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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 02/06
Nuclear proliferation in the 21st century: will multilateral diplomacy work?
Martin Rødbro, Martin Fernando Jakobsen, Line Juul Bay
November 2005
Abstract
For 35 years the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has been the very cornerstone of the international nuclear non-proliferation regime. The treaty has proven to be a strong bulwark against prolific spreading of the materials and technologies necessary to produce the most destructive weapons the world has ever known.
The world has, however, changed dramatically since the inception of the treaty: The very political order which gave rise to huge arsenals of nuclear weapons has vanished with the nuclear weapon states of the treaty only reluctantly embarking on the nuclear disarmament laid down in the treaty. This hesitation is a source of frustration with some non-nuclear weapon states pointing to a bias between the two categories of member states under the treaty.
Accompanying political change, globalisation has made access to technology, know-how and materials easier and less costly. Designs of dual-purpose products are e-mailed across continents; know-how can be bought all around the world; components are manufactured in different countries only to converge for assembly in the country of destination. Thus—as hardly envisaged when the treaty was negotiated in the late 1960s—a huge number of states today have the capacity to control the nuclear fuel cycle, as is their right under the treaty. With control of the nuclear fuel cycle, however, comes the ability to produce fissile material not just for power reactors but also in weapons grade quality for nuclear weapons.
