Author-Meets-Critics: "Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture" by Grégoire Mallard

States lock their desired futures in international treaties. International law is indeed the repository of states’ desires and promises. It does not mean that all states commit to one coherent set of promises as they sign a wide range of treaties and conventions on overlapping issues. This Author-Meets-Critics session analyzes how various states in Europe have dealt with the multiplication of sometimes contradictory legal commitments, by focusing on the transnational legal field of nuclear nonproliferation. Indeed, in 'Fallout' (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Grégoire Mallard proposes a historical analysis of the role that European and American (and non-Western) diplomats played in successive waves of negotiations of nuclear nonproliferation arrangements in Europe, and in the rest of the world, from the mid-1940s to the most recent era. 'Fallout' explains the reasons why we find discrepancies between European Community law (in particular the European Community of Atomic Energy, or EURATOM), and the international regime centered around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Rather than seeing the two regimes – regional and global – as providing a coherent set of prescriptions, this book shows how, and why, the two regimes evolved in contradistinction with one another, until their rules were finally harmonized. In doing so, the book draws lessons from the process of harmonization between European and global nuclear rules to reflect upon the process by which the three nuclear holdouts – e.g. Israel, India, and Pakistan – could be included in a unified global nonproliferation regime.