# The Struggle for Abolition. Power and Legitimacy in Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Diplomacy

Kjølv Egeland

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Kjølv Egeland. The Struggle for Abolition. Power and Legitimacy in Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Diplomacy. Routledge, 222 p., 2025, 9781032596334. 10.4324/9781003456841. hal-05058943

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THE STRUGGLE FOR ABOLITION

POWER AND LEGITIMACY IN MULTILATERAL
NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT DIPLOMACY

Kjølv Egeland

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a

ROUTLEDGE

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# The Struggle for Abolition

Can the genie be returned to the bottle? This book investigates the pursuit by states, civil society groups, and international organisations of nuclear abolition. Detailing the evolution of the institutional architecture for multilateral nuclear disarmament from the 1960s onwards, this book tells a story of high hopes, broken promises, and clashing views of history, security, and the future.

Global nuclear politics deals in material power and security but is also shot through with contests over prestige, justice, and mutual recognition. Waves of innovation in multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy have typically come about on the back of crises of legitimacy within the broader nuclear order.

The book concludes with a discussion of policy implications and a reflection on successes and failures in the history of multilateral nuclear disarmament. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of diplomacy, history, and politics and international relations.

**Kjølv Egeland** is a postdoctoral fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges Programme at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris. Completing his doctorate in International Relations at the University of Oxford in 2018, his research interests centre on international security, ideology, and multilateral diplomacy. Egeland's work on nuclear arms control and disarmament has appeared in a range of leading social science journals. His article 'A Theory of Nuclear Disarmament' was awarded the Bernard Brodie Prize in 2022.
‘Kjølv Egeland renders us a valuable service in giving us this painstakingly accurate account of the long efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. They have been sadly frustrated and the weapons have retained their strategic importance. Yet, the broad resistance to them, including the Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons, has undoubtedly caused them to be delegitimized. Even the G 20 group of states meeting in New Delhi in September 2023 with China, the United States, and Russia participating acknowledged that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible”.’

Hans Blix, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Foreign Minister of Sweden

‘Egeland has written an essential book on nuclear disarmament and nuclear order.

The Struggle for Abolition combines extensive primary research with thoughtful analysis of questions of legitimacy, order, and recognition to provide a new understanding of the international disarmament framework and the potential for nuclear abolition.’

Laura Considine, Associate Professor of International Politics and Director of the Centre for Global Security Challenges, University of Leeds, UK

‘Within a novel and illuminating conceptual framework, the author uses elements of recognition theory and identity to show how the prevailing nuclear hierarchy has threatened non-nuclear states’ identities as sovereign equals, rejecting them as partners in the nuclear ordering process. Unsurprisingly, and in a world where all states are vulnerable to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, the non-nuclear states’ most recent action has been the creation of a new treaty, the TPNW, to transcend and move beyond the inequities of the NPT.

Egeland’s book sheds a revealing light on the history of the long struggle against a dominant nuclear order that threatens planetary security. It is vital reading for anyone interested in peace and disarmament, and the role of small and middle-sized states in resisting entrenched but inequitable narratives and practices.’

Marianne Hanson, Associate Professor and Director of the Rotary Centre for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution, University of Queensland, Australia

‘US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once offered a dire prospect for humankind: “If, then, man is to have a future at all, it will have to be a future overshadowed with the permanent possibility of thermonuclear holocaust. About that fact, we are no longer free.” This book smartly traces the history and politics of the more than 50-year struggle through international diplomacy to break free from this future. It shows how nuclear diplomacy has sometimes mattered, critically illuminating the roles of institutional legitimacy, rules and
roles, and the recognition of others, in the fitful evolution of the current global
nuclear order from the 1960s effort to stop the spread of the bomb to the new
treaty banning nuclear weapons. The focus here is showing why the handful
of powerful nuclear-armed states do not always get their way, bringing into
sharp relief the importance of diplomatic contestation, confrontation, and
crisis, in driving occasional but seemingly inevitable reforms in the nuclear
order. It offers insightful and compelling scholarship on the need to shift
attention to the very nature of the nuclear order as the source of the problem
rather than one or other nuclear-armed state.'

Zia Mian, Senior Research Scholar and Co-Director, Program on
Science and Global Security (SGS), Princeton University, USA
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Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis Group

http://taylorandfrancis.com
# The Struggle for Abolition
Power and Legitimacy in Multilateral
Nuclear Disarmament Diplomacy

Kjølv Egeland

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Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2025

by Routledge

4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

*Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business*

© 2025 Kjølv Egeland

The right of Kjølv Egeland to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

*Trademark notice:* Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

*British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data*

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-59633-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-59925-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-45684-1 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003456841

Typeset in Sabon

by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 759707)

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Funded by
the European Union

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European Research Council
Established by the European Commission
# Contents

<table><tr><td><i>Acknowledgements</i></td><td><i>viii</i></td></tr><tr><td><i>Abbreviations and Acronyms</i></td><td><i>ix</i></td></tr></table>

Introduction: Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and International Order

1

1 Nuclear Order and the Struggle for Recognition 10

2 Democratisation and Discord, 1969–1978 31

3 Renewing the Bargain, 1979–2000 69

4 The Road to Prohibition, 2001–2021 123

Findings and Implications 184

Index 201
Acknowledgements

This book is the product of a decade of research. My engagement with the
nuclear question began at the University of Oslo in 2013, continued with my
doctoral studies at the University of Oxford between 2014 and 2018, and
evolved further at Sciences Po over the subsequent few years. I am deeply
indebted to professors Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Benoît Pelopidas for their
mentorship and repeated rounds of feedback. I am also grateful to the anony-
mous reviewers and members of my thesis committee – Andrew Hurrell, Jan
Ruzicka, Neil MacFarlane, Lucas Kello, and Edward Keene – who offered
constructive suggestions at various stages. My work on the manuscript and
broader topic has also benefitted greatly from engagement with numerous
friends and colleagues, including Nick Ritchie, Thomas Fraise, Hebatalla
Taha, Clément Therme, Sanne Verschuren, Roxana Vermel, Austin Cooper,
John Krige, Gro Nystuen, Torbjørn Graff Hugo, Cecilie Hellestveit, Steffen
Kongstad, Magnus Løvold, Lyndon Burford, Erik Skare, Todd Hall, Rodrigo
Moraes, James Shires, Josie Lianna Kaye, Bent Natvig, and Sverre Lodgaard.
I have received financial and institutional support from the Norway
Scholarship to the University of Oxford, the Cyril Foster Fund, Wadham
College, the Nuclear Knowledges Programme at the Center for International
Studies at Sciences Po, and the European Research Council under grant
agreement 759707 (NUCLEAR). Finally, the book would not have existed
without the support of Marianne Egeland, Jon Haarberg, and Mari Reisjå.
Abbreviations and Acronyms

**ABM** Anti-Ballistic Missile

**CARICOM** Caribbean Community

**CD** Conference on Disarmament

**CCD** Conference of the Committee on Disarmament

**CELAC** Community of Latin American and Caribbean States

**NGO** Non-governmental organisation

**CTBT** Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty

**ENDC** Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament

**G77** Group of 77 developing states

**HINW** Humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons

**IAEA** International Atomic Energy Agency

**ICAN** International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

**ICJ** International Court of Justice

**IPNDV** International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament

Verification

**IPPNW** International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

**INF** Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces

**MFA** Ministry of Foreign Affairs

**NAC** New Agenda Coalition

**NAM** Non-Aligned Movement

**NATO** North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

**NGO** Non-governmental organisation

**NIEO** New International Economic Order

**NWS** Nuclear-weapon state

**NPT** Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

**P5** Permanent five members of the UN Security Council

**PNET** Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty

**PrepCom** Preparatory Committee

**PTBT** Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty

**SALT** Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (I and II)

**START** Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (I, II, and New)

**TPNW** Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

**TTBT** Threshold Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty

**UN** United Nations
**UNGA** United Nations General Assembly

**UNSSOD** United Nations Special Session on Disarmament (I, II, and III)

**WDC** World Disarmament Conference

**WHO** World Health Organization

**WMD** Weapon of mass destruction
# Introduction

## Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and International Order

### Introduction and Argument

What ought we do about the bomb? The official answer given by effectively all the world's states is abolition. To be sure, the current nuclear-armed states are for all intents and purposes resolved to retain and renew their arsenals for the foreseeable future. Disarmament rhetoric has persistently been belied by enormous investments in warheads, missiles, bombers, and submarines. Yet, on the level of official policy, even the major nuclear powers agree that abolition should be the long-term aim. The basic case for disarmament is threefold. First, it is widely acknowledged that the combination of nuclear armament and an international system composed of sovereign states portends eventual disaster. At some point, be it tomorrow, next year, or 200 years from now, deterrence will fail catastrophically. As put by the author Martin Amis, 'the trouble with deterrence is that it can't last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun'.¹ Second, nuclear weapons are of a nature to cause superfluous injury and uncontrollable, indiscriminate effects if used. The employment of nuclear arms is thus difficult or impossible to square with prevailing principles of international law and morality. And, third, abolition is widely seen as the only politically defensible long-term solution to the nuclear predicament. Few are prepared to say in public that nuclear weapons should be permanently available to some states but not others, and fewer still are prepared to maintain that they should be available to all. Accordingly, virtually all the world's states have committed, with varying degrees of sincerity, to pursuing multilateral nuclear disarmament. But in what way? How has the diplomatic pursuit of nuclear zero evolved over time? The history of the struggle for multilateral nuclear disarmament is a tale of frustrated hopes and broken promises, of backroom deals and creative diplomatic tricks, and of clashing visions of justice and security. It is also a story of how smaller states have sought to pressurise the powerful few – and of how the powerful few have sought to legitimate their power and privileges vis-à-vis the many small.

This book offers an effort to make sense of the history and politics of multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy from the 1968 adoption of Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to the 2021 entry into force
of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Admittedly,
nuclear disarmament has been on the international community's agenda
since the beginning of the nuclear age. In its very first resolution, adopted by
consensus in January 1946, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)
called for proposals to advance the 'elimination from national armaments of
atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruc-
tion'.² Yet it was only with the 1968 NPT that the goal of nuclear disarma-
ment was elevated to the status of binding international law. Often referred
to as the 'cornerstone' of the global nuclear order, the NPT codified a legal
distinction between 'nuclear' and 'non-nuclear' powers, obliging states in
the former category not to disseminate their weapons to others, committing
those in the latter never to acquire nuclear arms, and requiring all parties
to negotiate 'effective measures' for nuclear disarmament while simultane-
ously guaranteeing all states an enduring right to use nuclear technology
for peaceful purposes. The institutional framework for multilateral nuclear
disarmament diplomacy has since evolved and expanded considerably, with
new treaties, forums, actors, and practices being integrated into the existing
architecture. Containing a blanket prohibition on any retention of nuclear
arms, the TPNW offers the latest, and most sweeping, of these additions.

But does the multilateral nuclear disarmament architecture even work?
Does it actually serve its purpose? Despite the high and increasing volume of
diplomatic activity, global nuclear zero remains, at best, a vision. More than
half a century after the adoption of the NPT, the list of states armed with
nuclear weapons has grown and none of the states that possessed nuclear
arms at the time of the NPT's adoption have given up their arsenals. In fact,
no nuclear warhead has ever been dismantled as a direct result of multilat-
eral negotiations. Multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy has therefore
been derided as 'play-acting' and a 'charade' with little impact on the real
world.³ Some historians have gone further yet, arguing that the expansion
of the institutional architecture for multilateral nuclear disarmament has
actively harmed the disarmament agenda.⁴ A case in point is the Conference
on Disarmament in Geneva. Initially formed as a 10-member forum, the
Conference is today composed of no fewer than 65 states – each with de
facto veto powers. As of fall 2023, it has been almost three decades since the
Conference was able to move forward on a programme of work.

Against the objections outlined above, several scholars have maintained
that multilateral nuclear disarmament advocacy has contributed to the
emergence of diffuse but significant norms of nuclear restraint.⁵ It can also
be argued that multilateral nuclear disarmament initiatives have helped put
in place institutional and intellectual resources for future use. As argued by
the American economist Milton Friedman, once an existing sociopolitical
system is disrupted and radical change enabled, ‘the actions that are taken
depend on the ideas that are lying around’.⁶ Multilateral nuclear disarmament
diplomacy has also produced institutions that are highly relevant and
already in constant use by the international community. The Comprehensive
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), while not officially in force, has established a robust verification system that helps monitor and arguably deter nuclear testing worldwide. At the time of writing, only North Korea has carried out explosive nuclear testing since the turn of the last century.

On a more basic level, I maintain that advocacy for multilateral nuclear disarmament has served as a means for non-nuclear-weapon states to contest the creeping permanence of legalised nuclear inequality and, by extension, reaffirm the integrity of the norm of sovereign equality. Sovereignty is not a fact of nature, but rather ‘an ongoing accomplishment of practice’,⁷ produced, maintained, and transformed through evolving diplomatic actions.⁸ Multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy, in this perspective, may be understood as a practice of sovereignty affirmation. As I shall argue in this book, the politics of nuclear disarmament touches on both material and ontological security, meaning that relevant actors are concerned not only about their physical safety but also about their standing or identity as a certain kind of agent. It should be pointed out, however, that concerns with physical safety and identity recognition often cannot be unglued. As theorised by the German philosopher Axel Honneth, the demand to have one’s material interests minded is often inseparable from a demand for social recognition as a subject worthy of respect.⁹

This book develops five separate but related claims. First, I maintain that the expansion of the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework has occurred not through a gradual process but three bursts of activity followed by longer periods of institutional stasis (one burst playing out in the second half of the 1970s, another in the 1990s, and a third in the mid-2010s). Second, the perceived legitimacy of the NPT and wider nuclear order ebbs and flows over time. Phases of gradual delegitimation have invariably ended up fostering crises of legitimacy, which in turn have been resolved through institutional contestation and, eventually, the establishment of a new political settlement recalibrating the order. Third, phases of institutional delegitimation typically follow a pattern whereby mounting censure and disapproval are first directed towards actors deemed to be in non-compliance and later towards the institutional arrangement itself.¹⁰ Fourth, the effectiveness of counter-resistance – attempts at undercutting contestation and reform – depends on its timing in the cycle of de- and relegitimation.¹¹ If carried out during the active or ascendant phase of a period of contestation, counter-resistance typically proves counterproductive. Fifth and most fundamentally, I contend that struggles for recognition, involving conflicts over respect, equality, and special entitlements, have played a crucial role in shaping the global nuclear order’s institutions and practices. The 2017 adoption of the TPNW, I argue, marked a withdrawal of recognition of the traditional major powers as states uniquely entitled to possess nuclear weapons pending the fulfilment of the disarmament ambition enshrined in the NPT.

The remainder of this chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, I discuss the book's relevance and contribution, exploring the connections between
disarmament and non-proliferation. In the second part, I briefly outline the
study's research design and methods.

Relevance and Contribution

Why study the evolution of multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy at all? Two overarching reasons stand out. First, despite constituting a salient international practice, involving a myriad of international institutions, the politics of disarmament remains ‘under-studied and under-theorised.’¹² And in the words of Robert Keohane, ‘international institutions are worth studying because they are pervasive and important in world politics and because their operation and evolution are difficult to understand.’¹³ Second, multilateral nuclear disarmament is directly concerned with vital questions of security, planetary boundaries, and the integrity of the modern international system. Alongside the institutional frameworks governing nuclear non-proliferation and cooperation on the civilian uses of nuclear technology, multilateral nuclear disarmament plays an important role in the wider nuclear ‘regime complex’.¹⁴ This regime complex, in turn, makes up a central component of the so-called global nuclear order, which in turn forms a pivotal subsystem of the broader and often mythologised institutional edifice typically referred to as the ‘liberal’ or ‘rules-based’ international order.¹⁵

This book offers several contributions to scholarship on international institutions and nuclear politics. Empirically, the chapters that follow add to international relations literature on institution building and multilateral diplomacy by uncovering how the multilateral nuclear disarmament architecture has evolved in dialectic with legitimacy contests and power politics. Drawing on a wide range of sources to provide a detailed account of understudied historical events, the study also contributes to contemporary and Cold War history. On the theoretical plane, the book furthers the nascent literature on recognition and misrecognition in international affairs. Emerging in contemporary social theory from re-readings of Hegel’s Jena philosophy,¹⁶ recognition theory has been employed to good effect in studies of international conflict and global justice.¹⁷ Proceeding from the theoretical premise that ‘all people and groups, including nations and states, crave for recognition’,¹⁸ the present study marks a first book-length attempt at using recognition theory to understand institution building and everyday multilateral diplomacy.

One of the central concepts informing this study is legitimacy.¹⁹ Permitting a select group of five states to possess uniquely powerful weapons, the NPT has often been argued to conflict with humanitarian, environmental, and natural law principles.²⁰ A number of scholars have in recent years concluded that nuclear devastation has been avoided not just through purposive action by individuals and organisations but also by plain luck.²¹ Further, given the emphasis in contemporary international legal practice and diplomacy on the norm of equality,²² any regime that sets out different rights and obligations
for different groups of states is bound to be questioned on grounds of legiti-
macy. It may be argued on a legalistic basis that a treaty cannot undermine
the principle of sovereign equality as long as it has been consented to freely,
but in practice the NPT-centred nuclear regime complex is clearly ‘prone
to a critique that portrays it as an instrument of hegemonic power, divid-
ing the world into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots” and thus violating the
“sovereign equality” of States’.²³ Inequality is of course especially challenging
when perceived benefits go in favour of the actors that might be argued to
need them the least. In contrast, for example, to the climate change regime
negotiated in the 1990s, which prompted developed states to shoulder extra
responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,²⁴ the nuclear order
established in the 1960s has been claimed to provide for the ‘disarmament of
the disarmed’.²⁵

'Time is running out', wrote Thomas Halsted, the director of the US Arms Control Association, in 1975.²⁶ He argued that unless the nuclear-weapon states took decisive steps towards redressing the inequalities embedded in the NPT by acting more assertively on the disarmament agenda, there was a significant chance that the 1968 treaty would collapse, fostering a wave of nuclear proliferation. After all, the nuclear 'have-nots' had signed on to the norm of non-proliferation on the understanding that the 'haves' would move towards eliminating their nuclear armouries. Halsted's argument was echoed by the United Nations official and analyst William Epstein. Epstein posited that if the nuclear-weapon states did not make meaningful progress towards a world without nuclear weapons soon, the NPT's already questionable legitimacy would break down entirely and the treaty would not live to see its tenth birthday.²⁷ Distinguished scholars such as Hedley Bull, Ian Brownlie, Richard Falk, and Lincoln Bloomfield all questioned the viability of an 'inherently discriminatory global structure'.²⁸ In a 1980 classified dispatch to the president, US Special Representative for Non-Proliferation Matters, Gerry Smith, argued that the growing sense that America and other major powers had failed to honour their disarmament obligations boded badly for the 'life expectancy' of the NPT regime.²⁹ Similar predictions would be offered again and again over the subsequent years and decades.³⁰

But, as it turned out, the NPT did not collapse. How? A first and obvious reason is that the NPT serves an important security function for non-nuclear-weapon states regardless of whether disarmament is achieved.³¹ Providing a check on the nuclear ambitions of other non-nuclear powers, the NPT arguably contributes to security and stability in many regions. Further, as demonstrated by Benoît Pelopidas, the literature on nuclear proliferation suffers from a general overestimation of states’ desire to acquire nuclear arms. In his view, the mainstream ‘proliferation paradigm’ has stimulated wildly exaggerated predictions of the rate of nuclear proliferation by falsely portraying the bomb as universally desired and proliferation as an irreversible and self-begetting process.³² In reality, only a relatively small number of states have ever seriously considered acquiring nuclear arsenals.³³
In addition, I argue that multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy has offered an outlet for states dissatisfied with the nuclear status quo, venting pressure on the non-proliferation framework.³⁴ The empirical chapters that follow suggest that institutional contestation and advocacy for multilateral nuclear disarmament may indeed have provided an alternative to proliferation or overt opposition to the NPT in certain cases. In this view, multilateral disarmament advocacy and contestation have, ironically, played key roles in stabilising the prevailing nuclear order. As suggested above, however, it is also plausible that disarmament advocacy has contributed to the long-term strengthening of anti-nuclear norms, facilitating both the non-use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945 and a near disappearance of nuclear testing.³⁵

## Research Design and Methods

This book offers an analysis of the history and politics of nuclear disarmament diplomacy from the 1960s to the 2021 entry into force of the TPNW. Zeroing in on the evolution of the institutional framework for multilateral nuclear disarmament, the book identifies three consecutive cycles of institutional stasis and upheaval. The empirical analysis draws on a wide range of primary sources, including the verbatim or summary records of various diplomatic conferences; numerous resolutions, working papers, and other documents connected to diplomatic events; declassified government memos, meeting records, and correspondence; government documents obtained through freedom of information requests; the memoirs and other writings of many of the individuals involved in the events being discussed; and semi-structured interviews with practitioners. Interviews were conducted in London, Geneva, Oslo, Stockholm, and New York City, as well as over telephone. In addition, the book is informed by ethnographic research carried out at a large number of diplomatic conferences and meetings. The events and locations in question include NPT and TPNW conferences in New York (2014 and 2017); an open-ended working group on nuclear disarmament in Geneva (attending two separate sessions in 2016); a conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in Vienna (2014); and track 1.5 roundtable meetings involving diplomats, experts, and civil society representatives in the Philippines (2014), Zambia (2014), Jamaica (2014), the United Kingdom (2019), and Norway (2022 and 2023).³⁶

The remainder of the book is structured as follows. First, the conceptual framework lays out the central ideas and concepts structuring the analysis. In it, I explain the punctuated equilibrium model of institutional change, discuss recognition theory and its application to international affairs, and analyse the political settlement that enshrined nuclear disarmament as a principle of international law. Next, the three empirical chapters delve into the history of the struggle for abolition, covering the periods from the late 1960s to 1978, 1979 to 2000, and the early 2000s to 2021, respectively. The final chapter
summarises the findings, offers policy recommendations, and reflects on the politics of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

Finally, a few words on terminology. Since its establishment in 1960, the standing negotiating body for disarmament agreements currently known as the Conference on Disarmament has had several names – Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament, Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament, Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, the Committee on Disarmament, and now the Conference on Disarmament. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to it as the ‘Geneva Conference’ throughout the study. The term ‘disarmament’ is used interchangeably to refer to a field of diplomatic practice, the goal or end state of nuclear zero, and the practice of reducing weapon stocks. In each case, the meaning should be clear from the context. The term ‘multilateral’ is used to refer to a diplomatic arrangement involving four or more states. The term ‘non-aligned’ (lower case) is used to refer to all states outside the major alliance blocs – not only the members of the Non-Aligned Movement. In closing, this is not a history of nuclear weapons generally or of the disarmament effort per se. Equally, this is not an analysis of the merits or feasibility of nuclear abolition. Rather, this is a book about the evolution of the institutional and legal framework for multilateral nuclear disarmament.

## Notes

1. Martin Amis, *Einstein's monsters* (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 16–17.

2. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 1(I), ‘Establishment of a commission to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy’, London, 1946.

3. See, e.g., Jorge M. Pedraza, ‘How nuclear-weapon states parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty understand nuclear disarmament’, *Public Organization Review* 17: 2, 2017, p. 214; John Simpson, ‘The UN’s role in disarmament: retrospect and prospect’, *Contemporary Security Policy* 15: 1, 1994, p. 60. See also Ramesh Thakur, *The United Nations, peace and security: from collective security to the responsibility to protect* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 163.

4. Dimitris Bourantonis, *The United Nations and the quest for nuclear disarmament* (Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth, 1993); Avi Beker, *Disarmament without order* (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Anton Bebler, ‘Yugoslavia’s positions and policies on arms control and disarmament’, *The International Spectator* 10: 2, 1989, pp. 94–101.

5. William Walker, *A perpetual menace: nuclear weapons and international order* (London: Routledge, 2012); T.V. Paul, *The tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons* (Stanford, CL: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 160–77; Nina Tannenwald, *The nuclear taboo: the United States and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Thomas Schelling, ‘An astonishing 60 years: the legacy of Hiroshima’, *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* 103: 16, 2006, p. 6093.

6. Milton Friedman, *Capitalism and freedom* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. ix.

7. Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is what states make of it’, *International Organization* 46: 2, 1992, p. 413.
8 *Introduction*

8 Ole J. Sending, Vincent Pouliot, and Iver B. Neumann, *Diplomacy and the making of world politics* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 17.

9 See Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, *Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical exchange* (London: Verso, 2003).

10 Compare Ian Clark et al., ‘Crisis in the laws of war? Beyond compliance and effectiveness’, *European Journal of International Relations* 42: 2, 2018, p. 12.

11 See Charles D. Brockett, ‘The repression/popular-protest paradox’, in Mark Traugott, ed., *Repertories and cycles of collective action* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 117–44. See also Rebecca D. Gibbons, ‘Addressing the nuclear ban treaty’, *The Washington Quarterly* 42: 1, 2019, pp. 27–40.

12 Lyndon Burford, *National identity and nuclear disarmament advocacy by Canada and New Zealand*, PhD thesis (Auckland: University of Auckland, 2016), p. 1.

13 Robert O. Keohane, ‘International institutions: two approaches’, *International Studies Quarterly* 32: 4, 1988, p. 393.

14 On the concept of regime complexes, see Kal Raustiala and David G. Victor, ‘The regime complex for plant genetic resources’, *International Organization* 58: 1, 2004, pp. 277–309.

15 Walker, *A perpetual menace*.

16 Especially Axel Honneth, *The struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts* (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Charles Taylor, ‘The politics of recognition’, in Amy Gutman, ed., *Multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 25–73. See G.W.F. Hegel, *Jenaer realphilosophie* (Hamburg: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1969); G.W.F. Hegel, *Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

17 E.g., Erik Ringmar, *Identity, interest and action* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Thomas Lindemann, *Causes of war* (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2010); Tony Burns and Simon Thompson, *Global justice and the politics of recognition* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Nicholas, G. Onuf, ‘Recognition and the constitution of epochal change’, *International Relations* 27: 2, 2013, pp. 121–40; Thomas Lindemann and Erik Ringmar, *The international politics of recognition* (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Michelle Murray, *The struggle for recognition in international relations* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Constance Duncombe, *Representation, recognition and respect in world politics* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

18 Jörg Friedrichs, ‘An intercultural theory of international relations’, *International Theory* 8: 1, 2016, p. 64.

19 See, e.g., Patrick M. Cottrell, *The evolution and legitimacy of international security institutions* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

20 E.g., Susan Watkins, ‘The nuclear non-protestation treaty’, *New Left Review* 54, Nov/Dec 2008, pp. 5–26.

21 See, e.g., Martin Sherwin, *Gambling with armageddon: nuclear roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis* (New York, NY: Knopf, 2020); Benoît Pelopidas, ‘The unbearable lightness of luck: three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises’, *European Journal of International Security* 2: 2, 2017, pp. 240–62; Patricia Lewis et al., *Too close for comfort: cases of near nuclear use and options for policy* (London: Chatham House, 2014).

22 See articles 1 and 2 of the United Nations Charter, signed 26 June 1945, in force 24 Oct. 1945.

23 Jörn Müller and Andreas Paulus, ‘Survival through law’, *Finnish Yearbook of International Law* 18, 2007, p. 87. See also Yoshiko M. Herrera and Jacques E.C. Hymans, ‘The Non-Proliferation Treaty as a conditional norm’, *PONARS Eurasia, Policy Memo* 142, May 2011, p. 2; Nick Ritchie, ‘A hegemonic nuclear order’, *Contemporary Security Policy* 40: 4, 2019, pp. 409–34.
24 According to the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ for reducing emissions, developed states are expected to shoulder the brunt of the cuts.

25 Quoted in Sara Z. Kutchesfahani, *Politics and the bomb* (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 40.

26 Thomas A. Halsted, ‘The spread of nuclear weapons’, *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* 31: 5, 1975, p. 11.

27 William Epstein, *The last chance* (London: The Free Press, 1976), p. 256.

28 See Hedley Bull, ‘Rethinking non-proliferation’, *International Affairs* 51: 2, 1975, pp. 175–89; Lincoln P. Bloomfield, ‘Nuclear spread and world order’, *Foreign Affairs* 53: 4, 1975, pp. 743–55; Bruce Unger, ‘The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference’, *World Affairs* 139: 2, 1976, p. 91; Richard Falk, ‘Nuclear weapons proliferation as a world order problem’, *International Security* 1: 3, 1977, p. 84. See also Ian Brownlie, ‘Nuclear proliferation: some problems of control’, *International Affairs* 42: 4, 1966, pp. 600–8.

29 Foreign Relations of the United States 1977–1980, vol. XXVI, arms control and nonproliferation, ‘Memorandum from the president’s assistant for national security affairs (Brzezinski) to president Carter’, Washington, 24 Nov. 1980, doc. 395.

30 E.g., John M. Lamb, ‘Rolling the arms control waters’, *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* 43: 8, 1987, p. 18; Jayantha Dhanapala, ‘Indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty’, *Acronym Report* 7, Sept. 1995, http://www.acronym.org.uk/old/archive/acrorep/a07intro.htm; Manpreet Sethi, ‘NPT reviews conference 2000’, *Strategic Analysis* 24: 1, 2000, pp. 51–64; Graham Allison, ‘Nuclear disorder: surveying atomic threats’, *Foreign Affairs* 89: 1, 2010, pp. 74–85; Nina Tannenwald, ‘Justice and fairness in the nuclear nonproliferation regime’, *Ethics & International Affairs* 27: 3, 2013, pp. 299–317.

31 See T.V. Paul, ‘Systemic conditions and security cooperation: explaining the persistence of the nuclear non-proliferation regime’, *Cambridge Review of International Affairs* 16: 1, 2003, pp. 135–54.

32 Benoît Pelopidas, ‘The oracles of proliferation’, *The Nonproliferation Review* 18: 1, 2011, pp. 297–314; See also Benoît Pelopidas, ‘The nuclear straitjacket’, in Stéfanie von Hlatky and Andreas Wenger, eds, *The future of extended deterrence* (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), pp. 73–105.

33 Benoît Pelopidas, *Repenser les choix nucléaires* (Paris: Sciences Po University Press, 2022).

34 Jan Ruzicka, ‘Behind the veil of good intentions: power analysis of the nuclear non-proliferation regime’, *International Politics* 55: 3–4, 2018, pp. 369–85.

35 See Tannenwald, *The nuclear taboo*.

36 The roundtable meetings in the Philippines, Zambia, and Jamaica were organised by the Oslo-based International Law and Policy Institute, where the author worked as an advisor between 2013 and 2016.
# 1 Nuclear Order and the Struggle for Recognition

## Punctuated Equilibrium in Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Diplomacy

The overall aim of this study is to give an account of the evolution of the institutional framework for multilateral nuclear disarmament between the adoption of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968 and the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2021. The institutional framework in question is made up of the various legal instruments aimed at facilitating global nuclear disarmament (as defined through diplomatic practice), the diplomatic forums in which multilateral nuclear disarmament is discussed and negotiated, the rules of procedure and diplomatic behaviours associated with these forums, and the actors empowered to operate within the institutional architecture just described. Thus conceived, the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework is anchored in four dimensions: a subject matter and purpose (res), a selection of sites and arenas (loci), a collection of rules and practices (modi), and a set of actors authorised to operate within these structures (agentes). What I refer to as institutional adaptation takes place when either of these constituent parts of the framework is altered or added to. Since most adaptations have added to and not replaced existing regime components, institutional adaptation has led to significant institutional expansion. As suggested in the introduction, the overall volume of diplomatic activity in the field of multilateral nuclear disarmament has increased greatly since the 1960s.

I argue that institutional adaptation in the field of multilateral nuclear disarmament has followed a pattern of punctuated equilibrium. A pattern of punctuated equilibrium is ‘characterized both by periods of no significant innovation and periods of great innovation, as opposed to a continuous, gradual process of change’.¹

In other words, institutional adaptations in the field of multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy tend to come in waves or bursts. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was first propounded by Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge in the field of evolutionary biology, contradicting the Darwinian view of continuous change, but has since been applied to a range of other fields, including international relations (IR).²
An early application of the concept of punctuated equilibrium to the study of political institutions was provided by Stephen Krasner in 1984. Krasner argued that governmental powers have usually been expanded through short bursts of activity followed by longer periods of consolidation.³ While the concept has long been used by scholars working within the tradition of historical institutionalism,⁴ it has been used more sparingly in mainstream international relations literature on international regimes. A notable exception is provided by Colgan, Keohane, and Van de Graaf. In 2012, Colgan and colleagues argued that institutional adaptations in the energy regime complex – the set of institutions governing the production and trade of energy – have come about not as a result of a continuous process, but in junctures caused by changes in the oil price. In contrast to Krasner, who emphasised the short duration of periods of adaptation relative to periods of stasis, Colgan et al. found that, in the case of the energy regime complex, the phases of change and stasis were comparable in duration. The duration of the period of change simply depends on how long it takes for the pressures that induced the disruption to be resolved.

It is tempting to conceptualise punctuated equilibrium as a binary between ‘change’ and ‘stasis’, and to conceive of the transition from one state to the other as taking place, as it were, at the flick of a switch. But this is not necessarily accurate. According to Stephen J. Gould, punctuated equilibrium encompasses the idea that change usually takes place ‘when a stable structure is stressed beyond its buffering capacity to resist and absorb’.⁵ Stasis, in this view, is typically characterised by a cumulative build-up of ‘stress’ that eventually leads to a bursting point. This means that a crucial variable of the punctuated equilibrium model is *time*: While a structure might absorb a certain amount of stress for a finite period, sustained pressure will eventually explode the structure’s equilibrium.⁶

The institutional history of multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy may be divided into distinct phases of stasis and change. In this study, ‘stasis’ describes a period of institutional continuity. During a period of institutional stasis, the multilateral nuclear disarmament architecture’s stakeholders operate within the bounds of existing institutional structures; perform their respective roles in established arenas; and draw on existing rules, practices, and allies to pursue their interests. Note, however, that although stasis implies stability in the sense that the ‘rules of the game’ are largely left unaltered, stasis does not imply that the game is not played with high intensity. The game of multilateral disarmament diplomacy has been chronically discordant.⁷ Defined in opposition to stasis, ‘change’ or ‘expansion’ refers to a period of institutional upheaval. During such periods, institutions are changed and enlarged, rules altered, and established practices overturned.

Susan Strange argues that the concept of international regimes is too vague to enable rigorous analysis. The concept is poorly defined and exaggerates the degree of ‘predictability and order in the system’. Scholars should rather focus on specific institutions and the dynamic bargains on which regimes
are based, she claims.⁸ This study heeds Strange’s call by investigating the history of the disarmament bargain that underpins the nuclear regime complex, exploring how crises of legitimacy have prompted specific changes to the institutions and practices that make up multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy.

## The Politics of Recognition

This study’s ontological point of departure is that diplomacy takes place in a social milieu. Not only is diplomacy conditioned by existing norms, discourses, and relationships, diplomatic initiatives are often aimed at changing or reinforcing precisely such intersubjective phenomena. The function of diplomacy, in this view, is not just to facilitate ‘systemic’ interactions such as trade, but also to enable ‘societal’ interactions such as the cultivation of shared values and norms.⁹ Diplomacy also involves competition over status and entitlements. When gauging their own status and that of others, states tend to ‘make comparisons with others that are “similar but upward” – that is, to others that are similar on key dimensions but have higher status’.¹⁰

For scholars working in the Hegelian tradition, subject identities and corresponding demands for status are produced by ‘recognition and its absence’.¹¹ An actor can only gain a certain identity through interacting with, and gaining recognition from, an Other. Whether directed at gaining equality (sameness) or prestige (distinction), the demand for recognition ‘is a desire unlike all others’, argues Erik Ringmar.¹²

> [P]eople act not only in order to win things, but also in order to defend a certain conception of who they are. We act, that is, not only because there are things we want to have, but also because there are persons we want to *be*. In fact, this latter kind of action must be the more fundamental since it is only as a *some-one* that we can have an interest in *some-thing*. Without this ‘someone’ there would simply not be anyone around for whom something could, or could not, be an interest.¹³

In some cases, ideas about national prestige, reputation, and dignity have directly influenced crucial decisions about nuclear armament. According to French President Charles de Gaulle, for example, a France without nuclear weapons and corresponding ‘world responsibility’ would be ‘unworthy of herself’ as a major power.¹⁴ French nuclear policy has been powerfully influenced by demands for *grandeur*. As another example, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair opposed giving up his country’s nuclear weapons in part because he feared disarmament would downgrade the United Kingdom’s ‘status as a nation’.¹⁵ In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, state and religious institutions have consistently framed nuclear weapons as divine markers of Russia’s status as a great power.¹⁶
Along similar lines, North Korean authorities frequently invoke notions of national pride and honour when justifying the country's nuclear arsenal.¹⁷ By contrast, Sweden's Prime Minister from 1946 to 1969, Tage Erlander, eventually decided against the idea of developing a Swedish bomb at least in part because he wanted Sweden to be recognised as 'a good boy'.¹⁸ Analogously, in the late 1980s, officials at the South African Department of Foreign Affairs argued that South Africa's 'national pride' would be enhanced by South Africa renouncing nuclear weapons and joining the NPT, thus 'becoming a respected member of the international community'.¹⁹ In other cases, struggles for recognition have conditioned nuclear politics more indirectly. As I shall argue in this book, advocacy for multilateral nuclear disarmament, while invariably anchored in concerns about national or human security, has often been fuelled by non-nuclear-weapon states' justice-based demands for political inclusion and sovereign equality.

For the purposes of this study, 'recognition' describes the implicit or explicit avowal of an actor's self-description, identity, and/or social role. More specifically, social theorists have used the term 'recognition' to describe two slightly different things. First, recognition refers to the constitutive mechanism 'through which identities are formed and transformed'.²⁰ Such mechanisms are often ritualised. For example, students are 'matriculated', presidents 'inaugurated', priests 'ordained', and new members of international society 'recognised' by other states. Second, recognition also implies respectful or appropriate conduct. In this sense, recognition means to 'appropriately respect people as who they already really are'.²¹ Expressed through acts of inclusion, assertions of mutual respect, or the exchange of reciprocal rights and obligations, mutual recognition facilitates institutional stability and cooperation. By contrast, denial or withdrawal of recognition – referred to as ‘negation’, ‘disrespect’, ‘derecognition’, or ‘misrecognition’ – can foster so-called status disequilibrium and resultant conflict.²² Actors denied the social recognition they believe they are entitled to are confronted with a ‘recognition dilemma’: They must either accept that they are not who they want to be or fight to prove that they are.²³ Recognition theorists claim that many social conflicts and movements reflect precisely such struggles.²⁴ Genuine recognition is granted mutually. Coerced recognition, as described by Hegel in his famous dialectic of lordship and bondage, can never be truly meaningful or sustainable.²⁵

The idea of applying recognition theory to the behaviour of states has been criticised for ignoring the so-called 'multi-body' or 'levels-of-analysis' problem.²⁶ The levels-of-analysis problem arises from the difficulty of ascribing individual-level properties to collective agents. States, for example, are complex organisational structures that do not have interests, identities, or emotions in the same way individuals do.²⁷ According to Christian Olsson, 'the tendency to reduce “the state” or “society” to a representative agent with ideas, emotions, and motivations' is an 'obvious pitfall'.²⁸ Along the same lines, Volker Heins posits that the state 'does not express the identities
and feelings of its citizens and is not organized in such a way as to cater primarily to the needs for recognition felt by its own citizens or the citizens of other countries'.²⁹

Collective agents such as states cannot directly experience emotions. That much is clear. It makes little sense to speak of states being 'proud', 'humiliated', or 'frustrated' in a direct psychological sense. Yet that does not mean that recognition does not play a role in relations between states. The position I advance here, grounded in the theory of symbolic interactionism,³⁰ is that government officials consistently act as if states had human characteristics.³¹ As Mattias Iser points out, a state 'does not have to be able to feel disrespect in order to be disrespected'. States are 'capable of registering misrecognition exactly the way they can register (and react to) other events – they do not have to feel it the way individual persons do'.³² Along similar lines, Todd Hall argues that the anthropomorphisation of state behaviour can produce 'a form of perceptual hypocatastasis, in which the metaphor of human behaviour becomes the actual frame of understanding, such that no incongruity is perceived when states are described and understood to be displaying an emotion'.³³ The habit of both scholars, laypersons, and foreign policy practitioners of anthropomorphising states has been claimed to be at least as old as the state system itself. In fact, at least one scholar has argued that the anthropomorphising of the state was what enabled international society to form in the first place.³⁴ In multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy, the anthropomorphisation described by Hall and others is pervasive. Both in public and private, diplomats and politicians frequently describe their own and other states as 'big guys', 'little guys', 'bad guys', and 'good guys' (almost always male). These 'guys' are, in turn, regularly given human traits such as feelings, preferences, perspectives, and interests.

In international legal theory, the idea of state sovereignty stems from Grotius' and Vattel's extrapolation of Hobbes' conceptualisation of the anarchical state of nature – 'where all men are equal'³⁵ – to the international affairs of the European polities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.³⁶ While in an objective sense the 'state person' is a fiction, its widespread use has given it what recognition theorist Patchen Markell calls a 'structural effect'.³⁷ In an ethnographic study of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iver Neumann confirms that diplomats regularly see themselves as 'embodying' the state.³⁸ Hans Morgenthau, for his part, argues that 'diplomats are the symbolic representatives of their respective countries. The respect shown them is really shown their countries; the respect shown by them is really shown by their countries; the insult they give or receive is really given or received by their countries'.³⁹ Morgenthau's view links up well with the core theoretical insight of symbolic interactionism, namely, that people routinely act in accordance with the symbolic meanings objects and relationships are infused with.⁴⁰

The politics of recognition invariably revolves around a 'recognition order' that justifies norms and practices, determines appropriate behaviour,
and provides stakeholders with ontological security, that is, a stable iden-
tity to which values and interests may be anchored.⁴¹ Recognition orders
produce and rank specific social roles. In international affairs, such roles
must be compatible with relevant states' 'national identity conceptions'.
Jacques Hymans defines national identity conceptions as ideas about what
the nation in question 'naturally stands for' and how it ranks in compari-
son to others.⁴² National identity conceptions, in turn, are typically con-
strained by both domestic and international discourses.⁴³ Thus, even if
domestic audiences seldom pay close attention to the goings-on of day-to-
day multilateral diplomacy, they commonly help condition those activities
by shaping their leaders' conceptions of themselves and their states.⁴⁴ For
example, it has been persuasively argued that the United Kingdom's reten-
tion of nuclear weapons is entangled in a set of deeply ingrained British
(or English) cultural narratives that frame the United Kingdom as a great
power and military force for good.⁴⁵ These narratives, which are produced
through interaction between elites and the public (though not necessarily
consciously embraced by all or even most UK citizens), have not just made
the United Kingdom's continued possession of nuclear weapons possible
but legitimate and necessary as an expression of the collective identity of
the nation.⁴⁶ That said, the identity of any state is constantly subject to
an 'ongoing intersubjective and intrasubjective struggle about which of the
many possible stories of the Self [of the state] should at any one time be
activated'.⁴⁷ This implies that the state is both a participant in, and a prod-
uct of, the politics of recognition, making the normative aspect of recogni-
tion theory more difficult to apply.⁴⁸

In summary, if the arguments above have merit, the levels-of-analysis
problem may be overcome by conceptualising diplomats as symbolic repre-
sentatives enacting social roles.⁴⁹ Note, however, that although it may reason-
ably be argued that states assume roles and identities, one should be wary of
treating state identity as monolithic. Conceptualising states as unitary actors
seeking recognition, wealth, or material security may have analytical util-
ity for explaining international outcomes but ignores important sub-national
conflicts and processes.

Sovereign Equality and the NPT Grand Bargain

The diplomatic process that culminated with the adoption of the NPT, the
so-called cornerstone of the global nuclear order,⁵⁰ was initiated by the Irish
government at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in 1958.
Reacting to concern that the continued spread of nuclear weapons would
increase the risk of nuclear war – the renowned scholar Hans Morgenthau
believed continued proliferation would ‘result in a political anarchy of unim-
aginable proportions, followed by total nuclear destruction either in piece-
meal or in one single catastrophe’⁵¹ – Ireland proposed that the international
community should negotiate a nuclear ‘non-dissemination treaty’.⁵²
The apparent danger of nuclear war and proliferation was raised by several delegations in the years after 1958, but a significant number of states, both aligned and non-aligned, were reluctant to commit to a formal process. Stockholm, for example, was contemplating building nuclear weapons and instructed its diplomats to stall the international deliberations.⁵³ The superpowers were also indisposed. The United States saw the proposed non-proliferation agreement as an obstacle to plans for a 'multilateral nuclear force' under joint NATO command. As it happened, the creation of such a force was seen partly as a means of curbing proliferation, as it might help dissuade West Germany and Italy from acquiring their own nuclear arms.⁵⁴ It was not until 1964, when the People's Republic of China conducted its first nuclear explosive test, that the superpowers truly came around to the idea of a treaty to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.⁵⁵ Fearing that the Chinese test could provoke a wave of proliferation, the superpowers duly initiated formal, multilateral negotiations in Geneva in 1965. While the United Kingdom supported the move, France declined to take part in the negotiations; Paris had taken a strong stance against the negotiation of a non-proliferation treaty in the 1950s (when it was still in the process of developing its first nuclear explosive devices). China, equally, did not take part. At the time, Beijing was still not a member either of the Geneva Conference or the United Nations (UN).

The principle of sovereign equality is a fundamental international norm. And a regime that permits some states to possess nuclear weapons but not others 'appears to violate one of the bedrock principles of the international state system, namely, that sovereign states have an equal right to security, self-defense, and self-help, including the possession of nuclear weapons'.⁵⁶ According to the principle of sovereign equality, no state may 'plead privilege of rank or cast' in their international dealings.⁵⁷ For many states, the idea of bestowing upon the extant nuclear powers an exclusive and permanent right to possess nuclear arms was therefore 'an affront to the principle of sovereign equality under international law and that no "self-respecting" state could accept'.⁵⁸ How, then, was the codification of a palpably unequal regime justified?

Denying the non-nuclear-weapon states the opportunity to develop nuclear weapons – a presumed equaliser of superior conventional capabilities – the NPT has traditionally been understood to present the non-nuclear-weapon states with a security dilemma vis-à-vis the nuclear-armed powers.⁵⁹ During the NPT negotiations, some non-nuclear powers vigorously pushed the nuclear-weapon states to formally declare that they would never use nuclear force against non-nuclear states. But security assurances were not the non-nuclear powers' main demand. Updating the US Senate on the negotiations in February 1966, US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, expressed his bewilderment that the non-nuclear powers had thus far been more interested in disarmament.⁶⁰

I would say, Mr. Chairman, that the interest on the part of the non-nuclear states as registered in the last few months is, surprisingly, not
so much aimed at the question of assurances and guarantees as it is
aimed at a clear demonstration that those who have nuclear weapons
are proceeding on a path of disarmament.⁶¹

The Romanian government, which caucused with the non-aligned bloc, argued that the NPT should lead to ‘the ending of the division of the world into nuclear and non-nuclear countries’ and a ‘strengthening of equality among states’. Strong provisions for disarmament and a possibility to withdraw from the treaty would be necessary to avoid conflict between the NPT and ‘the principles of the sovereignty and equality of states’.⁶² The Swedish representative, Alva Myrdal, argued that the NPT should be ‘a first stop on the road towards nuclear disarmament, soon to be followed by others’.⁶³ According to Brazil, the non-nuclear-weapon states’ commitment to ‘sign away their right’ to build nuclear arms had to be coupled with a ‘specific and binding commitment on the part of the nuclear-weapon Powers’ to ‘eliminate the stocks of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles’.⁶⁴

Already in 1965, the UNGA had adopted a resolution, championed by Sweden and India, containing ‘five principles’ for a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Two of these spoke directly to the relationship between nuclear and non-nuclear powers: First, according to principle (b), the treaty should ‘embody an acceptable balance of mutual responsibilities and obligations of the nuclear and non-nuclear Powers’. Second, according to principle (c), the treaty should be ‘a step towards the achievement of general and complete disarmament and, more particularly, nuclear disarmament’.⁶⁵

The concept of general and complete disarmament, enthused by the League of Nations' call for the 'reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations',⁶⁶ had fallen into disrepute in the run-up to World War II,⁶⁷ but was partially rehabilitated in the 1950s.⁶⁸ In the so-called McCloy-Zorin statement of 1961, the United States and Soviet Union called for the development of a programme for general and complete disarmament to provide for the 'disbanding of armed forces', 'elimination of all stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, bacteriological and other weapons of mass destruction', 'cessation of military training', and 'discontinuance of military expenditures'.⁶⁹ These ideas were supported by numerous neutral and non-aligned states. At the same time, many advocates of nuclear abolition were wary that an overly ambitious and frankly unrealistic programme of general and complete disarmament would function as a quixotic fig leaf for inaction on the nuclear issue. They were thus eager to stress that nuclear disarmament should be pursued as a matter of special priority.⁷⁰

The superpowers were reluctant to include provisions for disarmament in the treaty. However, their negotiators soon realised that a treaty that did not at least pay lip-service to the goal of disarmament would fail to attract the support of many non-nuclear powers. Accordingly, the draft that was eventually adopted incorporated language on disarmament both in the preamble
– the parties pledged to ‘facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery pursuant to a Treaty on general and complete disarmament’ – and in a separate, operative paragraph.⁷¹ According to the NPT’s article VI:

> Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

As is clear from the wording, article VI obliges the parties to pursue negotiations towards three separate but overlapping ends. First, the parties must pursue negotiations on effective measures for the ‘cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date’.⁷² Second, the parties must pursue negotiations on effective measures for ‘nuclear disarmament’. And, third, the parties must pursue negotiations on ‘a Treaty on general and complete disarmament’.⁷³ The sequencing of the three elements suggests, but does not unequivocally mandate, a chronological order of business: first stop the arms race, then get rid of nuclear weapons, and finally negotiate a treaty on general and complete disarmament.

If judged as an attempt at tackling the neutral and non-aligned states’ material security dilemma vis-à-vis the nuclear-weapon states and their allies, the NPT’s disarmament language looks next to worthless. The parties explicitly agree to ‘pursue’ negotiations on disarmament, but not to complete them. No timeline is included. And given the wording of the disarmament language in the preamble, it is possible (though perhaps not very convincing given the sequencing in article VI) to argue that nuclear disarmament is no more of a priority than, or would have to be included as part of, an unrealistic treaty on general and complete disarmament.⁷⁴ Yet in the words of Mohamed Shaker, who represented the United Arab Republic (Egypt) at the negotiations and subsequently wrote an authoritative book about the treaty, the nuclear-weapon states’ commitment to disarm ‘was looked upon by the non-nuclear-weapon States not only in the context of achieving a more secure world but as a *quid pro quo* for the [... non-nuclear-weapon states’] renunciation of nuclear weapons’.⁷⁵ Disarmament, in this view, was actually ‘a question of principle more than a question of security’.⁷⁶ In fact, non-nuclear-weapon state officials privately admitted that they did not believe that the NPT alone would be an effective vehicle for nuclear disarmament.⁷⁷ They understood perfectly well that the vague language of article VI would not bind the nuclear-weapon states, at least not in the short or medium term.

What the disarmament commitment did do was to publically and in formal terms counteract the NPT’s apparent breach with the principle of the equality of states.⁷⁸ By casting the NPT as a step towards disarmament, article VI
allowed the non-nuclear-weapon states to describe themselves not simply as
'inferior' or 'unequal', but as 'equal in waiting'. In the words of one analyst,
the import of article VI was its promise of the future 'elimination of inequal-
ity within the treaty community, and thus of the intuitively unjust order'.⁷⁹
This crucial aspect of temporality was further bolstered by the inclusion of
a date stamp; according to the NPT's article X, the treaty would remain
in force for 25 years after its entry into force. After that period, a confer-
ence should be convened to decide on whether the treaty would be extended
indefinitely or for another fixed period or periods – depending, perhaps, on
conditions being met on disarmament. As the Swiss government put it dur-
ing the NPT negotiations, the non-nuclear-weapon states could not 'take the
responsibility of tying their hands indefinitely if the nuclear-weapon States
fail to arrive at positive [disarmament] results'.⁸⁰ Article X also codified the
parties' 'sovereign right' to withdraw from the agreement should extraordi-
nary events jeopardise their 'supreme interests'.

Indicating that the discriminatory structure codified by the treaty would
be temporary, articles VI and X allowed the non-nuclear-weapon states to
describe themselves as 'equal in waiting'. But the non-nuclear-weapon states
were not happy simply to wait idly for the nuclear-weapon states to disarm.
They were eager to be included in the process of disarmament as active,
audible stakeholders. Discussing the notion that the NPT had to 'embody an
acceptable balance of mutual responsibilities and obligations of the nuclear
and non-nuclear powers', the delegation of the United Arab Republic (Egypt)
argued that the treaty 'should represent a new era of partnership, of obliga-
tions and responsibilities'.⁸¹ A Ghanaian official argued that, 'in the past, the
super Powers have tended to treat the non-nuclear States as if they counted
for little and as if they had no interest in this vital question of war and peace'.
But no more: the non-nuclear-weapon states had 'a right to insist that our
views should at least be heard'.⁸² 'Our peoples, the peoples of the devel-
oping countries, want to be subjects and not objects of history, actors and
not merely spectators of the drama being acted out before our eyes', said
the Chileans.⁸³ The Romanians demanded there be 'constant participation
of all the contracting parties in the operation of verifying the working of the
machinery established by the treaty'.⁸⁴ The process of disarmament needed
to be based on 'a true dialogue' in the 'spirit of, and with rigorous respect
for, the principle of the equality of the States'. That, in turn, presupposed
'an understanding of and receptiveness to the arguments of each one'.⁸⁵ The
Brazilian delegation had made the same point with great expressiveness a few
years earlier:

> Some may think that, since we do not possess atomic weapons and do
> not belong to the atomic club, nothing we say on the subject is more
> than academic speculation. As we take no part in the actual game, we
> may be regarded as mere 'theoreticians' which in the etymological sense
> of the Greek word means spectators. [...] Would that be the proper
attitude for the non-atomic and non-aligned countries – the attitude of theoreticians or spectators? No. Such an attitude would be contrary to our terms of reference, contrary to the interests of our peoples, which coincide in this case with the common interests of mankind. [...] If we cannot still be spectators tomorrow, it is our right and duty today to pass from spectatorship to action.⁸⁶

The concerns rehearsed above are immediately recognisable through the ana-
lytical lens of recognition theory: For non-nuclear-weapon states to be able
to cultivate identities as sovereign actors, it was vital that they be recog-
nised a right to take part in the governance of the nuclear issue – a matter
of enormous relevance to their own citizens’ security and prospects. After
all, non-nuclear weapon states were highly vulnerable both to direct nuclear
attack and the transboundary consequences of a nuclear war elsewhere. In
this view, the non-nuclear-weapon states faced a threat to their sovereignty
not only in the sense that the unequal NPT brushed up against the norm
of sovereign equality but also in the sense that nuclear weapons, by their
nature, seem scarcely reconcilable with ‘the state form’ as a ‘protection pro-
viding entity’.⁸⁷ On this latter point, the nuclear and non-nuclear-weapon
states were of course in the same boat. There was and remains no defence
against nuclear-tipped, intercontinental-range missiles. National defences
and boundaries cannot stop radioactive fallout or the famine and economic
dislocations likely to be wrought by nuclear conflict.

Some non-nuclear powers, perhaps most notably India, Mexico, Sweden, and the United Arab Republic during this period, clearly also took pride in playing leadership roles within the neutral and non-aligned caucus.⁸⁸ In the latter three cases, it appears that the disarmament negotiations, not just of the NPT but also other processes, had a ‘second-image-reverse’ effect whereby international action conditioned domestic interests and priorities.⁸⁹ For example, Sweden’s eventual decision to abandon its nuclear-weapons programme and join the NPT has been argued to have been powerfully influenced by Sweden’s active role in the negotiations. Drawing praise internationally as a champion of peace and international law, disarmament advocacy provided Sweden with an alternative source of prestige.⁹⁰

The non-nuclear-weapon states’ desire for active inclusion was accom-
modated in two ways. First, article VI on disarmament was addressed to
‘each of the parties’ – not just the nuclear-weapon states (the negotiation of
a treaty on general and complete disarmament would inevitably also involve
most non-nuclear-weapon states in a material sense given their possession of
conventional armaments). Second, the superpowers agreed to a provision,
contained in article VIII, that was unique for its time: Five years after the
treaty’s entry into force, a ‘review conference’ would be convened to assess
the implementation of the treaty. Additional review conferences could be
convened at five-year intervals. As mentioned above, article X also made
provisions for an extension conference 25 years after the treaty’s entry into
force. The non-nuclear-weapon states would thus not be mere 'spectators'
or 'theoreticians'; they would, instead, be 'partners' in the nuclear order. As
William Walker puts it, the political settlement that underpinned the order
implied that all states 'should work together, over time, to dissolve the sys-
tem of deterrence'.⁹¹ Although disarmament might be difficult to achieve,
the non-nuclear powers would be able to participate in the multilateral pro-
cess at the UNGA, the NPT, and, for those that were members, the Geneva
Conference. Those in the aligned blocs would additionally be able to take
part in discussions about war, peace, and disarmament in their respective
alliance forums.

Most analysts and historians of the NPT emphasise that the treaty rested
on a wider political understanding or settlement.⁹² I conceptualise this settle-
ment as the NPT 'recognition order'. While the NPT recognised the nuclear-
weapon states as first among equals and de facto possessors of nuclear arms,
the non-nuclear-weapon states were recognised as sovereign equals with
legitimate stakes in the governance of the nuclear world. The core of the
NPT recognition order was what over time became known as the NPT 'grand
bargain', defined by US President Barack Obama in the following terms:
'Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries
without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access
peaceful nuclear energy'.⁹³ To be precise, the disarmament project was from
the outset pitched as a broad collaborative process in which all states had a
legitimate interest.⁹⁴

The idea of the NPT as the codification of a 'grand bargain' between
nuclear and non-nuclear powers has come under considerable scrutiny in
recent years.⁹⁵ For example, Roland Popp maintains that the grand-bargain
narrative obscures the reality that the NPT process was tied to narrow Cold
War imperatives and 'driven and dominated by the two superpowers'.⁹⁶
Joachim Krause suggests that the grand bargain is an 'ideological myth'
perpetuated by 'the liberal arms control school'.⁹⁷ There is no doubt that
superpower collusion and Cold War considerations played significant roles
in the process that brought about the adoption of the NPT. There is equally
no debating that the language of article VI was vague and effectively unen-
forceable. Contributors to what Popp labels 'new international nuclear his-
tory' have argued convincingly that, for the major powers, the purpose of the
NPT was to freeze the status quo, maintain trade advantages, and/or stabilise
Central Europe.⁹⁸ From the point of view of the superpowers, article VI was
a footnote. In a 1969 memorandum to then US national security advisor
Henry Kissinger, Spurgeon Keeny, a senior staff member of the US National
Security Council, described article VI as 'an essentially hortatory statement'
that presented 'no problems' for established US nuclear policy.⁹⁹

From the point of view of many non-nuclear powers, however, article VI
and the other compensatory measures that were included in the NPT over
the course of the negotiations were not footnotes but necessary conditions
for support. Claiming that the formation of the NPT owed to superpower
politics and Cold War imperatives alone risks underplaying the agency of
the states that the treaty was first and foremost created to restrain, i.e., the
non-nuclear-weapon states.¹⁰⁰ The nuclear-weapon states’ leaders certainly
understood the seriousness with which many non-nuclear powers saw the
disarmament agenda. In his closing statement during the NPT negotiations,
the US representative William Foster noted that ‘there has been at least one
theme on which all have been agreed. The non-proliferation treaty should be
a step towards achieving further measures of nuclear disarmament’.¹⁰¹ At the
NPT signing ceremony in Washington DC, US President Lyndon B. Johnson
maintained that the NPT’s three-pronged purpose was ‘very simple’: First,
the NPT committed states without nuclear weapons ‘not to produce them or
receive them in the future’. Second, the NPT assured the same states that they
were free to enjoy ‘the full peaceful benefits of the atom’. And, third, the NPT
committed the nuclear powers ‘to move forward toward effective measures
of arms control and disarmament’.¹⁰² There is no doubt that the treaty was
packaged and sold as an instrument of eventual disarmament and equality.

Admittedly, some neutral and non-aligned states were not convinced by
the compensatory package offered by the superpowers. Several middle pow-
ers, including Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan, and Spain, initially
refused to sign. Nuclear-armed China and France also declined to join. Yet,
as the norm of non-proliferation grew in strength over the following decades,
in particular as Cold War bipolarity eventually gave way to US unipolarity,
only a handful of states managed to withstand the pressure of adhering to the
treaty.¹⁰³ As argued by the authors of a 1980 US Government Accountability
Office report, ‘adherence by just one additional state increases by two the
difference between the number of parties and nonparties and thereby serves
to further isolate the nonparty states’.¹⁰⁴ As of 2023, India, Israel, Pakistan,
North Korea (which withdrew in 2003), and South Sudan (a recently inde-
pendent state) are the only UN member states that are not party to the NPT.

Institutional Adaptation and Cycles of Legitimacy

This book documents three waves of institutional contestation and change
in multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy. These waves of upheaval,
I maintain, have been brought on by recurring crises of legitimacy in the
nuclear regime complex. Crises of legitimacy, in turn, can be read as moments
or phases in an underlying cycle of institutional regeneration and decay. The
cycle begins with the constitution or reconstitution of an acceptable balance
of nuclear rights and duties – a recognition order. This recognition order
justifies the regime complex’ fundamental norms and sets out social roles and
expectations for appropriate behaviour. On the institutional level, an intact
recognition order is associated with stasis, meaning that the diplomatic pro-
cess unfolds within existing structures. In the case of the nuclear regime com-
plex, the various iterations of the underlying recognition order have obliged
the nuclear-weapon states to engage in an inclusive diplomatic process aimed
at eventual nuclear disarmament. In practice, however, this ideal has rarely
been upheld. The result has been gradual institutional delegitimisation – the
second phase of the cycle. Over time, sustained delegitimisation inevitably
leads to one or more ‘critical junctures’ – the third phase. At such moments,
the nuclear-weapon states will either stabilise the regime complex by return-
ing to the behaviour prescribed by the recognition order or they will continue
as before, causing the regime complex to suffer a crisis of legitimacy – the
fourth and final phase. Crises of legitimacy induce aggrieved parties to take
action to recalibrate the regime complex, notably through institutional con-
testation and change.¹⁰⁵ The cycle ends when the legitimacy crisis is resolved
through the reconstitution of an acceptable political settlement, bringing
about the start of a new cycle.

Overall, the legitimacy of a social order is a function of its stakehold-
ers' perception that the order's basic principles and operation are 'desirable,
proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms,
values, beliefs, and definitions'.¹⁰⁶ I thus take a subjective view of legitimacy:
Whether an order is legitimate or not is decided not by objective criteria but
by the order's stakeholders.¹⁰⁷ Martin Wight captures this idea well by defin-
ing legitimacy as 'moral acceptability'.¹⁰⁸ As discussed above, the legitimacy
of the nuclear regime complex depends to large parts on the credibility of
the prospect of inclusive multilateral disarmament. Several factors influence
the credibility of this prospect. The nuclear-weapon states' willingness to
engage in negotiations and meaningful diplomatic deliberations is an obvi-
ous indicator. Nuclear-weapon states' military strategies and spending on
nuclear weapons are other factors. Rhetorical commitment to the goal of a
world without nuclear weapons is a third. One of the most important factors
influencing the legitimacy of the regime complex, however, is time: So long
as the nuclear-weapon states are not seen to be in the process of getting rid
of their weapons, the very passage of time will reduce the regime complex'
credibility as a catalyst of change. If enough time passes without meaningful
progress towards the elimination of nuclear armouries, pressures for institu-
tional adaptation will inevitably surface, as those eager to advance disarma-
ment will seek new ways to further their interests. As the hydraulic model of
motivation predicts, actors' resolve to act typically follows a gradual build-
up of drive that – as when a water reservoir is slowly filled up and eventually
bursts under pressure – sooner or later reaches a point where action becomes
inescapable.¹⁰⁹

A crisis of legitimacy can thus be understood as a period of disruption or
upheaval brought about by the collapse of a social system's moral accept-
ability. A telling indicator of the onset of a crisis of legitimacy in the nuclear
regime complex, in other words, is the occurrence of institutional contesta-
tion and change. Yet institutional contestation and change are not the only
indicators available. Hirschman's theory of exit, voice, and loyalty offers
a formula for analytical pattern matching. According to Hirschman, any
social arrangement is 'subject to lapses from efficient, rational, law-abiding,
virtuous, or otherwise functional behaviour'. When such lapses occur, those concerned have three options.¹¹⁰ If the lapses are thought to be temporary or minor, Hirschman suggests, stakeholders are likely to remain loyal. But if the lapses are more serious, they are liable to either voice harsh criticisms or exit the arrangement altogether. What might this look like in the context of the nuclear regime complex?

‘Voice’ may be understood as a broad category of behaviours including both verbal and non-verbal communication. Using the term interchangeably with ‘protest’, Hirschman defines voice as ‘any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs’.¹¹¹ On this basis, we might expect crises of legitimacy in the nuclear regime complex to foster more heated rhetoric and argumentation than periods of relative stability.¹¹² But states also have at their disposal a wide repertoire of non-verbal diplomatic voice.¹¹³ For example, decisions to call diplomats home, pull out of negotiations, or block consensus on conference declarations are universally recognised in the diplomatic milieu as means of signalling dissatisfaction. Finally, to the extent that voice can be understood as synonymous with protest or opposition, one might also expect crises of legitimacy in the nuclear regime complex to reduce states’ willingness to compromise or accept additional obligations in related areas. For example, many non-nuclear-weapon states have been wary of accepting additional non-proliferation commitments so long as the nuclear-weapon states are not moving seriously on the disarmament agenda. Crises of legitimacy might be expected to accentuate such opposition.

‘Exit’ also encompasses a broad category of behaviours. Institutional contestation and change is itself an obvious example of a type of behaviour aimed at, in Hirschman’s words, escaping from an objectionable state of affairs. Another obvious way of exercising exit would be to withdraw from the regime complex’ constituent institutions. Short of that, states might threaten to do so. Arguably the most dramatic way in which non-nuclear-weapon states might exercise exit from the nuclear regime complex is to engage in proliferation.¹¹⁴ Low regime legitimacy could, in theory, function either as a direct cause of proliferation or an enabling factor making deviant behaviour easier to justify to external or internal audiences. By the same token, high regime legitimacy would be more likely to foster robust international reactions to non-compliance with central norms, including non-proliferation. When the regime complex’ legitimacy is high, in other words, we would expect non-nuclear-weapon states to react more firmly to proliferation threats by supporting sanctions or other measures to rein in potential or active proliferators. Conversely, when the legitimacy of the regime is low, we would expect non-nuclear-weapon states to be more prepared to make excuses for potential or actual proliferators, placing the blame on the nuclear-weapon states.

The next chapter turns to the history of the multilateral nuclear disarmament process, beginning with the immediate aftermath of the NPT’s adoption.
Notes

1 Jeff Colgan, Robert O. Keohane, and Thijs Van de Graaf, 'Punctuated equilibrium in the energy regime complex', *Review of International Organizations* 7: 2, 2012, p. 118.

2 See, e.g., Gary Goertz, *International norms and decision-making* (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

3 Stephen D. Krasner, 'Approaches to the state: alternative conceptions and historical dynamics', *Comparative Politics* 16: 2, 1984, pp. 223–46.

4 E.g., Kathleen Thelen, 'Historical institutionalism in comparative politics', *Annual Review of Political Science* 2, 1999, pp. 364–404.

5 Stephen J. Gould, 'Darwinism and the expansion of evolutionary theory', *Science* 216: 4544, 1982, p. 385.

6 See Emanuelle Blanc, 'Wither the international nuclear order?', in Emily B. Landau and Azriel Bermant, eds, *The nuclear nonproliferation regime at a crossroads* (Ramat Aviv: INSS, 2014), p. 109.

7 Alva Myrdal, *The game of disarmament: how the United States and Russia run the arms race* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977).

8 Susan Strange, 'Cave! Hic dragones: a critique of regime analysis', *International Organization* 36: 2, 1982, p. 487.

9 Hedley Bull, *The anarchical society* (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 161.

10 William C. Wohlforth et al., 'Moral authority and status in international relations', *Review of International Studies* 44: 3, 2017, p. 528.

11 Charles Taylor, 'The politics of recognition', in Amy Gutman, ed., *Multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 25.

12 Erik Ringmar, 'The recognition game: Soviet Russia against the West', *Cooperation and Conflict* 37: 2, 2002, p. 119.

13 Erik Ringmar, *Identity, interest and action: a cultural explanation of Sweden's intervention in the Thirty Years War* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3. Emphasis in original.

14 Quoted in Scott D. Sagan, 'Why do states build nuclear weapons? Three models in search of a bomb', *International Security* 21: 3, 1996/97, p. 79.

15 Tony Blair, *A journey* (London: Knopf, 2010), p. 130.

16 Dmitry Adamsky, *Russian nuclear orthodoxy: religion, politics, and strategy* (Stanford, CL: Stanford University Press, 2019).

17 Jina Kim, *The North Korean nuclear weapons crisis* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

18 Paul M. Cole, 'Atomic bombast', *The Washington Quarterly* 20: 2, 1997, p. 243.

19 Jo-Ansie van Wyk, 'Atoms, apartheid, and the agency', *Cold War History* 15: 3, 2015, p. 408.

20 Patchen Markell, *Bound by recognition* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 58. See also Nicholas G. Onuf, 'Recognition and the constitution of epochal change', *International Relations* 27: 2, 2013, pp. 125–6.

21 Markell, *Bound by recognition*, p. 59.

22 Compare G.W.F. Hegel, *Enzyklopädie der philosophischen wissenschaften I* (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). See also Robert R. Williams, *Hegel's ethics of recognition* (Berkley, CL: University of California Press, 1997), p. 286.

23 Ringmar, *Identity, interest and action*, pp. 13–14.

24 Axel Honneth, *The struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts* (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Taylor, 'The politics of recognition'.

25 G.W.F. Hegel, *Hegel's phenomenology of spirit* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 111–19. The dialectic has diverging interpretations, ranging
26 *Nuclear Order and the Struggle for Recognition*

from the pessimistic interpretation of Kojève to the more optimistic interpreta-
tion of Williams. See Alexandre Kojève, *Introduction to the reading of Hegel*
(London: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 7–16; Williams, *Hegel’s ethics of
recognition*, pp. 63–4.

26 Todd H. Hall and Andrew A.G. Ross, 'Affective politics after 9/11', *International Organization* 69: 4, 2015, p. 856.

27 Of course, poststructuralists and psychoanalysts have long disputed that even individuals can have stable and straightforwardly knowable selves. I argue that both individuals and organisations such as states can have discursively assigned and behaviourally consequential subject positions independent of the true nature of their constituent 'selves'.

28 Christian Olsson, 'Warfare and recognition in IR: on the potential inputs of the historical sociology of the state', *Global Discourse* 4: 4, 2014, pp. 539–42.

29 Volker Heins, ‘The global politics of recognition’, in Shane O’Neill and Nicholas H. Smith, eds, *Recognition theory as social research* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 222.

30 See, in particular, George H. Mead, *Mind, self, and society* (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1934); Herbert Blumer, *Symbolic interactionism* (Berkeley, CL: University of California Press, 1969).

31 Compare Todd H. Hall, *Emotional diplomacy: official emotion on the international stage* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 29–30. See also Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics’, *European Journal of International Relations* 12: 3, 2006, p. 352.

32 Mattias Iser, ‘Recognition between states?’, in Christopher Daase et al., eds, *Recognition in international relations* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 32.

33 Hall, *Emotional diplomacy*, pp. 29–30.

34 Erik Ringmar, 'On the ontological status of the state', *European Journal of International Relations* 2: 4, 1996, pp. 439–66.

35 Thomas Hobbes, *Leviathan*, Richard Tuck, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 86. See also Hidemi Suganami, ‘Grotius and international equality’, in Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts, eds, *Hugo Grotius and international relations* (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 221–40; Iver B. Neumann, ‘Beware of organicism’, *Review of International Studies* 30: 2, 2004, p. 265.

36 William T.S. Stallybrass, *A society of states* (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1918), pp. 60–1; Stephen D. Krasner, *Sovereignty: organized hypocrisy* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 14.

37 Markell, *Bound by recognition*, pp. 27–30. The view of the state as an analogised person squares with recent findings in cognitive psychology, which has demonstrated that analogies and analogical heuristics contribute to the structuring of human thought. See Arthur B. Markman and Dedre Gentner, ‘Thinking’, *Annual Review of Psychology* 52, 2001, pp. 223–47; Shulamit Kapon and Andrea A. diSessa, ‘Reasoning through instructional analogies’, *Cognition and Instruction* 30: 3, 2012, pp. 261–310.

38 Iver B. Neumann, *At home with the diplomats: inside a European foreign ministry* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 118.

39 Hans J. Morgenthau, *Politics among nations* (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 88.

40 Blumer, *Symbolic interactionism*.

41 Ruth Cox, ‘Recognition and immigration’, in Shane O’Neill and Nicholas H. Smith, eds, *Recognition theory as social research* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 192; Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics’.
42 See Jacques E.C. Hymans, *The psychology of nuclear proliferation: identity, emotions, and foreign policy* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 13.

43 See William Bloom, *Personal identity, national identity and international relations* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

44 E.g., Alexander Wendt, *Social theory of international politics* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

45 Nick Ritchie, ‘Valuing and devaluing nuclear weapons’, *Contemporary Security Policy* 34: 1, 2013, p. 155.

46 Ritchie, ‘Valuing and devaluing nuclear weapons’.

47 Neumann, ‘Beware of organicism’, p. 259.

48 See Markell, *Bound by recognition*, p. 28.

49 It should also be noted that in addition to representing their states, in a basic sense, individual diplomats also represent themselves. It is reasonable to assume that many diplomats desire recognition from others as being, for example, particularly capable, brave, or eloquent.

50 Laura Considine, “‘Cornerstones’ and “fire from the gods”: the role of language in nuclear disarmament”, *Brown Journal of World Affairs* 27: 1, 2020, pp. 55–68.

51 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘The four paradoxes of nuclear strategy’, *American Political Science Review* 58: 1, 1964, p. 35.

52 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), UN Document A/C.1/L.206, New York, 17 Oct. 1958. Ireland had no specific suggestions for what a process might look like and did therefore not submit the resolution to the UNGA Plenary. See US Department of State, *Documents on Disarmament 1945–1969*, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Public Affairs, 1960), p. 1186.

53 Jan Prawitz, ‘Det svenska spelet om nedrustningen’, *Framsyn* 1, 2004, https://archive.li/jC3Fh.

54 Lawrence S. Wittner, *Resisting the bomb: a history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, 1954–1970* (Stanford, CL: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 405.

55 Francis J. Gavin, *Nuclear statecraft: history and strategy in America’s atomic age* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 76.

56 Nina Tannenwald, ‘Justice and fairness in the nuclear nonproliferation regime’, *Ethics & International Affairs* 27: 3, 2013, p. 304.

57 Stallybrass, *A society of states*, pp. 60–1. See also United Nations Charter, signed 26 June 1945, in force 24 October 1945, article 1(2). See also Robert A. Klein, *Sovereign equality among states* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974); David A. Lake, *Hierarchy in international relations* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 39.

58 Ritu Mathur, ‘Sly civility and the paradox of equality/inequality in the nuclear order’, *Critical Studies on Security* 4: 1, 2016, p. 67. See also Manjani C. Miller, *Wronged by empire* (Redwood City, CL: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 97; Jita Mishra, *The NPT and the developing countries* (New Delhi: Concept, 2008), p. 191.

59 See Caroline Fehl, ‘Understanding the puzzle of unequal recognition’, in Christopher Daase et al., eds, *Recognition in international relations* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 106.

60 Provisions for civilian nuclear cooperation, not discussed here, were another crucial demand.

61 Quoted in Glenn T. Seaborg, *Stemming the tide* (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), p. 367.

62 Romania, Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENDC), Geneva, 8 Aug. 1967, doc. ENDC/PV.320, pp. 13–14.
63 Sweden, ENDC, Geneva, 31 Aug. 1968, doc. ENDC/PV.327, p. 9. See also, e.g., Mexico, ENDC, Geneva, 13 Jun. 1967, doc. ENDC/PV.304, p. 6; Chile, UNGA First Committee, New York, 14 Dec. 1967, doc. A/C.1/22/PV.1551, p. 17; United Arab Republic (Egypt), UNGA First Committee, New York, 8 Nov. 1965, doc. A/C.1/SR.1373, p. 107; Nigeria, UNGA First Committee, New York, 8 Nov. 1965, doc. A/C.1/SR.1373, p. 109.

64 Brazil, UNGA First Committee, New York, 14 Dec. 1967, doc. A/C.1/22/PV.1551, p. 27.

65 UNGA, Resolution 2028 (XX), 'Non-proliferation of nuclear weapons', New York, 1965.

66 Covenant of the League of Nations, signed 28 June 1919, in force 10 Jan. 1920, article 8. Note that the Covenant does not use the exact term 'general and complete disarmament'.

67 See, e.g., E.H. Carr, *The twenty years' crisis, 1919-1939* (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 74, 140.

68 UNGA, Resolution 1378 (XIV), 'General and complete disarmament', New York, 1959.

69 Soviet Union and United States, 'Joint statement of agreed principles for disarmament negotiations', 20 Sept. 1961, doc. A/4879.

70 E.g., Mexico, ENDC, Geneva, 19 Sept. 1967, doc. ENDC/PV.331, p. 10; Sweden, ENDC, Geneva, 3 Oct. 1967, doc. ENDC/PV.335, pp. 9-10; Ethiopia, ENDC, Geneva, 13 Feb. 1968, doc. ENDC/PV.364, p. 17.

71 Mohamed I. Shaker, *The nuclear non-proliferation treaty* (London: Oceana, 1980), p. 557.

72 For many, a cessation of the nuclear arms race implied the negotiation of a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing.

73 Daniel H. Joyner, *Interpreting the nuclear non-proliferation treaty* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 97.

74 See, e.g., Christopher A. Ford, 'Debating disarmament: interpreting article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons', *The Nonproliferation Review* 14: 3, 2007, pp. 401-28.

75 Shaker, *The nuclear non-proliferation treaty*, p. 564.

76 Shaker, *The nuclear non-proliferation treaty*, p. 926.

77 See Fehl, 'Understanding the puzzle of unequal recognition', p. 107.

78 See Matthew E. Harries, *The role of article VI in debates about the nuclear non-proliferation treaty*, PhD thesis (London: King's College London, 2014), p. 139. See also Jack I. Garvey, 'A new architecture for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons', *Journal of Conflict & Security Law* 12: 3, 2007, p. 353; Rosemary Righter, *Utopia lost* (New York, NY: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), p. 124.

79 Harald Müller, 'Between power and justice: current problems and perspectives of the NPT regime', *Strategic Analysis* 34: 2, 2010, p. 191.

80 Switzerland, aide-mémoire sent to the ENDC in November. 1967. Reprinted in US Department of State, *Documents on Disarmament*, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 2009), p. 573.

81 Shaker, *The nuclear non-proliferation treaty*, p. 52.

82 Ghana, UNGA First Committee, New York, 15 Dec. 1967, doc. A/C.1/PV.1553, p. 2.

83 Chile, UNGA First Committee, New York, 21 Nov. 1968, doc. A/C.1/PV.1615, p. 10.

84 Romania, ENDC, Geneva, 16 Nov. 1967, doc. ENDC/PV.348, p. 6

85 Romania, ENDC, Geneva, 3 Apr. 1968, doc. ENDC/PV.400, p. 24.

86 Brazil, ENDC, Geneva, 6 May 1963, doc. ENDC/PV.128, p. 8.
87 Daniel Deudney, 'Nuclear weapons and the waning of the real-state', *Daedalus* 124: 2, 1995, pp. 209–31.

88 Maria R. Rublee, *Nonproliferation norms: why states choose nuclear restraint* (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 104; Maj B. Theorin, ‘Ar en kärvnvapenfri värld möjlig?’, acceptance speech, The People’s Peace Prize, 3 Dec. 2016, https://www.laraforfred.se/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/%C3%84R-EN-K%C3%84RNVAPENFRI-V%C3%84RLD-M%C3%96JLIG.pdf.

89 Peter Gourevitch, ‘The second image reversed: the international sources of domestic politics’, *International Organization* 32: 4, 1979, pp. 881–912.

90 See Thomas Jonter, ‘The United States and Swedish plans to build the bomb, 1945–68’, in Jeffrey W. Knopf, ed., *Security assurances and nuclear nonproliferation* (Stanford, CL: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 236, 238.

91 Walker, ‘Nuclear order and disorder’, p. 708. Emphasis added.

92 See, e.g., Shaker, *The nuclear non-proliferation treaty*; William Walker, *Perpetual menace: nuclear weapons and international order* (London: Routledge, 2011); Jonathan R. Hunt, *The nuclear club: how America and the world policed the atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam* (Stanford, CL: Stanford University Press, 2022), p. 251; Andrew Futter, *The politics of nuclear weapons*, 2nd edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 117.

93 Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by president Barack Obama in Prague as delivered’, *Obama White House Archive*, speech delivered in Prague, 5 Apr. 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered.

94 See William Walker, ‘Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment’, *International Affairs* 83: 3, 2007, p. 437; Hunt, *The nuclear club*, pp. 5, 246–51.

95 See, in particular, Roland Popp, ‘Global order, cooperation between the super-powers, and alliance politics in the making of the nuclear non-proliferation regime’, *The International History Review* 36: 2, 2014, p. 199; Joachim Krause, ‘Enlightenment and nuclear order’, *International Affairs* 83: 3, 2007, p. 485.

96 Roland Popp, ‘The long road to the NPT’, in Roland Popp, Liviu Horovitz, and Andreas Wenger, eds, *Negotiating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty* (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 9.

97 Joachim Krause, ‘Enlightenment and nuclear order’, *International Affairs* 83: 3, 2007, p. 486.

98 See Gavin, ‘Nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation during the Cold War’, in Melvin P. Leffler and Odd A. Westad, eds, *The Cambridge history of the Cold War. Volume 2: vrises and détente* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 395–416; Dane Swango, ‘The United States and the role of nuclear co-operation and assistance in the design of the non-proliferation treaty’, *The International History Review* 36: 2, 2014, pp. 210–29; Andrew J. Coe and Jane Vaynman, ‘Collusion and the nuclear nonproliferation regime’, *The Journal of Politics* 77: 4, 2015, pp. 983–97; Mlada Bukovansky et al., *Special responsibilities: global problems and American power* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); John Krige, ‘US technological superiority and the special nuclear relationship’, *The International History Review* 36: 2, 2014, pp. 230–51; Leopoldo Nuti, ‘Negotiating with the enemy and having problems with the allies’, in Basil Germond, Jussi M. Hanhimäki, and Georges-Henri Soutou, eds, *The Routledge handbook of transatlantic security* (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 89–102; Rebecca D. Gibbons, *The hegemon's tool kit: US leadership and the politics of the nuclear nonproliferation regime* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).

99 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 1969–1976, vol. E-2, documents on arms control and nonproliferation, 1969–1972, ‘Memorandum from
30 *Nuclear Order and the Struggle for Recognition*

Spurgeon Keeny of the National Security Council staff to the president's assistant for national security affairs (Kissinger)', doc. 2.

100 Compare Harries, *The role of article VI in debates about the nuclear non-proliferation* treaty, pp. 133–4.

101 United States, ENDC, Geneva, 11 Mar. 1968, doc. ENDC/PV.376, p. 14.

102 Lyndon B. Johnson, 'Remarks at the signing of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty', Washington, DC, 1 July 1968, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-signing-the-nuclear-nonproliferation-treaty.

103 Christoph Bluth, 'The irrelevance of "trusting relationships" in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty', *British Journal of Politics and International Relations* 13: 1, 2012, pp. 115–30.

104 Cited in Rebecca D. Gibbons, 'The nuclear ban treaty and competing nuclear norms', *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists*, 30 Oct. 2020, https://thebulletin.org/2020/10/the-nuclear-ban-treaty-and-competing-nuclear-norms/.

105 See Christian Reus-Smit, 'International crises of legitimacy', *International Politics* 44: 2–3, 2007, p. 161.

106 Mark C. Suchman, 'Managing legitimacy', *Academy of Management Review* 20: 3, 1995, p. 574. See also Thomas Franck, *The power of legitimacy among nations* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ian Hurd, 'Legitimacy and authority in international politics', *International Organization* 53: 2, 1999, pp. 379–408.

107 The objectivist view, by contrast, would define legitimacy in accordance with philosophical first principles or some other predetermined yardstick.

108 Martin Wight, 'International legitimacy', *International Relations* 4: 1, 1972, p. 1.

109 Kent C. Berridge, 'Motivation concepts in behavioral neuroscience', *Psychology & Behavior* 81: 2, 2004, pp. 179–209.

110 Albert O. Hirschman, *Exit, voice, and loyalty* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).

111 Hirschman, *Exit, voice, and loyalty*, p. 30.

112 Compare Marco Fey, Aviv Melamud, and Harald Müller, 'The role of justice in compliance behavior', *International Negotiation* 19: 3, 2014, p. 465.

113 Alisher Faizullaev, 'Diplomacy and symbolism', *The Hague Journal of Diplomacy* 8: 2, 2013, p. 92.

114 See Jeffrey W. Knopf, 'Nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation: examining the linkage argument', *International Security* 37: 3, 2012, p. 119.
## 2 Democratisation and Discord, 1969–1978

### Hegemony and the ‘Freezing of World Power’

#### SALT and the Arms Race

The success of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a break on the spread of nuclear weapons was by no means certain when the treaty was opened for signature in July 1968. Keen to signal that the superpowers were serious about their end of the NPT bargain, US President Lyndon B. Johnson announced on the very day the NPT was opened for signature that the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to initiate bilateral negotiations on the limitation of ‘strategic’ nuclear weapons, i.e., nuclear weapons with intercontinental range. And, indeed, the commencement of ‘Strategic Arms Limitation Talks’ (SALT) was initially praised by numerous neutral and non-aligned states as an ‘encouraging sign of progress’.¹

Even India, one of the nascent nuclear order’s most ardent critics, applauded the initiative.² However, once the SALT process kicked on, it did not take long before criticism started to appear. SALT, critics believed, was not really a disarmament effort after all.

Developed by US defence experts in the 1950s and 1960s, the arms control paradigm sought not to abolish or even necessarily reduce nuclear-weapon stocks but instead to manage deterrence relations.³ Unsurprisingly, proponents of disarmament were deeply sceptical of this approach. Arms control would ‘normalise’ nuclear armaments and freeze the international power structure, they advanced.⁴ The Tanzanian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), for example, questioned the sincerity of the superpowers’ disarmament pledges already in 1970. ‘It appears’, said the Tanzanians, that the major powers ‘are not wholly committed or sincere in their efforts to achieve complete disarmament and therefore are offering this new concept of arms control and limitations on strategic weapons. One wonders whether this is not a mere charade’.⁵ The Swedish delegation, similarly, identified a growing ‘credibility gap’ between the nuclear-weapon states’ words and deeds.⁶ To the extent that the stability of the nuclear regime complex rested on the credibility of the concept of inclusive disarmament, these statements were clear warning signs. Defenders of the arms control paradigm countered that the purpose of arms negotiations should be to maximise
security, not necessarily disarmament.⁷ But the neutral and non-aligned states were not receptive to such arguments, claiming that security would have to be achieved through disarmament.⁸ The game-theoretic models and idealised notions of stability advanced by arms controllers seemed to many proponents of disarmament to privilege a narrow form of rationality over basic prudence and reason.⁹

The bilateral US-Soviet talks culminated in the adoption, on 26 May 1972, of two agreements. Both deals noted their parties' mindfulness 'of their obligations under article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons' in their preambles. The first and arguably most significant outcome of SALT was the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited the superpowers' freedom to develop anti-ballistic missile systems. According to the treaty, they would be limited to only two such systems each. The somewhat paradoxical idea behind the ABM Treaty was that mutual vulnerability was good for security; if neither party could attack the other without risking catastrophic retaliation, chances were that they would both avoid war at almost any cost. It would also attenuate incentives to build ever-more weapons to ensure an ability to get past the opponent's defences. The second agreement was a five-year interim agreement that placed a ceiling on the number of strategic missiles each side could deploy. These limitations, Luther Carter argued, offered a good example of the 'levelling-up-to-symmetry phenomenon', the practice of seeking 'strategic balance' by allowing one or both parties to scale *up* to a level of parity rather than down.¹⁰ Balancing the superpowers' capabilities, the interim deal on missiles was grounded in the same theory as the ABM Treaty: if neither party could go to war without risking pandemonium, major conflict would be improbable. The SALT agreements, William Walker concludes, formalised a 'managed system of nuclear deterrence' as a constitutive element of the global nuclear order.¹¹

The academic community's reception of SALT was mixed. According to Franklin Long, the results of the arms control negotiations had been disappointing: 'The world has, it is true, avoided nuclear war, but that is about all that can be said'.¹² According to Johan Galtung, the SALT agreement was 'neither a disarmament agreement, nor an agreement to maintain status quo, but probably the most significant armament agreement in world history'.¹³ Others were much more positive. In the view of Andrew Pierre, SALT constituted an important first step 'towards a safer and more stable world order'.¹⁴ Others argued that SALT provided necessary fuel for the gradual improvement in East-West relations that had been developing since the mid-1960s. In this perspective, SALT was 'a *sine qua non* for continued international security'.¹⁵

The reception of the SALT agreements in the diplomatic community was at best measured. The agreements may have contributed to stabilising the strategic balance. But from the perspective of many neutral and non-aligned states, comprising both liberal democracies and deeply authoritarian states, this was precisely the problem. A frozen nuclear order in which certain
states were free to practice nuclear deterrence while others were not was not compatible with long-term security or justice, they argued. Few non-aligned states appear to have even entertained the hypothesis advanced by Thomas Schelling and other proponents of managerial arms control that a non-nuclear world would be highly unstable and dangerous due to the risk of conventional war and nuclear rearmament.¹⁶

The neutral and non-aligned states' criticism of SALT fell into two broad categories, one substantive and one procedural. The chief substantive grievance was that, rather than washing away the distinction between 'haves' and 'have-nots' as foreseen under the NPT recognition order, SALT seemed to solidify the nuclear hierarchy legalised by the NPT. In the words of the historian Francis Gavin, SALT 'recognized the equality of the superpowers' as nuclear sovereigns.¹⁷ In other words, the superpower arms control process helped constitute the superpowers as such. But the corollary of this, of course, was that all others were relegated in status.¹⁸ According to Dimitris Bourantonis, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 'saw SALT as an institution that emerged to perpetuate the status group' and therefore as eroding the 'prestige and competence' of broader institutions such as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).¹⁹ The adoption of SALT, in this view, did not square with the recognition order established through the NPT negotiations, according to which all states 'should work together, over time, to dissolve the system of deterrence'.²⁰ In an article entitled 'The United Nations and the Freezing of the International Power Structure', the Brazilian statesman João de Araújo Castro argued that SALT reflected a deceitful attempt at creating a hegemonic 'directorate' in charge of an unequal world order.²¹

Many states welcomed the adoption of SALT I in the UNGA, but at least as many expressed considerable disappointment.²² A representative of Ecuador called out the alleged 'propaganda on the benefits of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks' and maintained that SALT did not in any way qualify as disarmament.²³ According to the Albanian delegation, SALT was 'designed only to strengthen the nuclear weapons monopoly'.²⁴ Punning on the SALT acronym, the Saudis charged that the agreement had only 'put salt on wounds'.²⁵ The superpowers simply 'have not wanted to relinquish any of their enormous accumulation of military power', argued the highly influential Swedish diplomat Alva Myrdal; Myrdal's many interventions would frequently be cited by other representatives in their official statements.²⁶ A large number of states were adamant that the nuclear-weapon states were not complying with their disarmament commitments under the NPT.²⁷ According to the Irish delegation, which was seen as an authority on NPT matters due to the fact that it was the Irish who had initiated the NPT process through the 1958 proposal for a nuclear non-dissemination treaty, the continuing arms race weakened the credibility of the nuclear-weapon states' commitment 'to the fulfilment of the obligation to disarmament'.²⁸ For the Indonesian delegation, 'the results of [... SALT] have in reality been illusory as far as their effect on disarmament is concerned'.²⁹
A grievance about procedure was also evident in the neutral and non-aligned states' critique. Alluding that they had been deprived of their roles as partners in the regime complex, many delegations complained that SALT had been negotiated behind closed doors, offering few opportunities for non-nuclear-weapon states to gain insight, let alone engage in the talks. At their meeting in Georgetown in 1972, the members of the NAM agreed that '[t]he destiny of the world [...] should not rest with a small syndicate of states'.³⁰ The NAM's choice of the word 'syndicate' – commonly associated with organised crime – was hardly accidental. The Nigerian delegation to the UNGA in 1972 'could not fail to note' that the importance of SALT 'would have been greater had the negotiations been carried out in a less restrictive forum'.³¹ 'Many countries like mine have not been able to participate', complained the representative of Uganda.³² The Albanians argued that the adoption of SALT was simply a means of 'deluding' the peoples of the world about the 'dangerous consequences flowing from this military collusion between the United States and the Soviet Union'.³³ According to the Mexican ambassador, Alfonso García Robles, 'the system which for 10 years has been available to the United Nations to deal with disarmament has proved itself obviously inadequate. This applies primarily to the question of allowing all peoples of the world to make a positive contribution to this matter which is of such interest to them'.³⁴ The non-nuclear-weapon states, in this view, experienced a denial of recognition as partners in the regime complex.

Despite the criticism, negotiations towards a second bilateral SALT agreement commenced quickly after the finalisation of SALT I. Continuing to resist almost any transparency – the Nixon administration believed strongly in the utility of secrecy, as did the authoritarian Soviet regime³⁵ – the superpowers fuelled the non-nuclear-weapon states' sense of marginalisation and suspicions of US-Soviet 'complicity' and 'collusion'.³⁶ In striking contrast to the conventional view of the Cold War as a struggle between East and West, in the context of multilateral nuclear disarmament talks, US and Soviet officials came across as 'old friends and comrades' keen to coordinate their actions to undermine the influence of disarmament-hungry non-nuclear-weapon states.³⁷ In Hedley Bull's words, SALT II was 'surrounded by humbug' and would likely have little impact on the level of armaments.³⁸ According to Beth Bloomfield, SALT had 'diminished the authority and prestige of the multilateral forum'.³⁹ The implication, of course, was that the authority and prestige of smaller states had declined. Even the superpowers' closest allies were excluded. According to the UK Labour peer Wayland Young,

[n]ot one of the present disarmament negotiations is of any great use or interest to the United Kingdom, to Europe or to the world at large. This is because the potentially useful ones are carried on in darkest secrecy, and those carried on openly are pointless.⁴⁰
The total number of stockpiled US nuclear warheads peaked in 1968 – the year of the NPT’s adoption. The Soviet arsenal, however, continued to grow into the 1970s. The UK arsenal, admittedly much smaller, was also growing. But arguably more important than these fluctuations, at any rate from the perspective of advocates of nuclear abolition, was the fact that all three nuclear-weapon states party to the NPT – as well as the nuclear-armed states that had declined to join the agreement – seemed firmly committed to security strategies anchored in nuclear deterrence and, by implication, the retention and periodic modernisation of their nuclear arsenals. New warhead designs were steadily introduced, and new generations of missiles, bombers, and submarines were periodically discussed, authorised, and funded by the relevant states’ legislatures. In short, nuclear weapons and deterrence had become firmly embedded in the major powers’ defence policies and political processes. While the first few decades of the nuclear age had seen influential authors and policymakers outlining bold visions for the governance of the nuclear world – including world government and total disarmament – by the 1970s the nuclear-political discourse on display within the major powers had grown narrow and managerial.⁴¹

The SALT II negotiations were concluded in 1979. The central agreement was a limit to the number of offensive delivery vehicles each side could deploy at any given time. Aimed at stabilising the ‘balance of terror’, SALT II was similar to its predecessor in aims and scope. But it came to naught. Not long after the conclusion of the negotiations, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support that country’s failing communist government, which had seized power in Kabul through a *coup d’état* the year before. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 shattered the détente that had developed between East and West since the mid-1960s. Declaring that the world ‘simply cannot stand by and permit the Soviet Union to commit this act with impunity’, the then US President Jimmy Carter, who otherwise appears to have been genuinely interested in reducing nuclear stockpiles and dangers, instructed the US Senate to defer action on SALT II ratification.⁴² The agreement never entered into force.

The neutral and non-aligned states clearly seemed to harbour more bitterness towards the three nuclear-weapon states party to the NPT than they did towards the two that had declined to join the agreement. Despite not participating in the Geneva Conference and refusing to ratify the NPT, China and France escaped much of the criticism. For Alva Myrdal, the fact that the three original nuclear possessors had been recognised as depositary states of the NPT was a particular source of annoyance.⁴³ This apparent double standard relates to the central argument of this study: While the three then-NPT nuclear-weapon states’ nuclear sovereignty had been legally endorsed, that of the other two had not, or at least not in the same way. While China and France ‘only’ enjoyed material superiority over the non-nuclear-weapon states, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union also enjoyed a form
of legal superiority that, in the eyes of many non-nuclear-weapon state officials, could only be justified through serious efforts at disarmament.

*The Geneva Conference vs the General Assembly*

The NPT negotiations consumed the Geneva Conference for more than three years. After the conclusion of the negotiations in 1968, most states were eager to move on to the issue of a comprehensive prohibition on nuclear testing (a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, CTBT). Such a treaty had been a central demand of non-nuclear-weapon states and peace groups since the 1950s. Both the 1963 Partial Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and NPT called explicitly for the negotiation of a CTBT in their preambles. The reference in the NPT's article VI to negotiate 'effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date', moreover, was widely understood as a reference to the negotiation of a CTBT. Providing a means of undercutting the nuclear-weapon states' ability to develop new types of nuclear explosives, a comprehensive test ban was seen as a crucial instrument for slowing and ultimately reversing the arms race. Many states were thus disappointed when, after the adoption of the NPT, the superpowers insisted on devoting the Conference's time to negotiations on a treaty banning the emplacement of nuclear devices on the seabed – another non-proliferation instrument. Although few states were opposed to such a prohibition per se, many thought other issues were a lot more pressing.⁴⁴

For many non-nuclear-weapon states, the superpowers' decision to ignore the majority's call for negotiations on a CTBT fell into an emerging pattern of superpower *diktat*.⁴⁵ In fact, the negotiation of the NPT had already brought out considerable dissatisfaction among non-nuclear-weapon states with how the Geneva Conference and wider 'disarmament machinery' operated.⁴⁶ Non-nuclear-weapon state officials grumbled that the great powers' domination of the existing institutions had undermined smaller powers' ability to contribute to disarmament negotiations in a meaningful way. Pressure for reform of the Geneva Conference came from both outside and inside the Conference.⁴⁷ From the outside, numerous states demanded a seat at the table. They saw the Conference as an exclusionary 'club' lacking in both representativeness ('input legitimacy') and transparency ('throughput legitimacy').⁴⁸ The 18 members of the Conference were in theory meant to act as stand-ins for their respective diplomatic blocs – Eastern, Western, and neutral/non-aligned – but many non-members felt insufficiently represented and engaged.

Aiming to appease the critics, the Soviet Union and the United States opened a bilateral dialogue on institutional reform in early 1969. The dialogue resulted in the renaming of the Conference from the 'Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament' (ENDC) to the 'Conference of the Committee on Disarmament' (CCD) and extension of membership to eight additional states (Argentina, Hungary, Japan, Mongolia, Morocco, the Netherlands,
Pakistan, and Yugoslavia). This expansion constituted the only significant
change to the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework in the years
between 1968 and 1975.⁴⁹ Although the expansion was popular among most
of the neutral and non-aligned states represented in Geneva, the expansion
seems, indirectly, to have impaired their collective clout. As the number of
neutral and non-aligned states grew from 8 to 12, it became more difficult
for those states to agree on a common position. From 1962 to 1968, all pro-
posals by neutral and non-aligned states (apart from individual statements)
had been expressed in the so-called 'memorandums of eight' that represented
the neutral and non-aligned states' unified view. But after the 1969 expan-
sion, such memorandums became rare.⁵⁰ Leading to an increase in the non-
aligned bloc's 'solution preference heterogeneity',⁵¹ the expansion appears to
have diminished the neutral and non-aligned states' ability to influence the
proceedings.⁵²

There were also pressures to reform the Conference's rules of procedure. After all, membership in the Geneva Conference was hardly synonymous with meaningful inclusion in the process of arms control and disarmament. On the contrary, what were widely seen as the most important talks – those on nuclear testing and strategic arms limitations – were carried out 'in darkest secrecy' between the superpowers. Spearheaded by India, Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia, a coordinated reform movement emerged in the early 1970s.⁵³ The reformers' most central demand was a discontinuation of the Conference's 'co-chair practice', which they reckoned conflicted with 'the basic principle of the sovereign equality of states'.⁵⁴ The co-chair was a special arrangement through which the Soviet Union and the United States permanently shared the function of chair, giving them a considerable degree of control over the Geneva Conference's business.

The co-chair arrangement had originally been proposed by India as a
means of forcing the superpowers to cooperate, but it soon became a sym-
bol of their alleged collusion and abuse of power.⁵⁵ For some, the Geneva
Conference was the ‘illegitimate child of the unlawful USA–USSR amours’.⁵⁶
Alva Myrdal held that it was high time for the non-aligned states to challenge
the institutional privileges of the ‘omnipotent’ superpowers.⁵⁷ Alfonso García
Robles thought the co-chair practice was ‘unheard of’ and not in keeping
with ‘sovereign equality’.⁵⁸ As argued in Chapter 1, such arguments could be
read to reflect a fundamental concern with ontological security: Formal pro-
cedural inequality challenges the idea of an international society of states that
mutually recognise each other’s identities as formally equal counterparts.

The relationship between the non-aligned-controlled UNGA and the
superpower-controlled Geneva Conference deteriorated over the course of
the first half of the 1970s. Formed in 1960, the Geneva Conference was for-
mally independent of the United Nations (UN). Yet, the Conference received
technical support from UN staff and was located inside the UN Palais des
Nations. The neutral and non-aligned states thus felt that the Conference
owed deference to the UNGA – the international community’s primary
deliberative body. The superpowers, for their part, were adamant that the Conference was formally independent, and that they, the co-chairs, had the right to ignore any instructions from external bodies. The neutral and non-aligned states' various demands – that the Conference should be formally obliged to report on its proceedings to the UNGA; that the UNGA should have the power to determine, or at least give input to, the Conference's priorities and agenda; and that negotiation mandates for the Geneva Conference should require a stamp of approval from the UNGA – were simply disregarded by the co-chairs.⁵⁹ The superpowers 'turned a deaf ear' to the calls of the neutral and non-aligned states.⁶⁰

The co-chairs' unwillingness to listen to the UNGA's increasingly desperate urgings meant that most of the world's non-nuclear-weapon states were effectively cut off from meaningful participation in the governance of the nuclear order. Speaking in 1972, the delegation of Uruguay objected to the UN being 'reduced to that of a simple spectator'.⁶¹ Iraq, for its part, complained that the superpowers' 'subtle procedural tactics' had reduced the UN to a 'toothless forum'.⁶² Brazil, which in contrast to Iraq and Uruguay had not joined the NPT, bemoaned that 'historical experience disavows any permanent differentiation of States into a small group endowed with, on the one hand, unparalleled power and, on the other, a second category of countries condemned to the role of spectators or *protégés* of power'.⁶³ The non-nuclear-weapon states, in other words, experienced an uncomfortable mismatch between their aspirations for sovereign equality and mutual recognition, on the one hand, and their marginalisation in the diplomatic process, on the other hand.

During the early 1970s, proposals for reform of the 'disarmament machinery' coalesced on the idea of convening a 'world disarmament conference' (WDC) – a major multilateral summit that would take up the mantle from the World Disarmament Conference hosted by the League of Nations between 1932 and 1937. The NAM had promoted the convening of a WDC since the mid-1960s, asserting that such a conference would be the optimal place to negotiate both institutional reforms and new measures of disarmament.⁶⁴ But the major powers were unwilling. Each declared that they would only support the convening of a WDC if all the others pledged their support first, passing the buck between them.⁶⁵ In a 1974 statement to the Geneva Conference on behalf of the Western bloc, the British delegation argued against reform of the Geneva Conference on pragmatic grounds:

> In a climate of belief in the sovereign equality of states, it may not be congenial to have to acknowledge that some countries are bigger and more powerful than others. But it is a political reality. And the present arrangements of our Committee reflect political realities.⁶⁶

The nuclear-weapon states and their allies argued that the unequal practices of the Geneva Conference had a functional justification: Disarmament could
only take place if the major powers felt in control of the proceedings. The neutral and non-aligned states would simply have to put up with being sidelined – too many cooks would spoil the broth. But this view was, unsurprisingly, unacceptable to a large number of states.

The growing pressure on the Geneva Conference coincided with a deepening rift between the developed and developing worlds across a range of international issue areas. The non-aligned states had originally presented themselves as ‘a golden bridge’ between East and West,⁶⁷ but as the Cold War proceeded, the structure of the international debate changed. Over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, the non-aligned bloc increasingly came to define itself not as an intermediary or bridge, but as a kind of watchdog or oppositional force to the colluding Cold War superpower blocs.⁶⁸ According to a commentator writing in the mid-1970s, the NAM had ‘been transformed into [...] a joint alignment against all the industrialised countries’; global politics had degenerated into a form of ‘class warfare’.⁶⁹ In more positive terminology, the NAM had come to cultivate a politics of collective resistance to what its members saw as neo-colonial international structures.⁷⁰ The most famous expression of this resistance was the effort to create a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO), launched by a coalition of 77 developing states (the so-called ‘Group of 77’ or ‘G77’) at the UNGA in 1974, but the developing states’ nuclear disarmament advocacy should also be seen in this light.⁷¹

The campaigns for economic justice, on the one hand, and for reform of the disarmament machinery, on the other, were both explicitly framed as demands for ‘democratisation’ and ‘decolonisation’ of international relations.⁷² The nuclear-weapon states’ lavish spending on the arms race was described as an ‘insult’ to ‘those peoples who lack urgent necessities’.⁷³ The politics of recognition thus entered the disarmament discourse in two ways: Not only was the nuclear-weapon states’ unwillingness to engage in transformative multilateral disarmament negotiations seen as a breach of contract and denial of recognition of the non-nuclear-weapon states as sovereign equals, the nuclear-weapon states’ perceived wastefulness was portrayed as disrespectful towards poor people worldwide. Lambasting the superpowers, non-aligned states frequently appealed to ‘public conscience’ and the interests of ‘humanity’. The struggle for disarmament was thus represented as an element of a broader struggle for global justice and emancipation. This was not only the case for post-colonial states. For example, Sweden’s disarmament ambassador, Alva Myrdal, often cast herself as an outsider representing ‘small nonaligned nations, the poor, women, and the grass-roots nuclear disarmament movement’.⁷⁴

Having concluded the Seabed Treaty in 1971, the Geneva Conference moved on to the issue of abolishing chemical and biological weapons. The non-nuclear-weapon states’ demand for a CTBT was thus again pushed back in the queue.⁷⁵ After an initial round of talks, the major powers found that they would be hard pressed to agree on anything related to chemical weapons, as
challenges related to dual-use and verification were deemed insurmountable for the moment. They thus separated biological weapons out to be addressed first. After bilateral US-Soviet negotiations and then relatively quick multi-lateral negotiations in Geneva, a draft convention on biological weapons was formally adopted on 10 April 1972.

After the conclusion of negotiations on biological weapons, the turn had finally come to the CTBT. Yet, as the negotiations commenced, it almost immediately became clear that the nuclear-weapon states were unlikely to come to an agreement.⁷⁶ When criticism against the superpowers' supposed collusion 'reached unacceptable proportions', Bourantonis notes, 'the United States and the Soviet Union resorted to their favourite diversionary tactic', introducing a new issue for negotiation. This time it was the issue of environmental manipulation in conflict.⁷⁷ The idea of an Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) came on the international agenda in 1974, and, in August 1975, the United States and Soviet Union tabled identical treaty drafts to the Geneva Conference. The Geneva negotiations lasted for about a year, resulting in a few clarifications to the draft. The Convention was adopted by the UNGA in December 1976.

There was a sense among non-nuclear-weapon state officials that the nuclear-weapon states were filibustering, introducing relatively insignificant topics for negotiation while continuing the arms race out in the real world.⁷⁸ 'Looking back at the diligent work by many delegates in Geneva and at the UN General Assembly', argued Myrdal, 'the verdict must be that the great powers have kept us preoccupied with trifles'.⁷⁹ However, the nuclear-weapon states' prioritisation of comparatively insignificant topics did not necessarily reflect a desire to thwart more sweeping disarmament progress. Some have understood the superpowers' prioritisation of 'easy' issues as an effort to build the mutual trust that would be necessary for more decisive steps towards disarmament in the future.⁸⁰ From the perspective of many neutral and non-aligned states, however, the superpowers' preoccupation with 'trifles' came across as a dishonest stalling tactic that was not in keeping with the NPT recognition order.⁸¹

While the superpowers were unwilling for the moment to negotiate a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing, they eventually agreed to more limited measures. In 1974, they adopted the Threshold Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (TTBT). Two years later, they adopted the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty (PNET), expanding the provisions of the TTBT to also cover 'peaceful' nuclear explosions (see below on the concept of peaceful nuclear explosions). The reception of the two treaties in the international community was almost universally negative.⁸² Allowing underground tests of devices ten times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, the treaties were seen as 'worse than no agreement at all'.⁸³ In contrast to the 1963 Partial Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which had been negotiated trilaterally between the two superpowers and the United Kingdom, the TTBT and PNET were negotiated bilaterally by Moscow and Washington. UK officials were not overly pleased with this.
John Edmonds, a senior UK official who would go on to lead subsequent British test-ban delegations, later described the outcome of the superpowers’ bilateral talks as ‘negative’, maintaining that ‘their prohibition of tests yielding 150 kt imposed no serious limitation on further nuclear weapons development by the two superpowers’.⁸⁴ The US and Canadian branches of the Pugwash Conferences labelled the TTBT a ‘mockery’.⁸⁵ Alva Myrdal called it a ‘disgraceful conspiracy’ designed to present the public with an image of restraint when in reality it ‘strangles all attempts to reach international agreements on a total ban’.⁸⁶ The Thai delegation to the UNGA claimed in 1974 that the TTBT was a ‘backward step which appears to legitimizethe very underground tests we want to suspend’.⁸⁷ The Austrians, for their part, said they:

> would consider it as absolutely essential that the nuclear-weapon States rapidly arrive at an agreement on the cessation of all nuclear weapon tests [...]. This would be at least a small step nuclear-weapon-States could take in the direction of eliminating some of the more glaringly discriminatory features of the non-proliferation Treaty. The 150-kiloton threshold agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States cannot in itself be regarded as coming anywhere near that goal.⁸⁸

As explicitly emphasised by Austria, it was vital for many non-nuclear-weapon states that the ‘discriminatory features’ of the existing nuclear order be progressively dismantled. Indeed, as I argued above, the understanding that the nuclear-weapon states would gradually deconstruct the nuclear hierarchy was an integral part of the recognition order on which the NPT was based. SALT and the threshold treaties, however, only seemed to codify the primacy of the nuclear-weapon states.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the function of the NPT’s article VI was not just or even primarily to solve the non-nuclear-weapon states’ security dilemma vis-à-vis the nuclear-weapon states. Important was also the ability of article VI to solve the non-nuclear-weapon states’ ‘recognition dilemma’, i.e., to counteract the NPT’s apparent breach of the principle of sovereign equality. But already by the mid-1970s, the ability of article VI to solve this dilemma looked questionable. Nuclear weapons remained symbols of power and prestige. Abolition looked distant. In a candid 1973 statement, the Swedish UNGA delegation explicitly highlighted the ‘status dimension’ of disarmament:

> A particular problem lies in the fact that no attempt at all has been made to reduce the prestige of nuclear weapons in international relations. As I have stated before in the CCD [the Geneva Conference], the political status value attached to the possession of these weapons is one main reason for the resentment felt by several non-nuclear-weapon states against nuclear-weapon states for refusing to give up something themselves which they try to keep others from acquiring.⁸⁹
For Sweden and other non-nuclear-weapon states, the deepening permanence of the nuclear hierarchy that had been codified by the NPT threatened not only long-term international security but also the non-nuclear-weapon states’ identities as sovereign equals. Moreover, the lasting prestige value of nuclear weapons – arguably boosted by the adoption of the NPT – threatened non-proliferation and disarmament alike.

## India's 'Peaceful' Nuclear Explosion

A momentous development for the regime complex took place in 1974. On 18 May, India became the world's sixth state to detonate a nuclear explosive device. The test had been a 'peaceful nuclear explosion', said Indian officials, but the blast nevertheless dealt a political shock to the international community.⁹⁰ The concept of peaceful nuclear explosions – the use of nuclear devices for civil engineering purposes such as the fashioning of dams and canals – had enjoyed some acceptance in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the NPT obliged the nuclear-weapon states to help non-nuclear-weapon states carry out such explosions should they demand them. However, the concept of peaceful nuclear explosions had fallen out of fashion as more information about the harmful environmental and public health consequences of nuclear detonations became available.

The Indian explosion of 1974 was a signal. India never actually proceeded to use nuclear explosions for civilian purposes. And according to George Perkovich, the test was not primarily motivated by security calculations either – India's security environment 'had not worsened' since 1964 (when China became a nuclear power). For Perkovich, the test was motivated primarily by concerns about international reputation and 'prowess'.⁹¹ Domestically, the test led to a significant boost in the approval ratings of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.⁹² The Indian academic M.S. Rajan argued that the Indian test had 'challenged the privileged position in the international system of the Big Five as permanent members of the Security Council and as nuclear-weapons powers', making it necessary to amend the NPT so as to 'accord a certain privileged status' to new nuclear powers.⁹³ The Indian government highlighted its 'sovereign equality' and made it clear that India would 'not accept any proposition which seeks to limit the right to conduct peaceful nuclear explosions to five states'.⁹⁴ It seems clear that concerns with recognition as a major power – equity with the 'Big Five' – was a major driver of the decision to test. The timing of the test is particularly interesting. In fact, the Indians seem to have had the capability to conduct nuclear tests for several years,⁹⁵ but it was only by the mid-1970s, when the credibility of the nuclear-weapon states' disarmament pledges had begun to seriously erode, that the Indians announced their nuclear capability to the world.⁹⁶

The Indian explosion met mixed reactions from other states. Many states were critical, seeing the test as a challenge to the norm of non-proliferation. Others expressed understanding. While urging India to place its nuclear
activities under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Swedish officials held that the superpowers ‘will have to take their share of responsibility for developments in this field as long as they do not show convincingly their will to implement article VI’.⁹⁷ A representative of Sri Lanka argued that it was ‘easy to sympathize’ with the Indians.⁹⁸ Regionally, the test created a recognition dilemma for India’s neighbour, Pakistan, whose foreign policy elite now felt compelled to match India. For Pakistan, Richard Betts argued, ‘national status and recognition are part of its security problem’.⁹⁹

## Crossroads at the First NPT Review Conference

The text of the NPT was not specific about the formalities of the review conference to be held five years after the agreement’s entry into force. Over the course of 1973, a conflict emerged between the NPT depositary states (the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union) and a group of neutral and non-aligned states led by Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia over the ‘ownership’ of the NPT review process. While the nuclear-weapon states were keen, in the words of the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Department at the UK Foreign Office, to create a ‘manageable’ process that could be ‘controlled by the depository powers without unduly alienating significant Non-Nuclear Weapon States such as Sweden and Mexico’, the latter wanted to subordinate the review process to the UNGA.¹⁰⁰ As noted above, influential figures in the neutral and non-aligned caucus had expressed regret that they had agreed to make the NPT nuclear-weapon states depositaries in the first place.¹⁰¹ As ever, the principle at stake was the perceived ‘balance of mutual responsibilities and obligations’ between nuclear ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.¹⁰² As the Swedish UNGA delegation put it in 1973: If the organisation of the review process is left to the nuclear-weapon states, ‘we risk strengthening the discriminatory feature inherent in the non-proliferation Treaty’.¹⁰³

As a compromise, the United Kingdom suggested that the three depositary states could organise the review conference in partnership with Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. But the superpowers were dismissive of this idea; US officials argued that the non-aligned states should not be awarded status as ‘senior partners’.¹⁰⁴ The Brits were thus compelled, as a telegram from London to Washington put it, ‘tactfully to smooth over hurt feelings’ among the neutral and non-aligned.¹⁰⁵ In the end, the review process (including three brief preparatory meetings) was set up through a 1973 UNGA resolution tabled by the United States and the Soviet Union. Participation in the preparatory meetings would be restricted to states represented on the IAEA Board of Governors and/or members of the Geneva Conference.¹⁰⁶ The disagreements leading up to the convening of the review conference offer an interesting window into the politics of recognition in international politics. It seems that, for the practitioners involved, ideas about standing, entitlements, and ‘hurt feelings’ provided important pieces of background knowledge. Recognition
theory formed part of the diplomatic ‘practical reason’ or *phronesis*.¹⁰⁷ The superpowers were wary of elevating supposed lesser states to the role of ‘senior partners’.

Two issues were particularly divisive in the preparatory process. The first was the matter of civil society participation. The non-aligned bloc suggested that the review conference should be open to all UN-registered civil society organisations and that representatives of these organisations should be allowed to speak. This was a radical suggestion at the time – few diplomatic arenas had opened for meaningful participation by non-governmental actors. The nuclear-weapon states and some of their allies forcefully rejected the proposal. Between the second and third preparatory committee meetings, the depositaries made intensive efforts to get the neutral and non-aligned states to back down.¹⁰⁸ The compromise outcome was that only state parties and signatories would be allowed to participate actively, but that plenary sessions and sessions of the ‘main committees’ would be open to the public. Meetings of the ‘sub-committees’, where the nitty-gritty would be discussed, would be closed. A second divisive issue during the preparatory process was the question of how the review conference should make decisions. While most non-aligned states argued that decisions should be reached by majority voting – that way the numerically superior neutral and non-aligned caucus could control the outcome – the depositaries insisted on consensus. The outcome, proposed by the Canadian government, was that voting could be used (two-thirds qualified majority), but only after a two-day interim period during which the delegations were to make ‘every effort’ to reach consensus.¹⁰⁹ This meant that, for all intents and purposes, the rule of consensus would reign. After all, any draft outcome would likely be finalised at too late a stage for the voting option’s notice period to run its course before the end of the conference.

Although the review conference was tasked with assessing the implementation of all the treaty’s provisions, ‘article VI issues’ had taken most of the attention in the run-up to the Conference.¹¹⁰ Sverre Lodgaard, a Norwegian nuclear policy expert and later director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), had argued in advance of the conference that the event offered an opportunity

to manifest views on the many fundamental issues involved, and to negotiate solutions to them. It should avoid being trapped into extensive occupation with technicalities. The strengthening of the NPT has to go primarily through accords on main political issues: Technical clarifications and agreements would eventually have to follow later.¹¹¹

In the years and months ahead of the review conference, some non-nuclear-weapon states had stipulated ‘red lines’ for what should be expected of the nuclear-weapon states. Iran, for example, had declared in 1971 that 1975 was an absolute ‘deadline’ for the adoption of a CTBT.¹¹² Mexico had stated that the credibility of article VI depended on the nuclear-weapon states’
giving ‘convincing proof’ at the review conference ‘that they have the neces-
sary political will to ensure that their promises do not remain a dead letter’.¹¹³
Sweden similarly called for ‘concrete evidence’ of the nuclear-weapon states’
‘serious intention to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective and early
measures on disarmament’.¹¹⁴ The NPT was, as the Australians put it, at ‘a
historic cross-roads’.¹¹⁵ Of course, these statements had implications for the
states that uttered them. After all, they would logically have to do something
were the red lines crossed. They were, in other words, setting up a commit-
ment trap.

The opening statements at the review conference revealed a large gulf
between the nuclear-weapon states and many non-nuclear-weapon states
with respect to how they judged the disarmament record. The Soviet Union,
for example, strongly denied that the nuclear-weapon states were not ful-
filling their obligations under article VI, claiming that ‘appreciable progress
had been made’.¹¹⁶ Many non-nuclear-weapon states, however, pointed
out that the number of nuclear weapons in the world had in fact increased
since the NPT’s adoption; they claimed that the nuclear-weapon states had
‘failed to honour’ their disarmament commitments.¹¹⁷ In the absence of Alva
Myrdal, who had just retired, the dominant figure among the neutral and
non-aligned was Mexico’s Alfonso García Robles.¹¹⁸ In the words of William
Epstein, Robles was the one to lead ‘the revolt against the hegemony of
the superpowers’.¹¹⁹ From the point of view of disarmament advocates, the
non-nuclear-weapon states were struggling against what they viewed as the
nuclear-weapon states’ subversion of the regime complex’ disarmament goal.

Under a rationalist approach to the study of international affairs, one
might expect the neutral and non-aligned states to focus their advocacy on
limited arms control goals achievable in the short term, such as improving the
non-proliferation architecture and/or extracting binding security assurances
from the nuclear-weapon states. And indeed, the issue of security assurances
was raised by several non-aligned states. By the time of the first review con-
ference, only a small subset of the non-aligned bloc had been offered binding
assurances from the nuclear-weapon states not to be attacked with nuclear
weapons. Those security assurances had been offered through the nuclear-
weapon states’ ratification of Protocol II to the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, the
treaty establishing Latin America and the Caribbean as a nuclear-weapon-
free zone. (Four of the five nuclear-weapon states had ratified Tlatelolco
before the 1975 review conference (China and France, admittedly, had not
yet joined the NPT.) The Soviet Union ratified in 1979.) But as had been
the case during the NPT negotiations, most neutral and non-aligned states,
and indeed several aligned non-nuclear-weapon states, seemed more inter-
ested in the general progress towards nuclear disarmament than more lim-
ited measures such as security assurances. While the summary records of the
review conference contain 46 references to ‘security assurance(s)’ and ‘secu-
rity guarantee(s)’, ‘disarm’ and ‘disarmament’ appear 310 times. ‘Article VI’
appears 164 times.¹²⁰
Led by Mexico, groups of non-aligned states submitted three ‘draft additional protocols’ to the NPT.¹²¹ While the draft ‘Additional Protocol III’ did indeed contain security assurances for non-nuclear-weapon states – the nuclear-weapon states would pledge to refrain from ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states (art. 1) and to aid any non-nuclear-weapon state that had ‘become victim to an attack with nuclear weapons’ (art. 2)¹²² – protocols I and II sought to establish a formal link between specific disarmament actions by the nuclear-weapon states and accessions to the treaty by non-nuclear-weapon states.¹²³ For example, draft Protocol II on nuclear testing proposed that the nuclear-weapon states should be obliged to institute ten-year moratoria on underground nuclear testing once the number of parties to the NPT reached 100 (the treaty had 91 parties by the time of the review conference) and that these moratoria should be extended by another three years for every five accessions on top of the first 100.

The neutral and non-aligned states were met with stark opposition from the superpowers. While the United Kingdom ostensibly attempted to appease the non-nuclear-weapon states by stressing that the NPT’s parties were ‘partners’ and that the treaty ‘had already proved its success’,¹²⁴ the superpowers, as one delegate recalled, ‘steadfastly refused to make even minor gestures’, and, in effect, told the non-aligned states that nuclear disarmament issues ‘were bilateral matters to be settled between the United States and the Soviet Union’.¹²⁵ The nuclear-weapon states’ primary negotiating tactic – agreed upon at a meeting in London prior to the review conference – was to divert discussions away from ‘political questions’ in favour of ‘technical’ ones.¹²⁶ To many non-nuclear-weapon state officials, the nuclear-weapon states’ ‘stone-walling approach’ came across as deeply irresponsible and even disrespectful.¹²⁷ Yet, the nuclear-weapon states’ rhetoric was not the only thing that caused a stir at the review conference. One of the most significant events that took place during the conference did not occur in Geneva, but underground in Nevada. Mid-conference, in what some read as a deliberate attempt at ‘humiliating’ the non-nuclear-weapon states, the United States exploded a 380-kiloton nuclear bomb (about 25 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb and more than twice the limit of the TTBT, which had not been brought into force) at one of its test sites.¹²⁸

The review conference saw the parties reaching agreement on many questions relating to non-proliferation and the civilian uses of nuclear technology. But the talks on disarmament went nowhere. A particularly divisive issue was the relation between disarmament and non-proliferation. While a large number of neutral and non-aligned states held that non-proliferation was, or at least should be, dependent on disarmament,¹²⁹ the nuclear-weapon states and many of their allies argued that ‘the one should not be made a *sine qua non* condition of the success of the other’.¹³⁰ The Soviet Union’s delinquation asserted that the attempt to tie non-proliferation and disarmament ‘into a single bundle’ could only ‘create further barriers in our talks’. The NPT, the Soviets alluded, was a non-proliferation treaty, not an instrument
of disarmament.¹³¹ Arguing along similar lines, the US delegation contended that ‘members should be guided not by any abstract concept concerning a balance of obligations under the Treaty’.¹³² Such arguments might be persuasive under a rationalist framework. After all, improvements to the non-proliferation architecture – even if not coupled with specific disarmament steps – would constitute Pareto efficient improvements of the regime complex for all states committed to non-proliferation. But a large number of states – including states that were seemingly fully committed not to develop nuclear weapons – were concerned precisely about the ‘abstract concept concerning the balance of obligations’ referred to by the Americans.

Virtually all the scholarly accounts of the review conference note the superpowers' 'negative', 'dismissive', or 'arrogant' attitude as a critical factor in the failure of the Conference to reach a negotiated agreement.¹³³ According to William Epstein, the 'actions of the two superpowers seemed almost deliberately calculated to anger the third-world countries'.¹³⁴ It was 'almost incredible' that the nuclear-weapon states 'could have been so insensitive to the legitimate demands of the third-world countries that they live up to their treaty obligations'. The nuclear-weapon states' behaviour came across 'not merely as discriminatory but as a form of nuclear neo-colonialism'.¹³⁵ In the vocabulary of this study, the nuclear-weapon states' behaviour provided a clear denial of recognition of the non-nuclear-weapon states in their desired roles as equal and audible partners in the regime complex.

The review conference broke down without a negotiated final declaration. By the standards of diplomatic rhetoric, the closing statement of the Group of 77 developing nations was scolding; the group 'felt a deep sense of disappointment and disillusionment at the deliberations of the Conference. Where commitment had been called for, members had been served with complete indifference'.¹³⁶ Individual non-nuclear-weapon states also made strong statements. The Romanian delegation complained that the review conference had 'failed to treat on an equal basis all the views expressed by all the sovereign States participating in it'.¹³⁷ Yugoslavia's representative argued that:

> while the non-nuclear-weapon States had fulfilled their obligations under the Treaty in every respect, the nuclear-weapon States had failed to do so. [...] The non-nuclear-weapon States [...] demanded a programme of measures that would strengthen and consolidate the Treaty and enhance equality among nuclear and non-nuclear-weapon States as regards their rights and duties. [...] But the Conference had failed to reach consensus [...] The Yugoslav Government, having regard to the above-mentioned facts, found itself obliged to re-examine its attitude towards the Treaty and to draw the corresponding conclusions.¹³⁸

Yugoslavia, in other words, threatened to withdraw from the NPT over the nuclear-weapon states' apparent unwillingness to advance disarmament
and, by implication, enhance equality between nuclear and non-nuclear-weapon states. Nigeria made a similar threat.¹³⁹ As suggested in the conceptual framework, this is precisely the type of behaviour that would be expected to occur when the legitimacy of the regime dwindles. While a crisis of legitimacy had probably occurred in the eyes of the Indian leadership already the year before, the 1975 NPT review conference marked the advent of a wider crisis.

Since no negotiated text had been concluded, the president of the conference, the Swedish diplomat Inga Thorsson, drafted what was essentially a brief summary of the discussions. This summary was then incorporated into a final document accounting for the proceedings. The G77 accepted this arrangement on the condition of having its critical 'interpretative statement' and the three Mexican-drafted protocols annexed to the declaration. In later histories of multilateral nuclear diplomacy, it has sometimes been claimed, erroneously, that the 1975 review conference succeeded in producing a 'consensus outcome'. But, as others have also pointed out, it did not.¹⁴⁰ The 1975 final document contains a summary of discussions annexed with critical interpretative statements, not a negotiated final declaration.

The review conference was widely seen as a disaster for the disarmament cause. 'No single development or event in recent years brought out with such clarity the failure of the arms control accords as the debate at the 1975 NPT review conference', one analyst concluded.¹⁴¹ The Swiss government claimed that there was an urgent need to redress the 'imbalance of rights and obligations' between nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states so as to make the regime complex 'consistent with the principle of the sovereign equality of states'.¹⁴² Alva Myrdal proclaimed article VI 'dead'.¹⁴³ Its only hope of resurrection, she believed, resided in the prospect of the neutral and non-aligned states taking action on their own: 'Up to this very moment we nonaligned powers have been too submissive', she argued.¹⁴⁴ The non-aligned states 'should exert more pressure and be less willing than hitherto to endorse partial, discriminatory, and ineffective treaties'.¹⁴⁵ Myrdal's language brings out the non-nuclear-weapon states' 'recognition dilemma' clearly: An actor denied recognition can either accept that she is not who she wishes to be – a sovereign equal – or she can fight to prove that she is.¹⁴⁶ Overwhelmingly, the non-nuclear-weapon states opted for the second alternative. Over the next few years, non-nuclear-weapon states broke decisively with the established practices and institutions of the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework.

Would the wave of institutional contestation and change that took place from 1975 to 1978 have taken place if the nuclear-weapon states had engaged constructively with the non-nuclear-weapon states at the review conference in 1975? It seems highly likely that a more positive attitude by the nuclear-weapon states in 1975, perhaps agreeing to watered-down versions of the draft additional protocols introduced by the non-aligned states, would have reduced the demand for regime change in the years that followed. The review conference was a crossroads – and the path chosen by the nuclear-weapon
states was decidedly not the one favoured by the majority of the neutral and non-aligned states.

## Contestation and Reform of the Disarmament Machinery

### *A First Crisis of Legitimacy*

The 1968 adoption of the NPT had established a ‘recognition order’ acceptable to the majority of non-nuclear-weapon states. But the order could not be maintained. Already by the mid-1970s, the multilateral disarmament process envisioned by many of the treaty’s negotiators looked a shambles, and the nuclear regime complex was plunged into a crisis of legitimacy. The main symptom of this crisis was the wave of institutional contestation and change described below. But the occurrence of a crisis of legitimacy can be corroborated also by other indicators. First, as detailed above and below, the rhetoric of the non-nuclear-weapon states party to the NPT grew increasingly heated. By the mid-1970s, non-aligned states were describing the regime as ‘unacceptable’ and the behaviour of the nuclear-weapon states as ‘a serious international breach of faith’.¹⁴⁷

Second, dissatisfied non-nuclear powers used diplomatic signals to broadcast their deep displeasure with the status quo. The 1975 NPT review conference failed to reach consensus on a substantive final document; unwilling to acquiesce to what they saw as too weak language on disarmament, the non-aligned states insisted on having an interpretative statement and draft additional protocols annexed to the final declaration. India’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear explosion has also been interpreted as a diplomatic signal: if the ‘haves’ did not embark on a serious process of disarmament, the ‘have-nots’ would not support the non-proliferation endeavour.¹⁴⁸

Third, resistance to additional non-proliferation measures appears to have increased. Two attempts at tightening the non-proliferation framework were made over the second half of the 1970s. Firstly, between 1972 and 1978, overlapping groups of nuclear ‘supplier states’ (the Zangger Committee and the London Nuclear Suppliers Group) developed export guidelines for trade in nuclear materials and technology. Secondly, in 1977, US President Jimmy Carter proposed to restrict non-nuclear-weapon states’ access to plutonium. But although all committed parties to the NPT would have an interest in minimising the potential for horizontal proliferation, both initiatives were met with intense hostility from a large number of non-nuclear-weapon states.¹⁴⁹

Fourth, tolerance for non-compliance with non-proliferation norms grew within the non-nuclear-weapon state caucus. The United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States were eager to put pressure on India to abandon its nuclear programme and join the NPT. But many neutral and non-aligned states offered tacit support for India’s stance, blaming the nuclear-weapon states for their lack of commitment to disarmament. Finally, the mid-1970s saw the norm of non-proliferation explicitly questioned
by non-nuclear-weapon states party to the NPT. In 1975, Yugoslavia and
Nigeria both threatened to exit the NPT.

*The Neutral and Non-Aligned States Regroup – and Progress on the Test-Ban Issue*

The period from 1975 to 1978 saw a range of institutional adaptations to
the multilateral nuclear disarmament architecture. A first change, provided
for in the Geneva Conference's report to the UNGA at the end 1975, came
with the extension of Geneva Conference membership to East Germany, West
Germany, Iran, Peru, and Zaire.¹⁵⁰ Then, at the 1975/76 UNGA session, the
neutral and non-aligned states pushed through a resolution mandating the
establishment of an ad hoc committee composed of all UN member states to
discuss the 'role of the UN' in the field of disarmament. Meeting in 1976, the
committee produced a report that recommended a number of reforms; obliged
the Geneva Conference to provide more documentation of its work to the
UNGA; urged a resurrection of the UN Disarmament Commission (a deliber-
ative forum that had been dormant for decades); and called for a restructuring
and expansion of the administrative UN Secretariat for Disarmament.¹⁵¹ Also
in 1976, demands for progress on the test-ban issue resulted in the Geneva
Conference establishing, on the basis of a Swedish proposal, a group of sci-
entific experts to discuss seismic verification techniques for a future CTBT.
A year later, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union
opened trilateral test-ban talks in Geneva. According to Or Rabinowitz,
Carter was the first US president since Kennedy who was 'seriously intent' on
reaching a comprehensive test ban. The negotiations were difficult, however.
As had been the case previously, the main obstacle was a disagreement over
on-site inspections, a measure the Soviet government was loath to accept.¹⁵²

At the 1975 NAM conference in Lima, convened three months after the
NPT review conference, the Yugoslav delegation proposed the convening of
a UN 'special session' on disarmament. Such a session, the Yugoslav delega-
tion suggested, would be an ideal occasion to make the disarmament machin-
ery more inclusive. As discussed above, Yugoslavia had departed the NPT
review conference with a warning that it would 're-examine its attitude' to
the treaty.¹⁵³ But rather than withdrawing from the NPT, Yugoslavia made
an energetic push to recalibrate the nuclear regime complex through insti-
tutional reform.¹⁵⁴ Yugoslavia's proposal was supported by several influen-
tial neutral and non-aligned states, including Argentina, Egypt, Mexico, and
Sweden.¹⁵⁵ At a NAM conference in Colombo in 1976, the NAM collectively
decided to 'request the holding of a special session of the General Assembly
as early as possible and not later than 1978'.¹⁵⁶ A resolution convening the
session, co-sponsored by 68 non-nuclear-weapon states (mostly non-aligned
states), was duly tabled at the UNGA later that year. Although the superpow-
ers disagreed with the resolution's content – the United Kingdom was, as
usual, a bit more forthcoming¹⁵⁷ – they realised that it could not be stopped
and agreed to its adoption without a vote.¹⁵⁸ In a bilateral meeting with US counterparts, a Yugoslav official had explained that his government ‘wished the special session to “dramatize” the lack of progress in disarmament’.¹⁵⁹ In this view, the session had a clear symbolic or communicative function as well as the more immediate, practical one of reforming the so-called disarmament machinery.

According to Abraham Bargman, the convening of the first special session on disarmament (UNSSOD-I) signalled that, ‘after a long period of acquiescence’, the non-aligned states were now eager ‘to subject the disarmament policies of the superpowers to public and critical scrutiny’.¹⁶⁰ The conference was seen by many non-aligned states as a sort of rematch of the NPT review conference.¹⁶¹ The session would provide an arena for the neutral and non-aligned states to launch proposals for institutional reforms and hold the nuclear-weapon states’ representatives’ feet to the fire on disarmament generally and article VI specifically. The matter of the disarmament framework’s functionality, however, seemed arguably to be of secondary interest. As the analyst Unto Vesa points out, the reformers seemed more interested in ‘input’ than ‘output’. One would assume, he argues, ‘that the basic criterion in any appraisal of the fora for disarmament negotiations would be the expected outcome, i.e., to what degree one framework or another enhances progress towards disarmament’, but there was ‘little evidence to suggest that progress in arms control and disarmament could have been more substantial under a different kind of machinery’. However, ‘for many countries efficiency is not the only criterion in this respect; the equality of states and “democratisation of international relations” gets a prominent place as well’.¹⁶²

The onset of the first wave of institutional contestation and change in the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework took place during the period known as détente. Taking place from the mid-1960s to 1979, détente designates the relative improvement in East–West relations during the middle of the Cold War.¹⁶³ One might, from a realist perspective, contend that the expansion of the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework between 1975 and 1978 should be understood as an expression of the broader, geopolitical shifts associated with détente. But there are several problems with such a reading. First, the entirety of the period under consideration in this chapter – which includes periods of both institutional stasis and change – took place during détente. Détente alone is thus at best one of more conditions needed for institutional adaptation to occur. Second, the expansion of the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework was not enacted by the Eastern and Western blocs – to which détente applies – but by neutral and non-aligned states frustrated by the nuclear-weapon states’ alleged collusion and non-compliance with article VI. The major powers could, of course, have done more to dissuade the non-nuclear-weapon states from pursuing institutional reforms, but they were reluctant to do so as blocking institutional adaptation might fuel the non-nuclear-weapon states’ dissatisfaction with the status quo and thus increase the stress on the NPT even further. If anything, détente was
significant in that it exacerbated the perception among non-nuclear-weapon
states that the major powers were cooperating to maintain their privileges.
A third and more basic problem with using détente to explain institutional
developments in arms control and disarmament arises from a problem of
endogeneity: Since historians have used precisely the occurrence of arms con-
trol and disarmament talks to define the period of détente, there is a danger
of conflating *explanandum* and *explanans*.¹⁶⁴

Reform at the Special Session on Disarmament

With Yugoslavia's Lazar Mojsov serving as president of the conference, the first UN special session on disarmament opened on 23 May 1978. The conference, which had been preceded by three preparatory meetings over the course of 1977, would last six weeks. All UN member states sent delegations. Most were represented at a high political level (heads of state or government or ministers for foreign affairs). Many states and groups of states submitted elaborate working papers. Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Peru, Yugoslavia, and Zaire submitted a 'Declaration on Disarmament', in which they postulated that the arms race, 'which is both the cause and result of great Power rivalry, impedes the realization of the objectives of the United Nations Charter, especially those relating to the respect for sovereignty'. Taking aim directly at the arms control paradigm, the group claimed that the effort to 'maintain a strategic balance' provided the 'greatest stimulus to the global arms race'. 'The increase in weapons, especially nuclear ones, far from helping to strengthen international security, weakens and decreases it'.¹⁶⁵

The conference itself expanded the regime complex' *agentes*. For the first time, NGOs and research institutes were included as active participants in a central process of the complex. As discussed above, inviting NGOs to sit in on meetings and address the floor had been a preference of some of the neutral and non-aligned states in the process leading up to the NPT review conference in 1975, but their effort to create an inclusive forum for civil society actors was blocked by the superpowers. In the preparatory process for the special session, however, the neutral and non-aligned states refused to budge.¹⁶⁶ UNSSOD-I thus became a central rallying point for both national and international NGOs promoting nuclear disarmament. According to the historian Lawrence Wittner, it was UNSSOD-I that for the first time truly enabled disparate national civil society campaigns to coordinate and link up, fostering the rise of the 'global anti-nuclear movement'.¹⁶⁷ The burgeoning integration of civil society into the regime complex constituted one of the many institutional adaptations made during the second half of the 1970s.

On 30 June 1978, UNSSOD-I adopted a final document that provided for sweeping reforms of the UN disarmament machinery. First, UNSSOD-I (re-) created the UN Disarmament Commission. A UN Disarmament Commission had existed for a brief period in the 1950s but had not been in use since then. The Commission was now resurrected and given a new mandate. Open to all
members of the UN, it would complement the UNGA as a ‘deliberative forum’ for disarmament. Second, the UNGA First Committee was restructured. Having served as a deliberative forum for all kinds of international security questions – the First Committee had spent much of its allotted time in the 1970s on ‘the question of Cyprus’, ‘the question of Palestine’ etc. – the First Committee would now be exclusively devoted to disarmament and attendant security issues. Third, UNSSOD-I provided for the establishment of a UN Institute for Disarmament Research, an autonomous research establishment under the United Nations umbrella.¹⁶⁸ Fourth and perhaps most significantly, UNSSOD-I disbanded the CCD and replaced it with a new forum called the Committee on Disarmament (renamed the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in 1984). This updated version of the Geneva Conference – which would serve as a forum for negotiating new treaties – would be made up of the 31 members of the CCD plus an additional nine states. After multilateral consultations, Algeria, Australia, Belgium, China, Cuba, Indonesia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela were recognised as new members. The new forum would remain formally detached from the UN but had to report to and consider the recommendations made by the UNGA. Unless otherwise decided, plenary meetings would be open to the public (to listen in but not speak).¹⁶⁹ Changing the disarmament framework’s *modus*, the much-criticised co-chair system was abolished in favour of an egalitarian rotation formula whereby the duties and privileges of the chair would rotate alphabetically among all members. The new system, the non-aligned states exulted, would ‘reflect the basic principle of the sovereign equality of states’.¹⁷⁰ Finally, UNSSOD-I decided to carry on with further special sessions on disarmament in the future. UNSSOD-I would thus not be a stand-alone event but instead the beginning of a new institutional track.

Regime effectiveness, i.e., a regime's ability to produce the results it was formally established to produce, is invariably seen as a crucial variable for explaining institutional adaptation.¹⁷¹ On the face of it, this fits the first wave of expansion in the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework. Officially, the reforms of 1975–1978 were all justified as measures to facilitate disarmament. But effectiveness was hardly the reformers' only or even primary aim. Indeed, it could have been predicted in advance that some of the reforms would have a negative effect on the regime's effectiveness. The reform and expansion of the Geneva Conference, for example, would obviously make the diplomatic process in that forum more cumbersome while at the same time increasing the number of veto players; the rule of consensus was, after all, retained.¹⁷² The damaging effects of expansion had in fact been pointed out already after the limited increase in membership in 1969.¹⁷³ But this did not appear to dampen many non-nuclear-weapon states' desire for a further widening of the forum's membership.¹⁷⁴

The number of nuclear weapons in existence throughout the world continued to grow for almost another decade after the first wave of institutional expansion – a result, primarily, of the expansion of the Soviet
nuclear complex. Bourantonis argues straightforwardly that the reforms damaged any potential for ‘serious negotiations’ on nuclear disarmament through the multilateral disarmament machinery.¹⁷⁵ However, as discussed above, for many countries efficiency was not the only criterion for judging the institutional architecture for disarmament. Concerns with equality and democratisation were also central to the process.¹⁷⁶ And while the non-aligned states’ attempts at bolstering the regime’s effectiveness were mostly unsuccessful – or arguably had a negative effect – their quest for ‘democratising’ the regime was triumphant, at least in a formal sense. The reforms bolstered the non-nuclear-weapon states’ nominal standing within the regime complex.

## Codifying the NPT Bargain, Relegitimising the Regime

As discussed in Chapter 1, the legitimacy of the nuclear regime complex depended on both substantive and procedural elements. First, with respect to the substance, non-nuclear powers demanded assurances that the nuclear powers were serious about nuclear disarmament and, by extension, about dismantling the hierarchy codified by the NPT. Second, with respect to the procedural element, non-nuclear powers demanded a meaningful seat at the table. The following explores how these two elements of justice were temporarily satisfied through the wave of institutional expansion enacted between 1975 and 1978.

## Adopting the Disarmament ‘Bible’

At UNSSOD-I, the nuclear-weapon states agreed to a final document with far-reaching implications for the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework. In pro-disarmament circles, the document was soon dubbed the disarmament ‘bible’.¹⁷⁷ In terms of substance, the core of the final document was a ‘decalogue’ of priorities in the field of disarmament.¹⁷⁸ Nuclear disarmament ‘in all its aspects’ was established as the first commandment.¹⁷⁹ During the NPT negotiations in the 1960s and at the 1975 review conference, the nuclear-weapon states and some of their allies had been reluctant to acknowledge a link, whether normative or empirical, between non-proliferation and disarmament. The UNSSOD-I final document went far towards codifying the political understanding that had made the NPT’s adoption possible, namely, that non-proliferation and disarmament were intertwined, involving reciprocal commitments by nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states – the NPT ‘grand bargain’:

> The goal of nuclear non-proliferation is on the one hand to prevent the emergence of any additional nuclear-weapon States besides the existing five nuclear-weapon States, and on the other progressively to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. This involves
obligations and responsibilities on the part of both nuclear-weapon
States and non-nuclear-weapon States.¹⁸⁰

Harking back to the non-aligned-initiated resolution on 'principles' for a non-proliferation treaty adopted in 1965, the UNSSOD-I final document stipulated that an 'acceptable balance of mutual responsibilities and obligations for nuclear and non-nuclear weapon States should be strictly observed'.¹⁸¹ Drawing on article VI of the NPT, the conference also acknowledged that the implementation of 'effective measures' for nuclear disarmament was urgently required.¹⁸² With respect to the process of disarmament, the final document recognised the non-nuclear-weapon states as legitimate stakeholders and partners in the global nuclear order: All peoples of the world 'have a vital interest in the success of disarmament negotiations' and all states 'have the right to participate on an equal footing in those multilateral disarmament negotiations which have a direct bearing on their national security'.¹⁸³

The neutral and non-aligned states, and indeed most advocates of nuclear disarmament, lauded the special session as a great diplomatic victory.¹⁸⁴ According to a US official, the non-aligned states 'attached a totally disproportionate importance' to the UNSSOD-I final document.¹⁸⁵ Swedish diplomats asserted that 'new ground has been broken, new approaches have been introduced, and involvement in our efforts has greatly increased. Thus the special session has given new impetus to the disarmament effort'.¹⁸⁶ The disarmament machinery had been 'rendered more democratic and representative', said a Yugoslav diplomat, welcoming the dawn of a 'process of genuine disarmament'.¹⁸⁷ According to the Philippines, the 'historic' session had not only been 'the greatest gathering ever to be seized with the question [of disarmament], but also one of the most important and hopeful'.¹⁸⁸ From the perspective of most of the activists and civil society organisations that attended conference, the final document was 'excellent'.¹⁸⁹ Philip Noel-Baker, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his disarmament activism in 1959, described the UNSSOD-I final document as nothing short of 'the greatest state paper of all time'.¹⁹⁰

One may wonder why the nuclear-weapon states accepted a final docu-
ment with such strong language on disarmament. Bourantonis speculates
that the nuclear-weapon states were wary of non-aligned states withdrawing
from the NPT if the former were not more obliging. 'A negative attitude by
the superpowers', he argues, would 'have left the non-aligned states feeling
that the basic bargain that persuaded them to sign the Non-Proliferation
Treaty is being violated', possibly leading to defections from the non-prolif-
eration framework.¹⁹¹ Declassified US government documents suggest that
Bourantonis' assessment was accurate. For example, in a May 1978 memo
to US President Jimmy Carter, the director of the US Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency made the case that the United States needed to rec-
tify 'the widely resented discriminatory situation where the nuclear powers
continue to expand their nuclear arsenals and are not themselves subject to
the inspection procedures we are pressing on non-nuclear weapon states'.¹⁹² In its instructions to the US delegation to the UN, the US Department of State listed ‘improve our dialogue with important Non-Aligned and other countries’ and ‘make North-South dialogue on disarmament more constructive’ as key US objectives.¹⁹³ Secretary of State Cyrus Vance reported to the president that protecting US non-proliferation interest hinged, in part, on ‘our response to the desire of non-nuclear weapons states for [...] a commitment in principle to explore more steps to achieve nuclear disarmament’.¹⁹⁴ For the Carter administration, the then US official Joseph Nye explained, engagement in the multilateral disarmament process functioned as a means of securing a more cooperative climate for non-proliferation work and of lessening the ‘prestige motivations that might lead states to acquire nuclear weapons’.¹⁹⁵ Others maintained that the nuclear-weapon states had not actually agreed to anything radical. Frank Barnaby, for example, argued that, for all its grandiloquence, the UNSSOD-I final document was short on specific commitments and enforcement mechanisms.¹⁹⁶ There was no guarantee that the lofty ideals the document set out would be upheld. But from the perspective of the neutral and non-aligned states, it was nevertheless important that the symbolic ‘balance of mutual responsibilities and obligations’ between nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states had been restored.

*Inclusion and Participation in the Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Architecture*

The NPT negotiations had revealed a concern among non-nuclear-weapon states about being relegated to the role of mere ‘spectators’ of disarmament diplomacy. By the mid-1970s, these concerns were back. Mauritius, for example, complained that ‘the assertion of a new democratic spirit in international life requires the [...] contribution of all States, small and large, developed and developing’.¹⁹⁷ Along the same lines, Spain argued that the Geneva Conference’s rules of procedure ‘arouse a feeling of frustration which should be avoided by amending the rules of procedure so that the clear majority of States Members will no longer be mere spectators of the negotiations’.¹⁹⁸

Convening UNSSOD-I, the non-aligned states wanted to create political space for greater involvement and advocacy. According to one commentator, the session provided an opportunity for the non-aligned states to address their ‘greatest concerns – the promotion of the United Nations itself and the reform of the disarmament machinery – whereby they would gain equality with the great powers’.¹⁹⁹ The initiative to convene UNSSOD-I was widely praised by non-nuclear-weapon states and various organisations.²⁰⁰ Several states made statements about how the session would give non-nuclear-weapon states an opportunity to engage in a meaningful way.²⁰¹ Hailing the initiative of the non-aligned states, the government of Bangladesh expressed appreciation that UNSSOD-I would provide non-nuclear-weapon states with
an opportunity to escape their consignment to the spectator box of interna-
tional politics:

[T]he decision to convene the special session on disarmament, in
the wake of the initiative undertaken by the non-aligned nations,
holds an overwhelming significance. It offers a vital opportunity
totackleanewthefundamentalproblemsinthefieldofdisarmamentwithin
the full glare of international publicity and with the equal participation
of all States irrevocably bound together by their common vulnerability
to sudden extinction. No longer can smaller States afford to view this
question from the peripheries of the process as mere spectators; nor can
their role be reduced to that of exhortation.²⁰²

According to Romania, it was about time that the international disarmament machinery should ‘meet the requirements of the democratization of international life’.²⁰³ The Philippines expressed its ‘gratitude and indebtedness’ to the states that had promoted the session.²⁰⁴ The non-aligned states were clearly pleased with having pulled off the event, and the conference president, Lazar Mojsov of Yugoslavia, received heaps of praise both on his own person and on his country.²⁰⁵

The non-aligned states’ contestation of the established nuclear order in
the second half of the 1970s provided them with opportunities to assert
their agency and presence. Based, as Mojsov put it to the UNGA in 1972,
on ‘resistance to the policy or imperialism and hegemony’, the NAM saw
‘the struggle for disarmament’ as a fight for their ‘sovereign and inaliena-
ble rights’.²⁰⁶ Giving non-nuclear-weapon states the opportunity to act out
their self-descriptions as sovereign partners in the regime, the very act of
pursuing institutional adaptations vented pressure on the regime complex,
helping to resolve the crisis of legitimacy. ‘Thanks to their activities and ini-
tiatives, the non-aligned countries have become a recognised, indispensable
and irreplaceable factor in the United Nations’, Mojsov argued.²⁰⁷ Egypt,
which played a leading role at the conference alongside Yugoslavia, ratified
the NPT a few years later. A link between these facts seems highly plausible.
‘Instead of seeking the glory of an Arab bomb’, Maria Rublee argues, ‘Egypt
sought the glory of leading the nonproliferation effort’. Quoting a diplomat,
Rublee notes that '[s]ome say that states pursue nuclear weapons for the glit-
ter factor. For Egypt, the glitter factor was transferred over to using the UN
and taking a leadership role diplomatically'.²⁰⁸ As discussed in Chapter 1, a
similar process seems to have taken place in Sweden in the 1960s.

Conclusion

The recognition order established through the NPT negotiations quickly
came under pressure. Not only were the non-nuclear-weapon states excluded
from participating in the negotiations viewed to be of greatest significance,
the arms control measures adopted by the superpowers were seen to further entrench the nuclear hierarchy. The ‘colluding’ United States and the Soviet Union were seen to be engaged in practices of neo-colonial domination to the detriment of both international justice and security. To restore the NPT recognition order, the non-aligned states sought to reinvigorate the disarmament process and ‘democratise’ the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework. While pressure from NGOs and grassroots movements appears to have been quite marginal in the 1970s compared to the preceding and succeeding decades, the ‘invocation of the “third world masses”, whether real or imaginary’, was a central justification for the expansion of the regime.²⁰⁹ The membership of the Geneva Conference was expanded to include more non-aligned states (although at 40, the membership was still relatively limited), and the co-chair was abolished in favour of an egalitarian arrangement. The role of the UNGA was formally strengthened vis-à-vis the Geneva Conference. A second deliberative forum, the UN Disarmament Commission, was resurrected.

The first wave of institutional adaptation in the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework had at least three significant consequences, two intentional and one unintentional. First, greater ‘democratisation’ of the disarmament machinery provisionally boosted the regime complex’ ‘input’ and ‘throughput’ legitimacy, temporarily relegitimising the nuclear hierarchy.²¹⁰ From a liberal perspective, it may be seen as something of an irony that many of the states that promoted increased international ‘democratisation’ were not themselves democracies.²¹¹ But in a conservative international legal perspective, there is no contradiction between domestic authoritarianism and a demand for ‘democracy’ at the international level. It matters not, in this view, whether the ‘sovereign’ is constituted by the people or an absolute monarch or politburo.

A second outcome of the first wave of institutional contestation and change was the entrenchment of what over time became known as the NPT ‘grand bargain’, the idea that the NPT is based on a contractual exchange of pledges of non-proliferation (by the non-nuclear-weapon states) for disarmament (by the nuclear-weapon states), with all states free to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Through the UNSSOD-I final document, the nuclear-weapon states recommitted to the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and, by implication, the elimination of the legal hierarchy between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ codified by the NPT. It should be pointed out, however, that the nuclear powers’ commitment to disarmament remained rhetorical and, as such, symbolic. If judged as an instrument to guarantee the physical security of the non-nuclear-weapon states from nuclear attack, UNSSOD-I was of limited value. The updated negative security guarantees pledged by the nuclear-weapon states at the conference (declarations that they would not attack non-nuclear-weapon states with nuclear weapons) were not legally binding and subject to several caveats.²¹² From a material security-maximising perspective, the various institutional adaptations enacted over the course of the second half of the 1970s had little effect.
A third consequence of the first wave of expansion was unintentional. Having lost control of the Geneva Conference, the United States and the Soviet Union disengaged even more from the multilateral process. The expansion of the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework, in other words, led to a decline in meaningful multilateralism, as the superpowers simply opted to distance themselves from the multilateral arena. Anton Bebler puts it succinctly when he points out the following:

> The optimism expressed in the final document of the First Special Session [...] was followed by setbacks, deadlocks, and by an almost complete breakdown for several years in meaningful disarmament negotiations. The ill-fated reform of the UN mechanisms did not bring about the results expected by Yugoslavia and other non-aligned states. Deprived of privileges and privacy the two superpowers withdrew almost entirely all meaningful arms control-related activities [...] into bilateral seclusion.²¹³

With that foreshadowing, the next chapter turns to the evolution of multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy in the 1980s and 1990s.

## Notes

1. Yugoslavia, United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) First Committee, New York, 4 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1750, p. 5. See also, e.g., Morocco, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.17549, p. 2; Finland, UNGA First Committee, New York, 11 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1757, p. 11; Iran, UNGA First Committee, New York, 11 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1756, p. 12; Turkey, UNGA First Committee, New York, 16 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1761, p. 2.

2. India, UNGA First Committee, New York, 12 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1758, p. 4.

3. See, e.g., Hedley Bull, *The control of the arms race* (New York, NY: Praeger, 1965).

4. E.g., Marek Thee, 'The nuclear arms race', *Instant Research on Peace and Violence* 6: 1/2, 1976, p. 20; Hedley Bull, 'Arms control and world order', *International Security* 1: 1, 1976, p. 5.

5. Tanzania, UNGA First Committee, New York, 12 Oct. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1735, p. 4.

6. Sweden, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1750, pp. 10–11.

7. E.g., United Kingdom, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Nov. 1970, doc. A/C.1/PV.1750, p. 5.

8. E.g., Morocco, UNGA First Committee, New York, 8 Nov. 1972, doc. A/C.1/PV.1886, p. 6.

9. See Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, *Nuclear realism: global political thought during the thermonuclear revolution* (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 33; S. M. Amadae, *Rationalizing capitalist democracy: the Cold War origins of rational choice liberalism* (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

10. Luther J. Carter, 'Strategic arms limitation (II)', *Science* 187: 4177, 1975, p. 628. This phenomenon can, in part, be explained by the parties' use of so-called bar-