ABSTRACT
This chapter inquires into the practices of nuclear-weapon states – democracies and non-democracies – in dealing with information concerning their nuclear arsenals. Its objective is to identify differences in practices – if such differences exist – and the reasons for the choice of given levels of secrecy and transparency in the different countries. It opens with a discussion of the relationship between democracy and transparency, and the role of transparency in arms control in general. It then develops in some detail the contradictory rationales for both transparency and for secrecy in a nuclear-arms-control context. From this a raw catalogue of criteria for “necessary” and “unnecessary” secrecy emerges. These criteria are then applied in a comparative study of the degree of transparency and secrecy applied by nuclear-weapon states to the fields of deployment, warhead dismantlement, nuclear materials and production, and nuclear explosions. The different degree of the transparency applied means necessarily that our knowledge of the practices varies considerably among the states concerned, and the depth of the analysis must thus inevitably differ.
