"How to design a safe nuclear regime in the 21st century.

This research will consider how to de sign a safe nuclear regime in the 21st century with a focus on realist concerns including the Security Dilemm a, rearmament, and MAD, but also an exploration of Constructivism and the potential for a Nuclear Taboo leading to a disarmed world. The discussion will be framed in the context of shifting global power structures and how the existent nuclear regime will come under severe pressure in 'The Asian Century'.

I will consider the case that posits that the potential for a more dangerous rearmament race renders even multilateral disarmament to be undesirable. The realist position on the matter, advocated by Charles Glaser among others, argues that a well-designed nuclear order is preferable to a disarmed world in which states would have incentives to rearm . One must then consider how to design the nuclear order such that proliferation is minimised; I am interested in the work of Nuno Monteiro, who outlines a rationalist framework for the logic of nuclear prolife ration, and Erik Gartske , who
looks at the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its achievements more quantitatively. While respecting this realist analysis and its theoretical force , the core of my research Will be founded through close examination of policy documents and consideration of developments of nuclear treaties to explore how stable norm against nuclear use and rearmament could be developed, countering the arguments against the possibility of lasting peace under the 'gunslinger model' of MAD.

Through a series of elite interviews I also want to examine perceptions of nuclear weaponry and their adherence to what Robert Jervis would term 'cognitive consistency linkages'. I intend to consider particularly nuclear perceptions in both China and the West because it is important to understand the domestic norms and foreign policy of the country that, along with the USA , would be responsible for managing the global order through any transformation of both the material and the normative conditions around nuclear weapons.