Thesis (M.P.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 127 p. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis summarizes and analyzes the key factors in the cooperative U.S-Russian effort, pre-and post-9/11, to prevent nuclear proliferation. Especially highlighted are pertinent efforts to prevent terrorist organizations from obtaining nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons capabilities. This thesis catalogues both, Russian and the U.S. successes and failures to prevent nuclear proliferation through administration policies, as well as, the various cooperative threat reduction measures employed in coordination with the nations that once composed the former Soviet Union. Finally, this thesis offers a prediction of what the near future will hold for threat reduction and arms elimination programs.

Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are. - Nietzsche / On March 5th 1970, a long process of international negotiation and power brokering culminated into the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. As a result the 121 signatory states were legally subject to the norms, values, principles, and behavioural prescriptions of the nuclear proliferation regime. Twenty-nine years after the treaty's entrenchment, however, the nuclear proliferation regime and its enforcement agencies still face many of the same challenges that have plagued its implementation since its conception. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the causal relationship between the perception of the political legitimacy among the signatory members of the NPT, the likelihood of adherence to these behavioural prescriptions and to provide a framework to understand what would make for a legitimate treaty in the eyes of its members. This analysis will reveal that signatory members of the NPT who perceive the treaty as illegitimate are more likely to either defect or disobey the obligations of the treaty than those signatory members who perceive the NPT to be legitimate. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 259-270).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-80).

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Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Iran may have a nuclear weapon soon if Washington and Moscow do not unite to slow its efforts. The collapse of the Soviet Union created new complications in a long tradition of nonproliferation cooperation between the United States and Russia, and Iran is just one example. In the 1960s, faced with a common nuclear threat of China, Washington and Moscow united to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to prevent China and other nuclear aspirants from proliferating nuclear weapons. They shepherded their allies to the nonproliferation table and made them sign the treaties. Their efforts retarded nuclear proliferation but failed to prevent China, India, and Pakistan, from gaining nuclear weapons. Following the Cold War their cooperative relationship changed as Washington began treating Moscow as an unequal partner and their nonproliferation efforts broke down into a cooperative and uncooperative mix. This mix has reduced the effectiveness of their efforts and may accelerate proliferation. The September 11th terrorist attacks put more attention on the nuclear proliferation threat to the international community. If this threat is to be minimized, Washington and Moscow need to work together, as they did against China, to prevent new nuclear powers from emerging. / Captain, United States Air Force

Nuclear weapons proliferation produces a vehement global safety and security concern. Perhaps most threatening is the scenario of a rogue nation or a terrorist organization acquiring nuclear weapons where the conventional ideas of nuclear deterrence may not apply. To combat this threat, innovative tools are needed that will help to improve understanding of the pathways an organization will take in attempting to obtain nuclear weapons and in predicting those pathways based on existing evidence. In this work, a methodology was developed for predicting these pathways. This methodology uses a Bayesian network. An organization’s motivations and key resources are evaluated to produce the prior probability distributions for various pathways. These probability distributions are updated as evidence is added. The methodology is implemented through the use of the commercially available Bayesian network software package, Netica. A few simple scenarios are considered to show that the model’s predictions agree with intuition. These scenarios are also used to explore the model’s strengths and limitations. The model provides a means to measure the relative threat that an organization poses to nuclear proliferation and can identify potential pathways that an organization will likely pursue. Thus, the model can serve to facilitate preventative efforts in nuclear proliferation. The model shows that an organization’s motivations biased the various pathways more than their resources; however, resources had a greater impact on an organization’s overall chance of success. Limitations of this model are that (1) it can not account for deception, (2) it can not account for parallel weapon programs, and (3) the accuracy of the output can only be as good as the user input. This work developed the first, published, quantitative methodology for predicting nuclear proliferation with consideration for how an organization’s motivations impact their pathway probabilities.

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Mannheim, Universiẗat, Diplomarbeit, 2006.