{"id":217010,"date":"2010-01-21T11:15:07","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T16:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.armscontrolwonk.com,2010-01-21:57f256023a9af1385990be02cc9db91e\/cf7ad28320e6ed8ac6641d741799b7ce"},"modified":"2010-01-21T11:15:07","modified_gmt":"2010-01-21T16:15:07","slug":"george-bunn-the-norm-builder-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/217010","title":{"rendered":"George Bunn, The Norm Builder [6]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

George Bunn (above, sailing and with son Matt<\/em>) is one of the founding fathers of nuclear arms control. He was present at the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and served for eight years as ACDA\u2019s first General Counsel. George participated in the negotiation of the Limited Test Ban and Nonproliferation treaties. Fortunately, he took notes during his years of public service, which is evident in Arms Control by Committee, Managing Negotiations with the Russians<\/a> (1992). George wrote this book to add to the negotiating history of key accords and to suggest lessons learned, using the case study method. <\/p>\n

In his chapter on the test ban, George reveals that ACDA<\/span> Director William Foster exceeded his negotiating instructions trying to bridge differences on the number of on-site inspections required for a comprehensive treaty. The Politburo finally budged from zero to three OSI<\/span>s per year; the Kennedy administration wanted seven inspections, but was prepared to fall back to six. Before throwing in the towel, George relates that Foster held up five fingers to his Soviet counterpart, who scowled. A CTBT<\/span> wasn\u2019t in the cards in 1962-3 for this and other reasons. <\/p>\n

There is still along way to go before the CTBT<\/span> enters into force, but as George wrote in The Status of Norms Against Nuclear Testing<\/a> (The Nonproliferation Review, 1999), \u201cthere are norms operating against nuclear testing even though the CTBT<\/span> has not been ratified.\u201d Norm building is a poorly analyzed, alchemical process in which political activism, risk-taking leadership, resolute negotiators, and \u201cmere words\u201d combine to eventually gain the status of customary and then international law. All of the key bulwarks of arms control — the tradition of non-battlefield use of nuclear weapons, the global nonproliferation regime, and constraints on nuclear testing \u2013 began as outlandish notions that have become norms. Norms can be broken, of course. So, too, can traffic laws. But we would be much less safe without them. <\/p>\n

Without rules, there are no rule breakers. Norms, George wrote, \u201care international prescriptions for state conduct. They are principles, standards or rules.\u201d Or as Abe and Antonia Chayes put it, \u201cThey are prescriptions for action in situations of choice, carrying a sense of obligation, a sense that ought to be followed.\u201d The states of greatest proliferation concern are outliers, rejecting a widely shared sense of obligation. Norms clarify their outlier status, as well as the steps required for their rehabilitation. <\/p>\n

Norm building was George Bunn\u2019s life work. His handiwork now constrains political choices, and helps promote personal, national, and international security. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Bunn (above, sailing and with son Matt) is one of the founding fathers of nuclear arms control. He was present at the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and served for eight years as ACDA\u2019s first General Counsel. George participated in the negotiation of the Limited Test Ban and Nonproliferation treaties. Fortunately, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}