The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
China in 2024 proposed the five nuclear-weapon states of the NPT [the US, Russia, UK, France, and China] consider a treaty on “mutual no-first-use of nuclear weapons” and offered some key obligations for possible negotiation. This came 30 years after China had submitted a “Draft Treaty on No-First Use of Nuclear Weapons" to these states. A no-first-use treaty has been a highly controversial topic in international nuclear arms control for even longer in part because it is seen only as a declaratory position with little to no impact in nuclear forces and not verifiable. This presentation will make a case that a no-first-use treaty can be both substantive and verifiable. The presentation builds on a June 2024 article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
About the speaker: Li Bin is professor of international relations at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Defense and Arms Control Studies Program and then at Princeton’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies (the forerunner of the Program on Science and Global Security). He also has been a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Li previously directed the arms control division at China’s Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, where he also served as executive director of the Program for Science and National Security Studies. He received his PhD in physics in 1993 from the Graduate School of the China Academy of Engineering Physics.