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The United Nations and Disarmament Treaties
- Source: UN Chronicle, Volume 51, Issue 3, Dec 2014, p. 25 - 28
- French
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- 31 Dec 2014
Abstract
Established upon the ashes of the Second World War to represent We the Peoples, it is not surprising that both peace and security were fundamental objectives for the United Nations. While many also wanted disarmament, countervailing lessons were drawn by some political leaders, which made it difficult to get multilateral agreements on disarmament for several decades. Debates around nuclear weapons epitomized and sharpened the challenges. Academics in the United States of America led in developing theories of deterrence to provide legitimacy for these weapons of mass destruction, which soon became embedded in the military doctrines and political rhetoric of further Governments, from NATO allies to the Eastern bloc and beyond. Deterrence theory sought to invert the normative relationship between peace and disarmament by arguing that nuclear weapons were actually peacekeepers amassed to deter aggressors rather than to fight them. From there it became a short step for some countriesincluding permanent Members of the Security Council of the United Nationsto promote ideologies that equated security and peace with high defence budgets and military-industrial dependence on arms manufacture and trade. This is the backdrop for understanding how the United Nations System and disarmament approaches have intersected since 1945, and the way in which reframing disarmament as a universal humanitarian imperative has opened more productive opportunities for future multilateral disarmament treaties.
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