TCJS Early-Career Scholar Forum | Global Nuclear Order and Japan

Early-Career Scholar Forum

Global Nuclear Order and Japan
Jin Hamamura (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo)

<Abstract>
The Global Nuclear Order is in dire straits. Many nuclear-armed states are expanding their arsenals. Prospects of arms control between the United States and Russia are grim. The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the cornerstone of international security architecture in the nuclear field, is resented in some quarters for perpetuating a supposedly temporal inequality between five privileged nuclear weapon states and numerous non-nuclear weapon states, some of whom opted to establish the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Ukraine, a state who once inherited Soviet-era nuclear weapons on its soil but chose to become a non-nuclear weapon state under the NPT, is brutally invaded by Russia, a nuclear weapon state who threatens nuclear strikes against outside intervention in support of Ukraine, apparently attacks nuclear power plants there, and falsefully accuses Ukraine of trying to develop nuclear weapons. How does Japan find itself in this environment? We will explore this question.

<Profile>
Jin Hamamura is a Project Researcher at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. in the field of International Relations from the university in 2022. His research interests include international normative order, hierarchy in the international society, nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, and dual use technology management. He received the Nanzan Award for Outstanding Research by Young Scholars in Social Ethics in 2017 for a peer-reviewed article in Kokusai Seiji as well as having contributed chapters to two edited books and received research grants from several foundations.