Alex WellersteinVerified account

One reflection on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Every year that I teach my nuclear history course, I have the students do a mock-NPT treaty exercise (instead of a midterm, because I hate grading tests). (thread)

In the exercise (which I'm happy to send copies of to other academics who are interested), the students role-play as a few of the key countries who were involved in the NPT negotiations, based roughly on Mohamed Shaker's history of the NPT.

Each of the "delegations" are given talking points and ultimatums from their heads of state, reflecting the real-world positions of the countries in 1968. (Usually the ones I use are US, USSR, UK, Ireland, India, Brazil, Egypt, Poland, and Mexico, which give a lot of options.)

And the delegations are given a few options in how they construct their treaty that reflect some of the issues of 1968, e.g., Does basing of weapons in a foreign nation count as proliferation? What do the non-nuclear countries get in exchange for signing? Etc.

Anyway, things are weighted (in the "secret" memos to the delegation) so that MOST of the time the end result is pretty similar to the final NPT — it is one of the possible ways to reconcile enough of the different requirements to get a majority vote.

But there are deliberately some choices that, if they align in the right way, can produce a different treaty. And if that happens, then often things (again, deliberately) will go off the rails — e.g., the US won't be able to sign it, which triggers the USSR to not sign it.

At the end of the exercise, we have a "debriefing" where we talk about how it went and how it compared to the actual history. And when it goes off the rails, the students often want to know how "realistic" a possibility that would have been.