Countering Nuclear Terrorism through Formal and Informal International Regimes: Analysis of the ICSANT and the NTI
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars argue that Canada and other nations' best hopes for security against nuclear terrorism are to cooperate in order to prevent attacks. Looking into global conventions as collaboration between states allows us to observe state-level actions concerning terrorism, often seen as a non-state phenomenon. Assessing to what extent the international regimes address the states’ security concerns is crucial. The regimes that this thesis analyzes are the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (ICSANT) and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). The former is a major formal treaty that addresses nuclear terrorism concerns, and the latter is an informal international agreement dealing with nuclear threats. The central question of this thesis is: "to what extent does the NTI succeed in addressing gaps within the ICSANT?" Regime theory explores the emergence of cooperation between international organizations and is used to understand two different versions of collaboration, formal and informal, and through examining their emergence, advantages, limits, and the differences among actors involved. Through the analysis of both regimes and assessments from states and the United Nations specifically concerning ICSANT, this research provides a better understanding of the capacity of the international community to address complex and evolving security threats. This thesis demonstrates how the NTI addresses the gaps in the ICSANT to a medium extent, as the informality of the former helps fill nuclear related problems within the international community, while both regimes still share similar weaknesses. The NTI reaches a broader number and types of actors than the convention, supports the sharing of best practices and capacity building, develops and publicizes expertise, and influences global actors. However, it fails to reach reluctant states and to mandate measures comparable to the ICSANT.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".