S. Paul Kapur, Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan & Diana Wueger
Introduction
Nuclear safety and security—the protection of nuclear facilities, weapons, technologies, and materials against accidents or attacks—is an under-studied area of international security studies.1 Periodically, the subject has received high levels of attention. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, scholars and policymakers worried intensely about the fate of its nuclear arsenal and infrastructure.2 The problem again came to the fore following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which raised the specter of terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapons or materials.3 Much of this post-9/11 focus was directed at South Asia, where the Pakistani nuclear program’s potential vulnerabilities to militants and other religious extrem-ists were a major concern for the United States and the international community.
Despite these periods of interest, however, the problem of nuclear safety and security has generally received only modest scholarly atten-tion. Most scholars and analysts of nuclear-related matters have focused their attention elsewhere, such as the ways in which nuclear weapons can generate deterrence and how they might contribute to coercive success in the event of conflict.5 A significant cohort studies nuclear proliferation, including the reasons why states acquire nuclear weapons, ways to prevent them from doing so, and proliferation’s effects on the behavior of newly nuclear states.6 Others study the normative aspects of nuclear weapons, debating whether their use can ever be justified, as well as the role of moral concerns in preventing their use in the past.
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