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The Neutrals and the Bomb — Conference on the N+N States and Non-Proliferation

Leader

1. Objectives

This project will bring together an international team of historians and political scientists to understand the developments, choices, and decisions of Neutral and Non-Aligned (N+N) states toward the nuclear question. In collaboration with colleagues from Waseda University (Pascal Lottaz) and the Catholic University of America (Herbert Reginbogin) we are calling for a conference at GRIPS to fill the a void in the literature of nuclear arms control and find answers to key questions:

  • What was the role of Neutral and Non-Aligned (N+N) states in the formulation of the NPT?
  • What were their security considerations on the occasion of joining the NPT?
  • What was the role of energy security in this consideration?
  • Did the N+N states consider acquiring independent nuclear capabilities?

 

2. Overall Project Description

A) Preparatory works

For several years my working group studied the process under which the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was created and implemented amongst the American allied countries. In 2017, we held an international conference on this topic and published its outcome in 2018 under the title “Joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty—Deterrence, Non-Proliferation and the American Alliance.” The book focused on the process through which the US and its partners joined the NPT (Baylis and Iwama, Routledge, 2018).

As a follow up, I am now launching a new project that will examine the role of another group of countries, the Neutral and Non-Aligned states, in the formation of the NPT regime. I will be joined by two specialists on neutrality, Dr. Pascal Lottaz and Dr. Herbert Reginbogin, who organized the “2017 Madrid Conference on Neutrality In the 21st Century” and recently published the book Notions of Neutralities (Lexington, 2018).

 

B) Why the N+N States

Until now, N+N states have not been included in the systematic analysis of Global Nuclear History, despite their great number and importance in formulating the NPT. Therefore, the role of an entire category of developing and developed countries in the formulation of the NPT has been overlooked for decades. This project will remedy the situation. The principal way of investigation will be a two-day conference, for which we will gather approximately 30 international and Japanese scholars to contribute their research to the project. We will launch a Call for Papers, distributed through international research networks like H-Net. Finally, we will collect the best contributions after the conference and publish them as chapters of a new book