ABSTRACT
Nuclear weapons help to deter the kind of aggression that might spark a major war with global consequences, but the long-term costs and risks of their retention mean that good faith efforts to pursue their abolition are in the interests of their possessors. For an abolition treaty to enhance (or at least not undermine) security, it would have to contain (1) well-defined provisions that extended beyond the elimination of military nuclear programs to include the regulation of nonnuclear military and even civilian activities; (2) effective verification arrangements capable of providing timely warning and clear evidence of noncompliance; (3) effective enforcement mechanisms capable of denying a violator any benefits of noncompliance; and (4) provisions creating an alternative security architecture that enabled former nuclear-armed states and their allies to protect their vital interests without nuclear weapons. Not only does the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) not meet these criteria, but, for the foreseeable future, no treaty could. Abolition should instead be approached as a co-evolutionary process in which lessons from one stage of the disarmament process can be applied to the next.
