Future Directions in the Study of Nuclear Disarmament -- Managing the Atom

Francesca Giovanini: So I really want to welcome you all. My name is Francesca Giovanini. I'm the executive director of the project Managing the Atom here at the Belfor Center. And it is my absolute pleasure, I have to say, to welcome Matt Fuhrmann, one of our wonderful most outstanding former MTA fellows, back to an MTA event today. And I also want to welcome all the outstanding panelists who have agreed to speak to us today about the future orientation of the nuclear disarmament studies. Befor

e I turn over to Matt, I just want to say a couple words about how we came to convene this meeting, and I want to take a little bit of credit for me and for all the scholars who are around this video today. I want to say this is probably the very first event talking about nuclear disarmament that Harvard has convened in a rather long time. And we have decided to convene this event really to mark the first conference of the state parties to The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. When w

e started thinking about this first conference of the state parties, one of the very first questions we ask is, what is the space the TPNW opens up for scholars and intellectual to think or rethink the nuclear disarmament questions? What questions does the TPNW rise, and how can we tackle these questions? This event is particularly important, at least to me, because it comes actually as part of a very important initiative we've just launched, which is the Research Network on Rethinking Nuclear D

eterrence. This is a major effort of many academic institutions, some of them represented here on the screen today, to rethink the theory and practice of nuclear deterrence. So the network really begins with the fundamental assumption that nuclear deterrence is a theory, and as such has to be questioned, and there its assumptions and principles have to be tested against empirical case studies. And this opens up, in our view, also some space perhaps to do some serious work on the nuclear disarmam

ent side of the equation. And so we were particularly pleased to convene this, and really to merge the practice and policy that is going to go on in Vienna very soon with the work that some of our most outstanding experts and scholars have done on the nuclear disarmament question. I want to turn it over to Matt Fuhrmann. I want to thank you so much, Matt, for agreeing to moderate this panel. And I want to thank again every one of you for joining us in this conversation today. Matt, over to you.

Matt Fuhrmann: Thanks very much, Francesca. It's great to be here, and great to see you all for this, what I think is a really important discussion on an enduring issue, nuclear disarmament, that continues to have relevance today. One interesting and important facet of what we're going to do today is think about this issue from a scholarly standpoint. That is, we're going to hear from six scholars who are doing really interesting and important work on this subject, and they're going to come at t

he issue from a social science and scholarly standpoint. And I think that's significant, because a lot of times the issue of disarmament can have an advocacy type flair. Of course, the work that everyone's carrying out has obvious policy implications, which we'll tease out in our discussion hopefully, but everyone here is going to be sharing some of the insights from their scholarship as well. So I'd like to take a moment just to briefly introduce the people who will be speaking on this panel. A

gain, I'm Matt Fuhrmann. I'm a professor of political science at Texas A&M University and a former fellow at the Belfor Center back in 2007 and 2008. We'll be hearing first from Rebecca Gibbons, who is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Maine. And she'll be followed by Stephen Herzog, who is a senior researcher in nuclear arms control at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich. We also have Hassan Elbahtimi, who is a senior lecturer in the department of war studies and di

rector of the Center for Science and Security Studies at Kings College London. Also on the panel is Olamide Samuels. He's a research associate in nuclear politics at the University of Leicester's school of history, politics, and international relations. Our fifth speaker will be Sholav Eggland, who is a post-doctoral fellow in security studies at Sciences PO. And finally, we have Tamara Patton, who is currently a standard nuclear security fellow at MIT security studies program. So as you can see

, we have a really interesting set of scholars here representing people from multiple countries, and they're going to bring a diversity of perspectives to this important issue. All of the speakers are going to take about five minutes to convey their remarks, and then I will kick off the discussion using my prerogative as moderator with some questions that come out of the remarks. And then we'll open the floor for discussion from the audience. So with that, let me turn things over to Dr. Gibbons.

Rebecca Gibbons: All right. Thank you so much, Matt. Five minutes is a challenge, so I'm going to do my best, but I do want to thank Matt for being here to moderate this, all the other scholars, and to Francesca and Managing the Atom for holding this discussion. So my research in this area is focused on the treaty that Francesca mentioned, The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. That is the new treaty that entered into force last year and bans or prohibits all nuclear weapons-related

activities. My first scholarship related to the TPNW was a brief history of the treaty and how it came about, and I'll ask Marina to link to that in the chat. This new treaty was born out of, I would say, the existing global nuclear architecture, especially the 1970 non-proliferation treaty known as the NPT. If you're on this call, you probably know this, but the NPT's article six calls for all members of the treaty to pursue effective means towards eventual nuclear and general disarmament. And

so in 2000, all the parties of the NPT met for their every-five-year review meeting, and all the parties were able to come to an agreement. As you know, this doesn't always happen at these every five-year meetings, but in 2000, they were able to come to an agreement on what was known then as 13 practical steps towards disarmament. And this agreement was widely lauded within the international community, within the disarmament and non-proliferation communities as a major political step forward in

making more progress on nuclear disarmament. However, just five years later at the next conference, the parties were unable to come to consensus on these same 13 steps, and that was in part because the U.S. administration at the time did not agree on all of them. And so after this 2005 conference, both diplomats from non-nuclear weapons states in the NPT and disarmament-focused NGOs became concerned. And so diplomats, and these are people I've interviewed over the past few years. They were worri

ed about the sustainability of the NPT in the long run if they didn't see further progress on nuclear disarmament. They were worried about the legitimacy of this treaty. Members of a group known as the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, they sought a new means of promoting disarmament outside of the NPT framework. And I think that's really important, outside of the NPT framework. And they founded what we know now as ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Wea

pons. Eventually, some diplomats from non-nuclear weapons states and these activists would join together. The states would help with resources among the activists, and they started the humanitarian initiative, where there was these three humanitarian conferences in 2013 and 2014. That helps build momentum, and eventually leads to negotiating the TPNW, which again, entered into forest in 2021. None of the NPT nuclear weapon states participated in these negotiations. They have forcefully, in actio

n and rhetoric, rejected this new treaty. And so, I provide all that background because the current research I am sharing today examines the normative contest between the NPT's five legitimate or official nuclear weapons states and those promoting the TPNW, those that want to ban nuclear weapons for all states. And so, this topic broadly fits into a constructivist research agenda examining the life cycle of norms. So you may be familiar, early norm lit say in the late 1990s, particularly by Finn

emore and Sikkink, talked about norms. First, they emerge, and then they cascade. And then they become entrenched and taken for granted in the international system. But soon after, scholars pointed out that some norms never make it through that cycle. Some norms die. They fade away, and that new norms are often strongly contested by those who favor the status quo, those who don't want to see this new norm emerge. And so, for the past six or seven years, I have followed the efforts to develop a t

reaty to ban nuclear weapons, as well as the ways in which the five NPT nuclear weapons states have responded to this treaty. And so, this is, like I said, within a constructivist research agenda, and then more specifically, there's this increasing amount of literature on norm contestation or norm resistance. And so, in the particular area I'm looking at, we have supporters of the ban treaty promoting a norm of non-possession for all. No state should have nuclear weapons. In contrast, the P5 fav

or working through the NPT, which enshrines a norm of selective possession, whereby these five states are legitimately allowed to have these weapons, and they're legal possessors, and the rest of the states are not. And so, this norm of non-possession takes direct aim at nuclear deterrence and extended nuclear deterrence, which is why it is so concerning to the NPT's nuclear weapon states. And so, I know I'm running out of time, but I'll just say that in studying how the P5 and particularly the

U.S. have tried to resist this norm and stop it from becoming entrenched, there have been several strategies or tools, and this is what I've been looking at. So for example, nonparticipation was one of the first ones, not showing up at the humanitarian conferences, not even showing up for the Nobel prize ceremony when ICAN won the Nobel prize, or at least not sending the high-level ambassadors. There's been lots of critical rhetoric about this treaty, particularly saying that it's going to be ha

rmful, and it's going to undermine and hurt the NPT. That's one of the strongest lines that's used against the treaty by the P5, that it's going to hurt the NPT. There's also been coercion. There was an example of a former secretary of defense telling the Swedish that they couldn't expect future help in, and this is before their NATO process or NATO ascension process began, but that they couldn't expect any help from the U.S. if they were to join the treaty. And then they also begin or create ne

w institutions. And I see the institution, Creating the Environment for Nuclear Disarmament, which was created under the Trump administration, as being an example of trying to do something institutionally towards disarmament without being a part of this other effort. And so I think it's interesting, because we might think that great powers have many advantages in trying to stop or resist new norms. And yet today, we have this treaty with 61 states parties. It's about to have its first meeting ne

xt week, so we see this very active process of norm contestation going on right now. And so, I think this treaty offers us a particularly interesting way to study norm, norm change, norm resistance, and norm contestation. And thank you for listening to that very fast talk. Matt Fuhrmann: Excellent. Thank you. Okay. Let's turn it over to Stephen Herzog. Stephen Herzog: All right. I am going to share some slides here really quickly, so let's just make sure that those share. Can everybody see those

? Okay. All right. Wonderful. So thank you very much to MTA and Francesca for having me, and thanks as well to Matt Fuhrmann for agreeing to be here. Very excited to have all these people doing excellent work in the same place. It's nice. Today, we're going to talk about public opinion on the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And when I say public opinion on this, I think it's important, in part, because to date, we have 61 states parties to the TPNW, and 86 countries that are state

signatories. So whether or not you like the TPNW, whether or not you agree or disagree politically with the approach to the ban treaty, the ban treaty is now part of the multilateral global nuclear order. And I think that's only going to be reemphasized later this month with the first meeting of states parties of the TPNW in Vienna, which I assume that multiple people here on this call will be present for. Public opinion on nuclear issues is oftentimes very controversial. In principle, the publ

ic should probably care about nuclear issues, and maybe be involved in nuclear issues, because the threats and dangers presented by nuclear weapons. But it remains controversial, and there are always debates when there are studies about, does the public support the use of nuclear weapons and things like that. Does this actually matter? Does the public have any influence over this? I think the TPNW is a little bit different though, and that is, if you look from these quotes by ICAN head Beatrice

Fihn here, it's very clear that the ban movement in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is based on this long term idea of a bottom up stigmatization of nuclear weapons. So getting the publics in nuclear arms states, states under the nuclear umbrella, and otherwise to not support nuclear weapons, and the idea that nuclear weapons provide for security. So I think that this actually provides a lot of really relevant and very interesting opportunities to study public opinion on nuclear

issues. So I want to talk today about some published research that Marina, I believe, has dropped or will soon drop in the chat. One is published in the Journal of Politics and the other is published in the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. And what they are is, they're two public opinion studies conducted simultaneously in the year 2019 with two of my colleagues, Rebecca Davis Gibbons, who's here, and Jonathan Barron. And we conducted the studies in the United States, nuclear arms sta

te, and Japan, a country which is under the U.S. wing, under the nuclear umbrella. And what we wanted to see is, will these governments who support on some level nuclear deterrence or extended deterrence be able to affect public support for what appears like a potentially popular emerging norm, like nuclear non-possession? And a lot of the discourse that we see related to the ban treaty seems to be supportive on some level of the ban treaty, but there is government pushback. And we were interest

ed to see is that actually having an effect? Is that doing anything? So what we did in each of these countries is we did a survey experiment, where we divided the groups, the populations in the United States and Japan into five groups. First, we had a control or baseline group. They received basic information about the TPNW and its objectives, and then they were asked whether they wanted their government to ratify the treaty. Then there was a second group. They received that baseline information

, and then a statement noting their government's national opposition to TPNW because nuclear weapons are used for deterrence against nuclear armed states. Then there's a third group that received this control baseline text, plus institutional messaging saying that the TPNW is a weak international institution with enforcement and verification issues. And then there was another group that received the baseline information, and then information saying the TPNW had the potential to undermine the nor

ms of the NPT regime. Whether or not you buy these arguments, these have external validity because these are the types of arguments that the U.S. government and the Japanese government have substantively been making against the TPNW. And then finally, building on the work of Kertzer and Zeitzoff, we offered what we call a group Q, which involves mild deception, and the idea is to see if social pressure can influence your viewpoints related to a treaty. And so this is what we did, is after people

answered demographic questions and got the baseline text, this group Q group would also get this image on the screen, informing them that people who had similar demographics to them essentially had answered questions similarly, did not support the TPNW. Okay. So what do we find? What we found is that in the United States, it might be surprising, 64.7% of control or baseline group respondents, which is a strong majority of respondents, support TPNW ratification. But what we also found is that al

l of these treatment effects are strongly significant. All of the substantive cues and the group cues, they range from 8.1 to 19.2 percentage points, which is enough, 19.2, for example, to move people a full point on a Likert scale. And so what we see though, is there are also some heterogeneous effects here, where Republicans are affected the most by the security cue, Democrats by the institution cue and otherwise. However, maybe people haven't heard of the TPNW. It has potentially low issue sa

lience. So we did a follow up survey on YouGov that you can see the results here. We asked people that they had heard of the TPNW, described what it did. We gave four options. Yes, and I support it. Yes, and I oppose it. No, I haven't heard of it, but it sounds like something I would support, and no, I haven't heard of it, but it sounds like something I would oppose. And you can see from the results there that 63.8% of people, a similar result, said they'd either support the TPNW or it sounds li

ke something they would support. However, only 26.1% of Americans said that they had heard of the TPNW, and that may be questionable too. Maybe they confused the TPNW with the NPT or something else. But the overall conclusion from this is that really, there's still strong, overt support for nuclear disarmament in the United States and latent support. So that also means that while there's this strong overt, and latent support, that these kind of U.S. government anti-normative cues are quite power

ful. We did the same study in Japan, and the results are shockingly different. What we find is that, while all demographic groups in Japan, across the board, liberal, conservative, anything, income, education, are supportive of the TPNW, none of these treatments that the Japanese government is using delivered in the Japanese language can change Japanese public opinion. They're all not statistically significant. And so, 75% of the Japanese population supports the TPNW in principle. Now let's conc

lude. And to conclude, what are the implications of this? Overall, baseline level support for the TPNW from social science research shows that it should be encouraging for advocates in the United States and Japan. We're seeing high majorities of populations that support it. However, the American public, while we've seen studies before that show the American public supports nuclear disarmament in principle, maybe they don't know much about the ban. Maybe they're not sold on the ban and can very e

asily be moved against the ban approach. The Japanese government, totally different situation. If public opinion on these issues matters, the Japanese government is not going to be able to hide from the TPNW. And so overall, I think this presents us with several new directions to research. Could these studies be done in other countries? Could there be different types of messaging used? Could we look at positive messaging and support of the TPNW, overlaying that with negative messaging, and where

does it put us as far as simulating this information environment? So thank you very much, and I'm looking forward to our discussion. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Thank you for that. Interesting overview of your work. Now, we'll turn it over to Hassan Imbatimi, Elbahtimi. Excuse me. Hassan Elbahtimi: Can you hear me? Fantastic. Great. Thank you so much, Matthew, and Francesca, and everyone on the call really. I'm really pleased to be here. I cannot really speak as fast as Rebecca and Stephen. So I trie

d to condense what I want to share with you so that I can fit in the five minutes allocated to me. So let's see how I can do that. What I want to share with you is some thinking that I've been doing on the NPT, and thinking about the NPT is far less fashionable these days, compared to the new kid on the block, TPNW, but there is some form of idiosyncrasy that I've always felt as someone who's followed the NPT, attended these meetings, and also seen the analytical research and academic community

talking about the NPT. And there is some kind of a mismatch between my experience of what's going on in negotiations, and the sort of power and how it's distributed in the conference hall, and then how it is all that reflected in the academic practice, and academic research, and analytical research as well in research centers and think tank. So I'm going to propose that a part of this is because our view of the dynamics of politics within the NPT draws on a very narrow conception of agency in in

ternational politics. And that agency is primarily the agency of great powers, and is primarily also linked to the origins of the treaty that is more frequently than not portrayed as the product of kind of a great power collusion or agreement behind the doors. Some of that might have happened, and great powers play a very important and key role in the treaty. But what I want to share with you is by only focusing on this, we limit our universe of possibilities and options, and perhaps also misund

erstand both the origins of the treaty and its current politics. And part of this research tried to draw the attention to the role of middle powers and small powers, and how they sort developed positions of negotiation and influence on a global scale, whether in the NPT review conferences or in other forum. And to take it to the TPNW, you cannot really understand how the TPNW came into being and the effect that it might have without really understanding the role of middle powers, because they we

re actually in the driver's seat when it comes to the TPNW. But what I want to say is that they were also played a key and significant role in the NPT, whether in negotiations or in its current politics. So I shared with you some of the common narratives about the NPT and how it evolved, specifically, how it was negotiated, and key among them is that focus on this being a U.S./Soviet Union pact, bilateral superpowers affair almost entirely. The narrative sort of draws on the situation in Europe,

nuclear sharing in Europe, debate about multilateral nuclear forces in Europe. And that being, when that is resolved, that's unpacked sort of, sorry, unblocked the route towards negotiation of the treaty. It's more frequently than not also portrayed as a response either to a nuclear question in Europe. So the European theater is very, very prominent, or as a response to China's nuclear test, and the desire to close the door after China's nuclearization. And again, what I'm saying is that these

are not factors that played no role. I think they played a key and important role, but what I'm trying to say is that this is not the only way to think about the treaty and how it evolved. In more practical terms, if you look into the negotiations of the treaty, you always find it sort of confined the very last bit, the late '60s, maybe from '66 to '68, and specifically chronicled by the submission of common drafts between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, first individually, then jointly. I would

also argue that a lot of this on the analytical community and in terms of research is driven by either whether that debate between realists and - Speaker 1: Stopped. This meeting is being recorded. Hassan Elbahtimi: Sorry about that. I'm not sure whether that came from my laptop or from someone else's, but I will carry on. So that liberal/realist debate that sort of is very prominent in international relations. Obviously not the only one, but that consequential logic that ties treaties and regim

es into great powers is something that both liberals and realists share. But also when you look into constructivist work, you kind of feel like it's predominantly linked to a certain kind of actors that primarily I would say does not include a lot of actors from the global south. And when they include middle powers, that's also kind of European kind of profile. So I think as a result of this, we have a very stilted view of the treaty and how it developed. When you look into actually the history

of how the treaty evolved, however imperfect it is, you find that Ireland played a key role. You find in 1964, there is an African summit that included a declaration for denuclearization. You can take the whole 'Nam involvement back to 1955 and the Bandung Conference. Then the Nam summit in 1964 was a big push towards sort of pushing the treaty on nonproliferation negotiations, unified Nam position behind the treaty, behind the process that led to the negotiation of the treaty. If you look at th

e indefinite extension of the NPT, there is no way you can write up that history without acknowledging the role of Canada, South Africa, and possibly also Egypt. So final thoughts from me, to understand the origins and trajectory of the NPT, you need to broaden the length and see beyond just the great power collusion, or bilateral pact into something that is bigger. I think the role of agency and conception of agency here is important, highlighting the role of other states that were parts of the

treaty and continue to be key actors, and then can take the whole issue to new forums like the TPNW is really important. And here, the role is not passive acceptance or inheritance of a treaty, or direct coercion, as sometimes is portrayed in the literature, but actually a full agents that situated in regional dilemmas that relate to security. And these treaties can be part of addressing that. Also, it's very important, I think, to situate the treaty into that long standing anti-nuclear interna

tional advocacy. That once you start exploring broader agency international politics you see in Bandung, you see in all these other conferences. Right, that's it from me. And I perhaps can share more in the discussion. Thank you very much. Matt Fuhrmann: Thank you, Hassan. Very interesting remarks. Our next speaker will be Olamide Samuel. Olamide Samuel: Oh, thank you, Matthew. I don't think I'm capable of speaking as quickly as all the other experienced speakers here today, but I'll try my best

. Well, thank you very much for having me, and the summary of my research looking at the TPNW has actually been to sort of ignore the orthodoxy of studies that is beginning to develop around the TPNW treaty process, which looks at how the treaty is a challenge to nuclear orthodoxy, and how supporters are somewhat monolithic. As someone from the global south, my interest really is about looking closer at the coalitions that form the core support for the TPNW treaty, and looking at diversity of in

terest within that coalition. And so, it's quite convenient that Hassan has highlighted the non-aligned movement in the '60s, and how there were massive supporters for nuclear disarmament, and how a lot of agency from the global south is sort of overlooked when we're thinking about the drivers for nuclear disarmament. And it really relates a lot to my research, because when I look closer at what nuclear disarmament means for states in the global south, we find a stark difference with western sta

tes that support nuclear disarmament. So for western states that support nuclear disarmament, we find that they are looking at the TPNW as a way to channel or to express the injustices they face in terms of their inability to extract themselves, or to insulate themselves from the adverse impacts of a nuclear war or a nuclear exchange. And so these western states, we usually see them as the norm entrepreneurs, those that are driving positive neutrality. States which come to mind are Austria and I

reland, who really championed some sort of nuclear ban globally. Whereas when I look at the global south, there's a bit more diversity with regards to the sort of injustices that are being expressed by global south states. The first category of states are those that I would call the retributive justices, sorry, retributive justice-seeking states from the global south. And these are states that are very active when we talk about the humanitarian initiative, and the humanitarian impacts of nuclear

weapons. And this is precisely because many of these states have suffered the adverse impact- As many of these states have suffered the adverse impacts of nuclear testing on their territories, many of them were colonies of Imperial powers when these tests were carried out. And so they see the humanitarian initiative and the TPNW as a means to seek for some sort of retribution, seek for some sort of compensation and recognition of the harm that was caused. The other type of global south supporti

ng state of the TPNW are those that fall under the category of distributive justice seekers. And this is where it gets quite interesting. So what we find is that distributive justice seekers are many states in the global south whose primary security concern is interlinked with their developmental concerns. They face massive economic insecurity, energy poverty, social instability. And so when they interact with global processes, such as the TPNW, of course they support nuclear dis discernment bec

ause of their membership in the nonaligned movement initially, but they also see nuclear discernment, not as an end in itself, but as a stepping stone, pun intended, for development, making the world safe for nuclear power. And this is where it gets quite interesting because the distributor justice seeking states among TPNW supporters are sometimes in conflict with the positive neutrality states of the west, such as Ireland and Austria, that explicitly reject nuclear energy and nuclear power. An

d also sometimes in conflict with retributive justice seeking states, which have actually experienced the environmental and human damage that could be caused by the misuse of nuclear technologies, but the TPNW at the end of the day through the negotiating processes was actually able to form or create consensus and focus around the primacy of nuclear disarmament as the core interests of all of these diverse states. Distributive justice states, many of which are from the global south, are mostly a

lready members of nuclear weapons free zones. For example, [inaudible 00:33:24] treaty is just one of these examples where essentially for many African states signing onto the TPNW doesn't really change their legal environment because they've already outlawed nuclear weapons. They've already rejected nuclear weapons, possession, threats, et cetera, but the TPNW advocates were able to still encourage these states from the global south to support the positive neutrality looking states and the retr

ibutive justice seeking states as a way of sort of challenging nuclear orthodoxy on the condition that the TPNW was not going to interfere with their article four rights in the NPT. And so when you look at the TPNW treaty text in the preamble, you actually see that there's an explicit reference to the inalienable right of states to pursue nuclear energy in a disarmament treaty. Now at first glance, that seems out of place, but understanding these internal dynamics makes you see more clearly how

this was perhaps a compromise to still get the largest number of states to support the TPNW. Another oddity, which I wouldn't get into here for reasons of time would be the additional protocol, the joining process of the TPNW where some call it the lowest standard is what has been accepted if you want to join the TPNW. States like Switzerland states like Ireland states like Austria have been looking to universalize the additional protocol as a way of ensuring that new nuclear material and techno

logy is not diverted for military purposes, and I think they saw an opportunity in the TPNW in joining procedures to sort of enshrine this universalization of the additional protocol, but there was significant pushback to that from distributed just in seeking state states, many of whom, and non-aligned movement states. If you look at the treaty text, the original draft and the corrections that have been uploaded on the UN website, you'll see that states like Algeria, Brazil, that is in a signato

ry actually wrote comments about the preamble, where they explicitly included the protection of nuclear energy in the TPNW and these same states are states that have in principle rejected the universalization of the additional protocol. So in summary, when we look at the TPNW and when we look at how states are supporting nuclear discernment, we have to understand the wider context within which these states exist beyond just the nuclear politics from, we have to think about their developmental co

ncerns and also their historical inclinations towards certain types of technologies or others, and that would give you much, much more comprehensive perspective of the politics that occurs and will occur within the TPNW process. Thank you very much. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Thank you. Very interesting perspective, and I like how both other two prior presentations brought in some actors who from the global south, especially who are often neglected in scholarship, at least in the United States on nuc

lear security. So that's a really good perspective to have next, we'll turn it over to Kjolv Egeland. Kjolv Egeland: Thank you. Thanks very much. And thank you also to Marina, Rebecca and Steven for making this happen. I'm very, very glad to be here. I'm going to talk not really about the TPNW today, but rather about the more general phenomenon of nuclear disarmament or nuclear relinquishment. Specifically, I'll talk a bit about or give a summary of a recent article of mine called A Theory of Nu

clear Disarmament, which was published in the Journal Contemporary Security Policy. It's open access, so should be available to anyone interested and possibly there's going to be a link in the chat box as well. So in broad strokes, what I'm trying to do in the article is to ask a pretty straightforward question, namely, what causes or might cause decisions to relinquish a nuclear arsenal, and importantly, also how can we adjudicate between different answers to this question? Sorry. So how might

a theory of nuclear disarmament or nuclear relinquishment be tested, so nuclear disarmament has provided a nominally shared goal for pretty much all the world's states for decades, at least in theory, yet nevertheless, surprisingly little efforts has actually been devoted to systematically theorizing the drivers of nuclear disarmament or relinquishment, so my article is an attempt at beginning to fill this void or gap in the literature, and the article is divided into three parts, and in the fir

st I discussed the conceptual material and ideational features of nuclear disarmament or renunciation. So I'm talking here about state's complete relinquishment or renunciation of nuclear weapons and not just stockpile reductions, so in the first part, I discussed the conceptual material and ideational features of this to arrive at some rudimentary or basic understanding of what fundamentally nuclear disarmament is or involves. Then secondly, I try to scope out and assess the empirical evidence

on which a general theory of nuclear renunciation might be based. And in the third part, I try to synthesize or look at the dominant explanations that have been offered by other scholars for the cases or the candidate bodies of evidence that I discuss in the second part. So on this basis, I try to outline a very basic or first attempt at an account of nuclear relinquishment and try to discuss this theory with and compare the compatibility of this theory with common assumptions about disarmament

practice. So what diplomats are doing, essentially. So there is actually very little, I would say, surprisingly little theory on nuclear disarmament or nuclear renunciation. So there is of course, a lot of debate about strategies of disarmament, ideas about how to do it responsibly, ways out of the nuclear age, as Lawrence Friedman would say, there's much less literature on the general causes or drivers. Much of the literature on disarmament, I would say, is also very policy oriented. It's also

often written by policy makers or current or former diplomats, and much of it essentially takes the talking points of governments for granted basing the assumptions about what is possible or not possible on the formal statements of governments. I think however, that government statements are often not totally reliable here, so in nuclear discourse as other political discourse, statements by policy makers are often performative and meant to have an effect on the world rather than to describe the

world as accurately as possible. Then lastly, there's also quite a lot of work on the disarmament movement, like on the TPNW, but again, much less on the general drivers or courses of nuclear disarmament. Now we see big contrast to fields like nuclear proliferation, where we have multiple books offering different theories that are based on empirical data and studies, standard social science work on causal questions. So you might say that one of the obvious reasons why there's less work on nuclea

r development is because there is very little evidence to base any theory on, and this is definitely the case. This is true. Then again, this is also the case for things like nuclear escalation, and we have quite a lot of different theories about that, even though we still thankfully have not experienced the nuclear war, and I'm making the case that scarcity or paucity of evidence should be an invitation to be a little bit more creative in terms of how we understand the evidence, rather than jus

t throwing empirical, systematic social science analysis overboard altogether. So then the main part of my article is a discussion of various candidate bodies for evidence or historical lessons or parallels that we might use to inform a theory of nuclear disarmament. So firstly, I of course discussed the case of South Africa's disarmament. Then I secondly also discussed the renunciation of nuclear weapons by the post Soviet States of Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. And then thirdly, I discuss

nonnuclear disarmament processes, then forcefully bilateral nuclear arms control and stockpile limitation agreements, and then fifth nuclear reversal processes, also known as nuclear rollback cases in countries like Sweden and Switzerland. And then finally, I also look a bit at another set of evidence that people have invoked as historical lessons in this field, which is major social and change like the abolition of the slave trade, and then assessing these bodies of evidence, I argued that proc

esses to do with non-nuclear phenomena could actually be of some value and perhaps even of greater value than for example, the cases of stockpile limitations and bilateral arms control. After all disarmament or nuclear relinquishment would necessitate the transcendence of nuclear deterrents, and the confrontation was vested interests that are invested in nuclear arsenal. Arms control, however, can be done without doing any of those things. Some of you might remember for example, that when the Ob

ama administration negotiated for New START Treaty that was justified by the administration as an effort at strengthening nuclear deterrents rather than overcoming it. I think it's really important to have research on these very important topics, so I'm really grateful for this event and thank you for having me. Thanks. Matt Fuhrmann: Thanks very much. Okay. Our sixth and final speaker for now will be Tamara Patton. Tamara Patton: Great. Thank you so much. Can you all hear me and see the slides?

Perfect. So thank you again to the organizers for having me, I was asked to focus on disarmament verification. My remarks draw from a paper that I coauthored with [inaudible 00:46:19] at Princeton, which I believe will be shared in the chat. So I'll start off by saying that I agree with those who have pointed out that the TPNW has not changed much in terms of the longstanding questions surrounding nuclear disarmament and its verification. What I do think is that the treaty has sharpened the foc

us on some existing questions in ways that are very relevant to the study of disarmament verification, specifically, and to international cooperation more broadly. So for the sake of time, I'm going to focus on one such example, which is the way that the TPNW frames disarmament not just in terms of the weapons, but in terms of a program. The treaty takes the perspective that a nuclear weapon program comprises production, maintenance and modernization, and an article for it calls for states to su

bmit a plan for the verified and irreversible elimination of that program. So what does that mean in practice? How far are we in understanding and deciding on the scope of a nuclear weapon program? So if we begin with precedent, and I apologize if this is difficult to read, but this is essentially an aggregation of all nuclear weapon related activities and facilities as mentioned in IAEA documentation and in relevant nuclear treaties, whether all of this would need to be addressed and how is cer

tainly one set of questions, but I think another question is what verification experience do we have across this landscape at the international level to draw upon? So to offer the beginnings of an answer here is one perspective on elements of a nuclear weapon program, which draws from this helpful report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. So their simplified framework covers the key areas of the fuel cycle, weaponization delivery and militarization. So just to run through a cou

ple of examples to give an idea here, if you look at IAEA reporting on North Korea prior to its withdrawal from BNPT, this is what the scope of verification looked like. You can see the focus was almost entirely on the civilian fuel cycle with a view to preventing diversion for weapon purposes. In the case of South Africa's former nuclear weapon program, you can see the IAEA's inspections moved into weaponization and militarization in some areas, but verification was still pretty limited in scop

e because South Africa had not yet progressed to integrating the weapon into its for structure. In the case of Iran, the IAEA also dealt with some military facilities, but these were organized through ad hoc agreements rather than on the basis of a more broadly agreed systematic approach. So with these quick case overviews, I think the uncharted territory in terms of international verification experience becomes a bit clearer. Further, what has worked in the past for nascent nuclear weapon progr

ams will not necessarily translate to states with much older, much larger or more diverse nuclear weapon programs and much bigger material balance uncertainties. So in the paper I shared, we make the case that there exists both a technical and procedural gap, as well as an institutional gap when it comes to nuclear disarmament and verification and an area where the TPNW might be positioned to assist with. So looking ahead, disarmament verification research is, of course, clearly still very activ

e through organizations like [inaudible 00:50:27], IPNDV, many technical programs within universities and through NGOs. These groups, we see a lot of workable ideas from how to get from point A with a warhead, navigate a chain of knowledge and end up at point B, which could be disposed nuclear waste, or other debated alternatives. There's also a lot of great work on leveraging commercial, remote sensing technologies in ways that balance effectiveness with non intrusiveness, but what we're not ne

cessarily seeing a great deal of is this interrogation of the scope of a nuclear weapon program and how these proposed procedures either will or won't work for this much broader array of infrastructure that we're talking about, which might, in addition to the list I showed you, include things not tied to any physical location, such as scientists, training, funding, research, and development streams. So my co-authors and I have been among those that see these knowledge gaps as benefiting from an

ongoing process of scientific and technical consultation and advising again, not because we don't have answers on disarmament verification. There are a lot of answers and proposals, but rather for organizing and applying the work that's been done across these different contexts depending on how a nuclear weapon program delimited. So if the TPNW does include a scientific advising mechanism as part of its work, this would be something to watch closely, and perhaps in parallel academics might deepe

n work on the question of what is the role of scientific and technical advising on verification in shaping things like disarmament norms and practices. And finally, I think future research could usefully examine intersections with the literature on international cooperation with the concept of reciprocity. For example, states might see value in a more comprehensive definition of a nuclear weapon program if their adversary is also adopting that definition and implementing that definition. In gene

ral, I see this as very much linked, not only with verification, but also with questions of reversibility and irreversibility and the sustainability of nuclear disarmament, both through a technological and institutional lens. So I'll stop there. Thank you so much for your time. Matt Fuhrmann: Great, excellent and concise comments. Thank you. In a few moments, we're going to open the floor for questions from the audience members and for that we will call on you and have you ask your question. We'

ll need to give you the capability to be able to speak, but we'll do that when you're called on. And for that purpose, please use the hand raise function in Zoom so we can get a queue going with questions, be thinking about questions you might want to ask now. In the short term, I'm going to kick things off and use my role as moderator to ask a few broad questions for the panelists to respond to and in doing so, I'm going to intentionally be a little provocative in the spirit of fostering conver

sation. So the questions that I'm asking do not necessarily reflect my own views or views that come from my research, but are rather meant to stimulate your responses. So let me just begin with a perspective about nuclear disarmament that is pretty cynical or skeptical, which would hold that in today's environment, where you have countries like North Korea building and threatening to use nuclear weapons in a bellicose manner. In addition, you have Russia under Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, an

d then using nuclear threats quite explicitly to deter third party intervention by the United States or others. And so in this kind of international environment where nuclear weapons seem very much front and center, I wonder how we think about from a scholarly standpoint, the issue of nuclear disarmament? Right when the Cold War ended, there was, I think, more optimism about nuclear disarmament and therefore good work done in the academy looking at things like virtual nuclear arsenals, for examp

le, but now the environment is different as new nuclear threats have emerged and so I wonder if somewhere, all of you could comment on how you think about approaching your research in that kind of environment we're facing in the real world. Stephen Herzog: I'll take a go at it. Might as well. And that is one of the things that I think we see right now is increasing polarization, because I do think you have,, Matt you've mentioned something which is deeply concerning that I think that a lot of co

untries in the age of great power competition, which is increasing, are going to see nuclear weapons as being more useful as far as modernizing arsenals. And I think as well, there will be cases where countries will now be interested in obtaining a nuclear umbrella or even considering proliferation in some way. And in my view, perhaps I think that some states may see what happened to Saddam and Gaddafi, and then see Ukraine, which disarmed, and then take this as another data point that nuclear w

eapons are guarantor of national sovereignty, but I also think that it is going the other way. And with the first conference of the states' parties on the TPNW coming up, I think that we see lots of countries and states and individuals that are pushing in a direction in which they see a potential confrontation between the United States, NATO, and Russia as being a reason for the TPNW so it kind of supercharges their advocacy and their interest in joining the TPNW so what I would say is, looking

at public opinion itself, I see that there are a number of debates that are going to be coming in the future years, and I think that the TPNW may grow more appealing in certain countries and certain security environments who are horrified by what they see going on, and I think that there will also probably be some political parties along the left-wing spectrum within NATO or countries under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, who are going to take that opposite lesson. And so I see the polarization that

is coming and is a rising with the conflict in Ukraine as being another reason why, if you are interested in public opinion on the TPNW to continue measuring these types of things, because I think what we're seeing right now, as far as the challenges to the global nuclear order mean there's going to be more discussions within NATO and more discussion elsewhere. And if certain countries within NATO or certain countries under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, their domestic political factions are interes

ted in taking on the TPNW, that has implications, of course, for Alliance politics and extended deterrents and other things, so I think that for me, at least it's a continuing reason. It makes it even more important to really keep an eye on what publics think about nuclear weapons in general and disarmament. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Would anyone else like to take a stab at that broad question? Rebecca Gibbons: I'm happy to speak, but I want to give other people a shot first. Nobody? Okay. Just a re

ally brief comment. I want to say, because I've examined the security rhetoric on one side that says we need these, but on the TPNW side, if you listen to some of the diplomats from leaders in that movement, they will say that they are making a security calculation and that they are being realistic, and so you have now both sides saying that they are the ones examining the world and taking the realistic look and saying that we've made a security calculation that the world is more secure without

nuclear weapons. And so I thought it was interesting, Matt, that you just used the word real world because we seem to be having a contest over who's more in reality, the people against nuclear weapons or the people for nuclear deterrents, I should say. I also think we've seen in the immediate aftermath of what's happened in Ukraine, fear amongst the public, and that has led... There's all these stories about Europe and iodine pills and maybe more support for nuclear deterrents, but I wonder that

as that fear dissipates [inaudible 01:00:02] say well, maybe someone like Putin shouldn't have nuclear weapons, and how would you get to that state where he doesn't? Well, you probably need some sort of multi-lateral discernment process. So I will pass it on to Hassan, who I think was next. Hassan Elbahtimi: Great. Thanks. Yes. And I would also add to what Rebecca and Stephen mentioned. I agree with what they both said, that this is a long term issue and problem that the analytical community ha

s been engaging with and are those in, and those interested in nuclear policies have been thinking about this for such a long period of time. I think since basically the nuclear weapons came into existence, thinking about how to actually control it, get rid of it, perhaps, started, and I think we limit ourselves too much by just also following the news cycle of what's... The conclusions from what's happening at Ukraine might change tomorrow. We might find ourselves in a very different place next

week. We might find ourselves much closer to nuclear disarmament under some of these scenarios that are currently being discussed in Ukraine. And we might find ourselves in a different place, but I think what would remain is that this is a long term issue and requires some long term thinking and that some of us are engaged in that long term thinking, I think is a good thing. Matt Fuhrmann: Tamara. Tamara Patton: Thanks. Just to build on what others have been saying with the environment becoming

more dangerous, essentially for some increasing... The impetus for nuclear disarmament rather than decreasing it, and just since I'm the little voice of verification on this panel, I can say that as one- ... verification on this panel. I can say that as one, yes, the militarization side of things, and the tensions have certainly increased in one respect, but something that has also changed is our verification capabilities in terms of their availability, their quality, their accessibility. And s

o it's an asset I certainly think deserves to be part of the conversation. And I'll invoke Jonathan Schell here, who back in the eighties was saying that deterrents, for those who want to hold onto it can exist in many different forms, but rather than having weapon deterring weapon in a disarmed world, with the support of a verification system, you would have factory deterring factory and blueprint deterring blueprint, and you would have much longer lead times for decision making in the event of

a defection or a crisis. So there are multiple approaches and multiple ways to answer this question. But I think starting with looking at how we reframe some of this is a starting point. Matt Fuhrmann: Kjolv, did you want to take a shot at this as well? Kjolv Egeland: Yes, please. I think I would struggle to add to what my fellow panelists have already said in response to your direct question. So perhaps I'll try to answer a slightly different question or rather just to speculate a bit, because

I mean, I do agree with you that the security environment now clearly looks quite difficult for nuclear disarmament. I think increases intention often serve to reinforce or strengthen status quo thinking in security policy, but there could be, at least hopefully, and after this current increase intention. Right. So my question would be what happens after that? If we do get a new post cold war period or whatever, it will be after, a post cold war period after that, the current cold war that we s

eem to be on our way into right now. And I just say one thing, which is that I think right now the Russian state and Mr. Putin himself are now so closely associated with nuclear weapons and nuclearism if you will, that I think almost any effort at creating a new Russia from the ashes of this current installation would almost have to be non-nuclear or anti-nuclear in a way if they wanted to create a genuine democratic alternative. Because I think if we look at what happened in the other post Sovi

et states after 1991, I think you saw it quite clearly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus that in all of those countries going non-nuclear and anti-nuclear became a pretty important way of distinguishing themselves from their Soviets past, from Moscow and creating new national identities as newly independent states. So I think that's something quite interesting to think about how something similar to that might happen in the future in a country like Russia now. Highly speculative, I know but may

be something to think about. Matt Fuhrmann: Great, thank you. Olamide. Olamide Samuel: Yeah. I just found Kjolv's response very interesting and this is no response of my own. I'm just adding to perhaps the evidence of a change of guard, welcoming change in nuclear stance. It's interesting that this is what happened in Poster Party in South Africa, where the black liberation movements in the Southern African region were so against the concept of a very aggressive national security posture that th

ey apparted government deployed that black liberation became an intertwined with nuclear disarmament. And even though there were some members of the ANC that saw some strategic benefit in perhaps retaining South Africa's nuclear weapons, it was already a bit too late to change such a discourse. So yeah, it might sound high in the sky, but it actually has precedent. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Thank you all for those interesting responses. I want to pivot a little bit and ask another broad question bef

ore opening it up to the other audience members, which has to do with another kind of tool in the nonproliferation tool kit, dealing with nonproliferation and disarmament. And that is nuclear weapons free zone treaties, which are regional treaties that denuclearize particular regions of the world. Many of you all had interesting things to say about the TPNW and also the NPT, but I didn't hear much about nuclear weapons free zone treaties, which apply to almost all the global south. These treatie

s tended to emerge out of some kind of nuclear trauma. So for example, the Treaty of Tlatelolco in Latin America was set up after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Some of the others were in response to nuclear testing by France, for example, in the South Pacific regions and the UK as well. And so I wonder if any of you all have looked into this in your research as another part of history that we might think about to gain leverage on the broader question of nuclear disarmament or at least arms c

ontrol. Does anyone have any thoughts about that that come out of their work? Olamide Samuel: I'll just jump in. I noticed- Matt Fuhrmann: Yeah, go ahead. Olamide Samuel: ... Matt's microphone is on mute. Yeah. I've come across very interesting things about nuclear free zones, looking specifically at Africa, but there is some interest in work by a colleague called Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh who looks at the entirety of nuclear weapons free zones dynamics within a concept called Obedient rebellion. The Af

rican nuclear weapons free zone case is quite interesting because there was of course born out of some sort of trauma. [inaudible 01:09:49] in the Sahara. So more generally speaking, nuclear weapons free zones born out of these traumas have over time limited, at least the spatial reach of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence relationships. So we found treaties that limited nuclear testing and the Antarctic, and all of a sudden, now we have nuclear [inaudible 01:10:12] in South America, in Afri

ca. And it seems as though the TPNW is almost a logical continuation of that, where the last region without a comprehensive nuclear weapons free zone treaty is now sort of the target for states that have already implemented or have already declared themselves nuclear free states, trying to increase that buffer zone geographically. So there's almost an evolution where we're seeing the space within which nuclear weapons can be used becoming less and less. Back to the South African nuclear weapons

free zone treaty, it's also interesting that the protocols of these treaties routinely call on former colonial powers or extra continental states that have territories within a particular region to sign onto that treaty. So in some way, they're directly also limiting the reach and the ability of nuclear weapons states to, for example, deploy some sort of nuclear deterrent within the African continental zone. So it's an interesting evolution. I'll pause here for now. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Thanks.

At this point, I think I want to open the questions to the audience members and I have other things I'd like to ask, but I'll hold off and see if there's time at the end of our discussion here. So again, if you'd like to ask a question, please use the hand raise feature in Zoom. If you type something in the chat, it's possible I might miss that due to the volume of things coming in there. So please use the hand raise function, and then we'll call on you to ask your question. The first person I

see in the queue is Benoit Pelopidas. Benoit Pelopidas: Hello? So should I activate something or can I just speak now? Matt Fuhrmann: We can hear you just fine. Benoit Pelopidas: Oh, fantastic. Okay. Sorry for being awkward. Thank you to all of you for doing this work. I'm going to be kind of short and build on the fact that what I've heard today essentially is trying to escape presentism. And so I'm going to build on mostly what Hassan said on taking the long term view, in what Kjolv said in te

rms of the post current miss, to ask you one question, which is, so the future you have in mind, when you think about the processes towards nuclear weapons police policy change, how does climate change feature in those, if at all? That's my question. Rebecca Gibbons: Do you want to collect questions or should we? Matt Fuhrmann: I think, well, why doesn't someone respond right after a question comes in? Rebecca Gibbons: I mean, I'm happy to say something quickly and then if someone wants to add,

I mean, one thing that I think is going to happen is it's not just environmental norms that are going to intersect with nuclear disarmament norms. I think growing norms about justice and fairness in the international system that we see emerging and becoming stronger, and I think the TPNW represents that in some ways, I think it's possible that all of those norms intersect and that you do get communities who really care about the environment, seeing how nuclear weapons can bring such environmenta

l devastation. On that topic, if you are interested in this topic and you haven't read Walter Pincus's book Fallout, [inaudible 01:13:56] at the Marshall Islands and just really captures the environmental devastation of nuclear weapons. Well, I recommend that. And so I think as we have more intersectionality of these norms, then it's a potential to kind of be a more powerful voice in thinking about nuclear disarmament. Matt Fuhrmann: Okay. Hassan and then Olamide. Hassan Elbahtimi: Yeah, I think

that's a great question. And I think we're perhaps a lot of times concerned about unblocking the way to imagining a different future than actually imagining that future. And certainly what the world with climate change would look like is a big question. And there is, I think very little written on that, but as you were asking that question Benoit, what quickly came to my mind is that also the way that climate emergencies is being handled can be a positive thing or a negative thing on how the nu

clear question is handled. So in a sense, if we emerge from addressing the climate with kind of like global mechanisms that can address this in a sort of an effective way, that perhaps that can go some way into convincing other skeptical voices, that some level of international structure is perhaps credible and doable. And in that way it can be a catalyst. Olamide Samuel: I'll just jump right in after Hassan, if that's okay. The question in its simplicity, really sort of obscured or very, very c

omplicated discussion. So the relationship between, imagine in the future without nuclear weapons [inaudible 01:16:02] one within which climate change and the climate's emergency is reliably dealt with is multifaceted because on the one hand, depending on what sort of nuclear technology you're looking at, there's an inverse relationship. So when you think about the relationship between say nuclear weapons and the system of nuclear deterrents, and a worsening climate and environment, there's been

some interest in studies that show, for example, just how certain deployed nuclear weapons installations are susceptible to the negative impacts of climate change. And just how unprepared many nuclear weapon states have been to deal with such emergencies, rising coastline levels, et cetera. So we have a very unstable world if we're facing a world within which the Earth is unstable and then nuclear installations are also much more dangerous when we think about nuclear weapons. An inverse relatio

nship is [inaudible 01:17:06] we talk about nuclear energy and nuclear technologies, where there are many advocates supported by the IEA that have started sort of really championing nuclear energy as the solution to still enable simultaneous development in energy poverty regions, while still having lower carbon emissions. This is a trend that was really, really exposed in COP26. And I would suspect it would be repeated in COP27. And these discussions completely ignore, of course, the associated

dangers with nuclear technologies, human and environmental dangers, but they also ignore something that has been left unattended in the nuclear non proliferation disarmament space. And that is the issue of if you have many more nuclear energy installations, as we saw in Ukraine, they could sometimes be targets of conventional attacks. If there are targets of conventional attacks, what does that mean for human and environmental safety? And the question, the legal question and the protection of nu

clear power plants has still been left unanswered. I think Sweden raised it in the CD in 1980. A couple of countries have raised it ever since then. Africa sort of did its own thing and trying the protection of power plants in article 11 of the Pelindaba Treaty, but at a global level, it's an unanswered question. So when you couple the increased focus in nuclear energy and the potential for more installations to be erected and the lack of legal protections, we're going to still be facing the ver

y unstable, perhaps insecure future. [inaudible 01:18:55]. Thank you. Matt Fuhrmann: Okay. Let's take one more response to this question and that will be Kjolv. Kjolv Egeland: Yeah. Thanks. And thanks for a predictably good question, Benoit. I think for me, one of the most obvious ways in which the climate crisis could impact debates on nuclear disarmament would be that solving the climate crisis and solving all the various consequences of the climate crisis is going to demand a lot of resources

. And currently quite a lot of resources is going into producing and maintaining nuclear weapons. So you could quite easily see this strengthening the argument that we need, the resources that are currently going into nuclear weapons for other things, which might strengthen the case for nuclear disarmament. I think I checked these numbers a few months ago, and I may be misremembering, so take this with a pinch of salt. But if I remember correctly, I think the Biden administration is spending abo

ut twice as much over the next 10 years on nuclear weapons as on electric vehicle infrastructure and rail combined. So there is probably an argument there, but you could easily also see the argument being made that we are now heading into a dark and dangerous climate future with more security competition and competition for resources. And in this brave new world, we're going to need nuclear weapons for deterrents. So I think which of those narratives went out is obviously going to be impacted by

political and cultural factors. I think more broadly though, there's been quite a lot of literature produced, excuse me, over the last 10 or so years on the security implications of climate change. There have been far less research, however, on the climate consequences of alternative approaches to security, and that I think is something that we might look more into in the future, different military postures and defense policies and nuclear weapons policies of course were important. Part of that

have different implications or carbon footprints associated within, including in terms of how likely they are to help or hinder corporational climate solutions in the future. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Thank you. Let me go now to our next question from the audience and that will be from Edwin Kindler. Edwin Kindler: Hello. Thank you very much. So my question is about verification. So inherently, I think for Dr. Patton, but also for anyone else who wishes to answer it, what's the kind of forward outl

ook or scholarship on the role of states without nuclear weapons in nuclear [inaudible 01:22:01] verification, as inherently with the TPNW discussion, states without nuclear weapons are kind of driving a lot of this. What's the current outlook for how states can be involved in this process for their satisfaction as disarmament goes on and then without affecting their article two responsibilities under the NPT? Tamara Patton: Yeah, thanks so much for the question. I think the answer gets in one r

espect down to the technologies themselves and in another to the broader approaches. So I'll start with the technologies, but a number of different organizations, universities have developed ways for non-nuclear weapons states to participate in this process, theoretically on the basis of masking signatures of nuclear weapons, through a number of different approaches, information barriers, you may have heard of them. And there's obviously a big body of work that surrounds that from the architectu

re of chain of knowledge and how these different technologies come into play at different parts in the process, but a number of the really early exercises involved non-nuclear weapons state participants, Hassan and Verdict were among the pioneers in that area with the UK-Norway initiative. So there's certainly been a lot of thinking and practice about how to involve non-nuclear weapons states. There are also a lot proposals for sort of broader approaches to basically not having to ever deal with

the sensitive information. Unit Year has proposed, for example, an approach based on verifying the absence of nuclear weapons. So essentially under that framework, it would be up to the state to dismantle its weapons, engage in a process of [inaudible 01:24:34] material accountancy in a non-classified form. And then afterward it would really just be about going into these facilities and through a structured inspection approach, a number of which they have proposed verified that there are no lon

ger any nuclear weapons or radioactive material in these storage sites, in these bases, maintenance sites, procurement sites. Again, you saw the very long list of facilities, but essentially that approach is one that non-nuclear weapon states could very much be involved in, but again, it would be a process of negotiation with the state that has decided to disarm. And again, that is that process for how that negotiation and engagement would take place with the state's parties of the TPNW is laid

out in that treaty. If anyone else wants to chime in, feel free. Matt Fuhrmann: Thank you. Let's go to our next question, which will be from David Allison. David Allison: Hi. So my question follows along the same line, which is very convenient. It's also for Tamara. And what I'm wondering is, it seems to me that there are sort of two discrete verification challenges to think about when it comes to total disarmament. The first one is technological, which I think you address really nicely, but the

second one is psychological or sociological. And that is how we convince suspicious fearful humans who are bad at rationally assessing extremely low probability events that there really are no nuclear weapons left, right. I mean, I think if you go and you speak to policy makers and go talk to sort of Air Force generals and say, what would you need to see to believe that the Russians have really given up all their nuclear weapons? The answer is [inaudible 01:26:52]. And so my question is, can th

is be overcome? Do we know how to design institutions to reduce uncertainty this far? And if so, what can we as a scholarly community do to move in that direction? Thanks. Tamara Patton: Thanks for the question. It's certainly a big one, but I think obviously no verification system is ever going to be perfect, no verification system with the best technology, the best institutions, the best approaches is never going to give you a hundred percent certainty that there are no nuclear weapons at all

in the world. That is a fair point. But I think in terms of what you're asking, communicating to the public, why this might still be a viable approach, gets into communicating some of the realities of what it takes to produce a nuclear weapon and a nuclear weapon program in broad and easy to digest terms. The fact that nuclear weapons require huge amounts of infrastructure in order to mine, refine, convert, and rich reprocess the material to, we've seen states in the past try to hide these facil

ities unsuccessfully underground. It's the realities of what it takes to run these things, come with the massive amount of electrical infrastructure that make them very hard to hide, the massive amount of cooling infrastructure needed that make them very hard to hide. So I think that's part of the answer is communicating that nuclear weapon programs are very visible. And the other part is I think communicating that, what I think we're really talking about is in terms of what matters at the end o

f the day and this is, I hate to borrow this term from the 80s in the US, but they would always talk about what matters in terms of verification is a capability of military significance. So in negotiating for the INF where there was all of these same questions, there could never be a hundred percent certainty that all intermediate range, nuclear weapons have been dismantled, that treaty was fought for on the basis of the argument that we will be able to see at least any capability that matters o

n a military level. So I think that's not a complete answer to your question, but I hope it's a start, that it is a lot of taking some complexities and realities about the technology and communicating them in a way that is clear and effective. Matt Fuhrmann: Hassan, would you like to respond to this as well? Hassan Elbahtimi: Yeah, very quickly. And just to add to what Tamara mentioned is that we currently don't have the institutional infrastructure, you can call it that practices, international

ly accepted practices that would make this possible. I mean, I think the clearest example is all the disagreements about chemical weapons used in Syria, for example. If you look into the politics of OPCW, you'll find that the bar and the standards of evidence, actually also very significantly between different actors and in addition to all the technical solutions that are very, very important. I think we also need to think about institutional setup and institutional infrastructure, international

organization, standards of proof and standards of evidence. And I think this can only be like a long term, long game effort. I think the more we have, the more verification is done, the more there are actually controversies around verification that get resolved hopefully, the more we have cumulative experience of how to address this difficult question, but I think ultimately it would be also a question about who to include and who to not include in this, because I don't think any verification o

utcome can be satisfactory to everyone. So ultimately also there will be a question of judgment, hard question of judgment about how to define acceptable standard of proof and evidence. These are very difficult questions. Thank you. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Thanks. Let's go to our next question now from Christine Rostampour. Christine Rostampour: Hi, thank you so much for all of your insight and for organizing this panel. My question is about other multilateral non proliferation agreements, such as

the joint comprehensive plan of action between Iran and the P5+1. What are the impacts of these packs being violated or being torn apart on attempts to gain support for the nuclear ban treaty and nuclear disarmament at large, especially because now there are talks coming from Iran about possibly Iran leaving the NPT? Thank you so much. Matt Fuhrmann: Does anyone want to take a first cut at that big question? Go ahead, Kjolv. Kjolv Egeland: Thanks. Kjolv Egeland. Again, a really good question, a

nd I don't think I'll be able to answer it exhaustively, but I think it could have quite contradictory effects. On the one hand, it shows that multilateral nonproliferation and disarmament work is really difficult, and specifically when you look at the US, it can be quite difficult to get treaties through the senate, and that clearly is... Given that the United States is such a powerful actor in the international system, it is something that other states really have to think quite carefully abou

t. On the other hand though, I think the kind of collapse of the JCPOA also, to some states, will be seen as yet more evidence that the traditional way of doing things, the traditional way of doing nonproliferation and disarmament isn't really working, and that this approach where you have a relatively small circle of great powers having all the agency and telling other countries what to do or not to do with nuclear technology is perhaps not as effective as we might hope it would be, and that pe

rhaps we need a new approach. This could lend itself to arguments in favor of the TPNW, the ban treaty, and a kind of paradigm shift in terms of how we think about nuclear weapons, and the role of nuclear weapons in the world. More broadly, perhaps the other states, the large number of nonnuclear weapon states should also have a role in pushing for these agreements and being involved in these agreements, rather than having these smaller circles of states negotiating between themselves. Matt Fuhr

mann: Very good, thanks. Let me go now to Tom Sauer, who has our next question. Tom Sauer: For Stephen, it's a classic question about survey research. You measured the direction of the opinion, pro or against. That's one dimension, but another dimension is the intensity of the opinion. How thick, how thin are these opinions pro or against? It's all because the Japanese people are against nuclear weapons that they will make it a priority when they vote. So my question, did you also study the inte

nsity of the opinion? Stephen Herzog: Thanks very much for your question, Tom. I think that this is one of these things that comes up rather frequently, and I would, for example, draw attention to Benoit Pelopidas, who is on the call, who has a study, and one of the things that Benoit has done in some of his studies among European publics is he has found that even though European publics tend to be very antinuclear in some senses, when given a list of different reasons and different things that

may motivate them and kind of the where do they prioritize nuclear weapons among other issues, what we actually find is, and other studies have shown this too, is that nuclear weapons tend to rank as you give someone 10 things, eight considerations, and people will tell you, "I have a strong opinion about nuclear weapons." People will tell you that, "I oppose the TPNW," or, "I support the TPNW." But then you give them a list of other questions related to things about putting food on the table, e

conomic interests, and what do you see? What you see is that generally, in the past, even though people have opinions about nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons have been a very low-salience issue, and I think there are reasons why these have been a low-salience issue, and I think that this is something which we've seen this kind of production of low nuclear salience has taken place in the post Cold War era. But, what I would say is I think that things are about to change on some level, and I don't

mean it's going to be a huge or massive shift, and maybe we're embedded in our own scholarly bubbles thinking about it, but I think one of the things that we're seeing right now is I think that what Russia has done is it has, in many ways, increased the salience of nuclear weapons. And what Russia has done is, by threatening other countries with nuclear weapons, by using nuclear weapons as a shield for deterrence and grievous war crimes, what Russia has done, in many ways I think, has exposed th

e fa ade of durable institutions and structures which may be seen as pretty unsavory, this idea of nuclear targeting, and deterrence, and other things. So, 100% I agree with you, and I think that there's something to be said about our public opinion polling about the TPNW, and yes, people have strong opinions, but will it actually affect their votes? So I don't know if it will actually affect their votes. I do know that there is good scholarship out there that shows that both military leaders an

d public and public officials do take into consideration the perspectives of the public. However, all that said, I think it remains unclear what the future direction is of nuclear salience, given the conflict in Ukraine, and I think it's going to increase. That's just my personal opinion. Thanks. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Let me go now to Sofia Wolman, who has a question. Sofia Wolman: Greetings. Thank you all so much. In part responding to Dr. Samuel's observations connecting nuclear disarmament an

d the construction of national identities, as well as black liberation at that time, and the analysis of retributive and distributive justice motivating states parties to the TPNW. I'm wondering if you can speak to kind of an approach of restorative justice, but I think that's part of the retributive justice model you were describing, but really that pushes into profound questions about power dynamics. Nuclear weapons are an integral part of imposing economic and political status quo globally, s

o given the silence, both in the media but also in scholarship, well not silence because of us here, but in the US around nuclear disarmament, when there's silence in these spaces, I think it's usually serving to protect institutions like of neoliberal capitalism that are inseparable from the legacy of colonization. So I'm wondering if you can speak to that based on your research, or if others can. I hope that question is a question that's clear enough. Thank you. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Who would

like- Olamide Samuel: Yes, it's a- Matt Fuhrmann: ... to answer that? Olamide Samuel: Oh, sorry. Matt Fuhrmann: Go ahead, Olamide. Olamide Samuel: Yes. It's a clear question. It's also a big question. I can respond to portions of it, because I suspect that certain portions of it are sort of deeply related to the US domestic politics and the interaction between especially indigenous peoples and the nuclear establishment there. The part I can speak to is, at least at the system level, at the glob

al level, there definitely is, and has been, a connection between nuclear weapons possession and ideas of imperialism, in the sense that after the sort of US-Russia moment of... The US-Soviet Union moment of being the only states with a nuclear weapons capability, we saw that France and the UK followed suit to attempt to procure a nuclear weapons capability. And especially in the UK's case, some of the justification being made then was that nuclear weapons would serve as a way to enable the Grea

t Britain to continue to act as a superpower, albeit a receding superpower given their conventional inferiority. So there's always been this connection with nuclear weapons giving geographically small states much geopolitical reach. An interesting sort of example to that is Iran. Even just in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, even just in its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, it still has massively disproportionate amounts of attention given to it. It has much bigger leeway at the global stage,

where it can carry out actions or just turn off cameras and have this significant impact on public opinion, so there's that link. Another link, again, between weapons and imperialism is, of course, how nuclear weapons have been developed over time, especially when we think about nuclear testing. There's clear evidence to show that many of those then imperial powers, in testing their nuclear weapons, decided to utilize spaces that were far away from the metropole, so France testing in Algeria, Fr

ance testing everywhere else, as far as it was away from Paris, the UK doing the same thing in Australia, the US doing this in Pacific Islands. It just shows that there's been a sort of deprioritization of essentially nonwhite bodies, when we think about where is an appropriate site to test, and whose opinions should we count or discount when we make the decision to test nuclear weapons. I can go on and on about this. There's a great book by Vincent Intondi, who looks at the African-American mov

ement against the nuclear bomb, and he does have some good sections that talks about colonialism, but there's also some extensive sections on the domestic US policy relationship to this global dynamic. I'll pause here and pass on the mic. Matt Fuhrmann: Excellent. Thank you. We have time for two more questions. First, I'll call on Roger Slattery, and then I'm going to turn it over to Francesca. Roger Slattery: Thank you. My question is concerning the production of new knowledge in this field. I'

m a layperson, just interested because I'm a civilian target here in Northern California, but I'm impressed with the knowledge of this panel. It's amazing, but I'm wondering about the funding, the adequacy of funding in this field, specifically focusing on nuclear disarmament, whether it's adequate, and what kind of trend do you see in it? That's it. Matt Fuhrmann: Kjolv, I see your hand up. Kjolv Egeland: Yeah, thanks, and thanks for the question. I think this is really, really a crucial questi

on right now. There's been some changes in the funding landscape for nuclear policy studies generally recently, with MacArthur Foundation pulling out, or will soon pull out of the field, which was one of the major funders of work in this field. So of course, you have traditional research being done at universities, which all have their own different and varied sources of funding, but then you also have the more policy-relevant stuff, which is usually, or as is often happens, within think tanks.

I've actually done a research project on the funding of think tanks, and turns out that quite a lot of the funding comes from actors with interests in, shall we say, the existing nuclear order, so there's quite a lot of funding in the top foreign policy think tanks, not just in the US, but all around the world, from the companies that produce nuclear weapons systems, and of course, governments that base their policies, their security policies, on nuclear deterrence. And the overall volume of tha

t funding really far outweighs the funding that you can get from, shall we say pro-disarmament actors. I think this is important, and I think this does have an effect. We know from essentially maybe not every other, but many other fields, that what we might call stakeholder funding does impact the research outputs in different ways. You know, one of the most important mechanisms, I think, isn't necessarily censorship or self-censorship, although that can also happen. Another problem is sort of t

he platforming of which topics and agendas are given attention in the first place, and which questions are being asked in the first place, which of course is something that the funders of research and policy-relevant research can control to quite a significant degree. But I think there are lots of really important and good questions that urgently need attention and more research in this field, and I think staying clear on conflicts of interest could be quite important. At my program, the Nuclear

Knowledges program at Science Po in Paris, we make a thing out of our refusal of funding from actors with interests in the questions that we study, and we think we have done some good stuff in this field in recent years, on the role of luck in nuclear deterrence and the nuclear order for example, and on the inconsistencies between declared policies and actual events on the ground within the nuclear policies field. So yeah, I'm going on. I'll leave the floor to someone else. Thanks. Matt Fuhrman

n: Great. Why don't I turn things over to Francesca at this time? Francesca Giovanini: Thank you so much, guys. This was absolutely great, and I'm so happy you have hosted this. I have a final question for all of you, and I see on the call, Zia and a few others, Tom and others, who have talked a lot about these issues. Two weeks ago, Livermore hosted a nuclear deterrence symposium, where none of the attendees that we had today on this event or good luck with the attendees of two weeks ago events

. They were completely different communities, separated from language, vision, worldviews, values, principles, anything. And while we're here talking about nuclear disarmament, others in that community are asking what are the future nuclear capabilities, not even the current ones, but what are the future capabilities 45 years down the line, that we would need to confront adversaries? And my impression is that the nuclear disarmament window is really closing down for one reason. The US is embarki

ng on a major modernization process, millions and millions and millions of dollars. They are not going to do it so that in 10 years from now, they can debunk everything and just pack their way and go, right? So the idea is, this is going to be a 50 years, 100 years down the line. My question as academics is the following. These communities don't speak to one another, so... I know there are some attempts in the arms control, risk reduction strategies, but I have a [inaudible 01:49:46] question, w

hich is should we try to speak together? What are the channels that need to be created, so that we really speak and present, and we are taken credibly, on both sides of the aisle? Or, do you think that more or less, the train is gone, and we shouldn't even try to connect with that community, because they just fundamentally think about the world very differently. So I would like to hear your views on this, and where are some of the opportunities to link up with that community, if at all? Matt Fuh

rmann: And let me just add to that, because I want to give each panelist around one minute or so to make any closing remarks that they would like. During your time, feel free to answer Francesca's question or to make any other closing remarks you'd like to wrap up the panel. Why don't we start with Rebecca Gibbons? Rebecca Gibbons: Francesca, that, as you know, is a really hard question that we are grappling with. I mean, I would say that as someone who studies the TPNW, I do regularly get to sp

eak with the deterrence community. But it can be a hard place to feel like you're in the middle of, you're not truly in one or the other, so are you legitimate in either one? But I do try hard to kind of talk to people in the deterrence world about the perspective of people who want to ban nuclear weapons, of acknowledging that when you're talking about nuclear weapons, you're talking about something that could... that it goes beyond borders, and could affect many different countries, so trying

to make the argument that whether you're going to agree or not, that people have a right to be at the table to talk about such an existential threat, right? It's not fair and it's not right for the P5 to say, "We're the only ones who sit at this table. You don't know anything about it." And that's why I think the humanitarian movement was so useful, in that it did have this function to educate diplomats from nonnuclear weapon states, who don't deal with this in their day-to-day lives. So I think

, I mean part of it is we all, public, elite, government, academia, we all need to be more educated about nuclear weapons, and we need to have a goal of, I think, talking more about nuclear weapons and their effects, and what the different arguments are on either side. So I don't want to be so pessimistic to say to give up, but I do think on the extremes of this spectrum, it is very difficult. Because like I said, I think earlier, maybe it was to Matt's question, one side sees nuclear weapons as

providing security, and one side sees nuclear weapons as undermining security, so they see the same object with opposite effects, which is quite difficult to bring them together. Matt Fuhrmann: Thanks. And I'm going to go in the order in which you all initially presented, so that means Stephen, you have the floor. Stephen Herzog: Yeah, I like the kind of the comment that Rebecca made about one side sees them as providing security and the other side sees them as not providing security. I think t

hat when we talk about the idea of bringing people who are advocates of deterrence and disarmament together, I think it's perhaps even more stark than that, where you have one side that has gone in a direction now, where a lot of the rhetoric is about how nuclear weapons are weapons of mass murder, and this is immoral, and some of the people who are involved in the deterrence mission and nuclear targeting are perpetuating murder. And then on the other side, you have people who say, "these people

have never had security clearances. They're na ve. They don't know what they're talking about. These are..." You know? And so I think it's a really damaging and kind of toxic stew of events, sorry a toxic stew to kind of find that middle ground. And you know, my personal view on this, and that is that we need to find, as terrible as it is, as difficult as these conversations may be, is we need to actually find funding from places and opportunities to get these people in the same room and get th

em to have interesting conversations. And I know that a number of people on this call probably know that Rebecca, Hassan, and I are co-chairs of Managing the Atom Beyond Nuclear Deterrence Working Group, and one of the things we're hoping to do is to actually, heaven forbid, have dialogues and get these people in the room and see it. You know, one of the things too is I think it's important to understand the interest and worldview of each side, and I think that for example, the people who work o

n nuclear deterrence every day, can they explain to those who are advocates of disarmament, this idea that they have that we use nuclear weapons every day, the fact that the arsenal exists is deterrence? And can those who advocate disarmament talk about reasons why they don't need nuclear weapons, or reasons why even countries who are under the umbrella or have nuclear weapons don't actually rely on their arsenals for 99% of actually security related incidents? And that's not an answer, that's n

ot a solution, it doesn't do anything, but we just need people to talk to one another. Thanks. Matt Fuhrmann: thanks, Stephen. Hassan. Hassan Elbahtimi: Yeah, thank you. I completely agree with what Rebecca and Stephen mentioned. I think there is a significant difference in terms of power, and platform, and opportunities provided to questions about how to use nuclear weapons or how to think about nuclear weapons in the context of deterrence versus sort of disarmament, or an alternative different

future of a world without nuclear weapons. There is absolutely, like there's a huge difference in terms of like power, opportunities, platforms, and so on. I sometimes feel that because of this, there is sometimes the implicit... or is the desire of the disarmament camp to sort of get the attention and try to convince the other side, or I don't know, maybe get also some of that spotlight and so on. And I think the real opportunity is in somewhere else. I think the real opportunity is... I think

perhaps I go back to that, my very early comment in the first question that was posed, is actually to sort of have your head down and sort of do serious, credible work. Do networking in the sort of small end. Make sure that the research is relevant, and speaks, and can be seen as credible, and try to find venues for that to come out. And I think it's a long-term conversation, and I think it's a long-term conversation that is not going to be settled in anyone's lifetime around this, involved in

this circle, and may you all live very, very long. And I think the secret to it is to look at it as speak to the debate that you want to have in the future. Matt Fuhrmann: Great, thanks. In the interest of keeping the train running on time, I just want to point out we have about three minutes left and three speakers that I want to recognize. Olamide. Olamide Samuel: Thank you, Matt. I'll be quite brief. I think to build upon what our co-panelists have said, it's also... It's not just about the t

wo communities speaking to each other, but also recognizing the fact that we have very different audiences, and this is almost structurally predetermined by one side. What I mean, to not speak in code, is as academics, and a lot of the nuclear ban advocates, the platforms we have are usually public facing. We get to engage a lot with grassroots movements. We get to engage a lot with individuals and laypeople with an interest in this. But at the end of the day, the debate or the question of nucle

ar deterrence has been sort of securitized, removed from any sort of democratic discourse, to such a degree that regardless of the influence that academics and activists have on grassroots movements, that doesn't necessarily directly translate into policy change at the state level. So you know, just that recognition shows that there's hardly any interest or incentive for the two sides to communicate. That's one. And secondly, as Hassan highlighted, the power imbalance, the difference in funding

structures, the difference in access is just remarkable, so remarkable that it almost seems as though the centers of power have to make a more proactive approach to speak to academics and activists. And I'll pause there. Thank you so much for having me. Matt Fuhrmann: And thank you. Kjolv. Kjolv Egeland: Thank you. We're running out of time, and I've already talked a lot, so I'll be really, really quick. I just thought I'd say, I think if our objective is to get at something close to the truth,

I think talking to people is always good, to have dialogue and to understand where other people are coming from, and to understand the different arguments is crucial. But if the question is to change nuclear politics, then personally, I think the social mechanism of persuasion is extremely overrated, you know? I think if you're a Beatrice Fihn of ICAN, you're not going to be persuaded that nuclear deterrence is a good thing, and if you were persuaded of that, you would be replaced, because you h

ave a role in an organization. And likewise, if you're Vladimir Putin, you're not going to convince Vladimir Putin that disarmament is suddenly a great thing. It's probably not going to happen, so for me, nuclear politics is not really about persuasion. It's about power, and ideology, and pressure, and I think that's where change is going to come from if it is going to change. Matt Fuhrmann: Thank you. Tamara. Tamara Patton: Yeah, thank you Francesca, for the question. I think, and many of us kn

ow, verification is another space or conversation where these two groups are often sitting at the same table. The difference is that one group says, "First, we have to create the conditions. Maybe we can do this stuff in 100 years." The other says, "Let's do this now." I think when we look at a lot of that work, one thing that strikes me is that it really revolves a lot around models, and imaginary countries, and the abstract, including my own work. And I think a place where we start to take tha

t conversation and engagement between the communities to a more useful space is when we start to get into the specifics. And that includes the intersection of nuclear force structures and conventional force structures. To take the engagement to a space where we're either addressing real concerns and talking about them, or we're exposing places where there actually isn't a real argument or legitimate argument for concern about why we can't act or implement this now. I'll stop there. Matt Fuhrmann

: Great. Well, I just want to close by thanking everyone for a really rich and informative discussion today. Thank you to all the audience members for coming and for asking questions. I think we have a nice agenda here of some future research questions that have come out of this, and hopefully, we'll have opportunities to continue the discussion. Francesca, did you want to say any final words? Francesca Giovanini: The only final word is I want to thank you all. Thank you, Matt, as well. And to a

ll of you, we are going to set up a website on The Research Network on rethinking nuclear deterrence. We will do plenty of other public events throughout the next two years, where we really want to encourage the public, scholars, policymakers to engage in a series of conversations, so please follow us. We will tweet, also, the network, the website when it's up. Matt Fuhrmann: Great. Thanks, everyone.