Rizwan Asghar

On October 11, 2001, exactly a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, President George W Bush was informed by his CIA director, George Tenet, about the presence of al Qaeda-linked terrorists in New York City with a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb. Overwhelmed by paralysing fear that terrorists could have smuggled another nuclear […]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the principal multilateral organisation seeking to promote the peaceful applications of nuclear technology, has, over the years, grown into a pre-eminent entity of the global nuclear governance system. Established in 1957 and based in Vienna, the organisation envisioned itself as a “global platform for nuclear security efforts”. The role […]

After the first Indian nuclear test on May 18, 1974, the US, Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, Japan, the UK, France and the Soviet Union joined hands to coordinate their nuclear export controls. All these seven nuclear supplier countries were totally convinced of the fact that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was not doing […]

Two months back, in November 2013, Mark Urban of the BBC came up with one of the most sensational pieces of journalism, claiming that Saudi Arabia had allegedly financed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme and was confident it could acquire atomic bombs at will from Pakistan. Unnamed NATO officials and a former Israeli military intelligence chief […]

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive and unrelenting instruments ever created by mankind. The whole world can be destroyed by less than 200 nuclear weapons within the space of a few days. Given the potentially disastrous complexities involved in nuclear force employment and contrasting control methods, building up a formidable command and control system has […]

“One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action” — Robert McNamara. The concept of nuclear deterrence gained increased prominence during the Cold War period when a generation of national security scholars and practitioners, including Bernard Brodie, Kenneth Waltz, etc., advocated nuclear development as an effective deterrent. However, most academic research on the […]

Global efforts to halt the quantitative and qualitative nuclear arms race by preventing nuclear weapons testing started less than a decade after the first nuclear explosive test was carried out in Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945. On the larger nonproliferation canvas, a global ban on nuclear explosions has remained one of the oldest agenda items. […]

If you ever ask nuclear advocates in our strategic community why Pakistan is going down the dangerous road leading towards the development of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs), the most logical explanation could be a description of the threats emanating from India’s Cold Start Doctrine (CSD). The CSD is basically a strategy to execute a ‘limited […]

(This article is based on a paper presented at an international conference in Germany recently.) The government discourse on the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons has long been dominated by traditional approaches to national security. However, the increased attention being given to the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear war, after the five-year review conference of […]

Nuclear weapons and efforts to curb the spread of nuclear material and technology emerged almost simultaneously in the early Cold War period, highlighting tension that continues to this day. As of 2012, nine states have developed nuclear capability and a few other states are openly signalling their intentions to develop the atomic bomb. Although more […]