Nuclear Disarmament

Given the fact that there is a lot of noise being made to prod India into doing more on nuclear disarmament counter-intuitively suggests that India is actually doing very less on the issue. What explains India's reluctance?

• Yogesh Joshi
• September 05, 2012
• IDSA Comments

The latest report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme, released on November 8, 2011, has effectively raised the global threat level. The agency faced the daunting challenge of making a judgement on how far Iran's nuclear programme has advanced and its potential for weaponisation on the basis of suggestive but dated, inconclusive and possibly fake evidence (hundreds of pages of evidence have been sourced to one laptop of unproven provenance given to the IAEA by a Western intelligence agency).

• Ramesh Thakur
• March 2012
• Strategic Analysis

Though Global Zero’s ‘umbrella activism’ involving current and past policy practitioners and the general public alike can be expected to gain further momentum in the near future, its continued vitality may however be captive to the pressures of the timeline within which its vision is intended to be achieved.

• S. Samuel C. Rajiv
• July 19, 2011
• IDSA Comments

The durability of the New START will depend largely on how both sides value it as a means towards disarmament rather than for strategic competition.

• A. Vinod Kumar
• January 07, 2011
• IDSA Comments

The report provides useful documentation on nuclear issues but falls short of making recommendations which would speed up nuclear disarmament. This is not surprising considering that many of the Commissioners are from nuclear armed states or from ones which enjoy the comfort of a nuclear umbrella. Actually, the report may have the unintended impact of strengthening the hawks in nuclear and security establishments as it fails to put enough moral pressure on them to undertake drastic measures to achieve nuclear disarmament.

• Arvind Gupta
• March 18, 2010
• Book Review

As long as nuclear weapons determine a nation’s power and capability, India must have no hesitation in strengthening its nuclear capability and learn to ‘live with the bomb’.

• S Sasikumar
• June 15, 2010
• IDSA Comments

The expiry of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty-1 (START-1) in 2009 and an urgent need to conclude a new US-Russian agreement on strategic nuclear weapons so that the oldest and biggest nuclear powers demonstrate some progress in implementing Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in proximity of the 2010 NPT Review Conference has drawn international attention to the interface between the progress/crisis in nuclear disarmament and strengthening/weakening of the NPT regime.

• Alexander Nikitin
• March 2010
• Strategic Analysis

Disarmament, especially nuclear disarmament, has long been a dream of world ever since it witnessed the horrors of the effects of its use in the Second World War. Nuclear disarmament is likely to be the centre of debate at the forthcoming NPT Review Conference.

• G. Balachandran
• March 2010
• Strategic Analysis

Nuclear disarmament is once again fashionable. If rhetoric was sufficient, nuclear disarmament should be easily achievable. But what the rhetoric hides is not only the difficulty of achieving nuclear disarmament, but also the instrumental manner in which that rhetoric is being deployed. At the height of the Cold War, the two superpowers traded a number of detailed proposals for controlling the atom.

• Rajesh Rajagopalan
• March 2010
• Strategic Analysis

Obama is the first American president to actively pursue the goal of nuclear disarmament. But roadblocks on the road to disarmament nirvana, as envisaged by Obama, remain.

• S. Samuel C. Rajiv
• October 08, 2009
• IDSA Comments