TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN ITALY: Striking a Balance between Disarmament Aspirations and Alliance Obligations

Despite the fact that Italy hosts almost half of the remaining estimated 150–200 US tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) that are currently deployed in Europe, case studies of Italy have been largely neglected. The article seeks to fill that gap by outlining the key elements of Italy's position regarding the presence, role, and future of TNW in Italy. By considering both the military and political-symbolic dimensions of TNW, the author argues that Italy has largely embraced the process of the devaluation of nuclear weapons; however, this is offset by the country's determination to preserve the principles of solidarity and the indivisibility of Euro-Atlantic security. By making the alliance's cohesion a priority, Italy appears willing to postpone the complete elimination of TNW from its territory if necessary; despite this, Italy otherwise considers TNW to be not only weapons of little intrinsic value but also obstacles to the global nuclear disarmament program that it strongly supports.     

No war,no peace

The armed conflict over crude petroleum oil in the Niger Delta has raged for several decades. A host of peace initiatives have been adopted by the Nigerian state to address it, but with minimal impact. The amnesty offer to repentant militias in 2009 by President Umaru Yar'Adua's administration is one of the most recent and broadest peace initiatives by the Nigerian government intended to end the general tendency to warfare and the absence of peace in the Niger Delta. This article, based on secondary sources of data, examines the components of the amnesty, its critical problems and their implications for peacebuilding in the Niger Delta. It finds that though the programme has engendered relative peace, the issues and grievances that occasioned the general tendency to warfare and absence of peace in the region – such as inequitable distribution of oil revenue, environmental degradation, and underdevelopment – are not properly articulated in the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration components of the programme. Thus, it holds that the prevailing situation in the region largely approximates a swinging pendulum of no war, no peace.     

ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES FOR ARMS CONTROL

The efforts of President Barack Obama and his administration to restore the United States as a driving force of multilateral arms control and nonproliferation negotiations are commendable, yet the lack of progress on such issues over the last eight years has ensured that U.S. policy has not kept pace with changes in the geostrategic environment and the evolving security agenda. Meanwhile, an alternative agenda has been articulated by non-Western countries. This article focuses on the arms control perspectives of Non-Aligned Movement states and others that have begun to embrace the idea of “disarmament as humanitarian action.” It explores this idea in the context of recent initiatives and argues that if the Obama administration wants to make progress on its arms control and nonproliferation priorities, it should consider a multifaceted approach that incorporates this emerging alternative agenda.     

Deferred verification: verifiable declarations of fissile-material stocks for disarmament purposes

ABSTRACT

Nuclear disarmament is often seen as eventually requiring access to nuclear warheads or to the warhead-dismantlement process to verify that a state has not hidden weapons or weapon-materials despite promising to disarm. This article suggests this view is misplaced, and that what is needed is a verification mechanism able to provide reliable assurances of the absence of fissile materials available for use in weapons after a state has disarmed. Such a mechanism will need an initial declaration of the amount of fissile materials held by a state for all purposes, military and civilian. In a state with a nuclear arsenal awaiting elimination, this declaration would have to include materials that may not be available for verification because they are in nuclear weapons or are in other classified or proliferation-sensitive forms. This article describes a verification arrangement that does not require access to materials in weapons and in sensitive forms while still allowing checks on the overall accuracy of the declaration. Verification of the completeness and correctness of the declaration is deferred to the time when the weapons-relevant material enters the disposition process, at which point it no longer has any sensitive attributes. By removing the focus on monitoring warheads and dismantlement, this new approach could provide a more manageable path to nuclear disarmament.     

The Power of the NPT: International Norms and Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament

ABSTRACT

There is a lingering disagreement among scholars on how the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) affects nonproliferation and disarmament outcomes. Drawing on constructivist scholarship on international norms, this article examines the extent of the NPT's effect in the case of Ukraine's nuclear disarmament. In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, Ukraine found itself host to the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. Despite Ukraine's initial commitment to become a non-nuclear state, it proceeded along a difficult path toward NPT accession. Most controversial and directly at odds with the NPT was Ukraine's claim to ownership of its nuclear inheritance as a successor state of the Soviet Union. This article argues that, while much domestic discourse about the fate of these nuclear weapons was embedded in the negotiation of Ukraine's new identity as a sovereign state vis-à-vis Russia and the West, the NPT played an important, structural role by outlining a separate normative space for nuclear weapons and providing the grammar of denuclearization with which Ukraine's decision makers had to grapple.     

Icons Off the Mark

In two landmark articles, longtime scholars Kenneth N. Waltz and Thomas C. Schelling have re-emphasized the utility of nuclear deterrence over nuclear nonproliferation (Waltz) and nuclear disarmament (Schelling). While the thrust of the articles is seemingly different, both are rooted in the same intellectual ground: an epistemology that assumes problem-free inferences, drawn from past experiences, are applicable in future scenarios; a foundational rooting in strategic rationality that entangles them in unsolvable contradictions concerning comparable risks of different nuclear constellations, namely deterrence versus proliferation and disarmament; and a bias in framing the empirical record that makes nuclear deterrence more conducive to security than nuclear disarmament. The common normative-practical denominator, then, is to let a nuclear weapon-free world appear both less desirable and less feasible than it might actually be.     

GREAT POWER RESPONSIBILITY AND NUCLEAR ORDER

A Perpetual Menace: Nuclear Weapons and International Order, by William Walker. Routledge, 2012. 247 pages, $42.95.     

ESCAPE FROM NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

Since the post-World War II genesis of nuclear deterrence, two presidential initiatives have been presented to deliver humanity from the threat of its failure. The first was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a constellation of space- and ground-based systems that President Ronald Reagan envisioned would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” The second is President Barack Obama's roadmap to “a world without nuclear weapons,” commonly referred to as “Global Zero.” While these proposals appear to have little in common, deeper investigation reveals a number of provocative similarities in motivation and presentation. Moreover, both generated fierce debate, often with ideological overtones, about their strategic desirability and technical feasibility. We use these parallels, as well as prominent dissimilarities, to draw lessons from the SDI experience that can be applied to the debate over Global Zero.     

Low-intensity conflict in Eastern Sudan: A comparative approach to the development of rebel groups

This article discusses the development of a low-intensity conflict in Sudan's eastern region between 1994 and 2006. Drawing on data collected in the region in 2009, recruitment processes within three different insurgent groups are analysed and compared, paying attention to the impact of these processes on insurgents' organisational development and military capacity. The peace process in Eastern Sudan is further discussed, focusing specifically on the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) programmes for former insurgents. The article finally discusses current developments and draws conclusions regarding the risk of renewed rebellion in Eastern Sudan.     

Army reconstruction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2003–2009

Since the peace agreements of 2002–2003 which ended the second war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reconstruction of the army has been an inherently political process, in common with other attempts to carry out security sector reform (SSR). This article briefly sketches out the Congolese army's history, then attempts to fill a gap in the literature on Congolese SSR by detailing what can be found of the actual structure and shape of the present army. The efforts that have been made to reform the army are then examined, followed by a conclusion which examines the major issues and possible ways forward.