Pundits and policymakers often decry the inability of international law to keep pace with technological change. Political scientists expect technological innovation to grant revisionist states with both the means and motive to evade unfavorable legal commitments. In practice, however, only some militarily disruptive technologies are institutionally disruptive. Status quo powers sometimes decline to contest revisionist breakthroughs, and revisionists sometimes concede (or conceal) their innovations instead of leveraging them to contest or evade undesirable rules. When contestation does arise, it is not always resolved in favor of the materially stronger party. If international law is what powerful states say it is, why are some international legal institutions comparatively resilient to militarily impactful technological innovations? This dissertation presents evidence that linguistic nuance, negotiated in ignorance about what the future might bring, can handcuff states to materially disadvantageous interpretations about what technologies are "compliant." To advance this argument, I depart from longstanding assumptions about what makes institutions effective. Norm specificity -- conventionally understood to minimize noncompliance -- works well for known forms of deviations, but unanticipated forms are inevitable. As the technology frontier inexorably expands, specificity dampens the credibility of restrictive analogies, making norms hard but brittle. When this happens, states that care about preserving at least the veneer of legal credibility can be deterred from adopting policies that would otherwise improve their material security. The theory is tested with a mixed-method empirical strategy. Seven case studies, based on thousands of pages of declassified records, are paired with two theoretically-motivated randomized experiments. This evidence shows while that emerging technologies may present states with incentives to evade the rules, the cost of evasive action depends on the perceived credibility of evasive justifications, a function of commitment language. An important finding is that seemingly "ambiguous" language can actually make legal institutions more resilient. In a world where change is understood as the only constant; words are widely viewed as cheap talk; and law is subordinate to politics, these results help explain why technology contestation is not ubiquitous.

In this essential guide to the past, present and future of bio-warfare, international security expert Malcolm Dando draws a wealth of ecperience and research to uncover the truth about the alarming failure of international community to place effective curbs on the use of this deadly weapon.

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Clear changes occurred in the field of conventional arms control in the last two decades. States adopted a multitude of norms on especially small arms control in various multilateral control instruments. In addition, non-governmental advocacy actors often established themselves as active participants in control debates with governments. The changes are surprising because they took place in the security sphere and therewith in an area traditionally understood to be the exclusive domain of governments. This research project investigates the significance of the changes for the traditional understanding of security governance. Specifically, it investigates the emergence of control norms and the role and policy impact of non-governmental actors in the promotion of the norms. It asks whether the normative changes and significance of nongovernmental actors therein challenge the understanding of security governance that underpins many established approaches to international relations theory.

Analyses of US/Soviet arms control have usually focused on domestic variables to explain US/Soviet arms control behavior. Partly because the number of negotiating parties is only two, there is a propensity to focus on the bilateral relationship of the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective domestic political situations. Only superficial attention has usually been given to international systems variables that may well influence the domestic political situation and arms control policy. This thesis broadens the explanatory scope of US/Soviet arms control by showing how the political environment of a trilateral relationship (a subsystem that includes the West European members of NATO as a single actor as well as the United States and the Soviet Union) is a primary motivator of US/Soviet arms control behavior.

This thesis examines the regulation of naval competition between the major naval powers, and especially between Britain and the United States, under the regime of the Washington and London naval treaties, and the attempts to extend and maintain naval limitation in the period 1927 to 1936 in the face of Anglo-American rivalry and, later, the threats from Japan and Germany. Based upon British and American public and private sources, it traces the interaction of the two nations, and their relationships with other naval powers, from 1927 - when Anglo-American relations reached a nadir after the failed 'Coolidge Conference' in Geneva and the subsequen abortive 'Anglo-French Compromise' - to 1936, when naval limitation ende but by which time Anglo-American antipathy was fading in the face of mut external threats. The naval conferences of Geneva (1927) and London (19 and 1935-36), and the parallel naval side of the long-running Disarmamen Conference and its Preparatory Commission are reviewed with their attend preparations in London and Washington, and the influence of domestic factors - public opinion, financial stringency, and personal and politic prejudice - are examined. The central role of the naval balance in the relationship between the interward Great Powers is stressed, and the importance of the naval negotiations to both governments and public opinion echoes our contemporary concern for the preservation and management of the strategic balance. While the Washington-London naval system failed to halt naval rival it achieved the unforeseen consequences of permitting Britain to gracefu cede naval supremacy to the United States, under the guise of conceding 'parity', with a minimum of friction or indeed recognition of the fact. Additionally, it demonstrated by its breakdown the vulnerability of an arms limitation system that was neither geographically nor technically comprehensive.

This study analyzes the rule of the law of treaties permitting the provisional application of treaties or parts thereof, which usually occurs between signature and ratification (article 25 of the 1969 Vienna Convention). Chapter 1 reviews the negotiating record of article 25. Chapter 2 examines the reasons for provisional application, which include the urgency of the treaty and preparation for a new international organization. Chapter 3 considers article 25 in detail, while chapter 4 explores provisional application under customary international law, including the origins of the custom. The constitutionality of provisional application and the municipal effect of provisionally applied treaties are examined in chapter 5, along with provisional application in South African law and treaty practice. Chapter 6 considers the special role of provisional application in the field of arms control instruments. The main conclusion reached is that the principle of pacta sunt servanda applies during the provisional period. / Jurisprudence / LL.M

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1993 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper provides a brief history of the role strategic ballistic missile telemetry has played in U.S.-Soviet and Russian arms control relations from the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) through the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II).

How might new technical verification capabilities enhance the prospects of success in future nuclear arms control negotiations? Both theory and evidence suggest that verification technologies can influence the dynamics of arms control negotiations by shaping and constraining the arguments and strategies that are available to the involved stakeholders. In the future, new technologies may help transcend the specific verification challenge of high-security warhead authentication, which is a verification capability needed in future disarmament scenarios that address fewer warheads, limit new categories of warheads, and involve nuclear weapons states other than the United States and Russia. Under these circumstances, the core challenge is maintaining the confidentiality of the classified information related to the warheads under inspection, while providing transparency in the verification process. This analysis focuses on a set of emerging warhead authentication approaches that rely on the cryptographic concept of zero-knowledge proofs and intend to solve the paradox between secrecy and transparency, making deeper reductions in warhead arsenals possible and thus facilitating future nuclear arms control negotiations.

Mathematical methods have been developed to perform arms-control-treaty verification tasks for enhanced information security. The purpose of these methods is to verify and classify inspected items while shielding the monitoring party from confidential aspects of the objects that the host country does not wish to reveal. Advanced medical-imaging methods used for detection and classification tasks have been adapted for list-mode processing, useful for discriminating projection data without aggregating sensitive information. These models make decisions off of varying amounts of stored information, and their task performance scales with that information. Development has focused on the Bayesian ideal observer, which assumes com- plete probabilistic knowledge of the detector data, and Hotelling observer, which assumes a multivariate Gaussian distribution on the detector data. The models can effectively discriminate sources in the presence of nuisance parameters. The chan- nelized Hotelling observer has proven particularly useful in that quality performance can be achieved while reducing the size of the projection data set. The inclusion of additional penalty terms into the channelizing-matrix optimization offers a great benefit for treaty-verification tasks. Penalty terms can be used to generate non- sensitive channels or to penalize the model's ability to discriminate objects based on confidential information. The end result is a mathematical model that could be shared openly with the monitor. Similarly, observers based on the likelihood probabilities have been developed to perform null-hypothesis tasks. To test these models, neutron and gamma-ray data was simulated with the GEANT4 toolkit. Tasks were performed on various uranium and plutonium in- spection objects. A fast-neutron coded-aperture detector was simulated to image the particles.