Karim Kamel, Valerie Lewis, Dadie Loh, and Victoria Swisher

As countries continue to pursue nuclear weapons capabilities, international organizations and think tanks have a role to play in nonproliferation efforts. Organizations’ efforts to enforce treaties, advocate new treaty ratification, and bolster verification regimes are often at odds with individual states’ security concerns and desire to protect state secrets and sovereignty. Yet, organizations like the CTBTO retain support from member states, as well as confidence in their abilities to remain impartial and authoritative on the enforcement and support of verification in the absence of nuclear weapons programs. Each section of this paper addresses the tension that arises as States embrace transparency and ambiguity in their search for security. One paper looks at this problem by investigating how an international treaty like the CTBT can promote the creation of a nuclear weapons free zone, another discusses the potential security concerns states could have about the CTBT’s verification system, and the final section looks at the role NGOs can play in ameliorating security concerns a State may have about a bilateral treaty such as New START.