Scott Sagan's essay on 'Shared Responsibilities for Nuclear Disarmament' fosters global debate on eve of NPT review conference
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has published a paper with seven essays from leading scholars invited to respond to Scott
Sagan's concluding essay Shared Responsibilities for Nuclear Disarmament in the Fall 2009 special issue of Daedalus on the global nuclear future. The paper includes Sagan's original essay
and responses by James M. Acton, Jayantha Dhanapala, Mustafa Kibaroglu,
Harald Muller, Yukio Satoh, Mohamed I. Shaker and Achilles Zaluar.
As
Leslie Berlowitz, CEO of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
states in an excerpt from the paper's introduction:
"Renewed
interest in arms control and restated commitments to the longterm goal
of nuclear disarmament have clearly increased over recent years, most
dramatically with President Barack Obama's April 2009 speech in Prague.
With that change in focus comes an opportunity for the international
community to rethink how Article VI of the NPT is traditionally
interpreted and to move beyond the cycle of repeated complaints from the 'have-nots' that the 'haves' are not doing enough to disarm themselves
and repeated retorts by the "haves" that they are already taking every
step that is realistic or prudent. The promise of a different approach
to the commitments made under the NPT forms the basis of the Scott
Sagan's valuable article--"Shared Responsibilities for Nuclear
Disarmament"...
"The differences in national perspectives and the
differences in individual opinions about appropriate disarmament steps
among the authors should not mask a commitment they all share. The
contributors to this volume agree that new thinking and continued debate
about how best to maintain momentum toward nuclear disarmament is to be
welcomed. Only by seeking out, and taking into consideration, a cross
section of views can progress toward the goal of a nuclear-weapons-free
world continue...
"Their contributions serve to expand the
discussion that was started by the original Daedalus article--and together they are intended to spark renewed policy debates
about
how best to pursue global disarmament, debates that will be prominent at
the
May 2010 NPT Review Conference in New York City and in the years
following that important meeting."