S.C. Sazak¹

¹Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

Abstract:

The objective of the paper is to examine the role of scientific community in promoting the CTBT. The crucial role scientists played as public intellectuals, policy influencers, and community leaders in shifting nuclear weapons policies and helping to build the international nuclear nonproliferation regime––including CTBT––remains understudied in policy scholarship.  The CTBT’s historical antecedent––the Partial Test Ban Treaty––is an exemplar of how "policy entrepreneurship" by scientists and advisers (e.g. Bush, Killian, Seaborg) helped to create conditions conducive to a pro-test-ban policy that eventually culminated in the CTBT, against the influence of anti-test-ban advocates (e.g. Strauss, Teller) The paper will address three areas. First, it will examine the role of the scientific community’s "policy entrepreneurship" played in bringing about the CTBT. Secondly, it will draw contrasts between the political and scientific opposition pro-test ban advocates faced in their time and the CTBT regime faces at present. Third, it will identify lessons from history on how CTBT and the scientific community can help build similar synergies in non-ratifying and non-signatory states; particularly focusing on the current state of affairs in the U.S., the geopolitical situation in the Middle East and South Asia, and the climate-change discourse around the Small Island Developing States initiative.