Description
Accounts of the origins of the global nuclear order usually portray the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a grand bargain that nuclear-weapon states presented to the rest of the international community. Mainstream international-order scholars focus on nuclear-weapon states as the designers of solutions to nuclear problems. In contrast, they portray non-nuclear-weapon states, especially those with developing economies, as having a minimal role in this quest. In this project, I use historical methods and archival materials to explore the parallel negotiations of two treaties aiming to prevent nuclear dangers in the 1960s. Latin America negotiated a nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) at the same time the NPT debates took place. The Treaty constituting the Latin American NWFZ and the NPT promoted different compromises among advocates of disarmament, nonproliferation, and peaceful use of atomic energy. I compare these two instruments to theorize about the connections between regional and global ordering projects constructing geographies of nuclear constraints. I explore the complementarities, contestations, and contradictions between the regional and the global nuclear governance mechanisms. Latin American states actively designed regional and global nuclear limits and crafted institutions to enforce them when the international community shared a primary goal—guaranteeing security from nuclear war. This project challenges current interpretations of the role of the Global South in the global nuclear order. I move beyond studying these actors as sources of security problems and proliferation challenges. Instead, I pay attention to the security solutions Global South actors have proposed to build more comprehensive theories about international ordering.
