Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The other Side of Midnight: Opaque Proliferation Revisited

1993; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/002070209304800108

2052-465X

Michel Fortmann,

International Relations and Foreign Policy

In 1966, Leonard Beaton was probably the first student of proliferation issues to realize that If a power armed with weapons of mass destruction is something new in the history of war and diplomacy, there may soon be a new and different phenomenon: the potential nuclear power which has not sought to realize its potential/ And he added: The military and political usefulness of this status remains to be explored.'1 He was referring, indirectly, to the notion of opaque proliferation which remained largely unexplored until Benjamin Frankel initiated the first collective effort to analyse it as the type of posture that second-generation nuclear states adopt in a world in which the merit of non-proliferation is generally accepted.2 Ironically, as this collection was appearing in 1990, its editor, while noting that important aspects of the subject remained to be researched, nevertheless implied that current structural changes in the international system could very soon make opaque proliferation a thing of the past.3