Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> International Relations - Arms Control

This volume brings together more than three decades of research and writings by Professor Ramesh Thakur on the challenges posed by nuclear weapons.

Following an introduction to the current nuclear state of play, the book addresses the challenge of nuclear weapons in three parts. Part I describes the scholar-practitioner interface in trying to come to grips with this challenge, the main policy impact on security strategy, and the various future nuclear scenarios. Part II addresses regional nuclear challenges from the South Pacific to East, South and West Asia and thereby highlights...

Since its enactment in 1970, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has become one node of a massive, sprawling, multibillion-dollar regime that is considered essential to slowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons technology. However, according to Shampa Biswas, these well-intentioned efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons deflect attention from a hierarchical global nuclear order dominated by powerful states and capitalist interests that benefit from the status quo.

In Nuclear Desire, Biswas proposes that pursuit and production of nuclear power...

In both the popular imagination and among lawmakers and national security experts, there exists the belief that with sufficient motivation and material resources, states or terrorist groups can produce bioweapons easily, cheaply, and successfully. In Barriers to Bioweapons, Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley challenges this perception by showing that bioweapons development is a difficult, protracted, and expensive endeavor, rarely achieving the expected results whatever the magnitude of investment. Her findings are based on extensive interviews she conducted with former U.S. and...

Conventional wisdom holds that criminal groups are the biggest obstacle to efforts to suppress illicit trade. Contrarily, Asif Efrat explains how legitimate actors, such as museums that acquire looted antiquities, seek to hinder these regulatory...

If international cooperation was difficult to achieve and to sustain during the Cold War, why then were two rival superpowers able to cooperate in placing limits on their central strategic weapons systems? Extending an empirical approach to game theory--particularly that developed by Robert Axelrod--Steve Weber argues that although nations employ many different types of strategies broadly consistent with game theory's "tit for tat," only strategies based on an ideal type of "enhanced contingent restraint" promoted cooperation in U.S.-Soviet arms control. As a theoretical analysis of the...