Fallout
Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture
Many Baby Boomers still recall crouching under their grade-school desks in frequent bomb drills during the Cuban Missile Crisis – a clear representation of how terrified the United States was of nuclear war. Thus far, we have succeeded in preventing such catastrophe, and this is partly due to the various treaties signed in the 1960s forswearing the use of nuclear technology for military purposes.
In "Fallout", Gregoire Mallard seeks to understand why some nations agreed to these limitations of their sovereign will – and why others decidedly did not. He builds his investigation around the 1968 signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which, though binding in nature, wasn't adhered to consistently by all signatory nations. Mallard looks at Europe's observance of treaty rules in contrast to the three holdouts in the global nonproliferation regime: Israel, India, and Pakistan. He seeks to find reasons for these discrepancies, and makes the compelling case that who wrote the treaty and how the rules were written – whether transparently, ambiguously, or opaquely – had major significance in how the rules were interpreted and whether they were then followed or dismissed as regimes changed. In honing in on this important piece of the story, Mallard not only provides a new perspective on our diplomatic history, but, more significantly, draws important conclusions about potential conditions that could facilitate the inclusion of the remaining NPT holdouts".Fallout" is an important and timely book sure to be of interest to policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens alike.
About the Author
Gregoire Mallard is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Reviews
"This brilliant book should be of wide interest to students of government, politics, sociology, and law, as well as to high-level policy makers and the general public concerned with nuclear non-proliferation and problems of global governance. Mallard draws deftly on a wealth of primary and secondary sources to provide us with a lucid and captivating account of the centrality of 'opacity' as a discursive strategy in transnational affairs" – Daniel Halberstam, University of Michigan
"With this extraordinarily ambitious and pioneering work Mallard opens up an entirely new research frontier for sociology – the terrain of international relations, diplomacy, and treaty-making in pursuit of nuclear arms control. Through a fine-grained parsing of complex foreign policy struggles, 'Fallout' recounts how Euratom and the IAEA emerge alongside states as influential transnational actors. Mallard offers a sophisticated theoretical account of the role of transparency, ambiguity, and most importantly, opacity in treaty-writing and international law. This artful and path-breaking study of interpretation and reinterpretation of treaties reveals how much formal properties of law influence subsequent negotiations and shape the trajectory of non-proliferation and international law more generally" – Terence Halliday, co-author of "Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis"
"The nuclear age is often bifurcated between a Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and then a transition into the age of globalization focusing on nuclear non-proliferation on the other. Gregoire Mallard has uncovered a profound link between the two narratives in the frustrated ambitions of influential Eurofederalists – architects of today's European Union – to build a unified nuclear force. Mallard traces the path from the Euratom treaty to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to today's nuclear-armed or -arming Israel, India, and Iran by exploring the productive ambiguities and opacities of nuclear negotiations. 'Fallout' masterfully combines several disparate histories into a single powerful analysis of the nuclear regime in particular and global diplomacy in general" – Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University
