Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
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Books: Research
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Article VI of the NPT obliges all parties to the treaty to pursue negotiations toward arms control and eventual disarmament. A number of gaps in our understanding of Article VI exist, however, and these impede efforts to revive negotiations today.
Under international law, an obligation to negotiate is an obligation of best efforts, not an obligation of result. It is therefore an enduring puzzle why the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its 1996 advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, said that Article VI obliges disarmament as a result. The ICJ read too much into Article VI. Realists, by contrast, deprecate Article VI: they describe it as hortatory—the expression of a wish, not the stipulation of a duty.
To negotiate in good faith, a party must do more than go through the motions. The party must come prepared to make, and to entertain, fresh proposals. Moreover, the party must observe an essentially negative obligation: it must not seek to impose a fait accompli in respect of the subject matter of the negotiations; and it must not aggravate the problem that it has committed to negotiate to resolve.
Policy makers across the political spectrum in the US and allied countries recognize that China’s nuclear weapons buildup is a challenge to the strategic balance that had prevailed for decades among nuclear-weapon states. However, consensus is lacking as to what to do about it. One element of our response should be to negotiate toward arms control, as Article VI of the NPT requires.
It takes more than one party to hold a negotiation. China has refused to take part in a nuclear arms control negotiation. China maintains that only when China is at nuclear weapons parity with the US and Russia will it be appropriate for China to negotiate. But NPT Article VI does not stipulate parity as a precondition for the pursuit of negotiations.
An NPT party violates Article VI that refuses to negotiate. An NPT party that instigates an arms race and seeks to impose a strategic fait accompli also violates Article VI. The US, its allies, and like-minded countries should call attention to the inconsistency of China’s conduct, including its nuclear weapons buildup, with Article VI.
Armed aggression, geopolitical rivalry, and an impasse in nuclear arms control are realities of today’s international environment. The Nuclear Ban Treaty, the TPNW, attracts support in many quarters, but it does not address the realities. Lacking a good faith effort toward arms control, the pressure will grow on countries with democratic systems of government to pursue alternatives such as the TPNW. An insight of an earlier generation of strategists was that nuclear arms control, in the world as it exists, requires negotiation. In the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, realists fashioned a negotiated approach to seek verifiable limits on nuclear arms, and, by so doing, they ensured that nuclear-weapon states would preserve the opportunity to achieve progress toward the eventual disarmament that was, and remains, a shared goal. It is timely to consider how to renew the negotiated approach. Engagement with the NPT among policy makers in the US and allied countries appears to be at a low ebb, but important voices continue to champion this cornerstone treaty. The preceding chapters offer an argument for realists in particular to return to arms control.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the NPT, has supplied the cornerstone for nuclear arms control ever since countries adopted it over half a century ago. This open multilateral treaty no longer stands alone, however. In 2021, a new treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW, entered into force. As its title suggests, the TPNW bans nuclear weapons outright for any country that becomes a party. The weapons ban in the TPNW reflects a radically different approach to arms control from the negotiated approach in the NPT. Unlike the NPT, the TPNW demands any country holding nuclear weapons that becomes a party eliminate these almost immediately and provides no means to navigate the strategic challenges that such disarmament would present. Unsurprisingly, no country that holds nuclear weapons has signed the TPNW—again, a contrast to the NPT, which embraces the five main nuclear-weapon states. The chapters that follow argue that the nuclear-weapon states, in an age of resurgent great power rivalry, need to return to negotiations under the NPT if they are to sustain a realistic chance for nuclear arms control.
In this book, a former US Department of State senior arms control official critically analyses two pivotal nuclear arms control treaties: the established Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the rising Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
The book offers a concise and critical analysis of the two, illuminating both their strengths and shortcomings. The author acknowledges the idealistic goal of the TPNW but argues that its immediate abolitionist stance lacks a roadmap for achievement. Instead, the book advocates realistic progress within the NPT framework. It provides twelve key negotiation topics for fostering meaningful dialogue among nuclear-weapon states, while emphasizing the urgency of concrete action in a world facing growing nuclear threats.
Reading the NPT as three interdependent promises—non-proliferation, peaceful use of nuclear energy, and the pursuit of negotiations toward disarmament—states and commentators have come to see the slow progress toward disarmament as a green light to relax the obligation to refrain from proliferating nuclear weapons. The ‘three pillars’ reading of the NPT has especially eroded observance by non-nuclear-weapon states of their obligation under the treaty’s Article III, the provision requiring them to submit their nuclear activities to safeguards in agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). A legal theory of continuous bargaining over peaceful use of nuclear energy and safeguards threatens to obscure non-proliferation, the NPT’s one foundation. Meanwhile, the TPNW gains support among politicians and the citizenry at large in countries with democratic governments and open societies. These developments place the NPT at risk and imperil the realistic approach to arms control that the NPT embodies.
The Nuclear Ban Treaty, the TPNW, unlike the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, declares an immediate prohibition of nuclear weapons and applies the prohibition to all its parties. However, the TPNW supplies no pathway to achieve nuclear disarmament: it starts with the desideratum of a nuclear-weapon-free world and proceeds as if restating this as a legal obligation will make disarmament a reality. The challenge is not to agree the goal but, instead, to find a mechanism to achieve arms control and eventual disarmament among nuclear-armed states that are geopolitical rivals. The TPNW, failing to provide for negotiated arms control, fails to provide the mechanism.
Advocates of the TPNW assert that the new treaty complements the NPT. They are unconvincing. The TPNW is already displacing the NPT from disarmament discourse. If the TPNW pushes the NPT entirely out of the picture, then we will have lost our only broad-based framework for nuclear arms control.
To have any chance of getting China to the negotiating table for nuclear arms control, the US must be prepared to negotiate meaningful questions. Possible negotiation topics emerge from concrete questions that bedevil US–China relations in respect of nuclear weapons. Among the topics in particular that merit deliberation and possible further exploration are transparency, confidence-building, hotlines, plutonium production and fuel-cycle accountability, limits on tritium production, safeguards for fast reactors, nuclear testing and the problem of definitions in the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, nuclear safety, export controls, institutionalizing the NPT, the relationship between conventional and nuclear deterrence, and security relations in northeast Asia. These topics are possible starting points; by no means a ready mandate to start negotiations. If we are to save the NPT as cornerstone of nuclear arms control, however, then we must identify substantive topics such as these on which the US and China might enter into negotiations to address.
This chapter summarises the contributions made by this book, with particular attention to the roles and limits of parents’ [often ephemeral] agency in relation to algorithms. The chapter outlines a set of recommendations for sectors interfacing with parents, including state sectors, educational and childcare settings, local government, technology companies and the media. The chapter draws out the importance of adopting a relational, and life-course perspective to making sense of families’ experiences of datafication and emerging technologies.
This chapter considers how parents experience algorithmic curation, in its diverse forms, across social media platforms, and how the world of parenthood is filtered for parents in ways which are inherently recursive. While architectures and logics of personalisation diverge across platforms, and amidst broader conversations on sharenting, the chapter notes how parents in this work often presented a deeply individualised understanding of algorithmic environments, where they imagined themselves almost as sole players in the system, not often recognising the aggregate environment of curation. Examples in the chapter demonstrate that parents’ agentic feedback into social media platforms is not free of context such as gendered care roles, and algorithmic filtering itself produces and maintains invitations to care, and parent, along socially structured routes already set in motion. The chapter draws attention to the notion of presences and absences of parenting content and the clustering of certain parenting content on some timelines and news feeds and what that might reveal. The chapter also discusses practices of care that some parents speak of, in managing their own feedback into algorithmic environment, in ways that care for other parents.
