Reviews the prominent works in recent years on the relative merits of total nuclear disarmament, and argue that while nuclear weapons have not become irrelevant, they have become less relevant as a result of the processes of globalization

This article critically reviews scholarship on the role of conflict and cooperation in conditioning nuclear proliferation. We start by laying out the trajectory of scholarship on the causes of proliferation, organizing it in three waves: (a) security and (b) nonsecurity drivers of proliferation,...