ABSTRACT

Nuclear proliferation presents a significant threat to international security, as the possession and escalation of nuclear weapons can undermine global stability, peace, and progress. This abstract provides a summary of the complex relationship between nuclear proliferation and international security as explored in the literature.

The literature emphasizes the importance of understanding the motivations behind nuclear proliferation. Realism theory suggests that states pursue nuclear weapons to enhance their power and secure their national interest through a balance of power strategy. Meanwhile, crisis instability theory highlights the potential dangers during crises, where unintended escalation or sub-optimal decision-making can occur, leading to devastating consequences.

On the other hand institutionalism theory points to the role of non-proliferation treaties, diplomatic negotiations and monitoring agencies in reducing the incentives for states to acquire nuclear weapons. Through establishing trust cooperation and norms, institutions work towards maintaining international security. Constructivism highlights the significance of perception, shared norms and identities in shaping attitudes towards nuclear proliferation and disarmament.

With nuclear armed states acquiring or openly pursuing nuclear weapons, it becomes essential to address proliferation through coordinated multilateral efforts. Effective policy responses require a comprehensive understanding of the benefits challenges and risk associated with nuclear weapons possessions, as well as engagement with states to promote arms control, non-proliferation measures, and effective disarmament measures.

Despite the potential risk, the literature suggests there are actionable steps that can increase international security and curb the temptation for proliferation. Fostering diplomatic engagement and credibility, setting globally accepted norms, and establishing robust monitoring mechanisms play crucial roles in reducing military vulnerabilities and safeguarding international security.

In conclusion, the issue of nuclear proliferation remains a critical concern for global security. Analyzing the existing literature has provided invaluable insights into the theoretical frameworks surrounding nuclear proliferation and its impact on international security. Policy makers and scholars must continue to investigate and develop strategies to address the challenges posed by nuclear proliferation in order to ensure a more peaceful world.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the study

 A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first test of a fission (“atomic”) bomb released an amount of energy approximately equal to 20,000 tons of TNT (84 TJ).[1] The first thermonuclear (“hydrogen”) bomb test released energy approximately equal to 10 million tons of TNT (42 PJ). Nuclear bombs have had yields between 10 tons TNT (the W54) and 50 megatons for the Tsar Bomba (see TNT equivalent). A thermonuclear weapon weighing as little as 600 pounds (270 kg) can release energy equal to more than 1.2 megatons of TNT (5.0 PJ).

 International security is a term which refers to the measures taken by states and international organizations, such as the United Nations, European Union, and others, to ensure mutual survival and safety. These measures include military action and diplomatic agreements such as treaties and conventions. International and national security are invariably linked. International security is national security or state security in the global arena. The meaning of “security” is often treated as a common sense term that can be understood by “unacknowledged consensus”. The content of international security has expanded over the years. Today it covers a variety of interconnected issues in the world that affect survival. It ranges from the traditional or conventional modes of military power, the causes and consequences of war between states, economic strength, to ethnic, religious and ideological conflicts, trade and economic conflicts, energy supplies, science and technology, food, as well as threats to human security and the stability of states from environmental degradation, infectious diseases, climate change and the activities of non-state actors.

While the wide perspective of international security regards everything as a security matter, the traditional approach focuses mainly or exclusively on military concerns.

In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann reported that they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutron. Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch correctly interpreted these results as being due to the splitting of the uranium atom. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on January 13, 1939.They gave the process the name “fission” because of its similarity to the splitting of a cell into two new cells. Even before it was published, news of Meitner’s and Frisch’s interpretation crossed the Atlantic. [8] In their second publication on nuclear fission in February of 1939, Hahn and Strassmann predicted the existence and liberation of additional neutrons during the fission process, opening up the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. After learning about the German fission in 1939, Leo Szilard concluded that uranium would be the element which can realize his 1933 idea about nuclear chain reaction. In the United States, scientists at Columbia University in decided to replicate the experiment and on January 25-1939, conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States in the basement of Pupin hall. The following year, they identified the active component of uranium as being the rare isotope uranium 235 Between 1939 and 1940 Joliot-Curie’s team applied for a patent family covering different use cases of atomic energy, one (case III, in patent FR 971,324 – Perfectionnements aux charges explosives, meaning Improvements in Explosive Charges) being the first official document explicitly mentioning a nuclear explosion as a purpose, including for war. This patent was applied for on May 4, 1939, but only granted in 1950, being withheld by French authorities in the meantime. Uranium appears in nature primarily in two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235. When the nucleus of uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, it undergoes nuclear fission, releasing energy and, on average, 2.5 neutrons. Because uranium-235 releases more neutrons than it absorbs, it can support a chain reaction and so is described as fissile. Uranium-238, on the other hand, is not fissile as it does not normally undergo fission when it absorbs a neutron. By the start of the war in September 1939, many scientists likely to be persecuted by the Nazis had already escaped. Physicists on both sides were well aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon, but no one was quite sure how it could be engineered. In August 1939, concerned that Germany might have its own project to develop fission-based weapons, Albert Einstein signed a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the threat. Roosevelt responded by setting up the Uranium Committee under Lyman James Briggs but, with little initial funding ($6,000), progress was slow. It was not until the U.S. entered the war in December 1941 that Washington decided to commit the necessary resources to a top-secret high priority bomb project. Organized research first began in Britain and Canada as part of the Tube Alloys project: the world’s first nuclear weapons project. The Maud Committee was set up following the work of Frisch and Rudolf Peierls who calculated uranium-235’s critical mass and found it to be much smaller than previously thought which meant that a deliverable bomb should be possible. [15] In the February 1940s Frisch–Peierls memorandum they stated that: “The energy liberated in the explosion of such a super-bomb…will, for an instant, produce a temperature comparable to that of the interior of the sun. The blast from such an explosion would destroy life in a wide area. The size of this area is difficult to estimate, but it will probably cover the center of a big city. “Edgar Sengier, a director of Shinkolobwe Mine in the Congo which produced by far the highest quality uranium ore in the world, had become aware of uranium’s possible use in a bomb. In late 1940, fearing that it might be seized by the Germans, he shipped the mine’s entire stockpile of ore to a warehouse in New York.

For 18 months British research outpaced the American but by mid-1942, it became apparent that the industrial effort required was beyond Britain’s already stretched wartime economy. In September 1942, General Leslie Groves was appointed to lead the U.S. project which became known as the Manhattan Project. Two of his first acts were to obtain authorization to assign the highest priority AAA rating on necessary procurements, and to order the purchase of all 1,250 tons of the Shinkolobwe ore. The Tube Alloys project was quickly overtaken by the U.S. effort and after Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Quebec Agreement in 1943, it was relocated and amalgamated into the Manhattan Project. Szilard started to acquire high-quality graphite and uranium, which were the necessary materials for building a large-scale chain reaction experiment. This experiment was successfully demonstrated on December 2, 1942 at the University of Chicago. The success of this demonstration and technological breakthrough were partially due to Szilard’s new atomic theories, his uranium lattice design, and the identification and mitigation of a key graphite impurity (boron) through a joint collaboration with graphite suppliers, both to American commentators—and to the Soviets—that it was an attempt primarily to stymie Soviet nuclear efforts. The Soviets vetoed the plan, effectively ending any immediate postwar negotiations on atomic energy, and made overtures towards banning the use of atomic weapons in general. The Soviets had put their full industrial might and manpower into the development of their own atomic weapons. The initial problem for the Soviets was primarily one of resources—they had not scouted out uranium resources in the Soviet Union and the U.S. had made deals to monopolies the largest known (and high purity) reserves in the Belgian Congo. The USSR used penal labor to mine the old deposits in Czechoslovakia—now an area under their control—and searched for other domestic deposits (which were eventually found).Two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, the U.S. government released an official technical history of the Manhattan Project, authored by Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, known colloquially as the Smyth Report. The sanitized summary of the wartime effort focused primarily on the production facilities and scale of investment, written in part to justify the wartime expenditure to the American public. The Soviet program, under the suspicious watch of former NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria (a participant and victor in Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s), would use the Report as a blueprint, seeking to duplicate as much as possible the American effort. The “secret cities” used for the Soviet equivalents of Hanford and Oak Ridge literally vanished from the maps for decades to come. At the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, Arzamas-16, physicist Yulii Khariton led the scientific effort to develop the weapon. Beria distrusted his scientists, however, and he distrusted the carefully collected espionage information. As such, Beria assigned multiple teams of scientists to the same task without informing each team of the other’s existence. If they arrived at different conclusions, Beria would bring them together for the first time and have them debate with their newfound counterparts. Beria used the espionage information as a way to double-check the progress of his scientists, and in his effort for duplication of the American project even rejected more efficient bomb designs in favor of ones that more closely mimicked the tried-and-true Fat Man bomb used by the.

Russia, officially known as the Russian Federation, is a major nuclear power and possesses one of the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons in the world. The country’s nuclear program can be traced back to the Soviet Union, which developed its first nuclear weapon in 1949, becoming the second country after the United States to do so. The Soviet Union continued to build up its nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, and this stockpile was inherited by the Russian Federation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.As of 2021, it is estimated that Russia has around 6,375 nuclear arsenals, including both strategic and non-strategic (tactical) warheads. These warheads are deployed on various delivery systems, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), strategic bombers, and ground-launched cruise missiles. Russia’s nuclear policy is based on the concept of deterrence, with the primary goal of preventing aggression against the country and its allies. The country has a no-first-use policy, meaning it pledges not to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, except in the case of a conventional attack that threatens the existence of the state. However, Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or a conventional attack that poses a threat to the country’s sovereignty. In addition to its operational nuclear weapons, Russia is also modernizing its nuclear arsenal, developing new delivery systems and upgrading its existing weapons. This includes the development of new ICBMs, such as the Sarmat, as well as the modernization of the existing fleet of nuclear-armed submarines and bombers. Russia is also a party to several arms control agreements, including the New START treaty with the United States, which limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons on both sides. However, the future of arms control efforts between the US and Russia is uncertain, as the New START treaty is set to expire in 2026.