Verification in Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation

This edited book offers an inter-disciplinary approach to the verification of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear verification sits at the fault line between technical assurance and political will. It is at the same time both necessary for building trust and also the victim of political calculations. This volume examines the inherent tension between the technical promise of verification and the political conditions that determine its feasibility. The reemerging nuclear arms race, coupled with an increasingly fractured rules-based order, have placed further strain upon the legitimacy and credibility of global verification mechanisms. The book argues that nuclear verification is best understood as a hybrid domain: one in which technology, law, physics, diplomacy and politics are constitutively interwoven rather than simply adjacent. It argues that, just as this book is an inter-disciplinary collaborative effort, verification is a process, or a “progression ladder”, which is multi-layered and involves efforts from diplomats, politicians, nuclear physicists, chemists and other on-site inspectors. Their work needs to be complementary if there is to be successful verification compliance.

This book will be of interest to students of nuclear arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation, international organisations, foreign policy and security studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.