Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article offers a historical and political analysis of how the international nuclear non-proliferation system emerged and evolved, tracing its development from the first post-war attempts to establish international control over atomic energy to its present-day configuration. It argues that this system did not arise from a single treaty-based decision, but rather took shape as a complex, multilayered institutional framework combining normative principles, international legal arrangements, verification procedures, export-control mechanisms, political assurances, and patterns of interaction among the major powers. Although the 1968 NPT became the core of this framework, the article shows that its durability depended not only on the treaty’s legal provisions, but also on great-power coordination, the activities of the IAEA, U.N. mechanisms, and, in later decades, the work of the CTBTO, UNODA, and related institutions. Particular attention is devoted to the denuclearization of Ukraine, with emphasis on the role of political elites in shaping the decisions that led these state to join the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states. The author presents a vision of the evolution of the non-proliferation regime, which encompasses five successive stages: pre-regime, initial treaty codification, operational expansion, adaptive strengthening, and conflictual pluralization. It is demonstrated that the current crisis in the regime is caused not by the disappearance of the non-proliferation norm itself, but rather by the growing asymmetry of obligations, the weakening of the arms control system, the selectivity of security guarantees, and competition between the model centered on the NPT and the latest prohibition-based approaches, primarily the TPNW.
Source: Society and Security
Author: Olena Voitiuk
Institution: Zhytomyr Polytechnic State University
Language: English
Topic: Nuclear Issues and Defense
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7161275475