the United States signed a nuclear pact in October 2008. The agreement, which allows civilian nuclear trade between the two countries, symbolized a turning point in US-India relations after a disagreement on the latter's nuclear weapons programme. This book examines the factors involved in the US-India nuclear agreement, focusing on actors, influences, and processes in international politics. It employs a Levels of Analysis approach to analyse issues and events in international relations at the international, state, and individual levels. It also discusses the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the debate in India over the liability bill, and President Barack Obama's priorities regarding non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Both India and the United States encountered stiff resistance to their civilian nuclear energy cooperation agreement. For President George W. Bush, the challenge was to reconcile conflicting viewpoints and convincing the nation's various constituencies that the nuclear pact was in America's interest. Most of the negative reactions against the deal had to do with its potential impact on other states with plans of pursuing nuclear weapons. Some members of Congress were initially hostile to the agreement. The pact also drew criticism from non-proliferation advocates because of India's rejection of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This chapter examines how President George W. Bush dealt with the critics of his administration's nuclear agreement with India.

This introductory chapter analyzes how the legal framework intended to ensure nonproliferation—the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), adopted in 1970—is failing to contain the evolution and exponential growth of nuclear risk. It explains why the Grand Bargain of the NPT is not succeeding as conceived, and why counterproliferation will continue to fall short in achieving nuclear security unless reinforced and eventually supplanted by a different legal and institutional framework. The task of creating a new legal and institutional framework requires, first, understanding why the current legal and institutional infrastructure is failing, and how contemporary nuclear risk defies containment. This in turn requires examination of nuclear risk in greater detail, to understand its components and its dynamics, at every principal stage, from source to detonation, to identify where in the process we can work a new regime to construct security.

This chapter discusses Anglo-German relations in the context of the negotiations leading to the agreement reached between the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain, and ultimately by Germany, on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The negotiations were complex, in that they spilled over into other issues of concern to members of the Atlantic Alliance. Principally, these included the MLF/ANF project and whether moves within the Alliance to create opportunities for greater nuclear weapons sharing would prove acceptable to the Soviet Union. Multilateral negotiations were influenced by the changes of government in Bonn in 1966 and 1969, and the Soviet-inspired invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They also occurred at a time when the British government was anxious to strengthen relations with Germany in support for Britain's commitment to Europe.

This chapter discusses the political aspects of European security. It focuses on the implications of different interests of Alliance partners for efforts to achieve détente and arms control regimes. It shows how West German policy adapted internationally. The chapter also discusses the ‘Gaullist’ and ‘Atlanticist’ tendencies in West German politics and discusses the consequences of the termination of the ‘Gaullist’ alternative. This chapter also focuses on the efforts of the British in achieving a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the expense of its relation with the Federal Republic.

This chapter begins with a brief review of the principal materials and technologies which are the subject of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). It then presents an account of the pre-NPT history of efforts to regulate these technologies through the sources of international law and international institutions. It argues that the diplomatic history of the NPT, when taken as a whole, establishes clearly that the NPT is not fundamentally about regulating nuclear weapons proliferation, as it is often summarily described to be. It is in fact fundamentally about regulating nuclear energy in its full dual-use nature and range of applications. Again, taken as a whole, this diplomatic history makes clear that the NPT is underpinned by three inherently linked, and presumptively equal, principled pillars — peaceful use of nuclear energy, non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and disarmament of nuclear weapons stockpiles — and not only one.

The history of the attitude of the United States towards the spread of nuclear weapons has been one of continuous opposition, tempered now and then by the judgement of the government of the day as to whether in particular instances the exigencies of the moment outweighed the force of the general principle. The starting point or the rough first draft for the U.S. policy of hostility towards the spread of nuclear weapons is the Baruch Plan, presented in 1946 to the newly created United Nations Atomic Energy Commission by the U.S. representative on the Commission, Bernard M. Baruch. The Baruch Plan aimed to harmonise an anticipated widespread international interest in the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. President Dwight D. Eisenhower adopted a new anti-proliferation initiative at the end of 1953 in the form of Atoms for Peace. This chapter discusses U.S. policy on non-proliferation and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the Partial Test Ban Treaty, counter-proliferation and U.S. President George W. Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative.

In this chapter, I unpack how India negotiates the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, recounting the transnational pressures pushing toward test ban negotiations and why those developments served India’s interests having pulled for such an agreement for decades. This legacy of disarmament diplomacy strongly influenced the approach adopted by the overseeing institution Ministry of External Affairs at CTBT negotiations where Indian diplomats strove to negotiate an agreement that placed uniform constraints vis-à-vis nuclear tests on both nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states. And finally, I distil how domestic interest groups, namely security and nuclear experts, shaped public debates concerning the CTBT which, in turn, gave MEA officials more space to determine whether to ratify or reject the treaty once it became clear that India’s strategy would not have produced the agreement they desired.

The 1953 U.S. Atoms for Peace initiative launched the dissemination of nuclear technologies to non-weapon states. It also led to the establishment in 1957 of the International Atomic Energy Agency and to the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970. The spread of nuclear power programs also has led to the spread of sensitive enrichment and reprocessing technologies which has given some non-weapon states the means of producing fissile material and thereby a “latent” proliferation capability, where a state could quickly produce nuclear weapons should it decide to do so. Even a small nuclear power program can provide a nuclear weapon breakout potential. The proliferation dangers associated with today’s dominant nuclear fuel cycle come from the fact that the uranium enrichment plants that produce low-enriched uranium for fuel could be rapidly converted to produce highly enriched uranium for weapons and that some countries reprocess spent fuel to recover plutonium, a weapons material, to recycle as fuel.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the book. This book is a thesis driven text which applies the rules of treaty interpretation in international law to produce a so-called ‘holistic interpretation’ of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). The unifying thesis of this book is that the original balance of principles underlying the NPT, which can be distilled through an application of the principles of treaty interpretation contained in Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, has for over a decade been distorted particularly by nuclear-weapon-possessing governments, led by the United States, in favour of a disproportionate prioritization of non-proliferation principles, and an unwarranted under-prioritization of peaceful use and disarmament principles. It is argued that this distortion of principled balance by nuclear-weapon states has resulted in a number of erroneous legal interpretations of the NPT's provisions.

The field of nuclear non-proliferation is in ferment. The existing regime is under considerable stress, facing challenges it was not designed for, like the threat of nuclear terrorism. The ferment is manifest in tension between traditional approaches to non-proliferation and various ad hoc initiatives that are less universal and depend less on international institutions. This chapter considers three sets of issues that have arisen in the context of the recent ferment: interpretive disputes over key provisions in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); weapons inspections and military action against Iraq, based on Security Council resolutions; and the interdiction of ships suspected of carrying WMD or related material to and from North Korea. The United Nations Security Council has been a central player in all three areas but not a sole practitioner. It is argued that both the management and enforcement of the regime is affected by a diffuse discursive process among a network of actors and institutions struggling to preserve the integrity of a regime that is in jeopardy. While legal considerations may seem tangential in the politics of non-proliferation, the legal discourse has had a significant impact on how the politics play out.

This chapter considers the patterns of change and continuity in the policies and actions of NPT by nuclear weapons states (NWS) since the end of the study's target era in 2008. As this book publishes in the summer of 2010, this latter period constitutes only approximately eighteen months, which in other areas of international legal inquiry might not constitute a sufficiently long duration of time to justify an entire final chapter. However, the past eighteen months have witnessed such significant developments in international law and politics regarding nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, that to not include a review of this relatively short yet eventful period in this study's consideration would leave the study incomplete and untimely. The changes that have occurred in the direction of NWS nuclear policies and approaches toward the NPT since the end of 2008 can be traced primarily to the change in government administration in the United States from the Presidency of George W. Bush to the Presidency of Barack Obama. President Obama has not only changed U.S. policy in significant ways, but has also provided a leadership role, looked to by other NWS, for facilitation of changes to the nuclear policies of other NWS as well.

Nuclear energy has peaceful applications and non-peaceful applications. The centrepiece of all political efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons lies in attempting to harmonise the proliferation of nuclear reactors with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. What all nuclear reactors have in common is nuclear fuel, which must contain at least some uranium in the form of the isotope uranium-235 (or very much more rarely 233), or plutonium, or both. This is usually described as ‘fissile material’. This chapter is about nuclear technology and the technical interconnections between commercial and military nuclear programmes. It also discusses the spread of nuclear technology and the use to which it has been put by a number of states, both inside and outside the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to bring them close to or even take them over the nuclear weapons threshold. Moreover, the chapter provides an overview on critical mass and nuclear bombs, the differences between the United States and its natural allies over nuclear proliferation, radioactive waste and nuclear accidents and uranium enrichment.

In 2000, almost every state in the world (all except Cuba, India, Israel and Pakistan) publicly subscribed once again to the principle that the spread of nuclear weapons to states not already possessing them is dangerous to international security and that it should therefore be energetically discouraged. The occasion was the latest review conference of the 30-year-old Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the chief international instrument for restricting nuclear proliferation, and for reversing such proliferation as has occurred, if its Article 6 is taken seriously. But the correctness of this principle is not self-evident. An important intellectual challenge comes from Kenneth Waltz, writing most recently in 2003. The basis of his challenge is a generalisation of what he regards as a significant lesson of the Cold War years. This chapter deals with nuclear weapons and international security, starting with Barry Buzan's concept of a ‘security complex’. It concludes by looking at two broad approaches to securing the mutually beneficial outcome of non-proliferation: the centralised approach and the decentralised approach.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons opened for signature on July 1, 1968, culminating a decade of multilateral efforts to regulate nuclear technology. Negotiations succeeded thanks to a global cadre of diplomats who brokered the treaty despite East-West tensions and North-South distrust. New institutions and internationalist principles led U.S. diplomats to surmount long-standing Cold War barriers, opening a window of opportunity to work with Soviet officials. As former enemies found common ground, their representatives outlined a zone of possible agreement that met the concerns of all but a handful of states from the Industrial North and the Global South. Superpower collaboration and Latin American leadership in Geneva and New York allowed the international community then emerging from decolonization to strike a bargain, which endowed a new global nuclear regime with the rules, norms, and institutions needed to manage the Janus-faced atom.

Chapter abstract: Spanning the decline of the US-Iran partnership after Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, this chapter focuses on the failure of negotiations between the shah and the Ford administration from 1974 to 1976 on American nuclear exports to Iran. The shah did not enjoy the same intimate relationship with President Gerald R. Ford as he had with Nixon. Although Kissinger worked hard to defend the US-Iran partnership and secure a nuclear agreement, the shah’s detractors were no longer sidelined, as they had been under Nixon. Ford sought to appease these critics by foisting a nuclear agreement on the shah that included safeguards that went beyond Iran’s commitments under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The shah rejected Ford’s demands, seeing them as a violation of Iran’s sovereignty and a reversion by the United States to treating Iran as a client, rather than a partner of the United States.