# 4 The Road to Prohibition, 2001–2021

## Setbacks and Great Expectations

### Nuclear Weapons in a New Millennium

The regime complex looked healthy during the fall of 2000 and spring of 2001. Conforming with the first of the 13 steps, Russia ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) shortly after the review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 2000 (it would de-ratify the agreement in 2023). George W. Bush, who succeeded Bill Clinton as president of the United States in January 2001, had run on a promise to ‘cast off outdated Cold War strategies, and have the United States lead by example in cutting its nuclear arsenal’.¹ At the 2000/01 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) session, the adoption of the 13 steps was praised far and wide: At ‘the very moment when the future of the Treaty and its non-proliferation regime appeared to be almost in jeopardy’, said Sweden’s Henrik Salander on behalf of the New Agenda Coalition (NAC), the NPT parties had demonstrated ‘a singular and common purposefulness’ by agreeing to pursue disarmament ‘without further procrastination’.² Mexico rejoiced that the 13 steps had ‘re-established balance’ in the regime complex.³ The NAC and its members toned down their praise somewhat the next year, but were still in high spirits, pledging to ‘pursue the complete implementation of the agreements reached’ in 2000.⁴ Yet, it had already become plain that several of the 13 steps would not actually be implemented any time soon. The Bush administration elected not to submit the CTBT for ratification (undercutting step 1), negotiations on a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear explosive devices continued to be blocked (undercutting step 3), the Geneva Conference failed to establish a subsidiary body to deal with nuclear disarmament (undercutting step 4), and the nuclear powers continued to invest heavily in their nuclear forces (undercutting steps 6 and 9).

In December 2001, the Bush administration finalised a new nuclear posture review that was seen by many to expand the role of nuclear weapons in US strategy. While the review committed the US government to drastically reduce the United States’ number of operationally deployed strategic warheads and outlined a series of measures to improve non-nuclear and defensive capabilities that might substitute for nuclear forces, it also explicitly
identified what appeared to be new roles for US nuclear weapons, including ‘dissuading military competition and defeating adversaries’.⁵ It also sought to elevate the nuclear weapons production complex and its supporting defence-industrial infrastructure, arguably suggesting that serious efforts towards abolition would not be forthcoming in the near or medium term. Richard Perle, who allegedly once described nuclear abolition as ‘the worst thing in the world’,⁶ had been installed by the Bush team as the chairman of the US Defense Policy Board.

According to the Malaysian delegation to the 2002/03 UNGA, the new US nuclear posture review was ‘perceived by many as a clear rejection of the 13 steps’. Malaysia was ‘very much disappointed and dismayed’ and indicated that a reneging on the commitments made at the previous NPT review conference would ‘deal a serious blow to the viability of the Treaty and to the disarmament process in general’.⁷ The NAC maintained that it was high time for the international community to act on the steps agreed in 2000, stating that ‘our continued indecision’ left the world vulnerable to nuclear dangers.⁸ Egypt intimated that a certain ‘laxity’ seemed to have ‘crept into global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation efforts since May 2000’.⁹ Overall, however, the mood was still reasonably amicable. Denmark expressed its ‘appreciation of the positive atmosphere and spirit of cooperation that have prevailed’.¹⁰ New Zealand said that the UNGA First Committee’s work remained ‘relevant and useful’. That being said, the international community should now take the opportunity to demonstrate ‘commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons’. The failure to implement decisive steps towards denuclearisation, New Zealand argued, threatened to ‘undermine the credibility of disarmament negotiations’.¹¹

Partly influenced by the dramatic terrorist attack on 11 September 2001, the bilateral US–Russian arms control process went through significant changes over the course of the early 2000s. A first major development was the United States’ withdrawal from the 1972 AMB Treaty, announced by the Bush administration in December 2001. Concluding that the ABM Treaty ‘hinders our government’s ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rouge state missile attacks’, President Bush proceeded to expand the United States’ efforts in the area of missile defence.¹² The withdrawal had serious and predictable consequences for the arms control and disarmament agenda. As the Russian Duma had explicitly tied its acceptance of START II to the continuing application of the ABM Treaty, the US withdrawal put the nail in the START II coffin and, by implication, step 7 of the 13, which had committed Russia and the United States to ratify and implement START II, conclude a START III agreement, and preserve the ABM agreement. In place of START II, Russia and the United States hurriedly concluded the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT). Containing no verification mechanisms, the SORT agreement was argued by many to represent a hollowing out of the arms control process – and arguably a contravention of the principle of irreversibility enshrined as step
5 of the 13.¹³ Experts mocked SORT as ‘make-believe arms control’ and ‘a parody’.¹⁴

While a number of scholars voiced major criticisms against the Bush administration's apparent disregard for arms control and the 13 steps,¹⁵ the reactions from non-nuclear-weapon states were comparatively meek. The undoing of the ABM and START II agreements was almost entirely ignored in the multilateral diplomatic debate.¹⁶ Presumably, the non-nuclear-weapon states were unwilling to bring up uncomfortable realities so soon after the successful adoption of the 'historic' 13 steps. They were eager, in other words, to maintain the recognition order that had been reconstituted in 2000. But from about 2003 onwards, the honeymoon period gradually came to an end. In 2003, the NAC declared it was 'deeply concerned' at the lack of progress. 'All NPT States parties must be held fully accountable with respect to strict compliance with their obligations under the Treaty'.¹⁷ That year and the next, several states used strong language to criticise the nuclear-weapon states' inaction. Costa Rica, for example, maintained that the nuclear-weapon states' commitment to the agreement reached at the NPT review conference in 2000 had not just been 'weak' but effectively 'non-existent'.¹⁸ The Brazilian delegation asserted that the non-proliferation and disarmament regime was facing a 'credibility crisis'. The reason, the Brazilians argued, was quite clear. There was a lack of political commitment 'on the part of nuclear-weapon States'.¹⁹ The Geneva Conference had become totally deadlocked, unable to agree even on a programme of work. Operating under strict rules of consensus, the Conference was highly vulnerable to obstructionism by small groupings or even solitary states. The major political movers seemed relatively unperturbed by this. They were happy, by the looks of things, to let the stalemate drag on and, according to the analyst Rebecca Johnson, play 'the "blame game."'²⁰

While the United States had emerged as the world's sole superpower upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remained a key player in the nuclear regime complex. And contrary to the hopes of nuclear abolitionists, the turn of the millennium saw Russia doubling down on nuclear deterrence.²¹ The early 2000s also saw the rise to power of a new Russian leader, the former KGB intelligence officer Vladimir Putin. While Russia and the United States had been able to work together on a range of issues during the 1990s,²² policymakers in Moscow had reportedly grown increasingly convinced that the United States was trying to 'isolate Russia economically, politically, and morally'. 'Humiliated by the West's unwillingness to accept Russia as an equal partner', argues the international relations scholar Andrei P. Tsygankov, 'the Kremlin revised its worldview'.²³ According to Jennifer Mathers, it was becoming increasingly clear that 'Russia's continued possession of nuclear weapons – especially strategic nuclear weapons – is one of the few ways in which Moscow can legitimately and indisputably claim to be a major player on the world stage'.²⁴

In 2004, the Bush administration launched the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) programme, increasing funding for the US nuclear weapons
labs. Along with the so-called stockpile stewardship programme established by the Clinton administration, RRW allowed the US nuclear complex to engage in what one set of scholars refers to as a process of ‘sociotechnical repair’, entrenching itself in the post-Cold War world.²⁵ Other nuclear-armed states also took measures to ensure the enduring viability of their nuclear arsenals. Russia retained a large nuclear production complex and invested heavily in the sea-based leg of its nuclear triad in particular. Russia’s nuclear submarine programme had fallen on hard times after the collapse of the Soviet Union but was now being revamped.²⁶ China laid down its first ballistic missile submarine in 2001, with another two following in 2003 and 2004, respectively.²⁷ France also spent heavily on its sea-based nuclear forces, placing an order for the serial production of a new generation of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the M51, in 2004.²⁸

Taking a countervailing action, the Mexican government seized the initiative in 2004 to bring the members of the world's various nuclear-weapon-free zones together in a single bloc.²⁹ Nuclear-weapon-free zones were established for Latin America and the Caribbean (1967), the South Pacific (1985), Southeast Asia (1995), and Africa (1996).³⁰ Mongolia was recognised as a state enjoying 'nuclear-weapon-free status' by the UN General Assembly in 1998.³¹ The creation of these zones had traditionally been understood, firstly, as regional non-proliferation efforts and, secondly, as vehicles to extract security assurances from the nuclear powers. The Mexican initiative aimed at bringing the respective states together as a pressure group for disarmament. The resulting Conference on Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones was held in Mexico City in April 2005 and occasioned the adoption of a final declaration that reaffirmed its participants' conviction that the international community should move swiftly 'to achieve the total elimination and prohibition of nuclear weapons' and expressed 'deep concern over the lack of progress to date' on the application of the disarmament measures agreed to at the 2000 NPT review conference.³² Follow-up conferences to the meeting held in 2005 would be convened in 2010 and 2015.

Expectations were low when the 2005 NPT review conference opened at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York. Citing US President Bush's axis-of-evil speech and threats to its national 'dignity', North Korea declared its withdrawal from the NPT in 2003.³³ Iran had been caught building undeclared nuclear facilities, strengthening long-held suspicions that Teheran wanted the bomb.³⁴ The US government, for its part, had made clear through both words and deeds that it no longer supported all 13 steps adopted in 2000. The NPT preparatory committee meetings in 2002, 2003, and 2004 had all indicated a wide gulf between the nuclear-weapon states – in particular the United States and France – and most neutral and non-aligned states in terms of how they assessed the past and future of article VI implementation.³⁵ On the eve of the 2005 review conference, the head of the US delegation, Stephen Rademaker, claimed that the US disarmament record was 'excellent'.³⁶ Not all states seemed to agree.
According to a New Zealand diplomat, the conference was ‘a disaster from start to finish’.³⁷ It actually took three weeks of procedural wrangling – primarily between Egypt and the United States – before the substantive sessions could even begin. Although some found the bickering over procedure petty, it reflected deep substantive disagreements between nuclear and non-nuclear powers. The core of the dispute, writes Harald Müller, was the ‘staunch refusal’ of the United States and France to accept the results of the 2000 review conference as the basis for proceedings.³⁸ A former UK secretary of state for foreign affairs, Robin Cook, contended that the ‘acrimonious exchanges’ at the review conference ‘reflect the frustration of the vast majority of states, who believe they have kept their side of the deal by not developing nuclear weapons but have seen no sign that the privileged elite with nuclear weapons have any intention of giving them up’.³⁹ In the words of William Walker, the Bush administration showed ‘disrespect’ for the NPT and, by extension, its partners in contract.⁴⁰

William Potter explains the failure of the 2005 review conference by pointing to a widespread sense of apathy. Whereas in 2000 many governments had been genuinely concerned about the viability of the regime complex as such, the period leading up to the 2005 conference lacked that sense of urgency; few delegations were prepared to make the compromises and do the diplomatic graft that would have been necessary to reach an agreement.⁴¹ But if there was no sense of crisis before the 2005 NPT review conference, there certainly was after. In the months and years after the 2005 conference, a wave of analysis predicting the imminent collapse of the NPT appeared. The non-proliferation regime was ‘failing, weakening and crumbling’, claimed one commentator.⁴² It was ‘under more pressure than ever’, suggested another.⁴³ The regime’s future was ‘uncomfortably uncertain’, warned a third.⁴⁴ The ‘legitimacy of this order has not been sustained’, averred a fourth, asserting that the regime faced an ‘acute legitimacy crisis’.⁴⁵ A fifth argued that the regime was ‘in danger of unravelling because the NPT is not only about nuclear non-proliferation. It is also about the elimination of nuclear weapons’.⁴⁶ Several commentators pointed their fingers at North Korea and Iran for their contravention of non-proliferation norms, but many added that the main cause of the regime’s troubles was the unilateralist policies of the French and especially American governments. According to a popular view, the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes were ‘symptoms as much as causes’. The real cause of the crisis was Washington’s attitude ‘that the NPT’s provisions apply to everyone else’.⁴⁷ This latter narrative was powerfully fuelled by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 – an invasion justified as a counter-proliferation exercise – and formation of the controversial Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), an initiative aimed at facilitating interdiction of illicit transfers of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at sea.⁴⁸

The years after 2005 delivered even more disappointment for the disarmers. The United States ‘added insult to injury’ by negotiating the US–India Agreement of 2006, effectively recognising India as a quasi-legitimate nuclear
power.⁴⁹ For emerging powers such as Brazil, India’s gradual admission into the ranks of recognised great powers sent a deeply troubling message. As Andrew Hurrell points out, India appeared to some to have benefitted from violating the rules: ‘India stood outside the club of responsible states, moved in 1998 to nuclear weaponization, and was rewarded by Washington with recognition of its major power status’.⁵⁰ Also in 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear explosive test. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reacted to UN sanctions against his country’s nuclear programme with threats of withdrawing from the NPT.⁵¹ According to the scholar Sverre Lodgaard, the US-led sanctions against Iran ‘did not compensate for the legitimacy deficit, but compounded them to the detriment not only of the NPT, but of the non-proliferation regime in general’.⁵² Progress on the 13 steps was virtually non-existent. At the UNGA First Committee meetings in 2005, 2006, and 2007, the NAC expressed serious concern at the ‘series of setbacks’ and ‘efforts by some States parties to disengage or draw back from agreements already made under the NPT umbrella’.⁵³ Numerous non-nuclear-weapon-state delegations urged the nuclear-weapon states ‘to keep their word’.⁵⁴ It was ‘paramount’, they argued, that the ‘sanctity of contracts’ be preserved.⁵⁵

Did the regime complex reach a point of crisis in the months and years after the 2005 NPT review conference? To answer this question, we must return to the indicators laid out in Chapter 1. With respect to the voice indicators, several non-nuclear-weapon states used strong language to express dissatisfaction with the lack of progress towards disarmament. However, in contrast to what had been the case for previous crises, the non-nuclear-weapon states’ criticism was directed primarily towards the nuclear-weapon states – less so the regime complex itself. With respect to diplomatic signalling, as a collective bloc or caucus, the non-nuclear-weapon states do not appear to have adopted a significantly more confrontational stance in the years after 2005. At the 2010 NPT review conference, the parties agreed to a rollover of the 2000 final document by consensus. The paralysis of the Geneva Conference was tacitly accepted; efforts at establishing rival forums failed to gain traction. With respect to non-proliferation measures and concerns about the balance of rights and duties within the regime complex, the mid-2000s actually saw significant progress on the multilateral non-proliferation agenda. While only 16 states in the neutral and non-aligned bloc signed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Additional Protocol between 1997 and 2000, as many as 38 signed during the five-year period following the 2000 NPT review conference. The rate of signature continued into the next review cycle, with another 35 states from the neutral and non-aligned group signing between 2005 and 2010. At the 2010 NPT review conference, the NPT parties agreed to the strongest language on non-proliferation ever achieved in the NPT context. That said, several large non-aligned states continued to oppose the IAEA Additional Protocol. As an Egyptian diplomat put it, ‘[h]ow are you going to add an obligation on us when the other guy has no obligations?’⁵⁶
On the exit indicators, North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003, and Iran explicitly threatened to withdraw in 2006. These were clearly dramatic events. That said, both Iran and North Korea were sharply criticised by the overwhelming majority of the world's states, including the NAM. Over the course of the 2006–2010 NPT review cycle, the UN imposed harsh sanctions against both Teheran (in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010) and Pyongyang (in 2006 and 2009). The first round of sanctions against both Iran and North Korea were approved unanimously by the UN Security Council, which at that time included states that had traditionally been sceptical about the lack of balance in the nuclear regime complex, including Argentina, Peru, the Republic of Congo, and Tanzania. In summary, the indicators explored above are not consistent with the occurrence of a full crisis of legitimacy as defined in this study. Most crucially, there were few efforts at seriously contesting or changing the institutional structures of the extant order. Had the regime complex reached a point of crisis in the months and years after the 2005 review conference, we would expect to see non-nuclear-weapon states launching initiatives to adapt the disarmament framework.

One significant initiative was indeed launched, but ultimately failed to attract the necessary support. Just months after the breakup of the 2005 review conference, a group of non-nuclear-weapon states (Brazil, Canada, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden) introduced a resolution to the UNGA that would establish four ‘ad hoc committees’ under the UN General Assembly to address the main issues on the gridlocked Geneva Conference’s agenda.⁵⁷ The Geneva Conference, after all, had not been able to agree to a programme of work since 1996 (bar a few weeks in 1998), largely due to disagreements over whether a future treaty on fissile material should address existing fissile material stocks or only future production. Many non-nuclear-weapon states were allegedly sympathetic to the group’s suggestion of circumventing the Geneva Conference, but the nuclear-armed states and some of their allies were very much against it.⁵⁸ The US delegation promptly circulated a memo to all UN member states arguing that the group’s ‘divisive proposal’ would ‘sour’ the atmosphere in existing forums and ‘retard the very international non-proliferation and disarmament objectives that its sponsors seek to advance’.⁵⁹ After consultations, the co-sponsors of the resolution realised that they did not have sufficient support – most non-nuclear-weapon states were unwilling at the time to challenge the nuclear-weapon states openly. According to a non-nuclear-weapon-state official close to the process, the initiative was ‘easy to kill’ due to the Non-Aligned Movement’s attachment to the disarmament machinery established through the UNSSOD-I outcome document.⁶⁰ Recalling the observation in Chapter 3 that attempts at suppressing contestation are usually successful during ‘normal’ times but may backfire during times of crisis or upheaval, the failure of the 2005 ad hoc committee initiative suggests that the regime complex had in fact not yet reached a state of crisis.
Experienced practitioners invariably described the mid-2000s as a period of gloom. The policies and rhetoric of George W. Bush and his UN ambassador, John Bolton, were widely seen as uniquely damaging to the cause of non-proliferation and disarmament. This personalisation of the regime complex' predicaments may, however, have had the effect of lessening some of the stress on the regime complex itself. As discussed elsewhere in this book, the erosion of a social arrangement's legitimacy tends to follow a process whereby criticism is first directed towards non-compliant actors and then later towards the broader social arrangement itself. The Bush administration seems to have prolonged the first phase through its unmatched unpopularity in multilateral diplomatic circles. Much of the heat that might have been directed towards the regime complex itself remained focused on the incumbent US administration.⁶¹

That being said, the lack of progress on the 13 steps and failure of the 2005 NPT review conference clearly tore at the existing regime complex' credibility as a vehicle of abolition. According to many non-nuclear-weapon states, the failure to advance disarmament had undercut the disarmament framework's 'credibility and effectiveness', fuelling perceptions of 'blatant selectivity and flagrant injustice' and 'suspicion about the ability of international instruments to maintain their credibility'.⁶² For Egypt, the lack of progress on the 13 steps 'affected the credibility of the Treaty [the NPT] and reinforced the widespread notion that it strengthened the status of the nuclear-weapon States'.⁶³ Hans Blix, chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission that operated between 2003 and 2006, argued that the fact that the nuclear-weapon states did not seem to take their disarmament commitments particularly seriously risked 'undermining the credibility and effectiveness of multilateral treaty commitments'.⁶⁴ As a former Swedish foreign minister, director of the IAEA, and executive chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission during the lead-up to the Iraq War, Blix held significant authority within the nuclear regime complex.

Pressed on their disarmament commitments, key nuclear-armed leaders attempted to push back. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, openly asserted in 2006 that 'it is clear that those who are the major nuclear powers can remain nuclear powers'.⁶⁵ A year later, he maintained that the NPT 'makes it absolutely clear that the United Kingdom has the right to possess nuclear weapons'.⁶⁶ In the British foreign policy establishment, nuclear weapons were viewed not only or perhaps even primarily as instruments of security, but rather as sources of international prestige.⁶⁷ Of course, the relative importance of security-motivations versus prestige-motivations is difficult to adjudicate methodologically; the various members of the foreign policy elite no doubt held divergent – and in many cases transitory and evolving – views and opinions. But as Paul Beaumont points out, whatever the relative weight or importance of security concerns versus prestige concerns, it was clear that, in practice, UK elites actively used nuclear weapons 'to perform a privileged
identity in relation to various Others', an identity underpinned by notions of great-power status and responsibilities for the maintenance of world order.⁶⁸ The NPT, and the recognition it was seen to have bestowed on the United Kingdom's nuclear programme, played a central role here. There was also a sense that the United Kingdom's status as a nuclear-weapon state under the NPT reinforced London's position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.⁶⁹ The retention of nuclear weapons 'adds credibility to our position as a member of the P5', opined UK Secretary of State for Defence Liam Fox in 2010.⁷⁰

Like with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks 30 years earlier, the depletion of the regime complex' legitimacy had a retroactive effect on states' attitudes towards previous initiatives and agreements. The shift in how the Indonesian delegation – arguably the most influential voice on disarmament within the NAM – talked about the SORT agreement between 2002 and 2007 is striking. In 2002, the Indonesian UNGA delegation described the SORT deal in the following terms:

> [The Indonesian delegation] welcomes the successful conclusion of negotiations between the Russian Federation and the United States that led to the signing of the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions. As an important milestone in limiting nuclear armaments, it has mandated a reduction of deployed nuclear weapons [...] and has provided a new foundation for strategic relations.⁷¹

Five years later, the Indonesians described the agreement in very different terms. What had changed was of course not the contents of SORT, but the wider political context. By 2007, there was no longer any desire to spin the treaty as an 'important milestone':

> [T]he 2002 Moscow Treaty contains no commitment either to destroy or to render unusable weapons that are no longer operationally deployed. Unfortunately, reductions in deployment and operational status cannot substitute for irreversible cuts in, and the total elimination of, nuclear weapons. [...The] nuclear-weapon States, instead of eliminating their nuclear arsenals, are modernizing, promoting and developing new types of nuclear weapons.⁷²

As noted above, the non-nuclear-weapon states' 'accrescent pessimism over the fate of the regime' was echoed by several experts.⁷³ Many blamed the nuclear-weapon states. However, from the mid-2000s onwards, a more radical view was coming to the fore; perhaps the problem was not just the behaviour of specific actors, but the structure of the regime complex itself. In late 2005, the international relations scholar Michael Wesley argued that article VI would never be able to deliver disarmament and that the continuation of the NPT had become 'farcical'.⁷⁴ Following a similar line of thought, the
writer Susan Watkins maintained in 2008 that article VI was ‘designed to shelter these weapons, not get rid of them’. For Watkins, the function of the NPT had always been to protect the ‘nuclear privileges of the haves against the have-nots’, setting up a sham disarmament commitment that crowded out more robust initiatives and undermined the potential for protest.⁷⁵ Ramesh Thakur, a long-time student of nuclear politics, described the NPT’s disarmament bargain in 2009 as ‘history’.⁷⁶ Thomas Doyle maintained that disarmament had been ‘subverted’.⁷⁷ According to Wade Huntley, the enduring ‘paralysis’ within the NPT and established disarmament machinery demonstrated the ‘need for a new initiative, separate from the NPT, to rekindle substantive movement toward global nuclear disarmament’.⁷⁸

*Obama in Prague*

By 2008, the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework's credibility as a vehicle of abolition had eroded to a point where a real crisis of legitimacy – a situation wherein major institutional upheaval was inevitable – looked imminent. According to a disarmament official representing an influential non-nuclear-weapon state, ‘we could not have continued like that’.⁷⁹ The atmosphere changed dramatically when, in November 2008, Barack Obama won the US presidential election. On the campaign trail, Obama had promised to pursue negotiations on ‘a verifiable global ban on the production of new nuclear weapons’ and to reverse the Bush administration’s unilateralism.⁸⁰ The debating climate in America was auspicious: A bipartisan group of former high-level policymakers, composed of William Perry, Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz, had called for renewed action towards abolition.⁸¹ Global Zero, a civil society group made up of a large number of (mostly retired) military and civilian leaders, including former US President Jimmy Carter, former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Shaharyar Khan, and former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, had been initiated in 2005 and was formally launched in 2008 to promote the elimination of nuclear weapons over the next 25 years. In an agenda-setting speech on foreign policy during his campaign, Obama claimed that, in order to shore up the non-proliferation regime, the United States needed to keep its commitments under the NPT.⁸² This, clearly, was music in the ears of non-nuclear-weapon state officials. Had a less disarmament-friendly candidate been elected as president of the United States in 2008, it seems highly likely that the regime would have spiralled into an acute crisis of legitimacy.

The new president’s rhetorical skills were put to good use in pursuit of the goal of healing the regime. Soon after taking office, in April 2009, the president made a major speech on nuclear policy in Prague. In the speech, drafted by the president’s foreign policy and communications advisor Ben Rhodes,⁸³ Obama confirmed ‘clearly and with conviction’ his government’s ‘commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons’.
‘The basic bargain is sound’, he continued: ‘Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy’. In addition, Obama would ‘immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’.⁸⁴ To communicate his recognition of the non-nuclear-weapon states as audible stakeholders in the process of disarmament, the president painted an image of an America returning to the virtues of multilateralism. Using the word ‘together’ 12 times in his relatively short speech, Obama communicated modesty and a will to cooperate: ‘together we will strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a basis for cooperation’, ‘voices for peace and progress must be raised together’, ‘together we can do it’.⁸⁵ Later in 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, largely on the back of the Prague speech.

In December 2009, a new International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, established by the Australian and Japanese prime ministers in July the year before, delivered its report. The commissioners, who counted among them notable figures such as former US Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, concluded that the end of the Cold War had seen ‘a brief but extremely productive period of nuclear disarmament and threat reduction activity’. The task now was to ‘renew’ the lost momentum.⁸⁶ The trouble, of course, was that much if not all of the arms control and disarmament progress that had been achieved over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s had been accomplished without upsetting what Joseph Rotblat called the ‘basic philosophy about nuclear weapons’ informing the defence establishments of the nuclear-armed states.⁸⁷ How far could the incrementalist formula really go so long as the nuclear-armed powers continued to insist that nuclear weapons were essential for international peace and stability? Central figures in the US defence establishment, and no doubt many of their peers in Moscow,⁸⁸ had seen the nuclear reductions undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s not as a step on the road to nuclear abolition, but rather as a ‘step on the road to rationalizing strategic nuclear forces in a new era’.⁸⁹ According to Hans Blix, the reductions undertaken in the years and decades after the end of the Cold War had been ‘in redundancy only’.⁹⁰

Obama's so-called Prague agenda did much to shore up the regime's legitimacy, at any rate for the time being. The Prague speech was widely praised at the 2009 UNGA First Committee meeting, including by delegations that had often been critical of US nuclear policy. The Mexican delegation, for example, noted that 'Obama's speech in Prague in April heralded the arrival of new hope'.⁹¹ A representative of New Zealand praised the 'very positive momentum that currently exists and the genuine willingness of many States to explore concrete steps to achieve the Prague vision'.⁹² 'We have been through a long winter of discontent and have the audacity to hope for springtime', wrote Jayantha Dhanapala, who had presided over the 1995 NPT review and extension conference.⁹³
As part of an overall effort to revise US nuclear and arms control policy, the Obama administration responded positively in 2009 to a British proposal of instituting a regularised consultation process involving the five NPT nuclear-weapon states. This ‘P5 process’ would be geared towards generating consensus between the established nuclear powers on matters to do with nuclear transparency, arms control, and international security. Also in 2009, the US delegation to the UN Security Council pushed through a resolution calling for negotiations ‘in good faith on effective measures’ for ‘nuclear arms reduction and disarmament’.⁹⁴ The resolution was intended as a reset of the relations between nuclear and non-nuclear-weapon states, a reconfirmation of the grand bargain.⁹⁵ And it worked, at least temporarily. ‘Many diplomats seemed buoyed by US support for multilateralism’, concluded the analyst Deepti Choubey on the basis of interviews with practitioners.⁹⁶ Almost by mere rhetoric, the Obama administration succeeded in halting the erosion of the NPT, claimed Harald Müller.⁹⁷ However, the real test would be whether Obama could live up to his words in practice.

Obama did not limit his agenda to the level of rhetoric or resolutions alone. In April 2010, perfectly timed to precede the start of the eighth NPT review conference by a couple of weeks, the United States and Russia signed a ‘New START’ agreement to reduce their deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1550 each. In contrast to the SORT agreement, New START included robust verification measures. The international community responded appreciatively. Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, hailed the ‘symbolic’ importance of the treaty.⁹⁸ The Austrians lauded the ‘inspirational approach of the President of the United States, which had made possible the signing of a new treaty on the reduction of strategic offensive arms’.⁹⁹ Numerous delegations saluted the treaty as an ‘encouraging’, ‘welcome’, ‘positive’, ‘hopeful’ development,¹⁰⁰ or at least as a ‘step in the right direction’.¹⁰¹ From the point of view of the Russians, the New START negotiations and agreement ‘emerged as an important vehicle for restoring Russia’s status as at least a “quasi-superpower”’.¹⁰² In this view, by engaging in arms control negotiations as a strategic peer of the United States, Russia gained recognition as a pivotal world power. The challenge, of course, was that successive repetitions of this formula would slash Russia’s nuclear arsenal and thus the basis of its claim to quasi-superpower status. Disarmament, clearly, was a finite source of prestige, at least if the principle of irreversibility – step 5 of the 13 steps adopted in 2000 – was to be observed.

The US government’s disarmament offensive continued at the 2010 NPT review conference. The Americans’ opening statement was delivered by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who reiterated the United States’ commitment to a nuclear-weapons-free world.¹⁰³ And after four weeks of negotiations, the conference adopted a fully negotiated substantive final document by consensus, the second in NPT history. Divided into a number of ‘action points’, the section on disarmament enshrined what was effectively an elaboration and rollover of the 13 steps adopted ten years before. According to
Rebecca Johnson, it had been clear quite early on that the parties, including most of the NAM, had wanted a consensus outcome at almost any cost. The disarmament language in the final document was 'feeble', she argued, and did not introduce any new substantive commitments of note.¹⁰⁴ But from the point of view of many non-nuclear-weapon states, the crucial point was that the nuclear-weapon states had once again committed, 'unequivocally', to 'accomplish, in accordance with the principle of irreversibility, the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals'.¹⁰⁵ According to a Norwegian government memo, however, many disarmament advocates were deeply disappointed by the outcome behind the scenes.¹⁰⁶ Those championing the goal of nuclear abolition had again failed to attach timelines or enforcement mechanisms to what remained essentially hortatory commitments. 'The same fucking shit round and round', one non-nuclear-weapon state representative was reportedly overheard saying to another after the conclusion of the conference.¹⁰⁷

After all, the failure of the 13 steps had illustrated that supposed consensus commitments could easily remain dead letter. The challenge for proponents of disarmament, some argued, was to create a political–normative environment in which nuclear weapons were seen not as legitimate or prestigious instruments of security, but as weapons of mass destruction with unacceptable humanitarian implications. Until such an environment was created, so went the argument, chances were that the pattern of nuclear politics that had repeated itself for decades would continue. Representatives of the Norwegian government had met informally with diplomatic allies from the campaigns to ban landmines and cluster munitions already before the 2010 review conference to discuss a new, ‘humanitarian’ approach to nuclear disarmament.¹⁰⁸ The Norwegian delegation to the Geneva Conference asserted in 2011 that the use of nuclear weapons ‘would be illegal under international humanitarian law’.¹⁰⁹ According to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ internal summary of the review conference in 2010, ‘Norway’s overarching goal is a world without nuclear weapons. A legally binding instrument codifying a ban on nuclear weapons is a natural anchoring of this goal’.¹¹⁰ The wording used, as well as other statements by Norwegian officials, indicated that the ban in question would not necessarily have to be enshrined in a comprehensive nuclear disarmament convention with detailed provisions for stockpile destruction a lá the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention described in Chapter 3; a ban might also be codified in a less ambitious legal instrument that would not require the buy-in of the nuclear-weapon states to be negotiated and adopted.¹¹¹

There can be little doubt that the Obama administration's disarmament offensive temporarily boosted the legitimacy of the regime complex.¹¹² As one commentator puts it, the United States 'took great pains to prove that it was negotiating in good faith and was not showing any disrespect toward the regime'.¹¹³ Expectations were high that the process towards zero would kick on.¹¹⁴ At the same time, there were obvious signs of long-term wear. The Brazilian delegation argued in its opening statement at the 2010 review conference that the NPT was 'an intrinsically unfair Treaty, which divides
the world between “haves” and “have-nots” and ‘an expression of the imbalances of the international system’. The world would only be safe, the Brazilians argued, once ‘all countries feel that they are being treated with fairness and respect’.¹¹⁵

## Nuclear Modernisation and Inaction on the Action Plan

Like the 1995 NPT declaration on ‘Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament’ and the 2000 NPT review conference final document before it, the action plan agreed to at the 2010 NPT review conference established as an ‘urgent necessity’ the need to negotiate and bring into force a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices – the 1995 and 2000 documents had called for negotiations to be opened ‘immediately’.¹¹⁶ The idea of negotiating a ban on the production of fissile material for nuclear explosive devices had in fact been debated, on and off, since the launch of the Baruch Plan in 1946. But the commencement of negotiations continued to be held back by differences over the prospective treaty’s scope. The major nuclear powers seemed comfortable with this stalemate. None were willing to revise their positions or put meaningful pressure on Pakistan, which was invariably seen as the most intransigent spoiler.¹¹⁷ Perhaps even more troubling for disarmament advocates was the Obama administration’s pledge not only to refurbish America’s nuclear warheads but also to ‘modernize or replace’ all three legs of the US nuclear triad – strategic bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and land-based missile systems – in exchange for a group of pro-nuclear senators’ support for New START.¹¹⁸ Moreover, wary that it would not receive sufficient support, President Obama never submitted the CTBT to the US Senate for acceptance of ratification.

As of spring 2012, all nine nuclear-armed states were in the midst of significant nuclear weapons modernisation projects and no new disarmament negotiations had been launched.¹²⁰ Having served his four-year period as president of the Russian Federation, the at that point in time more diplomatically inclined Dmitry Medvedev stepped aside to allow Vladimir Putin to return to the presidency in 2012.¹²¹ Mindful that the nuclear domain remained Moscow’s only area of equality with the United States (in numbers if not quality),¹²² the Kremlin rejected American offers of further bilateral negotiations on nuclear reductions.¹²³ As one analyst puts it, nuclear grandstanding remained ‘one of the few options that Russia has left to promote its standing as a global great power’.¹²⁴

For many non-nuclear-weapon states, the apparent collapse of the Prague agenda was read into a long history of failure. As Patchen Markell argues, ‘losing at politics once may leave an actor disappointed but unshaken in his sense of belonging to the community of participants’. However, ‘after months, years, or decades of persistent loss at the game of politics’, actors
‘may rightly wonder whether they’re really being allowed to play in any meaningful way’.¹²⁵ Serious doubts about the viability of the 2010 action plan were raised publically already in 2011. The NAM asserted straightforwardly that ‘improvement and modernization of existing nuclear weapons and the development of new types of nuclear weapons by nuclear-weapon States is in violation of their legal obligations’.¹²⁶ According to the Austrian ambassador for disarmament, Alexander Kmentt, the adoption of the action plan had provided ‘a little respite’, yet as long as meaningful progress on article VI remained stalled, the credibility of the regime complex would remain ‘challenged on all fronts’.¹²⁷ In the words of a civil society representative, there was a noticeable ‘come-down’ after it became clear that the Obama presidency would not generate transformative changes to US nuclear policy.¹²⁸

The regime complex’ third crisis of legitimacy hit in 2012. It was brought on by a sense that the established nuclear order simply would not bring about the elimination of nuclear weapons. The nuclear-armed states’ modernisation programmes, which appeared to be accelerating at a point in time when the conditions for disarmament would otherwise have seemed relatively favourable, had undermined any sense that the existing institutional framework for multilateral nuclear disarmament could deliver abolition. At the heart of this crisis, Nina Tannenwald held, was that ‘what was supposed to be a transformation regime – the transformation to a disarmed world – has become a status quo regime’.¹²⁹ Of course, what the NPT was ‘supposed’ to be was a matter of perspective. For some, the NPT was perhaps first and foremost supposed to function as a legal recognition of nuclear hierarchy.¹³⁰ Brazil, however, agreed with Tannenwald and argued that the ‘regime could not be simply a tool to manage deeply embedded inequalities; it must correct them in order to uphold its credibility and efficacy as a means of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons’.¹³¹

When the regime complex’ legitimacy came into question in the mid-2000s, George W. Bush’s deeply unpopular administration absorbed much of the blame. In the years after 2010, however, no such excuse was available. The White House was occupied by a nominally pro-disarmament, multilateralist president, and the relationship between Russia and the United States seemed comparatively good. The Russian intervention in Georgia in 2008 had soured relations between Moscow and the West to some extent, but the relationship had improved during the Medvedev interregnum of 2008–12 (the invasion of Georgia took place during Medvedev’s period as president, but had ostensibly been planned and prepared for under Putin). Many in the West believed that economic growth would lead to democratic and liberalising reforms in China, diminishing the potential for great power tensions in Asia–Pacific. The governments of the United Kingdom and France faced few if any traditional military threats and were imposing economic austerity measures following the financial crisis of 2007–08; reducing defence expenditures, for example by cancelling or declining to enter into new nuclear
modernisation contracts, seemed at least *prima facie* plausible. By historical
standards, the environment for disarmament seemed good. The blame for
multilateral nuclear disarmament framework's poor performance was thus
increasingly directed towards the regime complex itself.

As indicated above, a first major grievance of the non-nuclear-weapon
states related to the existing institutional structure's inability to do anything
about the nuclear powers' modernisation programmes. As discussed above,
the early to mid-2010s saw a range of ambitious armament programmes
launched in each of the nuclear-armed states. Russia, for example, was in the
process of building several new missile systems, upgraded Borei ballistic mis-
sile submarines, and new strategic bombers.¹³² The United States was in the
process of rebuilding much of its arsenal, including the B61 nuclear gravity
bombs stored in Belgium, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey.¹³³
According to the NAM, the nuclear-weapon states 'seemed to think that the
indefinite extension of the Treaty entailed the indefinite possession of nuclear
weapons' and were attempting to dress up their unwillingness to move
away from the status quo in 'pseudo-progressive, ambiguous language'.¹³⁴
Addressing the UNGA in September 2011, the president of Kazakhstan
argued that the situation that 'some are allowed to possess and upgrade
nuclear weapons, while others are strictly forbidden to be engaged even in
research and development', was 'unjust, disproportionate and unfair'.¹³⁵
Voicing its concerns over the apparent erosion of *pacta sunt servanda* – the
notion that contracts are definitive and must be upheld – the Algerian delega-
tion warned against 'differences in degrees of sovereignty among states'. As
the Algerian delegation maintained, the nuclear-weapon states continued to
modernise their nuclear arsenals 'in order to preserve what they describe as a
nuclear deterrence capability, the stated goal of which is to defend their sov-
ereignty and vital interests. Yet do not States which have no nuclear weapons
also have sovereignty and vital interests to protect?' This state of affairs was
'politically, legally and morally unacceptable', claimed the Algerians.¹³⁶

Several states expressed concern that the nuclear-weapon states' inaction
on the 2010 action plan perpetuated existential risks to humanity.¹³⁷ Many
non-nuclear-weapon states were increasingly using the language of 'risk' and
'luck' to describe the nuclear past and future. Eric Schlosser's 2013 book
*Command and Control*, detailing a series of nuclear close calls, received sig-
nificant attention in diplomatic and NGO milieus. In the words of a Swiss
diplomat, 'although no nuclear weapon has been used since 1945, we can-
not rely on luck indefinitely'.¹³⁸ Concurrently, a new wave of scholarship on
'nuclear winter' – the climatic effects of nuclear war – reminded representa-
tives of non-nuclear-weapon states of the dramatic transboundary conse-
quences of nuclear conflict. Even 'limited' nuclear wars could have enormous
ramifications for third-party states.¹³⁹

As discussed throughout this study, many non-nuclear-weapon states have
consistently portrayed the hierarchy codified by the NPT as a temporary
indignity; the supposedly shared goal of disarmament, enshrined in article VI,
implied that the non-nuclear-weapon states were not permanently inferior, but equal in waiting. However, the nuclear-weapon states' so-called nuclear modernisation programmes – in some cases aimed at developing weapon systems set to remain operational for well over half a century – made any such interpretation ridiculous. The delegation of Venezuela lambasted the 'perverse process of modernizing nuclear weapons', rejecting 'the undesirable practices that weaken the principle of the legal equality of states'.¹⁴⁰ At the NPT preparatory committee meeting in 2012, the Brazilian delegation claimed that it was 'simply not admissible that more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War nuclear weapons still continue to be an integral part of military and security doctrines'. Key concepts of the nuclear order could only be interpreted as 'perpetuating and legitimizing nuclear weapons forever'.¹⁴¹ According to the NAC, the simple fact remained that 'the threat posed by nuclear weapons endures' and 'the objectives of article VI are far from being met'.¹⁴²

A second grievance related to the apparent double standard in the regime complex' enforcement. While the non-nuclear-weapon states' non-proliferation commitments were assiduously policed by the UN Security Council and the IAEA – Iran's non-compliance with IAEA safeguards had led to years of economic sanctions – the nuclear-weapon states' multilateral disarmament commitments were neither enforced nor enforcable. As the Ecuadorian delegation to the UNGA put it, assessments of compliance should be 'carried out on an equal footing for all States without distinction'.¹⁴³ For the Austrian ambassador, the credibility of the entire regime complex was called into question by the nuclear-weapon states' selective approach to implementation and enforcement.¹⁴⁴ The implementation of NPT review conference final documents was of particular concern. If consensus agreements such as the 13 steps or the 2010 action plan could simply be disregarded by the nuclear-weapon states with complete impunity, there was little point for the non-nuclear-weapon states to go through the motions of the review cycle. According to the Norwegian ambassador to the UN in Geneva, many non-nuclear-weapon state officials were wary that they had given up their negotiating leverage by agreeing to the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995. Several non-nuclear-weapon state diplomats were consequently sceptical about what could be achieved on disarmament within the NPT framework.¹⁴⁵ Scholars Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka expressed their view on the NPT process in the following terms in 2012:

> These conferences are a bizarre spectacle, involving much fractious debate over minor rewordings in order to produce – if any agreement at all is reached – ‘final documents’ which are ignored by everyone concerned. Then the review process, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Soviet five-year plans, starts all over again.¹⁴⁶

The NPT review cycle clearly did not function according to its intended purpose of providing an arena for the non-nuclear-weapon states to participate
meaningfully in nuclear order-making. The non-nuclear-weapon states were
not given an opportunity to influence the pace or direction of the disarma-
ment effort. Power politics reigned.

A more immediate concern related to the fact that the Geneva Conference and UN Disarmament Commission remained deadlocked. Not since the CTBT process of the mid-1990s had the Geneva Conference – the regime complex’ only standing negotiating forum – held substantive sessions. The UN Disarmament Commission had not conducted substantive deliberations since 1999. Speaking at the UNGA in 2012, the Irish delegation bemoaned the international community’s relegation to the role of ‘bystander rather than participant’.¹⁴⁷ Similar criticisms had, as noted in previous chapters, been voiced during the first and second crises of legitimacy, as well as during the NPT negotiations in the 1960s. While an Algerian official described the disarmament talks in Geneva as a ‘charade’,¹⁴⁸ a diplomat from Liechtenstein called it ‘farcical’.¹⁴⁹ The ‘paralysis’ of the Geneva Conference was ‘unacceptable’, argued the Mexicans.¹⁵⁰ For Austria, the standstill was ‘deeply disconcerting’. Rather than seeing progress towards disarmament, Austria saw the application of ‘tactics to maintain the status quo for as long as possible. The consequence is an increasing erosion of the legitimacy of the existing legal frameworks and institutions’.¹⁵¹

At the 2011/12 UNGA session, the Austrian, Mexican, and Norwegian delegations announced that, should the Geneva Conference turn in another barren year in 2012, they would consider tabling a resolution mandating the circumvention of the Conference through the establishment of an open-ended working group (OEWG) on nuclear disarmament under the auspices of the UN General Assembly – with the latter forum’s more liberal rules of procedure.¹⁵² The scene was set for a showdown.

The Humanitarian Initiative for Nuclear Disarmament

After more than a decade of institutional stasis, a third wave of institutional upheaval began in 2013. Through three ad hoc conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, a UN high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament, two UN open-ended working groups, and the issuance of a ‘Humanitarian Pledge’ to ‘stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons’,¹⁵³ a large coalition of non-nuclear-weapon states and civil society actors sought to reinvigorate the cause of disarmament and strengthen norms of restraint.¹⁵⁴ On 7 July 2017, the so-called humanitarian initiative culminated in the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). How did this come about?

A ‘Severe Crisis’ of Credibility

The non-proliferation expert Emmanuelle Blanc argued in 2014 that the
nuclear order was embroiled in a ‘severe crisis’, in large parts due to lack-
ing progress towards disarmament.¹⁵⁵ But how can we know that the ‘crisis’
of the 2010s was not simply an expression of ‘normal’ discord within the regime complex? As discussed above, the regime complex has been argued to be in ‘crisis’ almost continuously since the 1960s. The following paragraphs explore a range of indicators that suggest that the nuclear order was indeed thrown into a crisis of legitimacy in 2012. The proliferation of new multilateral nuclear disarmament forums from that year onwards was just one of several signs. First, as documented throughout this chapter, many non-nuclear-weapon states sharpened their rhetoric; influential neutral and non-aligned states described the status quo as unacceptable and the regime complex itself as an instantiation of ‘nuclear apartheid’.¹⁵⁶ The heightened temperature of the debate was lamented by the nuclear-weapon states and many of their allies. Speaking on behalf of 27 aligned states at the UNGA First Committee in 2015, the German delegation complained that the debate was not ‘constructive, open, inclusive, and genuine’.¹⁵⁷ France, on behalf of the five nuclear-weapon states, lamented a lack of ‘mutually respectful dialogue’.¹⁵⁸

Second, several non-nuclear-weapon states adopted a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis the major powers, sending obvious signals of disappointment. For example, the Egyptian delegation marched out of the 2013 NPT preparatory committee meeting mid-conference to demonstrate against what it viewed as the major powers’ double standards and lack of commitment to long-standing agreements – specifically the 1995 resolution on the creation of a WMD-free zone in the Middle East.¹⁵⁹ The government of the Marshall Islands filed lawsuits against the nuclear-armed states at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2014, asserting that the nuclear powers were in violation of their disarmament obligations. Several pro-disarmament non-aligned states were reportedly also prepared to block consensus at the NPT review conference in 2015 (in the end, though, consensus was blocked by Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States). This stood in sharp contrast to what had occurred in 2010, when the neutral and non-aligned states had apparently been keen to join a consensus at almost any cost.

Third, resistance to additional non-proliferation measures seemed to grow. While at the 2010 NPT review conference the parties had been able to agree to unprecedentedly strong language on non-proliferation safeguards – the conference ‘encouraged all States parties’ to conclude an IAEA Additional Protocol¹⁶⁰ – the 2015 conference represented a step back. The language on safeguards contained in the last draft of the final declaration (which ultimately was not adopted) was weaker than the equivalent language five years before.¹⁶¹

Fourth, while no new state acquired nuclear weapons, tolerance of non-compliance with non-proliferation norms arguably grew. Between 2006 and 2010, the UN adopted six resolutions requiring Iran to stop enriching uranium. Four of these resolutions (2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010) imposed punitive measures on Teheran. Most of the world’s states supported the sanctions and embargo. After 2010, however, when the perceived legitimacy of the
nuclear regime complex started to plummet, several non-aligned states began expressing opposition, defending Iran's 'right to enrich'. In 2012, when Iran accelerated its nuclear programme, the United States and European Union failed to attract support for additional sanctions within the UN.¹⁶² The convening of the 2012 NAM summit in Teheran was widely seen as an expression of support for Iran's nuclear policy.¹⁶³

Between 2012 and 2013, Iran doubled its operational nuclear centrifuges from just under 10,000 centrifuges to almost 20,000.¹⁶⁴ Before 2012, Iran's nuclear programme had been proceeding in small incremental steps for about a decade. Teheran's nuclear ambitions were clearly motivated at least in part by material considerations – economic and potentially military – but they also appear to have been fuelled by concerns with equality and international prestige. According to David Patrikarakos, Iran's nuclear programme functioned in part as a means of healing the wounds of 'national humiliations'.¹⁶⁵ In the words of Hossein Mousavian, sanctions and covert operations against Iran had 'made the nuclear endeavor Iran's number one issue of national pride'.¹⁶⁶ Intriguingly, a quantitative study found that the sanctions campaign had in fact fostered greater support for the nuclear effort among certain sections of the Iranian population. For a 'small but politically significant portion of the Iranian population [...] economic incentives and disincentives result in a “backfire effect” in which offers of material rewards or punishment lead to increased anger and greater disapproval'.¹⁶⁷

The erosion of the nuclear regime complex' legitimacy appears to have enabled Iran to take a more defiant stance against the major powers. Despite Iran withdrawing from the IAEA Additional Protocol and having been found by the IAEA to have violated its comprehensive safeguards agreement, the NAM and individual non-aligned states increasingly supported Iran's nuclear programme – also during the aggressive centrifuge build-up of 2012. In 2006, the NAM summit adopted a final document encouraging Iran to 'urgently [...] continue to cooperate actively and fully with the IAEA'.¹⁶⁸ By contrast, the NAM summit in 2012 made no urgent calls on Teheran to cooperate with the IAEA and made no comment on Iran's violation of the six UN Security Council resolutions obliging Iran so cease enriching uranium. Instead, the NAM censured the 'politically motivated attempts' to 'politicize the work of the IAEA' – a statement that was clearly directed at the United States and its allies.¹⁶⁹ Non-permanent members of the UN Security Council such as Brazil (a NAM observer) became 'completely opposed to the US sanctions/embargo strategy'.¹⁷⁰

Given Iran's regional rivalries with several members of the NAM, in particular Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the NAM's unanimous support for Iran seems puzzling from a security perspective. But according to Bowen, Moran, and Esfandiary, Iran was able to tap into 'NAM concerns regarding the "grand bargain" perceived to be at the heart of the NPT'.¹⁷¹ Other members of the NAM shared Iran's disquiets about the major powers' alleged nuclear hypocrisy and were thus willing to support Iran in statements to the IAEA
Board of Governors, the UNGA, and NPT meetings.¹⁷² Partly due to NAM support, the major powers were unable to compel Iran to abandon its nuclear programme entirely. To facilitate agreement, the United States ultimately had to abandon its long-standing policy of not allowing Iran to enrich uranium. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called Iran Deal, ‘recognise[d] Iran’s right to enrich uranium’.¹⁷³ In exchange, Iran agreed to the IAEA Additional Protocol and a significant rollback of its nuclear programme and materials.¹⁷⁴ Iran’s struggle for recognition, in other words, was at least partially successful. That said, only a few years later, the Trump administration would cease US implementation of the deal, and the agreement eventually collapsed entirely.

## *The Emergence of the Humanitarian Initiative*

At the NPT preparatory committee meeting in the spring of 2012, the Austrian delegation asserted that it was time for ‘the “silent majority” of States committed to multilateralism to make itself heard’.¹⁷⁵ The statement proved predictive. Expanding the regime’s *locus*, the UNGA First Committee session later that year saw three new multilateral nuclear disarmament arenas established or announced. First, adopting a NAM-sponsored resolution with 165 votes in favour, none against, and five abstaining,¹⁷⁶ the UNGA resolved to convene a first-ever UN ‘high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament’ in 2013. All states were encouraged to send representatives at the ‘highest possible level’ to ‘contribute to achieving the goal of nuclear disarmament’.¹⁷⁷ Second, the Norwegian government invited all interested states, NGOs, and international organisations to an ad hoc conference in Oslo on ‘the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons’ in March 2013. Recalling that the 2010 NPT review conference had expressed ‘deep concern at the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons’, the Norwegian government wanted to create and arena to discuss nuclear weapons and disarmament from a humanitarian, facts-based angle. Norwegian leaders were convinced that furthering the NPT’s disarmament pillar was vital to holding the non-proliferation regime together.¹⁷⁸ Third, as the Geneva Conference failed to adopt a programme of work also in 2012, Austria, Mexico, and Norway went through with their plan of tabling a resolution authorising the formation of an OEWG to ‘develop proposals to take forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations’ under the auspices of the UNGA.¹⁷⁹

The resolution to establish a United Nations OEWG received considerable pushback from the nuclear-weapon states. Worried that the consensus-based and thus easily controllable Geneva Conference could lose its position as the disarmament framework’s go-to negotiating forum, the major powers argued strongly against the OEWG resolution. The United Kingdom, France, and the United States collectively declared that they saw ‘little value’ in the initiative. They also threatened to walk away from the 2010 NPT final document, warning that the establishment of a new forum might ‘threaten the consensus’ on
the 2010 NPT action plan.¹⁸⁰ The Russian delegation described the initiative as ‘unacceptable’ and threatened that the establishment of an OWEG might lead to results ‘completely contrary to the objectives of the sponsors’.¹⁸¹ The nuclear-weapon states’ strong opposition, which was expressed both formally and informally, made strong impressions on many non-nuclear-weapon state officials.¹⁸² As discussed above, similar pressure tactics had in 2005 dissuaded a group of non-nuclear-weapon states from going ahead with an initiative to circumvent the Geneva Conference thorough the establishment of ad hoc committees under the General Assembly. In 2012, however, the non-nuclear-weapon states would not be stopped. According to the civil society representative Beatrice Fihn, who would later go on to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), ‘it was obvious that the patience with the existing fora has finally run out for the majority of delegations’.¹⁸³ For Ray Acheson, another NGO leader, the creation of new forums demonstrated that non-nuclear-weapon states were no longer prepared to let the nuclear-armed states dictate the terms of the nuclear debate.¹⁸⁴ The OEWG resolution was adopted by a vote of 133 in favour, 4 against, and 35 abstaining.

The establishment of new forums was justified by supporters as a move to further a new, ‘humanitarian’ approach to nuclear disarmament.¹⁸⁵ The Oslo conference, in particular, presented the diplomatic community with novel scientific findings and analyses about humanitarian preparedness and the potential humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. However, in terms of the underlying ideas it promoted, the movement of states and NGOs that eventually came to be called the ‘humanitarian initiative’ drew on a tradition with roots going back several decades.¹⁸⁶ After all, diplomats, scientists, and activists had warned about the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima. In 1961, the UNGA had adopted a resolution declaring that the use of nuclear weapons would ‘exceed even the scope of war and cause indiscriminate suffering and destruction to mankind and civilization and, as such, is contrary to the rules of international law and to the laws of humanity’.¹⁸⁷ The preamble of the NPT acknowledges ‘the devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war and the consequent need to make every effort to avert the danger of such a war’.¹⁸⁸ In the 1980s, several states had highlighted the scientific discovery of the ‘nuclear winter’ effect, to wit, that the massive clouds of soot engendered by nuclear war could foster a dramatic drop in global surface temperatures and, by implication, undercut food production across the world.¹⁸⁹ What was new about the humanitarian initiative was the deliberate and instrumental way in which humanitarian language, norms, and law were used to challenge the existing security discourse.¹⁹⁰ According to one of the movement’s leading civil society strategists, ‘the humanitarian stuff was pushed in a highly self-conscious way; it was a discourse-control thing. Keep saying it, keep saying it. Everything’s about that, we said to ourselves. We were massively self-conscious in all of that, and so were the key governments’.¹⁹¹ The humanitarian
initiative constituted a deliberate attempt by non-nuclear-weapon states and NGOs to change the wider nuclear discourse. The idea was to foster a political–normative environment more amenable to nuclear disarmament – to disrupt the assumptions and narratives portraying nuclear weapons as abstract and quasi-magical deterrents.¹⁹²

Implicitly relying on the Gramscian assumption that politics is downstream of culture, the architects of the humanitarian initiative sought to influence nuclear politics via transforming the wider social environment in which nuclear politics and diplomacy take place. While for some of the initiative's instigators there was no clear goal beyond 'reframing' the debate and disrupting the established order, for others the initiative was from the beginning seen as a vehicle for promoting a nuclear weapons prohibition treaty. As one non-nuclear-weapon state diplomat put it, 'the ban idea came first, then we developed the humanitarian initiative as a “why”'.¹⁹³ As discussed above, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had identified the negotiation of a nuclear weapons ban as an aspiration already in 2010. The then Norwegian foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, had publically asserted in February of that year that the non-nuclear-weapon states could conceivably push such an initiative forward even if the nuclear powers objected:

> Some maintain that consensus is vital when it comes to nuclear disarmament. I am not fully convinced. I believe it would be possible to develop norms against the use of nuclear weapons, and even to outlaw them, without a consensus decision, and that such norms will eventually be applied globally. We cannot leave it to the nuclear weapon states alone to decide when it is time for them to do away with these weapons. Their destructive power would affect us all if put to use – and their threat continues to affect us all – therefore they are everyone's business.¹⁹⁴

The 'Oslo conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons' was attended by 128 government delegations. Numerous NGOs participated both in the conference itself and a civil society forum organised by ICAN, a coalition of hundreds of NGOs from around the world, a few days before.¹⁹⁵ Established in Melbourne in 2007 (the headquarters were expanded and moved to Geneva in 2011), ICAN promoted a more confrontational approach to disarmament than comparable campaigns. In contrast, for example, to the US-based Global Zero movement, which was designed to work with and within elite policy circles in the nuclear-armed states, ICAN's aim was to create political pressure from the outside.

Experts from various international organisations, universities, and think tanks were invited to give testimony at the conference. Several government delegations offered statements in which they called for decisive action towards nuclear disarmament, arguing that any use of nuclear arms would violate international humanitarian law.¹⁹⁶ The five states defined by the NPT
as nuclear-weapon states, however, as well as some of their allies, were con-
spicuous by their absence. Sending a stern letter of rejection, the nuclear-
weapon states collectively boycotted the conference, calling it a 'distraction'
from more important work.¹⁹⁷ The rejection letter was read out to an audi-
ence by a Norwegian official.¹⁹⁸

Presumably, the boycott was undertaken to discourage movement towards
a ban. Internal UK government communications suggested that:

At the heart of the ‘humanitarian disarmament movement’ is the thread
that any weapons which are indiscriminate in their effect should be out-
lawed. This is how the Cluster Munitions Convention campaign began.
The Oslo meeting will seek to establish as gospel that nuclear weap-
ons have such an indiscriminate effect, and must therefore be banned.
So we need to establish a strong counter narrative which reflects our
broader disarmament and deterrence strategy.¹⁹⁹

The United Kingdom's 'broader disarmament strategy' was the so-called step-by-step process nominally pursued by the nuclear-weapon states through the NPT review cycle and other established forums. The idea was to pursue disarmament as a technical, incremental process alongside practices of nuclear deterrence. Yet it was this very approach that the majority of non-nuclear-weapon states had lost faith in. Experience seemed to indicate that, in the absence of a stronger norm against nuclear weapons, deterrence would invariably win out against disarmament.

The nuclear-weapon states also boycotted the OEWG, which convened in Geneva a few weeks after the Oslo conference. Many non-nuclear-weapon states made strong calls for the development of new legal instruments to facilitate nuclear disarmament. The nuclear-weapon states' absence seemed, if anything, to underscore the need for a new approach, at any rate from the perspective of many non-nuclear-weapon states. In the words of the Irish delegation, there was 'a growing sense of frustration in the international community at the lack of progress'. The creation of the OEWG and convening of the high-level meeting demonstrated 'a growing momentum to take action'.²⁰⁰ According to the Brazilian ambassador, speaking on behalf of the NAC, the elimination of nuclear weapons had to be a 'clear and unconditional objective':

The unsustainable divide between haves and have-nots must end. The
narrow national security interests of a few cannot trump the collec-
tive security interests of all. It is beyond our understanding that, more
than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons
still threaten our world. [...] Non nuclear weapon states have already
taken the high moral ground by rejecting nuclear weapons, but frus-
tration is mounting at the lack of action by nuclear weapon states,
in particular with respect to the non-fulfilment of their multilateral
commitments. Humanity cannot wait forever, the time for action is now.²⁰¹

For the NAC, concerns with material and ontological security seemed to be entangled. The failure of disarmament was represented as a breach of solemn vows, a denial of sovereign equality, and an enduring security risk. For the NAC, security and *pacta sunt servanda* were two sides of the same coin.

A number of states and groups of states presented the OEWG with elabo-
rate working papers. In a joint contribution, Ireland and Switzerland argued
that the non-nuclear-weapon states could aid the process of disarmament
by taking ‘actions directed at further stigmatizing nuclear weapons’.²⁰² The
most discussed working paper was probably that of the NAC, which made a
conceptual distinction between ‘end state’ prohibitions that would be needed
to ‘maintain a world free of nuclear weapons’, on the one hand, and ‘interim’
measures that were needed to ‘accelerate progress’ toward the end state, on
the other. Crucially, the NAC maintained that these measures didn’t have to
be implemented in sequence. Work on the ‘end state’ prohibitions could start
‘immediately’;²⁰³ indeed, the adoption of prohibitions could potentially serve
over time to create political will for disarmament via the stigmatisation effect
discussed in the working paper by Ireland and Switzerland.

The 2013 OEWG concluded on 3 September 2013 with the approval of a
report that acknowledged the various views put forward.²⁰⁴ Then, just a few
weeks after the OEWG, a large group of states took part in the one-day high-
level meeting on nuclear disarmament in New York. Several foreign ministers
and heads of state were present to place their dissatisfaction with the status
quo on the record.²⁰⁵

As discussed above, the nuclear-weapon states' boycotting of the Oslo
conference and OEWG was seemingly intended to dissuade the non-nuclear-
weapon states from going forward on the disarmament agenda on their own.
Major powers such as the United States had traditionally been wary of initia-
tives that might 'stigmatize and inhibit possible US use of its nuclear weap-
ons capabilities even for self-defense'.²⁰⁶ This had been one of the central US
objections against the CTBT during much of the Cold War. Yet the boycott
appears to have backfired.²⁰⁷ In the view of Austrian Ambassador Alexander
Kmentt, one of the humanitarian initiative's architects, the nuclear-weapon
states' snubbing of the initiative illustrated precisely why it was needed:

Nuclear-weapon states have boycotted or rejected the above initiatives
with the utterly unconvincing argument that they would distract from
the NPT and the implementation of the 2010 action plan. In truth,
these initiatives do not distract from anything, but rather focus the
attention of governments and the wider public on the importance of
achieving a world without nuclear weapons. [...] Instead of resisting
and acting to undermine efforts by non-nuclear-weapon states and
civil society, nuclear-weapon states should start to embrace a different
discourse on nuclear weapons themselves and move seriously toward their elimination.²⁰⁸

The nuclear-weapon states clearly found it difficult to come up with a good answer to the humanitarian initiative. Countering value-based international advocacy by small states and NGOs is ‘neither easy or costless’, even for the international system’s most powerful state, argues Martha Finnermore:

> It requires constant management of the transnational conversation surrounding the unipole’s behavior and continuing demonstrations of the unipole’s commitment to the values or vision that legitimate its power. To simply dismiss or ignore these attacks is dangerous; it smacks of contempt. It says to others, ‘You are not even worth my time and attention.’²⁰⁹

As discussed throughout this study, the original nuclear recognition order compelled the nuclear-weapon states to acknowledge the non-nuclear-weapon states as subjects with legitimate rights and security interests, and to engage them as partners in governing the nuclear world. The boycotts discussed above, however, were interpreted as statements that the non-nuclear-weapon states were not even worth the nuclear-weapon states’ time and attention. The calculations of the Obama administration – previously so keen to communicate recognition of the non-nuclear-weapon states as valued stakeholders in the regime – are difficult to assess. While some held that Obama’s early rhetoric had simply been overstated or disingenuous, others believed Obama to have become disillusioned after receiving opposition to his disarmament agenda from domestic hawks.²¹⁰ The Nobel Peace Prize, which was intended by the awarding committee to boost Obama in his apparent campaign for a world without nuclear weapons, appears if anything to have reinforced an image of the president as a peacenik, undermining his political room for manoeuvre.²¹¹ Another factor was the so-called P5 process and the supposed imperative of solidarity within the group of nuclear-weapon states. It has been speculated that the Brits and Americans were dissuaded from participating in the Oslo conference by other members of the P5.²¹²

Either way, the nuclear-weapon states’ hostile attitude to the humanitarian initiative deepened the crisis of legitimacy. There seems to be agreement among many of the regime complex’ insiders that the nuclear-weapon states’ boycott of the Oslo conference and OEWG fuelled the incipient humanitarian turn.²¹³ The pushback from the nuclear-weapon states was interpreted as a sign that the initiative was working, to wit, that it was disturbing, or at least had the potential to disturb, extant power structures.²¹⁴ In the view of Alexander Kmentt, widely looked to as the leader of the non-nuclear-weapon states’ push for disarmament during this period, the nuclear-weapon states’ boycott had been a ‘fundamental tactical error’; the boycott highlighted the illusion of consensus on the need for disarmament and ‘energised’
the humanitarian initiative.²¹⁵ Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, argues that the nuclear-weapon states' 'arrogant and hostile response' only deepened the animosity driving the humanitarian initiative.²¹⁶ According to a former Canadian ambassador, Paul Meyer, the nuclear-weapon states' attempt at 'squashing' the humanitarian initiative constituted 'a blatant act of disrespect' and propelled mobilisation for radical disarmament measures.²¹⁷ The Norwegian ambassador suggested that the nuclear-weapon states' boycott of the Oslo conference strengthened the perception that the current nuclear order could not deliver meaningful disarmament.²¹⁸ In the view of a diplomat from another state closely allied to the United States, the development of the humanitarian initiative after the nuclear-weapon states' boycott demonstrated that 'when states get frustrated, you prompt more extreme and robust responses that perhaps weren't necessarily intended but are then allowed to develop'.²¹⁹ According to ICAN's director, Beatrice Fihn, the nuclear-weapon states' boycott was 'the best thing that could happen', because it pierced the canard that the nuclear-weapon states were in fact dedicated to disarmament and that progress towards zero was merely a matter of technical implementation. The absence of the nuclear-weapon states also allowed the non-nuclear-weapon states to coordinate a common position.²²⁰ For Magnus Løvold, another ICAN strategist, the boycott was 'good news for ICAN. It gave the campaign a boost'.²²¹

## From Nayarit to Vienna and New York

In February 2014, Mexico hosted 146 states in Nayarit for a second conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. The conference had been scheduled in advance of the Oslo conference but was announced in Norway as a concluding highlight. In the run-up to Nayarit, the Mexican government reportedly received requests from the US government to tweak the conference agenda in a direction that would make US attendance palatable, but the Mexicans were unwilling to budge.²²² According to the analyst William Potter, Mexico had adopted a deliberate strategy of 'attempting to polarise the debate'.²²³ Mexican sources have disputed this claim. But many representatives of neutral and non-aligned states were indeed growing increasingly wary that the public relations strategy of the nuclear-weapon states was to play down diverging interests and insist that, despite differences over process, all states were in harmony concerning the goal of abolition. As discussed in Chapter 2, this strategy of depoliticising nuclear governance had been adopted as a strategy by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom already in advance of the first NPT review conference in 1975. Ever since, the nuclear-weapon states had primarily opposed disarmament on procedural and technical, not substantive, terrain. By the mid-2010s, representatives of non-nuclear-weapon states were unwilling to allow the nuclear-weapon states to gloss over the political conflicts underpinning the global nuclear order.²²⁴ Any successful strategy of disarmament, so the
argument went, would have to open a space for adversarial politics on both domestic and international levels.²²⁵

At the Nayarit conference, Juan Gomez Robledo, chair of the meeting and deputy foreign minister of Mexico, declared that the discussions on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons should

lead to the commitment of States and civil society to reach new international standards and norms, through a legally binding instrument. It is the view of the Chair that the Nayarit Conference has shown that the time has come to initiate a diplomatic process conducive to this goal.²²⁶

The parallels to the processes that led to the adoption of treaties prohibiting anti-personnel landmines (1997) and cluster munitions (2008) were, as the UK Foreign Office had pointed out, rather obvious. Those processes had also started out as 'facts-based discussions' and evolved into diplomatic processes to institute legal prohibitions against the weapons in question. Alexander Kmentt, who was slated to host a third humanitarian conference in Vienna later in the year, was apparently caught off guard by the Mexicans' open call for a new 'legally binding instrument'.

> I remember vividly that most participants and especially NGOs cheered loudly in Nayarit when the Mexican chair concluded the Conference. I was plunged into panic, wondering how I could possibly manoeuvre through the political challenge that the organization of the upcoming Vienna Conference had just become.²²⁷

The Mexicans had deliberately cast the die, putting pressure on the Austrians. While Austria was broadly in favour of the course staked out by the Mexicans, there were some disagreements about when and where a diplomatic process towards a prohibition treaty should be initiated. On the one hand, the 'facts-based' formula made it easier to attract wide participation, including from aligned states. On the other hand, there was, from the point of view of those in favour of a ban, no need to drag the facts-based discussion out unnecessarily. Part of the point of the humanitarian initiative, after all, was to illuminate the very real political disagreements at the heart of the global nuclear order.

Many non-aligned states supported the political direction envisioned by the Mexicans. But the nuclear-weapon states and most of their allies were, predictably, critical. Over the next few years, US allies such as Australia, Canada, and Germany continued to engage with the humanitarian initiative, but took every opportunity to stress that nuclear disarmament depended on a favourable security environment, and that the adoption of new legal instruments would be 'premature'.²²⁸ Norway, which had been a strong proponent of the humanitarian initiative in its early phase, disassociated from the initiative following the election of a new government in that country in the fall of
2013.²²⁹ Norway was also subjected to a number of stern demarches from allies, including the United States.²³⁰

The P5 boycott of the humanitarian initiative was a major talking point in nuclear policy debates in the mid-2010s. As in nuclear discourse generally, the NPT-sanctioned distinction between ‘nuclear-weapon state’ and ‘non-nuclear-weapon state’ provided a filter for making sense of what was going on. The general understanding in the disarmament community was that the nuclear powers had snubbed the humanitarian initiative. In material terms, however, this was not strictly speaking correct. While the OEWG and Oslo and Nayarit conferences had indeed been boycotted by Israel, North Korea, and the five states recognised as nuclear-weapon states under the NPT, India and Pakistan had attended all three meetings. Yet, the attendance or non-attendance of the four ‘unofficial’ nuclear powers did not seem to count in quite the same way as that of the five ‘official’ nuclear-weapon states. The reason for this double standard lies precisely in the diplomatic distinctions between official/unofficial and recognised/non-recognised nuclear powers: While the nuclear possession of the five original nuclear powers had been legally ordained in exchange for a commitment to engage in multilateral disarmament negotiations – or at least so the story went – the nuclear possession of the four ‘unofficial’ nuclear powers had never been legally endorsed and was thus beyond the pale of political validation either way.²³¹ While the nuclear status of the five original possessors required justification, the status of the four nuclear revisionists was as it were unjustifiable by default.

The United States and the United Kingdom finally broke ranks with the rest of the P5 and sent delegations to the third humanitarian conference, convened in Vienna in December 2014.²³² Yet their attendance did not dissuade the non-nuclear-weapon states from pushing the agenda forwards – well beyond what the nuclear-weapon states were prepared to accept. At the conclusion of the Vienna conference, the hosts issued an ‘Austrian Pledge’, later to be renamed the ‘Humanitarian Pledge’, to revitalise the disarmament process. The pledge, which urged states to ‘stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons’,²³³ quickly became the central rallying point for the NGO coalition promoting a legal ban on nuclear weapons. Over the course of 2015, much of ICAN’s work revolved around drawing attention to the pledge and getting states to formally support it. In January 2015, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States endorsed the pledge en bloc.²³⁴ By the end of 2015, well over 100 states had signed up.

Alongside the OEWG and the series of ad hoc conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, the momentum of the humanitarian initiative was kept up in two ways. The first was the presentation of joint statements on the ‘humanitarian dimension’ of nuclear disarmament at various multilateral meetings. A total of six such statements, all similar in content, were read out on behalf of an ever-growing group of states at international conferences between 2012 and 2015. The first joint statement, read out by the Swiss delegation to the 2012 NPT preparatory committee meeting, was supported
by 16 states. The last joint statement, read out by the Austrian delegation to the 2015 NPT review conference in New York, was supported by as many as 159 non-nuclear-weapon states. The delivery of several of these statements was followed by enthusiastic applause from their supporters, a rare occurrence at multilateral disarmament conferences.²³⁵

A second way in which the momentum of the humanitarian initiative was kept up was through the development by the NAC and others of specific proposals for how the ‘effective measures’ referred to in the NPT’s article VI might be implemented. In a working paper submitted to the 2014 NPT preparatory committee meeting, the NAC presented four alternatives: (1) a comprehensive nuclear disarmament convention that would provide for both prohibitions and stockpile destruction (this would be similar to the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention launched in the 1990s), (2) a standalone prohibition treaty that would leave the negotiation of specific disarmament steps and the particularities of verification for a later time, (3) a framework convention that contained a few basic elements but could be added to through a dynamic diplomatic process, and (4) a hybrid arrangement that incorporated elements from the three options outlined above.²³⁶ In subsequent iterations, the list of conceptual alternatives was reduced, in effect, to two options: (A) a treaty that could be negotiated and adopted, if need be, without the nuclear-armed states on board (i.e., either (2), (3), or (4) above) and (B) a comprehensive disarmament convention (number (1) above). Since it was presumed that the negotiation of a detailed disarmament convention with precise provisions for stockpile destruction would require the good-faith participation of the nuclear-armed states, only one viable alternative remained.

*Human Security and the Role of Civil Society*

The humanitarian initiative spurred careful analysis in the academic community. For many of the contributors to this literature, the humanitarian approach emerged as a natural extension of an expanding ‘human security paradigm’ propelled by NGOs.²³⁷ Yet the binary distinction between NGOs, as supposed catalysts of change, and states, as targets of advocacy, does not hold. After all, most of the key NGOs in the field of nuclear disarmament, including ICAN, received much of their funding from governments.²³⁸ As persuasively argued by Iver Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, NGOs should not necessarily be seen as external agents acting ‘on’ states. In many cases, NGOs could be more fruitfully understood as agents ‘of’ states.²³⁹ ‘We were on the same team’, said one member of ICAN’s Geneva office staff about the campaign’s relationship with key governments in the humanitarian coalition.²⁴⁰ According to ICAN’s then director, Beatrice Fihn, ‘governments fund us [ICAN] because it helps them, either through us promoting something that is already their policy and that they want other governments to agree with, or by helping them develop their own policy’.²⁴¹ According to a third member of ICAN’s Geneva office staff, ‘we can say things that governments can’t.’
We can be a bit pushier'.²⁴² One of the pushiest and arguably most effective organisations within the wider ICAN umbrella was the NGO Wildfire, which hit the scene in 2014 as an anonymous blog and later Twitter account pushing polemical takes on the nuclear status quo. Wildfire's mission statement, the first text published on the blog, was the following:

No more commissions
No more pontificating windbags
No more paper cranes
No more NPT treadmill
No more whining, wishing and waiting
Change the game.²⁴³

The driving figure behind Wildfire was later revealed to be a former Australian diplomat with deep experience in disarmament diplomacy. In the run-up to the TPNW negotiations, Wildfire functioned as the campaign's most unruly and confrontational outrider, using humour and ridicule not first and foremost with the aim of converting non-believers but rather with an aim of energising the converted.²⁴⁴ If the non-nuclear-weapon states wanted to exert power, so the argument went, they would have to abandon their traditional role as 'watchdogs', adopting instead the role of normative 'locomotive' – championing new normative standards that might affect the nuclear powers' behaviour in the future.

Many of the states supporting the humanitarian initiative were clearly motivated by a desire to protect civilians and advance international humanitarian law.²⁴⁵ Some of the initiative's key backers, including Austria, Ireland, Mexico, and New Zealand, had long histories as champions of multilateralism, nuclear disarmament, and humanitarian law. But not all the humanitarian initiative's supporters were paragons of humanitarianism and disarmament in other fields. Egypt, for example, was a vocal supporter of the humanitarian initiative on nuclear disarmament but a holdout on other humanitarian disarmament instruments such as the Ottawa Landmine Treaty and Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions. Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and the Philippines also strongly backed the humanitarian initiative, but could not necessarily be listed as standout champions of humanitarianism more generally. Many of the human security agenda's usual suspects – Belgium, Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway – ended up opposing the humanitarian initiative's demand for a ban on nuclear weapons.

Support for previous 'humanitarian disarmament' instruments such as the Ottawa Treaty and Oslo Convention were in fact poor predictors of support for the humanitarian initiative for nuclear disarmament. Indeed, most of the liberal European states that had promoted those earlier conventions were quite unwilling to upset the nuclear hierarchy from which they themselves were presumed to benefit. The opposition of these states to the humanitarian initiative may be seen in part as a product of material national security
considerations – they were disinclined to give up the perceived national secu-
rity benefit of extended nuclear deterrence, or at any rate to do something
their most powerful allies opposed – but also seemed to reflect a more fun-
damental aspiration to maintain their standing as valued allies in the US
Transatlantic or Pacific security communities. Support for the humanitar-
ian initiative thus followed the traditional dividing line in nuclear politics,
namely the one between the aligned states, on the one hand, and the neutral
and non-aligned states, on the other. Sweden, formerly a principled neutral
state but increasingly a member of NATO in all but name, exemplified this
dynamic. Seeking to explain to the media why Sweden had not supported the
joint statement on the humanitarian dimension of nuclear disarmament at
the 2013 NPT preparatory committee meeting, Sweden's then foreign min-
ister, Carl Bildt, said that the supporters of the humanitarian initiative were
'not serious states'.<sup>246</sup> For Bildt, then, the relevant 'circle of recognition'
was not the small and medium-sized states that supported the humanitarian
initiative, but the ostensibly more serious major powers. Sweden duly with-
drew from the NAC, also in 2013, effectively discontinuing its traditional role
as a forward-leaning norm entrepreneur in nuclear disarmament diplomacy.
Aligned states further away from the geopolitical core, however, supported
the humanitarian initiative and ban-treaty movement. US allies Thailand and
the Philippines, for example, as well as the Russian ally Kazakhstan, sup-
ported the push for a prohibition treaty.

The backers of the Humanitarian Pledge and the idea of a treaty ban-
ning nuclear weapons were convinced that the nuclear-weapon states had not
lived up to their disarmament obligations under the NPT. At the 2013 NPT
preparatory committee meeting, the NAC asserted that it was 'important
to go back to basics; that is the original package of the NPT and its regime,
or if you will the Grand Bargain of 1968. [...N]uclear disarmament – a key
foundation of the Treaty – remains an ultimate disappointment'.<sup>247</sup> Before
2012, none of the working papers submitted by the NAC to the NPT review
cycle mentioned the ‘grand bargain’. From 2012 onwards, close to all NAC
statements and working papers censured the nuclear-weapon states’ appar-
ent undercutting of the NPT bargain. A huge number of statements, by the
NAC and others, maintained that the NPT was now at a ‘crossroads’ or
‘turning point’.<sup>248</sup>

The sentiment that the nuclear-weapon states had violated the so-called
grand bargain was echoed in numerous informal conversations and inter-
views. According to one diplomat interviewed for this study, the nuclear-
weapon states 'didn't fulfil their obligations'.<sup>249</sup> In the words of another, 'the
NPT was a bargain - it has not been fulfilled'.<sup>250</sup> For a third, the nuclear-
weapon states had 'totally disregarded their commitments'.<sup>251</sup> For her, adher-
ing to the law was 'an issue of sovereignty'. By refusing to implement their
commitments, in this view, the nuclear-weapon states were undermining
*pacta sunt servanda* and the very fabric of international society. This same
point was explicitly made by the Mexican delegation to the 2015 review
conference.²⁵² There was a widespread sense that the nuclear-weapon states’ supposed non-compliance with article VI could not be allowed to stand. The movement to ban nuclear weapons reflected precisely this sentiment. ‘It was not the slave owners who struggled for the liberation of the slaves’, asserted one diplomat from a non-aligned state, alluding that the nuclear-weapon states were never going to lead on disarmament.²⁵³ ‘For a lot of people, the humanitarian initiative became a reaction to the frustrations of about 60 years’, held another non-nuclear-weapon state representative.²⁵⁴ The humanitarian initiative was an ‘uprising of states that have been side-lined for a long time and wish to participate’, claimed ICAN’s Daniel Högsta.²⁵⁵

In November 2017, four months after the adoption of the TPNW (described below), Pope Francis became the first pope to explicitly condemn the possession of nuclear weapons. As discussed in Chapter 3, Catholic leaders had typically contented themselves with condemning the *use* of nuclear weapons while acquiescing to the practice of nuclear deterrence on the condition that efforts were made towards disarmament. This, of course, was a similar position to the one informing the traditional NPT recognition order. However, as detailed throughout this chapter, the credibility of the nuclear powers’ disarmament promises had eroded to a point where they could no longer justify the pope’s, or the majority of the non-nuclear-weapon states’, continued support for the status quo order. At a Vatican symposium, the pope expressed concern at the ‘catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects’ of any employment of nuclear arms. ‘If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned’, he maintained.²⁵⁶

## Towards a Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons

Expectations were low as the 2015 NPT review conference approached. Detecting increased tension between nuclear and non-nuclear-weapon states, experts were predicting a rancorous conference.²⁵⁷ In contrast to the situation five years earlier, when Russia and the United States had been able to present the review conference with New START, the nuclear-weapon states went into the 2015 review conference with little to offer the non-nuclear-weapon states in the way of progress towards disarmament. The most tangible outcome of the so-called P5 process was a set of definitions of terms relevant to nuclear diplomacy. This relatively paltry offering was met with scorn by neutral and non-aligned state officials. ‘What did we get from the nuclear-weapon states?’, jeered one diplomat, ‘a glossary!’²⁵⁸

A more notable development was the March 2015 launch of the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV), a multilateral forum for the development of strategies and techniques to verify nuclear disarmament. It was widely presumed that, as the number of nuclear weapons crept towards zero, the traditional verification techniques
used under the START agreements would not suffice. Those techniques, after all, had been developed to track and verify the destruction or converting of nuclear means of delivery – bombers, missile silos, submarines, etc. At very low numbers of nuclear weapons, so the argument went, every nuclear warhead would have strategic implications and would have to be accounted for.²⁵⁹ Initiated by the US government in cooperation with the NGO Nuclear Threat Initiative, IPNDV was seemingly aimed at making something happen on the disarmament front, in part to appease disgruntled non-nuclear-weapon states. In the former US official Lewis Dunn’s words, the initiative constituted an attempt at finding a way out of ‘the NPT disarmament stalemate’.²⁶⁰ Bringing together experts and officials, IPNDV would build on bilateral cooperation on verification between Norway and the United Kingdom dating back to the mid-2000s.

In an Australian diplomatic cable released through a freedom of information request, Australian officials expressed concern about the ‘increasingly combative’ position taken by the Austrian and other neutral and non-aligned governments. The Australian government was worried that Vienna was trying to develop ‘a narrative that a nuclear weapons ban treaty [...] would be the logical next step in disarmament in the event that the NPT was a failure’. Unless the humanitarian concerns of the non-aligned states were sufficiently ‘acknowledged’, the further radicalisation of the humanitarian initiative would be inevitable, the authors of the Australian cable believed.²⁶¹ Yet, by 2015, it would probably have been too late with an ‘acknowledgement’. With the regime complex in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy, the advocates of disarmament were looking for tangible results.

As before, the neutral and non-aligned states attending the 2015 NPT review conference seemed far more concerned with disarmament than nuclear security assurances. While ‘security guarantee(s)’ and ‘security assurance(s)’ appear 120 times in the meeting’s records, ‘disarmament’ and ‘disarm’ appear 855 times. ‘Article VI’ was mentioned 127 times.²⁶² As expected, the exchanges on disarmament were acrimonious. The negotiations on non-proliferation were also difficult. While the nuclear-weapon states and their allies were pressing for more demanding inspection standards, non-aligned hardliners were opposed to accepting further obligations on ‘their’ side of the NPT bargain. At the 2010 review conference, when the overall legitimacy of the regime complex had been higher, the language on non-proliferation and safeguards had been strengthened. While the 2010 review conference had stopped short of making the IAEA Additional Protocol legally obligatory for all states – something that would not have been within the review conference’s purview anyway – it recommended the universal conclusion of additional protocols. In 2015, after five years of disappointing progress towards disarmament, key non-aligned states were in no mood to advance the non-proliferation agenda. The language on non-proliferation and safeguards that was eventually agreed upon in 2015 was significantly weaker than that of five years earlier.²⁶³ As Harald Müller
writes, many non-aligned states ‘remember colonial humiliation, embrace sovereignty and reject further constraints justified as non-proliferation measures’. The NAM ‘believes the principle of equality is violated by the perpetual asymmetry of nuclear possession and renunciation’.²⁶⁴ For Brazil, Egypt, and others that continued to oppose the IAEA Additional Protocol, ‘resistance is genuinely framed as an issue of equity and protest against further limitations being imposed on non-nuclear weapon states without corresponding “sacrifices” by the recognized nuclear weapon states along with Israel, India, and Pakistan’.²⁶⁵

But any agreement on non-proliferation and civilian nuclear cooperation proved irrelevant. When, on the last night of the conference, delegations were asked to take a position on the final draft declaration, agreement was blocked due to differences over the way forward on the proposed WMD-free zone in the Middle East, an issue that to some extent had gone under the radar in the wider nuclear expert discourse prior to the conference. As discussed in Chapter 3, the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995 had been enabled in part by the adoption of a resolution recommending the establishment of a zone. Since 1995, several members of the Arab League had grown increasingly annoyed that the resolution had not been implemented due to opposition from Israel and the United States. Indeed, intransigence on the Middle East zone proposal had prompted the Egyptian delegation to walk out of the 2013 preparatory committee meeting in protest. In 2015, the disagreement concerned the inclusion of language authorising the convening of a conference to consider the establishment of a zone even if not all states in the region agreed – a phrase Israel could not accept. However, as a non-party to the NPT, Israel could not itself veto the agreement. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada therefore took it upon themselves to block consensus vicariously. It was said, however, that several of the humanitarian initiative’s supporters were deeply unhappy about the final draft’s language on disarmament, and that they would have blocked consensus had the Middle East issue been resolved. Several states allegedly had their ‘blocking statements’ ready.²⁶⁶

The conference had been marked by what pundits referred to as ‘polarisation’ between nuclear and non-nuclear-weapon states,²⁶⁷ a euphemism for the stiffening of disagreements about the pace and direction of nuclear (dis)armament. ‘What some countries are calling polarisation, I call honesty’, noted one interviewee.²⁶⁸ Many non-nuclear-weapon states argued that the credibility of the NPT as an instrument of disarmament had reached a point of zero – a charge the nuclear-weapon states were not able to counter convincingly.²⁶⁹ Several non-nuclear-weapon states reiterated their view that

> the status of nuclear-weapon States had been intended as a transitional status, and any assumption that the indefinite extension of the Treaty meant that nuclear-weapon States could continue to possess those weapons indefinitely was contrary to the spirit and letter of the Treaty.²⁷⁰
In a statement that received enthusiastic applause, the South African del-
egation argued that the nuclear-weapon states had made a mockery of the
multilateral nuclear disarmament process by continually backsliding on
their promises. The approach of the nuclear-weapon states, Ambassador
Samuel Minty argued, ‘makes nonsense of the South African proposal in
1995 to extend the Treaty indefinitely based on the historic bargain that
NWS will disarm, whilst others will not proliferate. It makes nonsense of
the 2000 review conference, together with many other agreements’. Minty
went on:

If we look back [...], we simply see agreements being reached and then
soon after, some of the five walk away from these agreements, when
the ink is hardly dry. So what are we to do with these kinds of agree-
ments? What has happened to the 1995 agreement? What has hap-
pened to the 2000 outcome and other outcomes that we have had?
Why do some still talk as if we do not have such agreements? Why do
some only refer to certain aspects of the Treaty and not to the NPT
regime as a whole.

The question is when will we ever get nuclear disarmament? It is
certainly the most neglected pillar of the Treaty where we urgently need
forward movement. The NPT is not like a menu at a restaurant where
NWS can decide what it is that they are going to eat. They seem to be
very allergic to their commitment or addicted to nuclear weapons, since
they seemingly cannot do without them. If you approach the NPT like
a menu, where you simply select what you want, then what does this
mean for the legal obligations that we all entered into together?²⁷¹

The statement brought out clearly the sense among many non-nuclear-
weapon-state officials that the nuclear-weapon states’ *à la carte* approach to
multilateral agreements had undermined not only the disarmament process
and declared interests of a huge number of the world’s states, but, more
fundamentally, the integrity of multilateral diplomacy and the non-nuclear-
weapon states as partners in contract. The brutal fact, of course, was that, in
an anarchic international system, the most powerful states could, indeed, get
their way in most instances. In its closing statement on behalf of 50 states,
Austria took note of the gulf between the nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon
states with respect to the urgency of disarmament:

The exchanges of views that we have witnessed during this review cycle
demonstrate that there is a wide divide that presents itself in many fun-
damental aspects of what nuclear disarmament should mean. There is
a reality gap, a credibility gap, a confidence gap and a moral gap. After
the discussions of the past weeks, we are now even more concerned
about the existence of nuclear weapons and the apparent attempts to
brush aside the facts, impact and risks of nuclear weapons.²⁷²
The failure of the review conference fuelled support for the idea of nego-
tiating a treaty banning nuclear weapons even if the nuclear-armed states
refused to cooperate.²⁷³ The idea of a ban had been promoted by a growing
number of states, academics, and NGOs since the early 2010s – in particular
from 2013 onwards.²⁷⁴ According to the international relations scholar Nick
Ritchie, a prohibition treaty could plausibly help facilitate nuclear disarma-
ment in the long term by contributing to delegitimising nuclear weapons and
amplifying anti-nuclear norms: ‘A strong case can indeed be made that a
new legal instrument is required since the NPT’s built-in discrimination [...] renders it structurally unable to categorically delegitimize nuclear weapons and the practice of nuclear deterrence’.²⁷⁵ The purpose of a ban, in this view, would not be regulatory or managerial in a narrow sense, at least not in the short term, as the proponents of the idea knew full well that the treaty would not be supported by the nuclear powers for the foreseeable future. Instead, as formulated by Ray Acheson and Beatrice Fihn, the purpose of the ban was to ‘support a discourse about nuclear weapons that understands them as weapons of terror, instability and insecurity rather than as “deterrents” or instruments of stability’.²⁷⁶ Changing the discourse, in this view, would help reinforce anti-nuclear norms and give a boost to more practical initiatives such as campaigns for financial divestment from companies involved in the production or maintenance of nuclear-weapon systems.²⁷⁷ Proponents of the humanitarian initiative maintained that the prevailing security discourse normalised and even glorified nuclear weapons. The assumptions and cultural narratives that gave value to nuclear weapons were seen, in turn, to dovetail with a conservative, patriarchal worldview.²⁷⁸ As an illustration of the latter, in 2015, a representative of Russia’s close ally Belarus opposed civil society participation in the Geneva Conference on the grounds that this might lead to ‘topless women’ throwing ‘jars of mayonnaise’ from the gallery.²⁷⁹

The neutral and non-aligned states were undeterred by claims that the adoption of a new treaty would be inconsequential, destabilising, or detrimental to the disarmament agenda. At the UNGA session following the review conference (2015/16), a group of states led by Austria and Mexico tabled a mandate for a second OEWG to be convened in 2016.²⁸⁰ The OEWG, according to its mandate, would address ‘legal measures, legal provisions and norms that will need to be concluded to attain and maintain a world without nuclear weapons’.²⁸¹ It was clear that such a forum would present those keen to advance a ban treaty with an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a new legal instrument. Despite staunch opposition by the nuclear-armed states, the resolution was carried in the UNGA plenary by a vote of 138 in favour, 12 against, and 34 abstaining.

The 2015/16 UNGA session also saw the introduction of a new and much-touted disarmament resolution, tabled by South Africa, on ‘ethical imperatives’ for the elimination of nuclear arms. Framing any use of nuclear weapons as an affront to ‘the laws of humanity’, the resolution was passed by a large majority of non-nuclear-weapon states. According to the resolution,
the long-term nuclear modernisation plans embarked on by the major
nuclear powers ‘run contrary to commitments and obligations to nuclear
disarmament and engender perceptions of the indefinite possession of these
weapons’. In conclusion, so went the resolution, all states share an ‘ethical
responsibility to act with urgency and determination, with the support of all
relevant stakeholders, to take the effective measures, including legally bind-
ing measures, necessary to eliminate and prohibit all nuclear weapons’.²⁸²

Meeting in Geneva over three sessions in 2016 (February, May, and August), the second OEWG saw a large number of states explicitly call for the negotiation of a nuclear weapons prohibition treaty. Many states also presented suggestions for what such a treaty might contain. Since the nuclear-armed states all boycotted the OEWG, the representatives of the aligned non-nuclear-weapon states that attended found themselves in the somewhat unfamiliar position of having to defend the nuclear status quo. They were, however, greatly outnumbered and could not check the momentum of the ban-treaty movement. Concluding in August 2016, the second OEWG recommended that the UNGA should adopt a formal mandate for negotiations on ‘a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons’ in 2017.²⁸³ Two months later, at the 2016/17 UNGA session, Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa tabled just such a resolution.²⁸⁴

The UNGA debate about the ban was full of implicit and explicit claims about standing, entitlements, and recognition. According to the Russian del-egation to the 2016/17 UNGA, the negotiation of a ban would ‘undermine and erode’ the NPT. In its view, Russia held a legitimate and internationally recognised right to possess nuclear weapons:

> The adverse repercussions [of a ban treaty] for the viability and the comprehensive nature of the NPT would be catastrophic. Let us remind those who for some reason wish to close their eyes to this fact that, pursuant to the NPT, five States possess nuclear weapons with absolute legitimacy. All the NPT States parties signed that Treaty and all national Parliaments ratified it.²⁸⁵

From the perspective of many neutral and non-aligned states, however, the five recognised nuclear-weapon states had lost any ‘right’ to possess nuclear weapons by failing to comply with the recognition order underpinning the NPT. No longer willing to tacitly accept the notion that the nuclear-weapon states were actively entitled to possess nuclear weapons pending the completion of the disarmament process, the supporters of the humanitarian initiative described the existing nuclear regime complex’ lack of a universal prohibition against the possession and use of nuclear weapons as a ‘glaring legal gap’ in need of filling.²⁸⁶ Thus, despite the collective ‘dismay’ of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States,²⁸⁷ the ‘serious concern’ of the Chinese,²⁸⁸ and the warnings of the Russians that the adoption of a ban treaty might have ‘catastrophic’ consequences,²⁸⁹ a resolution mandating
formal ban treaty negotiations in 2017 was adopted by a large majority at
the 2016/17 UNGA (123 in favour, 38 against, 16 abstaining).

The Nuclear Ban Treaty as Normative Recalibration

The resolution mandating ban-treaty talks provided for four weeks of sub-
stantive negotiations over two sessions (in March and from June to July
2017, respectively). On the first day, the then-US ambassador to the UN,
Nikki Haley, staged an unorthodox press conference in the lobby outside
the negotiating room to demonstrate against the process.²⁹⁰ The result was
that the negotiations garnered more attention than they otherwise would
have, receiving headlines in major international and American newspapers.²⁹¹
Boycotted by all the nuclear-armed states as well as all NATO members
except the Netherlands, which had been forced to attend through a vote
in its parliament, the negotiations went relatively smoothly.²⁹² For the most
part, the negotiations consisted of states making largely unopposed sugges-
tions for elements to include in the preamble and body text. For example,
several states that had previously hosted nuclear testing sites – Pacific island
states and Kazakhstan, in particular – demanded an explicit recognition in
the treaty of the devastating consequences of nuclear testing. Kazakhstan, for
instance, asked that the treaty should ‘recognise victims of nuclear testing’.²⁹³
The conference president and negotiating parties were happy to oblige: The
preamble of the resulting treaty notes both the parties’ mindfulness of the
‘unacceptable suffering of [...] those affected by the testing of nuclear weap-
ons’ and recognition of the ‘disproportionate impact of nuclear-weapon
activities on indigenous peoples’.²⁹⁴ ‘This is a time for moral justice for vic-
tims’, noted the Chilean delegation.²⁹⁵

The treaty was adopted on 7 July 2017. While 122 states voted in favour, one voted against (the Netherlands), and one abstained (Singapore). For the provisions on safeguards and civilian nuclear cooperation, the negotiators were happy to borrow language from the NPT and various nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties and simply widen the scope of application to all parties rather than just ‘non-nuclear-weapon states’. While a handful of NGOs had been eager for the international community to push back not only against nuclear weapons but also the production and use of nuclear energy, the majority of states, not least many in the Global South, were keen to protect the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful development purposes, something ICAN and the major NGOs accepted.²⁹⁶ Initial disagreements about whether the treaty should call on the nuclear-armed states to first disarm and then join the treaty (the ‘disarm then join’ model) or rather to first join the treaty and then disarm according to a process determined by the treaty (the ‘join then disarm’ model) were overcome by including provisions for both eventualities (article 4). In the second case, an acceding nuclear-armed state was obliged to ‘immediately remove them [their nuclear weapons] from operational status, and destroy them as soon as possible but not later
than a deadline to be determined by the first meeting of States Parties’. The first meeting of states party, held in July 2022, set the deadline for stockpile destruction to ten years.²⁹⁷

The central provision of the treaty, codified in article 1, was a set of comprehensive prohibitions. Recognising that the risks associated with nuclear weapons ‘concern the security of all humanity’, the TPNW unequivocally prohibits any use, threat of use, development, testing, transfer, production, manufacture, and possession of nuclear weapons, as well as assistance, inducement, or encouragement of these prohibited acts.²⁹⁸ The government of the Philippines applauded the negotiations as ‘marked by cooperation, mutual respect and the deep collective desire to achieve a breakthrough in nuclear disarmament’.²⁹⁹ ‘We have showed that democracy is possible’, asserted the Chilean delegation, adding that ‘this Treaty is now part of our common civilisation’.³⁰⁰

The nuclear-armed states were hostile. In public, their opposition to the TPNW was generally couched in technical arguments about the TPNW's verification arrangements and alleged incompatibility with existing legal instruments such as the NPT and CTBT. Hans Blix, a former director of the IAEA, found those arguments largely 'strained'. In his perspective, the 'real objection is that the Treaty bans the production, use, and handling of nuclear weapons without exception. The nuclear weapons states are attached to the Non-Proliferation Treaty because it legitimises the possession of their nuclear weapons'.³⁰¹ The TPNW, in this view, threatened to over time contribute towards delegitimising and stigmatising nuclear weapons, to wit, *delegitimising* in the sense of undermining the established nuclear-weapon states' claim to an internationally sanctioned right to possess nuclear weapons and *stigmatising* in the sense of adding to what the British defence strategist Michael Quinlan referred to as the 'political' and 'moral burdens of nuclear effort'.³⁰² The nuclear-armed states were adamant that nuclear disarmament could only be pursued in combination with practices of nuclear deterrence – and nuclear deterrent threats could in turn only be credible if the use of nuclear weapons was seen, at some level, as politically and morally acceptable in at least some circumstances.³⁰³ Writing in 2019, the chief of staff of the US National Nuclear Security Administration's Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation argued in a personal capacity that legal norms, moral constraints, and other factors that might contribute to the perception that US leaders 'are unwilling to order the use of nuclear weapons' could embolden adversaries and 'in fact *increase* the likelihood of nuclear war'.³⁰⁴ TPNW proponents, for their part, maintained that nuclear disarmament would stand little chance of success, and that unacceptable nuclear vulnerabilities would remain, so long as nuclear weapons were perceived as legitimate and usable.³⁰⁵

In October 2020, as the number of ratifications kept increasing, the Trump administration sent out official missives to the TPNW's then states party, directly urging them to retract their support for the treaty. Observers described the move as 'unprecedented' and 'outrageous'.³⁰⁶ It was, however,
only the latest instantiation of what one set of scholars describe as a ‘frantic intimidation campaign’ aimed at weakening support for the agreement.³⁰⁷ Nevertheless, only a few days later, on 24 October 2020, Honduras became the 50th state to ratify, triggering the agreement’s entry into force 90 days later. In the fall of 2020, 130 non-nuclear-weapon states adopted a UNGA resolution ‘welcoming’ the TPNW and encouraging ‘all States that have not yet done so to sign, ratify, accept, approve or accede to the Treaty at the earliest possible date’.³⁰⁸

## A Withdrawal of Recognition

The NPT is commonly seen to have ‘recognized the major powers’ right to possess nuclear weapons as part of their special managerial responsibilities for world order’.³⁰⁹ As theorised by Hedley Bull, great powers are states that have been ‘recognised’ by others to have [...] certain special rights and duties’.³¹⁰ However, the legitimacy of the hierarchy codified by the NPT was always conditional, at least from the perspective of the majority of non-nuclear-weapon states. The nuclear-weapon states were expected to engage in a collaborative process aimed at nuclear disarmament. In the words of William Walker,

> the possession of nuclear weapons by the acknowledged nuclear weapon states was a temporary trust, and a trust which could not be extended to other states. Nuclear disarmament remained the eternal norm, which would eventually displace the provisional norm of non-proliferation. Although the injunction to engage in arms control and disarmament in the NPT’s article VI was vaguely expressed, the expectation attached to it was unambiguous.³¹¹

As detailed in this book, however, the multilateral nuclear disarmament project has been mired by setbacks, countervailing forces, and bad faith. The nuclear regime complex was periodically revamped and relegitimised through solemn pledges and recomcommitments to the goal of disarmament, but the trick could only be repeated so many times. Half a century after the adoption of the NPT, with each of the five nuclear-weapon states engaged in large-scale nuclear modernisation programmes, the NPT recognition order collapsed. A large number of states – countries of all shapes and sizes – had decided that the time was up. As the Brazilian delegation to the TPNW negotiations put it, ‘we do not wish to maintain different categories of states’.³¹² ‘We are creating a universal norm’, held Liechtenstein.³¹³ While some scholars have expressed doubts about the viability of the strategy behind the ban treaty – the nuclear-armed states are free, in a legal sense, simply to ignore the treaty – others have maintained that meaningful progress towards abolition is all but unthinkable in the absence of the creation of a new nuclear order centred on the radical rejection of nuclear arms as legitimate instruments of statecraft.³¹⁴
In contrast to the respective architects of the 1978 UNSSOD-I outcome document and 2000 NPT review conference final document, the states championing the TPNW did not seek to revamp or re-legitimise the original NPT recognition order, but rather to transcend and move beyond it. If the 1995 indefinite extension of the NPT and consensus outcome of the NPT review conference in 2000 together signified the ‘end of history’ for the nuclear regime complex, the process that brought about the 2017 adoption of the TPNW marked the end of the end of history.³¹⁵ In the words of former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Angela Kane, approvingly cited by Alexander Kmentt in his book about the negotiation process, the adoption of the TPNW meant that the nuclear-weapon states ‘can no longer claim that their possession of nuclear weapons has international approval and legitimacy’.³¹⁶

The NPT never *explicitly* gave the nuclear-weapon states a right to possess nuclear weapons. In the words of the Egyptian delegation to the UNGA in 2014, the non-nuclear-weapon states had not ‘at any stage’ accepted that the original nuclear powers could retain their arsenals indefinitely. ‘This would have undermined the basic foundations of the principle of equality among States’.³¹⁷ However, as discussed above, the NPT stopped short of prohibiting the original five’s possession of nuclear weapons, allowing the established major powers to argue, as the Russians put it at the 2016/17 UNGA, that ‘in line with the NPT, the nuclear weapons possessed by the five nuclear Powers are absolutely legitimate’.³¹⁸ While the NPT obliged the nuclear powers to eventually disarm, it clearly also functioned as a means through which the nuclear-weapon states legitimated their nuclear deterrence practices and modernisation programmes. In the words of Nick Ritchie, the NPT involved an implicit but unmistakable ‘legal endorsement’ of the established major powers’ possession of nuclear arms.³¹⁹

The adoption of the TPNW was praised by its supporters as a great victory or, at any rate, a ‘fork in the road’ enabling meaningful choice between different nuclear futures.³²⁰ At the 2017/18 UNGA, on behalf of the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the government of Thailand called the treaty a ‘vital step towards global nuclear disarmament’, one that would make a ‘significant contribution towards the shared goal of making our region and the world free of nuclear weapons’.³²¹ For Austria, the treaty was a ‘historic achievement which Austria takes pride to have helped come about’.³²² The Caribbean Community group exclaimed that ‘July 7, 2017 is a day that will never be forgotten – the day the majority of member states adopted the Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons’.³²³ The Brazilian government affirmed that it had been honoured to have been the first country to sign the TPNW on 20 September 2017.³²⁴

The adoption of the TPNW marked a commitment to the goal of disarma-
ment but also, of course, to non-proliferation. Nigeria, speaking on behalf of
the African Group of Nations, made this point explicitly. Hailing the treaty
as a ‘landmark’ agreement, the Nigerian ambassador said that the adoption of the TPNW had ‘reinforced’ the African Group’s ‘commitment to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty’.325 The New Agenda Coalition welcomed the adoption of the TPNW and added that it remained fully committed to ‘upholding and preserving’ the NPT – both article VI and the provisions for non-proliferation.326 For the foreseeable future, the NPT will continue to exist as a widely supported treaty – complemented by the TPNW. While the TPNW clearly functioned as a means of challenging the notion that a select group of states was entitled to possess nuclear weapons in perpetuity, the treaty was hardly incompatible with the NPT in a legal or institutional sense. When negotiated, the NPT had invariably been seen, in the words of the Swedish diplomat Alva Myrdal, as ‘a first stop on the road towards nuclear disarmament, soon to be followed by others’.327 The NPT does not bind its parties to agree collectively on those next steps.

To the extent that the TPNW manifests an alternative nuclear order that privileges nuclear-free status, the ban treaty may also be described as the expression of a ‘counterculture’ that seeks to elevate the status of non-nuclear-weapon states. For Carlos Umaña, for example, an advisor to the Costa Rican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and leading member of IPPNW, the humanitarian initiative expressed the notion that

> the prestige of countries is not measured by their weapons or how rich they are, but by how cultured their people are; how peaceful and educated they are; and how their country participates in negotiations in pursuit of peace and disarmament.328

The same dynamic was alluded to by the representative of Chile, who suggested that the TPNW was now part of ‘our common civilisation’.329

The TPNW and its proponents are clearly up against powerful forces, and the extent to which the broader project succeeds remains to be seen. The further deterioration of the international security environment following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and increased rivalry between China and the United States has hardly helped those eager to convince the nuclear-armed states and their allies to give up the practice of nuclear deterrence. Many of the TPNW’s detractors have argued that the treaty and its supporters are not living in the real world, making ‘pie in the sky’ pronouncements detached from the realities of power politics. Yet the campaign has scored significant successes on the nuclear weapons divestment agenda. The years following the TPNW’s adoption have seen several large banks and pension funds divesting from companies involved in the production and maintenance of nuclear-weapon systems. On several occasions, the new treaty was explicitly highlighted as a motivating factor.330 The TPNW, in this view, is not an end point, but a political tool for the anti-nuclear movement.
*Discursive Space and Sovereignty in Action*

The humanitarian initiative provided non-nuclear-weapon states with what was for them a welcome vehicle for amplifying their voices.³³¹ For the Jamaican official Shorna-Kay Richards, the humanitarian movement expressed a ‘new approach’ to disarmament that had ‘equality and justice’ at its core; the OEWGs and conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons had ‘proven that the non-nuclear weapons States have a say in nuclear disarmament issues. Our voice matters. We have agency’.³³² In theoretical terms, the dynamic described by Richards may be understood as the creation of ‘discursive space’.³³³ By creating new forums and arenas for diplomatic action, the non-nuclear-weapon states gave themselves the opportunity to speak and act out their sovereignty in practice. As the Mexican delegation to the 2015/16 UNGA put it, the

> humanitarian initiative has generated new momentum and has given a voice back to scores of countries that have waited in frustration for 45 years for the nuclear-weapon States to do their part under the arrangement known as the grand bargain.³³⁴

The humanitarian initiative also allowed specific states such as Austria, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and South Africa to take leadership roles and engage in status diplomacy. Costa Rica was also enabled to build its reputation as a competent actor in multilateral negotiations; Laura Chinchilla Miranda, the president of Costa Rica, described the election of Costa Rica to preside over the 2013 OEWG as ‘a recognition of Costa Rica’s moral authority and commitment to disarmament’.³³⁵

*Conclusion*

The 13 ‘practical steps’ adopted in 2000 to implement article VI of the NPT soon came under pressure. The United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty and Russia refused to ratify START II. At the NPT review conference in 2005, which broke down without a consensus final document, France and the United States caused significant consternation by refusing to accept the 13 steps as valid. The election of Barack Obama and adoption by the United States and Russia of the New START agreement in 2010 did much to improve the regime complex’ faltering legitimacy. Obama eloquently declared his government’s intention to pursue the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. This was hardly a radical break with the commitments or rhetoric of previous US leaders – the United States had been legally committed to nuclear disarmament for several decades – yet the Obama administration’s moves in the 2009–2010 period came across to many of the regime complex’ insiders as uniquely promising. The come-down was significant when the Obama administration’s so-called Prague agenda broke down in the years after 2010. Determined to take
resolute normative leadership, a large coalition of non-nuclear-weapon states decided in the mid-2010s to pursue the negotiation of a legally binding instrument prohibiting nuclear weapons. The TPNW was adopted in July 2017.

As the two that came before it, the nuclear regime complex' third crisis of legitimacy led to a significant expansion of the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework. Through the convening the conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, the institution of high-level meetings on nuclear disarmament, the organisation of UN OEWGs on nuclear disarmament, and the mandating of the TPNW negotiating conference, the regime received new (admittedly mostly ad hoc) loci. The crisis also led to a change in the regime's *modus*: The Marshall Island's legal case against the nuclear-armed states at the ICJ – which attracted significant attention but was ultimately rejected by the Court on procedural grounds – and the negotiation of the TPNW by majoritarian rules of procedure marked new ways of ‘doing’ nuclear politics. Lastly, the regime complex' substantive rules were fundamentally transformed – or at any rate challenged – through the adoption of the new nuclear weapons prohibition treaty.

For the foreseeable future, the TPNW and the NPT will exist as parallel legal instruments. While some scholars have recommended that states keen to advance nuclear disarmament withdraw from the NPT as a means of further signalling their non-approval of the nuclear-weapon states' presumed right to possess nuclear weapons,³³⁶ the majority of non-nuclear-weapon states appear to see continuing value in the NPT. For one thing, the NPT remains a central *locus* of cooperation on the civilian uses of nuclear technology and non-proliferation safeguards. For another, for all its faults, the NPT remains the only legally binding framework formally committing at least five of the nuclear-armed states to disarmament. Pro-disarmament non-nuclear-weapon states are likely to continue to engage in the NPT review process to press the nuclear powers on their article VI obligations.

## Notes

1. Jamie McIntyre, ‘Bush’s missile defense plans may be indistinct from Clinton-Gore’s’, CNN, 1 Jun. 2000, https://edition.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/06/01/bush.missile/index.html.

2. Sweden on behalf of the New Agenda Coalition (NAC), United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2000, doc. A/C.1/55/PV.3, p. 18.

3. Mexico, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2000, doc. A/C.1/55/PV.3, p. 9.

4. South Africa on behalf of the NAC, UNGA First Committee, New York, 8 Oct. 2001, doc. A/C.1/56/PV.3, p. 13.

5. David S. Yost, ‘The US nuclear posture review and the NATO allies’, *International Affairs* 80: 4, 2004, p. 707.

6. Richard Rhodes, *Arsenals of folly: the making of the nuclear arms race* (New York, NY: Vintage, 2007), pp. 222–3.
7 Malaysia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 30 Sept. 2002, doc. A/C.1/57/PV.2, p. 21.

8 Ireland on behalf of the NAC, UNGA First Committee, New York, 30 Sept. 2002, doc. A/C.1/57/PV.2, p. 11.

9 Egypt, UNGA First Committee, New York, 7 Oct. 2002, doc. A/C.1/57/PV.7, p. 16.

10 Denmark, UNGA First Committee, New York, 29 Oct. 2002, doc. A/C.1/57/PV.23, p. 4.

11 New Zealand, UNGA First Committee, New York, 30 Sept. 2002, doc. A/C.1/57/PV.2, p. 24.

12 Terence Neilan, 'Bush pulls out of ABM treaty; Putin calls move a mistake', *New York Times*, 13 Dec. 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/13/international/bush-pulls-out-of-abm-treaty-putin-calls-move-a-mistake.html.

13 David Cliff, Hassan Elbahitmy, and Andreas Persbo, *Irreversibility in nuclear disarmament Vertic* (London: Vertic, 2011), p. 59.

14 Jack Mendelsohn, 'America and Russia: make-believe arms control', *Current History* 101: 657, 2002, pp. 325–9; Harald Müller, 'Between power and justice: current problems and perspectives on the NPT regime', *Strategic Analysis* 34: 2, 2010, p. 193.

15 E.g., John Dumbrell, 'Unilateralism and "America first"'? President George W. Bush's foreign policy', *The Political Quarterly* 73: 3, 2002, pp. 279–87; Ron Huisken, 'Missile defence, the ABM treaty, and nuclear weapons – an opportunity missed', *Pacifica Review* 14: 2, 2002, pp. 87–104; Mendelsohn, 'America and Russia', p. 657.

16 At the United Nations (UN), only a handful of delegations even took note of what had happened. Malaysia was most critical: UNGA First Committee, New York, 30 Sept. 2002, doc. A/C.1/57/PV.2, p. 22.

17 Brazil on behalf of the NAC, UNGA First Committee, New York, 6 Oct. 2003, doc. A/C.1/58/PV.2, p. 11.

18 Costa Rica, UNGA First Committee, New York, 7 Oct. 2004, doc. A/C.1/59/PV.4, p. 11. See also, e.g., Malaysia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 8 Oct. 2004, doc. A/C.1/59/PV.5, p. 12; Nepal, UNGA First Committee, New York, 12 Oct. 2004, doc. A/C.1/59/PV.7, p. 9; Nigeria, UNGA First Committee, New York, 18 Oct. 2004, doc. A/C.1/59/PV.10, p. 9.

19 Brazil, UNGA First Committee, New York, 7 Oct. 2004, doc. A/C.1/59/PV.4, p. 6.

20 Rebecca Johnson, 'Time for a fissban – or farewell?', *Disarmament Diplomacy* 83, 2006, http://www.acronym.org.uk/old/archive/dd/dd83/83fissban.htm.

21 Federation of American Scientists, 'Russian/Soviet doctrine', 4 Sept. 2000, https://nuke.fas.org/guide/russia/doctrine/intro.htm.

22 James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, *Power and purpose: U.S. policy toward Russia after the Cold War* (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

23 Andrei P. Tsygankov, *Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin: honor in international relations* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 130–1.

24 Jennifer G. Mathers, 'Nuclear weapons in Russian foreign policy', *Europe–Asia Studies* 64: 3, 2012, p. 496.

25 Benjamin Sims and Christopher R. Henke, 'Repairing credibility: repositioning nuclear weapons knowledge after the Cold War', *Social Studies of Science* 42: 3, 2012, p. 325.

26 See, e.g., Cristina Chuen, 'Greater attention pledged to Russian triad's naval leg', Monterey Institute of International Studies, 4 March 2002, https://nonproliferation.org/greater-attention-pledged-to-russian-triads-naval-leg/.
27 Stephen Saunders and Tom Philpott, *Jane's fighting ships 2015–2016* (London: IHJ Global, 2015).

28 Associated Press, 'France announces nuclear missile deal', 23 Dec. 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20150924172113/http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-103695206.html.

29 Mexico, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Oct. 2004, doc. A/C.1/59/PV.2, p. 5.

30 The Treaty of Tlatelolco (Latin America and the Caribbean) entered into force in 1968. The Treaty of Rarotonga (South Pacific) entered into force in 1986. The Treaty of Pelindaba (Africa) entered into force in 2009. A nuclear-weapon-free zone covering Central Asia was adopted in 2006 and brought into force in 2009.

31 UNGA, 'General and complete disarmament: Mongolia's international security and nuclear-weapon-free status', New York, 4 Dec. 1998, doc. A/RES/53/77.

32 Conference on Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones, 'Declaration for the conference of nuclear-weapon-free zones', April 2015, doc. CZLAN/CONF/5, pp. 2–3.

33 North Korea, statement of the government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, 10 Jan. 2003, doc. S/2003/91.

34 Seline Høiseth, 'Atomic ayatollahs: explaining Iran's post-revolutionary nuclear path', *International Politics* 52: 5, 2015, pp. 523–48.

35 John Simpson and Jenny Nielsen, 'The 2005 NPT review conference', *The Nonproliferation Review* 12: 2, 2005, p. 274.

36 Wade L. Huntley, 'Rebels without a cause: North Korea, Iran and the NPT', *International Affairs* 82: 4, 2006, p. 739.

37 Hine-Wai Loose, '2005 – year of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – but what happened to nuclear disarmament?', *New Zealand Yearbook of International Law* 4, 2007, p. 148.

38 Harald Müller, 'A treaty in troubled waters', *The International Spectator* 40: 3, 2005, pp. 34–5.

39 Robin Cook, 'America's broken nuclear promises endanger us all', *The Guardian*, 27 May 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/27/greenpolitics.usa.

40 William Walker, 'President-elect Obama and nuclear disarmament', IFRI Security Studies Center, *Proliferation Papers*, Winter 2009, p. 15.

41 William C. Potter, 'The NPT review conference', *The International Spectator* 40: 3, 2005, p. 20.

42 Chamundeeswari Kuppuswamy, 'Is the nuclear non-proliferation treaty shaking at its foundations?', *Journal of Conflict and Security Law* 11: 1, 2006, p. 154.

43 Tom Sauer, 'The nuclear nonproliferation regime in crisis', *Peace Review* 18: 3, 2005, pp. 333–40.

44 Daniel W. Drezner, 'The new new world order', *Foreign Affairs* 86: 2, 2007, p. 34.

45 Andrew O'Neil, 'Nuclear proliferation and global security', *Comparative Strategy* 24: 3, 2005, p. 346.

46 Ronald McCloy, 'Nuclear apartheid spawns proliferation', *Peace Research* 37: 1, 2005, p. 96.

47 Philip Stephens, 'A breakdown in the nuclear family', *Financial Times*, 13 May 2005.

48 The Proliferation Security Initiative is a US-led effort to interdict trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. Some states argue the initiative breaches with norms of non-interference and freedom of navigation.

49 Walker, 'President-elect Obama and nuclear disarmament', p. 15.

50 Andrew Hurrell, 'Brazil and the new global order', *Current History* 109: 724, 2010, p. 63.
51 Ali A. Dareini, ‘Iran threatens pullout from nuclear treaty’, *Washington Post*, 8 May 2006.

52 Sverre Lodgaard, *Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation: towards a nuclear-weapon-free world?* (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 78.

53 Egypt on behalf of the NAC, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2006, doc. A/C.1/61/PV.2, pp. 7–8; South Africa on behalf of the NAC, UNGA First Committee, New York, 3 Oct. 2005, doc. A/C.1/60/PV.2, p. 16; Mexico on behalf of the NAC, UNGA First Committee, New York, 19 Oct. 2007, doc. A/C.1/62/PV.12, p. 1.

54 Mexico, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2006, doc. A/C.1/61/PV.2, p. 15. See also, e.g., Uruguay on behalf of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), UNGA First Committee, New York, 18 Oct. 2007, doc. A/C.1/62/PV.11, p. 3; Morocco, UNGA First Committee, New York, 15 Oct. 2007, doc. A/C.1/62/PV.6, pp. 22–3.

55 Singapore, UNGA First Committee, New York, 6 Oct. 2005, doc. A/C.1/60/PV.6, p. 8; Eritrea, UNGA First Committee, New York, 3 Oct. 2006, doc. A/C.1/61/PV.3, p. 13.

56 Quoted in George Perkovich et al., *Universal compliance: a strategy for nuclear security* (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), p. 229.

57 Brazil et al., ‘Draft elements of an UNGA first committee resolution “Initiating work on priority disarmament and non-proliferation issues”’, New York, 2005, https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com05/documents/draftelementsinitiating.pdf. A similar initiative had been floated by Austria the year before. Telephone interview with non-nuclear-weapon state official, 16 Aug. 2023.

58 Interview with Beatrice Fihn, Geneva, 7 Dec. 2015; Sarah Estabooks and Lynne Griffiths-Fulton, ‘A report on the UN first committee on disarmament and international security’, *The Ploughshares Monitor* 26: 4, 2005, p. 4.

59 United States, ‘UNGA First Committee draft resolution on ad hoc committees’, memo, New York, Oct. 2005, https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com05/documents/ungafirstcommdraft.pdf. Capitalisation in original.

60 Telephone interview with non-nuclear-weapon state official, 16 Aug. 2023.

61 See Wade Mansell and Emily Haslam, ‘John Bolton and the United States’ retreat from international law’, *Social and Legal Studies* 14: 4, 2005, pp. 459–85.

62 Ghana, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Oct. 2005, doc. A/C.1/60/PV.4, pp. 6–7; Syria, UNGA First Committee, New York, 6 Oct. 2006, doc. A/C.1/61/PV.6, p. 11.

63 Egypt, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) review conference, 24 Jul. 2005, doc. NPT/CONF/2005/57/, p. 151.

64 Hans Blix, ‘Foreword’, in Blix, ed., *Weapons of terror: freeing the world of nuclear, biological and chemical arms* (Stockholm: Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, 2006), p. 14.

65 Tony Blair, ‘Oral answers to questions’, *Hansard*, UK Parliament, 4 Dec. 2006

66 Tony Blair, ‘Oral answers to questions’, *Hansard*, UK Parliament, 21 Feb. 2007. See Nick Ritchie, ‘Relinquishing nuclear weapons: identities, networks and the British bomb’, *International Affairs* 86: 2, 2010, pp. 465–87.

67 Ritchie, ‘Relinquishing nuclear weapons’.

68 Paul Beaumont, *Performing nuclear weapons: how Britain made Trident make sense* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 13.

69 Nick Ritchie, ‘Valuing and devaluing nuclear weapons’, *Contemporary Security Policy* 34: 1, 2013, p. 157.
70 UK House of Commons, Official report, 21 Jun. 2010, column 55.

71 Indonesia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Oct. 2002, doc. A/C.1/57/PV.6, pp. 6–7.

72 Indonesia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 17 Oct. 2007, doc. A/C.1/62/PV.10, pp. 9–10.

73 Ghana, UNGA First Committee, New York, 9 Oct. 2008, doc. A/C.1/63/PV.5, p. 14.

74 Michael Wesley, 'It's time to scrap the NPT', *Australian Journal of International Affairs* 59: 3, 2005, p. 288.

75 Susan Watkins, 'The nuclear non-protestation treaty', *New Left Review* 54, Nov./Dec. 2008, pp. 25–6.

76 Ramesh Thakur, 'Has the good become the enemy of the bad?', in Jane Boulden, Ramesh Thakur, and Thomas G. Weiss, eds, *The United Nations and nuclear orders* (New York, NY: United Nations University Press, 2009), p. 285.

77 Thomas E. Doyle, 'The moral implications of the subversion of the nonproliferation treaty regime', *Ethics & Global Politics* 2: 2, 2009, pp. 131–53.

78 Wade L. Huntley, 'Roadmaps to disarmament', in Richard Falk and David Krieger, eds, *At the nuclear precipice: catastrophe or transformation?* (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 175.

79 Telephone interview with non-nuclear-weapon state official, 23 Aug. 2017.

80 Barack Obama, 'Renewing American leadership', *Foreign Affairs* 86: 4, 2007, p. 9.

81 See Martin Senn and Christoph Elhardt, 'Bourdieu and the Bomb: power, language and the doxic battle over the value of nuclear weapons', *European Journal of International Relations* 20: 2, 2013, pp. 316–40.

82 Barack Obama, 'Fulltext: Obama's foreign policy speech', *The Guardian*, 16 Jul. 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/16/uselections2008.barackobama.

83 Ben Rhodes, *The world as it is: a memoir of the Obama white house* (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2018), pp. 41–2.

84 Barack Obama, 'Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as delivered', *Obama White House Archive*, 5 April 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered.

85 Obama, 'Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as delivered'.

86 International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), *Eliminating nuclear threats: a practical agenda for global policymakers* (Canberra and Tokyo: Paragon, 2009), pp. 5–6.

87 Joseph Rotblat, 'Toward a nuclear-weapon-free world as a prelude to a war-free world', in Jozef Goldblat, ed., *Nuclear disarmament: obstacles to banishing the bomb* (London: Tauris, 2000), pp. 3–4.

88 Nikolai Sokov, 'Russia's approach to nuclear weapons', *Washington Quarterly* 20: 3, 1997, pp. 107–14.

89 George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, *A world transformed* (New York, NY: Vintage, 1998), p. 514.

90 Hans Blix, *Why nuclear disarmament matters* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 7.

91 Mexico, UNGA First Committee, New York, 14 Oct. 2009, doc. A/C.1/64/PV.10, p. 14.

92 New Zealand, UNGA First Committee, New York, 14 Oct. 2009, doc. A/C.1/64/PV.10.

93 Jayantha Dhanapala, *Current position and recommendations in the field of disarmament* (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2009).

94 UN Security Council, Resolution 1887, New York, 24 Sept. 2009, doc. S/RES/1887.
95 Lodgaard, *Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation*, pp. 79, 83.

96 Deepti Choubey, *Restoring the NPT: essential steps for 2010* (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009), p. 5.

97 Harald Müller, ‘A nuclear nonproliferation test: Obama’s nuclear policy and the 2010 NPT review conference’, *The Nonproliferation Review* 18: 1, 2011, p. 219.

98 Sweden, NPT review conference, 8 Jun. 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 23.

99 Austria, NPT review conference, 8 Jun. 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 33.

100 E.g., Turkmenistan on behalf of the Central Asian Group, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Oct. 2010, doc. A/C.1/65/PV.2, p. 16; Mexico, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Oct. 2010, doc. A/C.1/65/PV.2, p. 19; Ireland, NPT review conference, 4 Jun. 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 18; Thailand, UNGA First Committee, New York, 15 Oct. 2010, doc. A/C.1/65/PV.11, p. 1; Argentina, NPT review conference, 8 Jun. 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 99; Burkina Faso, NPT review conference, 8 Jun. 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 101.

101 Lebanon on behalf of the Arab Group, NPT review conference, 8 Jun. 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 79.

102 Deborah W. Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, ‘Russia says no: power, status, and emotions in foreign policy’, *Communist and Post-Communist Studies* 47: 3–4, 2014, p. 274.

103 United States, NPT review conference, 8 Jun. 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, pp. 26–9.

104 Rebecca Johnson, ‘Assessing the 2010 NPT review conference’, *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* 66: 4, 2010, pp. 5–6.

105 NPT review conference final document (vol. I), New York, 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 12.

106 Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, internal memo, ‘Etter NPTs tilsynskonferanse’, Oslo, 18 Jun. 2010.

107 Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, ‘Who’s in, who’s out?’, *London Review of Books* 34: 4, 2012, p. 38.

108 On the concept of humanitarian disarmament, see John Borrie and Vanessa Martin Randin, eds., *Disarmament as humanitarian action: from perspective to practice* (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2006).

109 Norway, CD, Geneva, 17 March 2011, https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/cd/2011/statements/part1/17March_Norway.pdf.

110 Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Etter NPTs tilsynskonferanse’.

111 Kjølv Egeland, ‘Oslo’s “new track”: Norwegian nuclear disarmament diplomacy, 2005–2013’, *Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament* 2: 2, 2019, p. 472.

112 See also Lodgaard, *Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation*, p. 96.

113 Emily B. Landau, ‘US counter-proliferation policy’, in Efraim Inbar and Jonathan Rynhold, eds, *US foreign policy and global standing in the 21st century* (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 206.

114 Choubey, *Restoring the NPT*, p. 40.

115 Brazil, NPT review conference, 3 May 2010, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/review_conference2010/statements/3May_Brazil.pdf.

116 NPT review conference, Final document (Parts I and II), New York, 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 23 (action 15).

117 See, e.g., Zia Mian and A. H. Nayyar, ‘Playing the nuclear game: Pakistan and the fissile material cutoff treaty’, *Arms Control Today*, April 2010, pp. 17–24.

118 Barack Obama, ‘Message from the president on the New START treaty’, The White House, 2 Feb. 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press
-office/2011/02/02/message-president-new-start-treaty-0. See also Fred Kaplan, *The bomb: presidents, generals, and the secret history of nuclear war* (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020).

119 Ray Acheson, ed., *Assuring destruction forever: nuclear weapon modernization around the world* (New York, NY: Reaching Critical Will, 2012).

120 Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, ‘Global nuclear weapons inventories, 1945–2013’, *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* 69: 5, 2013, pp. 75–81.

121 Medvedev would subsequently assume a more hardline, nationalist position, in particular following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

122 Mathers, ‘Nuclear weapons in Russian foreign policy’, p. 496.

123 Obama in 2013 called for reducing New START’s limit of 1550 deployed strategic warheads by 1/3, as well as ‘bold’ reductions in tactical nuclear weapons. The Kremlin reportedly did not respond. Steven Pifer, ‘U.S.-Russian arms control in the absence of a summit’, *Brookings, 4* Sept. 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/u-s-russian-arms-control-in-the-absence-of-a-summit/.

124 Elias Götz, ‘Strategic imperatives, status aspirations, or domestic interests?’, *International Politics* 56: 1, 2019, p. 819.

125 Patchen Markell, *Bound by recognition* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 33.

126 Indonesia on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), UNGA First Committee, New York, 3 Oct. 2011, doc. A/C.1/66/PV.3, p. 7.

127 Austria, UNGA First Committee, New York, 14 Oct. 2011, doc. A/C.1/66/PV.12, p. 18.

128 Interview with Thomas Nash, London, 11 Sept. 2016.

129 Nina Tannenwald, ‘Justice and fairness in the nuclear nonproliferation regime’, *Ethics & International Affairs* 27: 3, 2013, p. 300.

130 Ramesh Thakur, ‘The nuclear ban treaty: recasting a normative framework for disarmament’, *The Washington Quarterly* 40: 4, 2017, p. 84.

131 Brazil, NPT review conference, 27 May 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/SR.4, p. 6.

132 Pavel Podvig, ‘Russian Federation’, in Ray Acheson, ed., *Assuring destruction forever: nuclear weapon modernization around the world* (New York, NY: Reaching Critical Will, 2012), p. 64.

133 Hans M. Kristensen, ‘B61-12: NNSA’s gold-plated nuclear bomb project’, Federation of American Scientists, 26 July 2012, https://fas.org/publication/b61-12gold/.

134 Indonesia on behalf of the NAM, NPT review conference, 15 June 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/SR.15, p. 6. See also Ecuador on behalf of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), UNGA First Committee, New York, 12 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.4, p. 2.

135 Kazakhstan, UNGA Plenary, 21 Sept. 2011, doc. A/66/PV.11, p. 21.

136 Algeria, Conference on Disarmament (CD), 6 Mar. 2012, doc. CD/PV.1251, p. 3.

137 See, e.g., Nigeria on behalf of the African Group, UNGA First Committee, New York, 8 Oct. 2012, doc. A/C.1/67/PV.2, p. 10.

138 Switzerland, UNGA First Committee, New York, 8 Oct. 2014, doc. A/C.1/69/PV.3, p. 14.

139 Alexander Kmentt, ‘The development of the international initiative on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons and its effect on the nuclear weapons debate’, *International Review of the Red Cross* 97: 899, 2015, pp. 681–710.

140 Venezuela, UNGA First Committee, New York, 6 Oct. 2011, doc. A/C.1/66/PV.6, p. 23.

141 Brazil, NPT review conference Preparatory Committee meeting (Preparatory Committee meeting), 29 Apr. 2012, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/
images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/Preparatory Committee meeting12/statements/2May_Brazil.pdf.

142 Egypt on behalf of the NAC, NPT Preparatory Committee meeting, 30 Apr. 2012, https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/Preparatory Committee meeting12/statements/30April_NAM.pdf.

143 Ecuador, UNGA First Committee, New York, 31 Oct. 2014, doc. A/C.1/69/PV.22, p. 14.

144 Alexander Kmentt, 'How divergent views on nuclear disarmament threaten the NPT', *Arms Control Today* 43: 10, 2013, pp. 8–13.

145 Interview with Steffen Kongstad, Geneva, 7 Dec. 2015.

146 Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, 'Who's in, who's out?', p. 38.

147 Ireland, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Nov. 2012, doc. A/C.1/67/PV.18, p. 5.

148 Algeria, CD, 10 Aug. 2010, doc. CD/PV.1192, p. 6.

149 Liechtenstein, UNGA First Committee, New York, 5 Oct. 2010, doc. A/C.1/65/PV.3, p. 8.

150 Mexico, NPT Preparatory Committee meeting, 2 May 2012, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/Preparatory Committee meeting12/statements/2May_Mexico.pdf.

151 Austria, UNGA First Committee, New York, 10 Oct. 2012, doc. A/C.1/67/PV.4, p. 3.

152 UNGA, 'Taking forward multilateral disarmament negotiations', New York, 25 Oct. 2011, doc. A/C.1/66/L.21/Rev.1.

153 Humanitarian/Austrian Pledge, Vienna, 9 Dec. 2014, https://www.bmeia.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Zentrale/Aussenpolitik/Abruestung/HINW14/HINW14vienna_Pledge_Document.pdf.

154 On hegemony and counter-hegemony in world politics, see Robert Cox, 'Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: an essay in method', *Millennium* 12: 2, 1983, pp. 162–75.

155 Emmanuelle Blanc, 'Wither the international nuclear order?', in Emily B. Landau and Azriel Bermant, eds, *The nuclear nonproliferation regime at a crossroads* (Ramat Aviv: The Institute for National Security Studies, 2014), pp. 101, 109–10.

156 Algeria, CD, 6 Mar. 2012, doc. CD/PV.1251; South Africa, NPT review conference, 13 May 2015, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/review conference2015/statements/13May_SouthAfrica.pdf.

157 Germany on behalf of 27 states, UNGA First Committee, New York, 3 Nov. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.23, p. 9.

158 France on behalf of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, UNGA First Committee, New York, 5 Nov. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.25, p. 18.

159 E.g., Qatar, UNGA First Committee, New York, 6 Oct. 2011, doc. A/C.1/66/PV.6, p. 14.

160 NPT review conference final document (vol. I), New York, 2010, doc. NPT/CONF.2010/50, p. 4.

161 William C. Potter, 'The unfulfilled promise of the 2015 NPT review conference', *Survival* 58: 1, 2016, p. 160.

162 Russia also opposed additional sanctions, albeit not due to the nuclear-weapon states' track record on disarmament.

163 E.g., S. Samuel C. Rajiv, 'The Iranian nuclear imbroglio and the NAM summit', Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 19 Sept. 2017, https://idsa.in/issue-brief/TheIranianNuclearImbroglioandtheNAMSummit_SamuelRajiv_190912.
164 *The Economist*, 'Iran's atomic agreement', 14 July 2015, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/07/14/irans-atomic-agreement.

165 David Patrikarakos, *Nuclear Iran: the birth of an atomic state* (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), p. 288.

166 Hossein Mousavian, 'The Iranian nuclear dispute: origins and current options', *Arms Control Today* 42: 6, 2012, pp. 10–13.

167 Morteza Dehghani et al., 'Sacred values and conflict over Iran's nuclear program', *Judgement and Decision Making* 5: 6, 2010, pp. 540–6.

168 NAM, '14th summit of the heads of state or government of the Non-Aligned Movement', Havana, 16 Sept. 2006, http://cns.miis.edu/nam/documents/Official_Document/14NAMSummit-Havana-Compiled.pdf.

169 NAM, '16th summit of the heads of state or government of the Non-Aligned Movement', Teheran, 31 Aug. 2012, p. 64, https://unidir.org/node/6070.

170 Pepe Escobar, 'The myth of "isolated" Iran', *Al Jazeera*, 23 Jan. 2012. See also Kjølv Egeland, 'La quête de légitimité autour du programme nucléaire iranien', *Moyen-Orient* 45, 2020, pp. 48–51.

171 Wyn Bowen, Matthew Moran, and Dina Esfandiary, *Living on the edge: Iran and the practice of nuclear hedging* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 77, 109–10.

172 E.g., Egypt on behalf of the NAM, NPT Preparatory Committee meeting, 30 Apr. 2012, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/PreparatoryCommittee meeting12/statements/30April_NAM.pdf.

173 Eliot A. Cohen, Eric S. Edelman, and Ray Takeyh, 'Time to get tough on Tehran: Iran policy after the deal', *Foreign Affairs* 95: 1, 2016, pp. 64–75.

174 Cohen, Edelman, and Takeyh, 'Time to get tough on Tehran', 64–75.

175 Austria, NPT Preparatory Committee meeting, 30 Apr. 2012, http://www.rea.chingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/PreparatoryCommittee meeting12/statements/30April_Austria.pdf.

176 France, Israel, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

177 UNGA, 'High level meeting of the general assembly on nuclear disarmament', New York, 18 Oct. 2012, doc. A/RES/67/39.

178 Egeland, 'Oslo's "new track"'; interview with Jonas Gahr Støre, 8 Dec. 2016.

179 UNGA, 'Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations', New York, 4 Jan. 2013, doc. A/RES/67/56.

180 United Kingdom on behalf of the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, UNGA First Committee, New York, 6 Nov. 2012, doc. http://www.rea.chingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com12/eov/L46_France-UK-US.pdf. See also France, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Nov. 2012, doc. A/C.1/67/PV.18, p. 2.

181 Russia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 6 Nov. 2012, doc. A/C.1/67/PV.21, p. 14.

182 Telephone interview with non-nuclear-weapon state official, 23 Aug. 2017.

183 Beatrice Fihn, 'Disarmament machinery', *First Committee Monitor* 5, 2012, p. 4.

184 Ray Acheson, 'Process for progress', *First Committee Monitor* 5, 2012, p. 3.

185 E.g., John Borrie, 'Humanitarian reframing of nuclear weapons and the logic of a ban', *International Affairs* 90: 3, 2014, pp. 625–46.

186 Laura Considine, 'The "standardization of catastrophe": nuclear disarmament, the humanitarian initiative and the politics of the unthinkable', *European Journal of International Relations* 23: 3, 2017, pp. 681–702.

187 UNGA, Resolution 1653 (XVI), 'Declaration on the prohibition of the use of nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons', 24 Nov. 1961.

188 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, signed 1 July 1968, in force 5 March 1970, preamble.
189 See, e.g., India, UNGA First Committee, New York, 23 Oct. 1984, doc. A/C.1/39/PV.11, pp. 2–21; Gabon, UNGA First Committee, New York, 25 Oct. 1985, doc. A/C.1/40/PV.14, pp. 48–58.

190 See Matthew Bolton and Elizabeth Minor, 'The discursive turn arrives in turtle bay', *Global Policy* 7: 3, 2016, pp. 385–95; Borrie, 'Humanitarian reframing'.

191 Interview with Thomas Nash, London, 11 Dec. 2015.

192 See Kjølv Egeland, 'The ideology of nuclear order', *New Political Science* 43: 2, 2021, pp. 208–30.

193 Telephone interview with non-nuclear-weapon state official, 23 Aug. 2017.

194 Jonas Gahr Støre, 'Disarmaemnt – reframing the challenge', speech at the Leangkollen Conference, the Norwegian Atlantic Committee, 1 Feb. 2010, https://www.regjeringen.no/en/historical-archive/Stoltenbergs-2nd-Government/Ministry-of-Foreign-Affairs/taler-og-artikler/2010/disarmament/id592550/.

195 On ICAN's strategy, see Magnus Løvold, Beatrice Fihn, and Thomas Nash, 'Humanitarian perspectives and the campaign for an international ban on nuclear weapons', in John Borrie and Tim Caughley, eds, *Viewing nuclear weapons through a humanitarian lens* (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2013).

196 E.g., New Zealand, HINW, 5 Mar. 2013, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/oslo-2013/statements/NewZealand.pdf; Austria, HINW, 5 Mar. 2013, https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/UD/Vedlegg/Hum/hum_austria_closing.pdf; Ireland, HINW, 4 Mar. 2013, https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/UD/Vedlegg/Hum/hum_austria_closing.pdf.

197 China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Statement to the Oslo Conference, Mar. 2013, p. 5, doc. http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/oslo-2013/P5_Oslo.pdf; William C. Potter and Benjamin Pack, 'Advancing nuclear disarmament: the US role', Asia-Pacific Leadership Network *Policy Brief* 10, Mar. 2014, p. 5.

198 Interview with Beatrice Fihn, Geneva, 7 Dec. 2015.

199 Cited in Article 36, 'Casualty recording, critical argument and campaigning against weapons', briefing paper, Oct. 2013, https://article36.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/A36_CasualtyRecording_UNGA.pdf.

200 Ireland, OEWG on nuclear disarmament, 14 May 2013, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/OEWG/statements/14May_Ireland.pdf.

201 Brazil on behalf of the NAC, OEWG on nuclear disarmament, 14 May 2013, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/OEWG/statements/14May_NAC.pdf.

202 Ireland and Switzerland, OEWG on nuclear disarmament, Working Paper 8, Geneva, 2013, doc. A/AC.281/WP.8, p. 2.

203 NAC, OEWG on nuclear disarmament, Working Paper 10, Geneva, 2013, doc. A/AC.281./WP.10.

204 OEWG on nuclear disarmament, 'Report of the open-ended working group to develop proposals to take forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations for the achievement and maintenance of a world without nuclear weapons', Geneva, 3 Sept. 2013, doc. A/AC.281/L.2.

205 See, in particular, Egypt on behalf of the NAC, High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, 26 Sept. 2013, http://www.un.org/en/ga/68/meetings/nuclear-disarmament/pdf/EG_en.pdf; Cuba on behalf of CELAC, High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, 26 Sept. 2013, http://www.un.org/en/ga/68/meetings/nucleardisarmament/pdf/CU_en.pdf; Indonesia, High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, 26 Sept. 2013, http://www.un.org/en/ga/68/meetings/
nucleardisarmament/pdf/ID_en.pdf; Malaysia, High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, 26 Sept. 2013, http://www.un.org/en/ga/68/meetings/nucleardisarmament/pdf/MY_en.pdf.

206 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), vol. VII, Arms control and disarmament, 'Memorandum from the joint chiefs of staff to Secretary of Defense McNamara', 23 Mar. 1961, doc. 9.

207 Gro Nystuen and Stein-Ivar L. Eide, 'Wanted: resolute normative leadership', *European Leadership Network*, 5 Sept. 2013, https://www.europeanleadership.network.org/commentary/wanted-resolute-normative-leadership/.

208 Kmentt, 'How divergent views on nuclear disarmament threaten the NPT'.

209 Martha Finnemore, 'Legitimacy, hypocrisy, and the social structure of unipolarity', *World Politics* 61: 1, 2009, pp. 67–8.

210 See, e.g., Micjael Izbicki, 'What's wrong with America's nuclear hawks?', *Strategic Studies Quarterly* 4: 4, 2010, pp. 134–43; Julian Borger, 'Obama has "failed to deliver on nuclear disarmament promises"', *The Guardian*, 27 May 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/may/27/obama-has-failed-to-deliver-on-nuclear-disarmament-promises.

211 Peter L. Bergen, 'Warrior in chief', *The New York Times*, 28 Apr. 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/president-obama-warrior-in-chief.html.

212 Andrea Berger, *A Mexican standoff: the P5 and the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons initiative* (London: European Leadership Network, 2014). In 2019, Lord Des Browne, one of the architects of the P5 process, lamented that the initiative had turned into a 'cartel' through which the nuclear-weapon states collectively resist disarmament. See Maximilian Hoell and Andreas Persbo, *Overcoming disunity: reinvigorating the P5 process a decade on* (London: European Leadership Network, 2020).

213 Rebecca D. Gibbons, 'The humanitarian turn in nuclear disarmament and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons', *The Nonproliferation Review* 25: 1–2, 2018, pp. 11–36.

214 See, e.g., Article 36, 'Casualty recording, critical argument and campaigning against weapons'.

215 Alexander Kmentt, 'Unprecedented challenges for nonproliferation and disarmament', Arms Control Association, May 14 Annual Meeting, New York, 15 May 2015. See also Alexander Kmentt, *The treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons: how it was achieved and why it matters* (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 159.

216 Daryl G. Kimball, 'Nuclear disarmament and human survival', *Arms Control Today* 44: 1, 2014, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2014_01-02/Focus.

217 Paul Meyer, 'The nuclear nonproliferation treaty: fin de regime?', *Arms Control Today*, April 2017, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017-04/features/nuclear-nonproliferation-treaty-fin-de-regime; Paul Meyer, Statement to the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons meeting of national red cross societies on nuclear weapons, The Hague, 16 Jun. 2014.

218 Interview with Steffen Kongstad, Geneva, 7 Dec. 2015.

219 Interview with nuclear-allied state official, Geneva, 8 Jan. 2016.

220 Interview with Beatrice Fihn, Geneva, 7 Dec. 2015.

221 Interview with Magnus Løvold, Oslo, 9 Sept. 2015.

222 Potter and Pack, 'Advancing nuclear disarmament', p. 6.

223 William C. Potter, 'Disarmament diplomacy and the nuclear ban treaty', *Survival* 59: 4, 2017, p. 91.

224 Telephone interview with non-nuclear-weapon state official, 23 Aug. 2017.

225 On democracy and adversarial politics, see Robert Dahl, *Controlling nuclear weapons: democracy versus guardianship* (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985).
226 Mexico, ‘Chair’s summary’, HINW, 14 Feb. 2014, http://www.sre.gob.mx/en/images/stories/cih/ci.pdf.

227 Kmentt, *The treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons*, Chapter 2, note 70.

228 E.g., Germany, UNGA First Committee, New York, 20 Oct. 2014, doc. A/C.1/69/PV.11, p. 23; Canada, OEWG on nuclear disarmament, Working Paper 20, 2016, doc. A/AC.286/WP.20; Australia, HINW, 9 Dec. 2014, https://www.bmeia.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Zentrale/Aussenpolitik/Abruestung/HINW14/Statements/HINW14_Statement_Australia.pdf.

229 See Egeland, ‘Oslo’s “new track”’.

230 See, e.g., Tormod Strand, ‘USA ga klar atomvåpen-beskjed til Norge’, *NRK*, 17 Mar. 2015, https://www.nrk.no/norge/usa-ga-klar-atomvapen-beskjed-til-norge-1.12265873.

231 At the same time, India’s and Pakistan’s attendance was clearly intended to further an image of these states as responsible nuclear powers committed to disarmament. See Elizabeth Minor, ‘Changing the discourse on nuclear weapons’, *International Review of the Red Cross* 97: 899, 2015, p. 717.

232 The author observed the conference as of the Oslo-based International Law and Policy Institute’s delegation.

233 Humanitarian/Austrian Pledge.

234 Community of Latin American And Caribbean States (CELAC), ‘Declaracion especial 16’, Belén, 29 Jan. 2015.

235 William C. Potter, ‘On the road to the 2015 NPT review conference’, *The Nonproliferation Review* 21: 1, 2014, p. 12.

236 NAC, ‘Article VI of the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons’, NPT Preparatory Committee meeting, Working Paper 18, 2 Apr. 2014, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/PC.III/WP.18.

237 E.g., Denise Garcia, ‘Humanitarian security regimes’, *International Affairs* 91: 1, 2015, pp. 55–75; Tom Sauer and Joelien Pretorius, ‘Nuclear weapons and the humanitarian approach’, *Global Change, Peace & Security* 26: 3, 2014, pp. 233–50; Minor, ‘Changing the discourse on nuclear weapons’.

238 Interview with Beatrice Fihn, Geneva, 7 Dec. 2015; interview with Thomas Nash, London, 11 Sept. 2016; interview with Grethe Østern, Oslo, 11 Sept. 2015.

239 Iver B. Neumann and Ole J. Sending, *Governing the global polity: practice, mentality, rationality* (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2010).

240 Interview with Magnus Løvold, Oslo, 9 Sept. 2015.

241 Interview with Beatrice Fihn, Geneva, 7 Dec. 2015.

242 Interview with Daniel Högsta, Geneva, 8 Dec. 2015.

243 Wildfire, ‘Nuclear disarmament: change the game’, https://www.wildfire-v.org/index.html.

244 Matthew Breay Bolton, *Imagining disarmament, enchanting international relations* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 42.

245 Garcia, ‘Humanitarian security regimes’, p. 55; Heather Williams, Patricia Lewis, and Susan Aghlani, ‘The humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons’, Chatham House, Mar. 2015, p. 3; Jenny Nielsen and Marianne Hanson, ‘The European Union and the humanitarian initiative in the 2015 non-proliferation treaty review cycle’, *Non-Proliferation Consortium, Non-Proliferation Papers* 41, Dec. 2014, p. 2.

246 Pressenza, ‘Swedish foreign minister attacks signatories of humanitarian initiative: “not serious states”’, 8 May 2013, https://www.pressenza.com/2013/05/swedish-foreign-minister-attacks-signatories-of-humanitarian-initiative-not-serious-states/.

247 Egypt on behalf of the NAC, NPT Preparatory Committee meeting, 23 Apr. 2013, http://papersmart.unmeetings.org/media/1263314/Sharp_A580_unog.ch_20130422_121257.pdf.
NPT/CONF.2015/MC.II/SR.4, p. 5; Egypt, NPT review conference, 25 Jun. 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/MC.I/SR.3, p. 4; Tunisia, NPT review conference, 18 Jun. 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/MC.II/SR.1, pp. 13–14.

270 Egypt, NPT review conference, 25 Jun. 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/MC.I/SR.3, p. 4. See also, e.g., Indonesia, NPT review conference, 15 Jun. 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/SR.15, p. 6; Ireland, NPT review conference, 25 Jun. 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/MC.I/SR.3, p. 2. See also New Zealand on behalf of the NAC, NPT review conference, 25 Jun. 2015, doc. NPT/CONF.2015/MC.I/SR.4, p. 5.

271 South Africa, NPT review conference, 13 May 2015, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/review conference2015/statements/13May_SouthAfrica.pdf.

272 Austria on behalf of 50 states, NPT review conference, 22 May 2015, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/review conference2015/statements/22May_Austria.pdf.

273 Ray Acheson, *Banning the bomb, smashing the patriarchy* (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

274 E.g., Kenya, UNGA First Committee, New York, 16 Oct. 2013, doc. A/C.1/68/PV.9, p. 16; Costa Rica, UNGA First Committee, New York, 20 Oct. 2014, doc. A/C.1/69/PV.12, p. 7; Palau, UNGA First Committee, New York, 21 Oct. 2014, doc. A/C.1/69/PV.11, p. 21; Borrie, ‘Humanitarian reframing’.

275 Nick Ritchie, ‘Waiting for Kant: devaluing and delegitimising nuclear weapons’, *International Affairs* 90: 3, 2014, p. 621.

276 Ray Acheson and Beatrice Fihn, *Preventing collapse* (New York, NY: Reaching Critical Will, 2013), p. 8.

277 See, inter alia, the NGO Pax’ annual reports *Don’t bank on the bomb*.

278 Ray Acheson, ‘Sex, gender and nuclear weapons’, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, 2015, https://wilpf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Sex-Gender-and-Nuclear-Weapons_Ray-Acheson.pdf.

279 Reuters, ‘Belarus diplomat worries topless, mayo-throwing women could disrupt U.N.’, 11 Feb. 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/un-belarus-mayonnaise-idI NKBN0LF2NO20150211.

280 Following a change of government coalition in that country in the autumn of 2013, Norway distanced itself from the humanitarian initiative over the next few years, falling in line with the NATO mainstream.

281 UNGA, ‘Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations’, L.13, New York, 29 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/L.13/Rev.1.

282 UNGA, ‘Ethical imperatives for a nuclear-weapon-free world’, New York, 21 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/L.40.

283 UNGA, ‘General and complete disarmament: taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations’, Geneva, 1 Sept. 2016, doc. A/71/371, p. 19.

284 UNGA, ‘Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations’, New York, 14 Oct. 2016, doc. A/C.1/71/L.41. The states mentioned were the original sponsors. A total of 57 states ended up co-sponsoring the resolution.

285 Russia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 27 Oct. 2016, doc. A/C.1/71/PV.22, p. 21.

286 Jamaica, UNGA First Committee, New York, 9 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.9, p. 14. See also, e.g., Uruguay on behalf of Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), UNGA First Committee, New York, 19 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.9, p. 13; South Africa, UNGA First Committee, New York, 13 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.5, p. 8; Zambia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 13 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.5, p. 24; Kenya, UNGA First Committee, New York, 14 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.6, p. 5; Jamaica on behalf of CARICOM, UNGA First Committee, New York, 19 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.9, p. 15; Austria, UNGA First Committee, New York, 19 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.9, p. 27; Costa
Rica, UNGA First Committee, New York, 21 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.11, p. 6; Guatemala, UNGA First Committee, New York, 21 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.11, p. 8.

287 France on behalf of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, UNGA First Committee, New York, 27 Oct. 2016, doc. A/C.1/71/PV.22, p. 16.

288 China, UNGA First Committee, New York, 27 Oct. 2016, doc. A/C.1/71/PV.22, p. 44.

289 Russia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 27 Oct. 2016, doc. A/C.1/71/PV.22, p. 21.

290 Michelle Nichols, ‘U.S., the United Kingdom, France, others skip nuclear weap-ons ban treaty talks’, *Reuters*, 27 Mar. 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-nuclear-un-idUKKBN16Y1QE.

291 See, e.g., Somini Senegupta and Rick Gladsone, ‘United States and allies protest U.N. talks to ban nuclear weapons’, *New York Times*, 27 Mar. 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/world/americas/un-nuclear-weapons-talks.html.

292 Spurred on by NGOs such as Pax, a large majority in the Dutch House of Representatives passed a motion instructing the government to participate in the negotiations. The motion was supported by most of the opposition and members of some of the governing parties.

293 Author’s notes, 5 Jul. 2017.

294 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed 20 Sept. 2017, in force 22 Jan. 2021, article 1.

295 Author’s notes, 7 Jul. 2017.

296 Andrew Futter and Olamide Samuel, ‘Accommodating nutopia: the nuclear ban treaty and the developmental interests of Global South countries’, *Review of International Studies*, early view 2023.

297 Report of the first meeting of states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, 21 July 2022, doc. TPNW/MSP/2022/6, Annex III, Decision 1(a).

298 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed 20 Sept. 2017, in force 22 Jan. 2021, article 1.

299 Philippines, UNGA First Committee, New York, 3 Oct. 2017, http://www.rea-chingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com17/state-ments/3Oct_Philippines.pdf.

300 Author’s notes. Compare Keith Krause and Andrew Latham, ‘Constructing non-proliferation and arms control’, *Contemporary Security* 19: 1, 1998, pp. 23–54.

301 Sophie Taylor, ‘Interview with Dr Hans Blix: the most important lesson in diplomacy is not to humiliate’, European Leadership Network, 23 Jan. 2019, https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/interview-with-dr-hans-blix/.

302 Michael Quinlan, *Thinking about nuclear weapons: principles, problems, prospects* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 42.

303 See Nina Tannenwald, *The nuclear taboo: the United States and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

304 Dallas Boyd, ‘Avoiding self-inflicted wounds to the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent’, *The Nonproliferation Review* 26: 1–2, 2019, p. 114. Emphasis in original.

305 See, e.g., Nick Ritchie, ‘A hegemonic nuclear order’, *Contemporary Security Policy* 40: 4, 2019, pp. 409–34.

306 Edith M. Lederer, ‘US urges countries to withdraw from UN nuke ban treaty’, AP, 22 Oct. 2020, https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-weapons-disarmament-latin-america-united-nations-gun-politics-4f109626a1cdd6db10560550aa1bb491; Jessica Corbett, ‘Unprecedented and desperate’, *Common Dreams*, 21 Oct. 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/21/unprecedented-and-desperate-nuclear-weapon-ban-treaty-nears-entry-force-trump.
307 Harald Müller and Carmen Wunderlich, ‘Nuclear disarmament without the nuclear-weapon states’, *Dædalus* 149: 2, 2020, p. 182.

308 UNGA, ‘General and complete disarmament: Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’, New York, 6 Oct. 2020, doc. A/C.1/75/L.6.

309 Thakur, ‘The nuclear ban treaty’, p. 84.

310 Hedley Bull, *The anarchical society* (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 196. Emphasis added.

311 William Walker, ‘Nuclear enlightenment and counter-enlightenment’, *International Affairs* 83: 3, 2007, p. 436.

312 Author’s notes.

313 Author’s notes.

314 Marianne Hanson, *Challenging nuclearism: Humanitarianism and reshaping the global nuclear order* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).

315 Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe, *The end of the end of history: politics in the twenty-first century* (Winchester: Zero Books, 2021).

316 Angela Kane, *Between aspiration and reality: Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons* (Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2019), p. 7; Kmentt, *The treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons*, p. 187.

317 Egypt, NPT Preparatory Committee meeting, 2 May 2014, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/PreparatoryCommittee meeting14/statements/2May_Egypt.pdf.

318 Russia, UNGA First Committee, New York, 4 Oct. 2016, doc. A/C.1/71/PV.3, p. 17.

319 Ritchie, ‘Valuing and devaluing nuclear weapons’, p. 157.

320 Kmentt, *The treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons*, p. 159.

321 Thailand on behalf of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2017, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com17/statements/2Oct_ASEAN.pdf.

322 Austria, UNGA First Committee, New York, 3 Oct. 2017, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com17/statements/3Oct_Austria.pdf.

323 Trinidad and Tobago on behalf of CARICOM, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2017, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com17/statements/2Oct_CARICOM.pdf.

324 Brazil, UNGA First Committee, New York, 3 Oct. 2017, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com17/statements/3Oct_Brazil.pdf.

325 Nigeria on behalf of the African Group, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2017, https://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com17/statements/2Oct_AfricanGroup.pdf.

326 Mexico on behalf of the NAC, UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 Oct. 2017, https://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com17/statements/2Oct_NAC.pdf.

327 Sweden, Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament (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.

328 Interview with Carlos Umaña, Geneva, 10 May 2016.

329 Author’s notes, 7 Jul. 2017.
330 See, e.g., Norwegian People's Aid, *Nuclear weapons ban monitor 2022: tracking progress towards a world without nuclear weapons* (Oslo, 2023), p. 59.

331 See John Borrie and Tim Caughley, *After Oslo: humanitarian perspectives and the changing nuclear weapons discourse* (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2013), p. 15;
Minor, 'Changing the discourse on nuclear weapons', p. 716.

332 Shorna-Kay Richards, lecture, 2016 Summer School on Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation, Mexico City, 7 Jul. 2016.

333 Kevin C. Dunn, 'Historical representations', in Audie Klotz and Deepa Prakash, eds, *Qualitative methods in international relations* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 78–91.

334 Mexico, UNGA First Committee, New York, 19 Oct. 2015, doc. A/C.1/70/PV.9, p. 19. See also Austria on behalf of 50 states, NPT review conference, 22 May 2015, http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/review conference2015/statements/22May_Austria.pdf.

335 Costa Rica, High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, 26 Sept. 2013, http://www.un.org/en/ga/68/meetings/nucleardisarmament/pdf/CU_en.pdf.

336 Jolien Pretorius and Tom Sauer, 'Is it time to ditch the NPT?', *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists*, 6 Sept. 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/09/is-it-time-to-ditch-the-npt/; Joelien Pretorius and Tom Sauer, 'When is it legitimate to abandon the NPT? Withdrawal as a political tool to move nuclear disarmament forward', *Contemporary Security Policy* 43: 1, 2022, pp. 161–85.
# Findings and Implications

## Summary of Findings

The purpose of this study has been to analyse the evolution of the multi-lateral nuclear disarmament framework up to and including the adoption and entry-into-force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This chapter presents the main findings, analyses the problem of nuclear disarmament more broadly, and lays out five broad policy recommendations. Taking the goal of eventual nuclear zero as given, I leave aside the question of whether nuclear disarmament is in fact desirable. I begin with the findings.

First, the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework has evolved through a pattern of punctuated equilibrium characterised by bursts of activity followed by periods of institutional stasis. A first burst of activity took place between 1975 and 1978, when the United Nations (UN) disarmament machinery was reformed and expanded. Through a series of institutional adjustments, the reformers managed to temporarily boost the wider nuclear regime complex' input legitimacy. A second burst of activity took place between 1991 and 2000. This period saw the fractious Partial Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty amendment conference, the request for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the threat or use of nuclear weapons, the negotiation and adoption of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), the tabling of a 'Model Nuclear Weapons Convention', and the formation of a first standing multilateral nuclear disarmamentinger group, the New Agenda Coalition. A third wave of activity took place between 2012 and 2017. Relying on informal networks and innovative diplomatic tactics, non-nuclear-weapon states formed several new forums and brought about the negotiation and adoption of the TPNW. An international partnership for nuclear disarmament verification (IPNDV) was formed on the initiative of the United States.

Second, the waves of institutional contestation and reform described above may be understood as symptoms of recurring crises of legitimacy in the broader nuclear order. Institutional contestation and change in the multilateral nuclear disarmament context have provided non-nuclear-weapon states with opportunities to signal their opposition to the creeping permanence of
the unequal nuclear order that came into relief in the 1960s and, by exten-
sion, to affirm their identities as sovereign equals. Before the onset of a cri-
sis of legitimacy, the non-nuclear-weapon states have typically been keen
to make compromises and gloss over differences with the nuclear-weapon
states. Once a crisis sets in, however, non-nuclear powers have often been
eager to *highlight* differences with the nuclear-weapon states, adopting less
flexible negotiating postures.

A third finding, corroborating the work of Clark et al.,¹ is that processes of institutional delegitimisation have followed a pattern whereby criticism and frustration with lacking results are first directed towards specific actors and later towards the regime complex itself. That said, my analysis suggests a caveat to this general tendency: When influential actors are seen to be uniquely non-compliant, censure can be ‘locked in’ on a particular set of actors or individuals, resulting in the process of institutional delegitimisation being stalled. Indeed, the deepunpopularity of George W. Bush and his UN ambassador John Bolton within multilateral diplomatic circles seems to have slowed the depletion of the nuclear regime complex’ legitimacy by soaking up much of the reproach that might otherwise have been directed towards the regime complex itself. By contrast, when the initially popular Obama administration seemingly swung from an ambitious, multilateralist disarmament posture to a more reluctant one, the regime complex was thrown almost instantly into a crisis of legitimacy.

Fourth, the effectiveness of counter-resistance, i.e., attempts at discourag-
ing disruption and reform, depends on itstiming in the cycle of legitimacy.²
When the overall legitimacy of the regime complex has been at a low ebb,
attempts by the nuclear powers to repress institutional contestation and
change have backfired, fuelling greater resistance by the non-nuclear powers.
The attempted undercutting of the advisory-opinion initiative in the 1990s
and humanitarian initiative in the 2010s seems clearly to have intensified the
neutral and non-aligned states’ will to press ahead with the initiatives in ques-
tion. At times when the legitimacy of the regime complex has been higher,
however, counter-resistance has successfully dissuaded non-nuclear-weapon
states from going ahead with controversial initiatives. This was the case, for
example, with the idea of an international satellite monitoring agency in the
1980s and the attempt at establishing United Nations General Assembly ad
hoc committees on disarmament in 2005.

Finally, the politics of recognition, involving contests over equality, status,
and dignity, has played a crucial role in shaping the nuclear regime complex'
institutions and practices. In fact, the entire multilateral nuclear disarmament
framework may be read as a structure designed to ameliorate the non-prolif-
eration regime's apparent contravention of the norm of sovereign equality.
The original idea, enshrined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons (NPT), was that legalised nuclear inequality – the recognition of
certain states as holders of special privileges – would be a temporary indig-
nity for the non-nuclear-weapon states; negotiations towards disarmament
would eventually level the NPT hierarchy. But abolition remained elusive. In fact, the nuclear-weapon states often relied on the NPT to legitimate their retention and modernisation of nuclear arms; in the words of the international relations scholar Marianne Hanson, the nuclear-weapon states used the NPT and its associated regime 'to ensure that the global nuclear order remains essentially static, always favouring themselves, the "recognized" nuclear states, as the hegemons of this order'.³ Half a century after the adoption of the NPT, none of the official nuclear-weapon states had given up their nuclear armouries. Consequently, in 2017, a large group of non-nuclear-weapon states adopted a universal ban on nuclear arms, derecognising the nuclear-weapon states' supposed right to possess such weapons.

Whether and how multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy 'works' is difficult to gauge precisely. While there can be no doubt that the multilateral process has struggled to deliver meaningful and enforceable disarmament agreements, multilateral diplomacy seems to have helped nurture a set of diffuse though consequential ideas, norms, and practices of restraint. One of these is the norm against nuclear testing. While the CTBT remains formally in a state of limbo, with key states unwilling to ratify and thereby bring the agreement into legal force, the decades-long campaign to end nuclear testing, which played out both on the streets and in the corridors of political and diplomatic power, has undoubtedly contributed to increasing the political costs associated with engaging in explosive nuclear testing. Consider, for example, how the Trump administration in 2020 was compelled to walk back its apparent plans to break the 28-year US moratorium on testing. The negative reaction to the Trump administration's feelers - from media commentators, experts, NGOs, and audiences overseas - proved swift and overwhelming.⁴ Public opinion polling indicated that the move would also be deeply unpopular with citizens.⁵

Another norm that has been buttressed by multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy is the norm against nuclear use. Several scholars, including the nuclear policy expert Pavel Podvig, have maintained that the international social more against use has helped dissuade Russia from employing nuclear arms against Ukraine.⁶ The argument, of course, is not that Russia's President Vladimir Putin is personally swayed by moral or humanitarian arguments, but that norm violation could incur serious reputational and other costs for the Russian leadership, including in the form of greater international isolation.⁷ While Russia has been powerfully censured and sanctioned by many states over its unlawful invasion of Ukraine, a large number of states, particularly in the Global South, have as of fall 2023 refused to decisively pick sides in the conflict. Russian nuclear use could change that.

Multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy has likely also contributed to discouraging nuclear arms racing, at any rate of the quantitative kind. Consider, again, how President Trump felt obliged in 2017 to explicitly deny rumours that he wanted to increase the size of the US nuclear arsenal. The rumours had been invented to 'demean' him, the president said.⁸ Of
course, this statement would be meaningless in the absence of a norm against
nuclear excess. More generally, multilateral nuclear disarmament advocacy
has undoubtedly dovetailed with arguments for arms control, disarmament,
and restraint within the US, Russian, and other nuclear-armed states' foreign
policy establishments.⁹ It is important to remember that nuclear policy is
debated not only between states but also within them. Proponents of restraint
are up against powerful political and economic forces but have occasionally
secured meaningful victories on nuclear policy. Thus, while it is crucial to
guard against the Panglossian notion that the nuclear world could not pos-
sibly be meaningfully better than it already is,¹⁰ it is equally important to
acknowledge that things could have gone far worse. The caveat is that one of
the reasons it has not gone worse is plain, dumb luck.¹¹

Multilateral Diplomacy and the Politics of Nuclear Disarmament

The history of the nuclear age is commonly rehearsed with reference to the
overall number of nuclear warheads in existence throughout the world (see
Figure 1). The story is often divided into three acts.¹² In Act 1, the superpow-
ers are embroiled in a mad arms race, climaxing in the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis, ‘when the USA and the Soviet Union paused at the nuclear precipice’.¹³
From there, the superpowers agree to tame the nuclear beast by negotiating
the Partial Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the NPT, and the SALT agreements.
Act 2 follows a similar arch. After a return to arms racing dynamics in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1 Trends in Nuclear Armament.⁶⁵</figcaption></figure>