Description
“Trust, but verify” is an old Russian proverb that became internationally known through the mouth of US president Ronald Reagan, who repeated it several times during Arms Control negotiations with the Soviet Union. Trust and verification are, indeed, well-connected concepts, particularly in negotiations involving weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) non-proliferation, control, and disarmament. This paper focuses on this interconnection by analysing which role considerations of “trust” play in international nuclear verification negotiations. We hypothesise that while some groups of countries regard trust as an objective (consequence), others view it as a requirement (antecedent) for the success of verification measures; consequently, those different, and sometimes contradicting, understandings of verification and trust may lead to deadlocks and miscommunication.
We test this hypothesis in three steps. First, we conduct a literature review of trust in WMD non-proliferation and disarmament studies to create an analytical framework to identify trust in primary sources. Second, we select all working papers that cover verification topics in the NPT Review Conferences and Preparatory Conferences from 2000 and identify through social network analysis all coalitions of countries that co-sponsor those proposals and how those coalitions changed over time. Third, we conduct a content analysis tracing all mentions of “trust” and associated terms in all those working papers. Here, we cluster different understandings and meanings of trust and verification propagated by each coalition and compare them with one another.
