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Talk:Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

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What's "dubious"?

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@NPguy: You reinstated a flag {{dubious|date=September 2011}} on the following:

Several high-ranking officials within the United Nations have said that they can do little to stop states using nuclear reactors to produce nuclear weapons.[dubious – discuss][1][2]

What's "dubious" about this?

I do not have access to Benjamin K. Sovacool (2011), Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power, OCLC 741924362, Wikidata Q5165159, so I cannot directly evaluate whether "Several high-ranking officials within the United Nations have said" what is claimed. However, I've "looked inside" the book on Amazon. It looks like a reasonable work of scholarship with substantive notes at the end of each chapter and a section on "weapons proliferation" in chapter '6. Political and social concerns: "Broken Plowshare"', which sounds to me like it could easily contain such a claim.

The book was deemed sufficiently notable to merit its own Wikipedia article, and the author "is an American academic who is director of the Danish Center for Energy Technology at the Department of Business Development and Technology and a professor of social sciences at Aarhus University ... [And] is editor-in-chief of Energy Research & Social Science", according to the Wikipedia article on him. The Wikipedia article mentions that the possession of nuclear reactors makes it much easier to get nuclear weapons, though United Nations is not mentioned in that Wikipedia article.

I found the other book, Thomas C. Reed; Danny B. Stillman (2009), The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation, Zenith Press, Wikidata Q111270086, in the Internet Archive. The page cited, 144, does NOT directly mention "Several high-ranking officials within the United Nations", but does initiate a discussion that includes a discussion of problems with the 2005 NPT Review Conference: 'The conference chairman described the event as "a failure."' (p. 145)

Do we really need a close analysis of Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power to support that exact verbiage?

??? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 04:19, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Benjamin K. Sovacool (2011). Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power: A Critical Global Assessment of Atomic Energy, World Scientific, pp. 187–190.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference tcr2009 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
@Grorp: If you have the book, would you mind adding a page citation to support your claim? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 04:23, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
DavidMCEddy: Access to Sovacool is through google books as I updated it on the book's Wikipedia page.
There were, and still are, two citations here, both with page numbers:
7) Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power pages 187–190, and
8) The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation, page 144.
Content from Wikipedia page: "Several high-ranking officials within the United Nations have said that they can do little to stop states using nuclear reactors to produce nuclear weapons."
From page 190 of Sovacool: "For these five reasons, a number of high-ranking officials, even within the United Nations, have argued that they can do little to stop states from using nuclear reactors to produce nuclear weapons."
The "five reasons" are discussed on the preceding pages: specifically 188-189 covers reasons 2-5, page 187 is excluded from the google books preview and I presume that covers the first reason. Grorp (talk) 07:32, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I flagged the citations as dubious because many of the factual claims based on the citation are either nonsensical or at best display a confused understanding of the facts. On this basis I concluded that either the source is not reliable or the quotes misrepresented the source. The author (Sovacool) is not a recognized expert on nuclear nonproliferation. I had not heard of him ten years ago and have not heard of him since. His views might merit a passing mention, not the repeated use of a low quality source, as noted here.NPguy (talk) 22:30, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Bowing out since I am not sufficiently interested in this subject, and not motivated to read your decade-old spat. I was simply reading the page, saw the 'dubious' tag, located the sources through google, read the pages cited, saw that the citations matched the language on the page, and so I updated their links on the wiki pages and removed the tag. As for evaluating the quality of the citations, sounds like material for one of those noticeboards. Grorp (talk) 00:52, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree this is not dubious, based on the second source alone which had not been elaborated on in this discussion I am replying to. I expected the source to say the science behind a conversion from energy-producing uranium to weaponized uranium is difficult and theoretical, but the source simply states it is easily accomplished. One of the writers was a U.S. Secretary of the Air Force. Seems like he would know LightProof1995 (talk) 22:10, 17 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
What second source? It's been a while and I don't know what you're referring to. NPguy (talk) 01:48, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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On 2022-06-30T02:17:33 User:GreenC bot replaced

in Cho, Adrian (28 January 2016). "Ridding research reactors of highly enriched uranium to take decades longer than projected". Science. Retrieved 13 April 2020..

SADLY, neither of those URLs discuss highly enriched uranium (HUE).

Fortunately, I was able to find a copy of the article on the Internet Archive: Adrian Cho (28 January 2016). "Ridding research reactors of highly enriched uranium to take decades longer than projected". Science. ISSN 0036-8075. Wikidata Q112808574.. I've migrated the reference to Wikidata, where it's actually more complete (e.g., which "Adrian Cho"?) and more easily maintained. DavidMCEddy (talk) 04:29, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@DavidMCEddy: The URL suggests an article about HEU, but the underlying article is about something completely different. It's so obviously wrong, it's probably a one-off error during the recent migration Science did from sciencemag.org to science.org. I will report it to them as I am currently volunteering to help them with this migration. Thanks for the notification. Hopefully this does not indicate a bigger problem with their redirects. -- GreenC 04:54, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenC: Thanks for your attention to this. It does look like it could be symptomatic of larger problems. I'm glad you read my report ;-) DavidMCEddy (talk) 05:24, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like in 2016 two different papers were assigned the same DOI number 10.1126/science.aae0287 which confused the new science.org site. I've never heard of duplicate DOIs before but here is a case. Still researching. -- GreenC 15:31, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@DavidMCEddy@GreenC Thank you for your patience while the team at science.org researched and resolved the DOI and URL conflict described here. The intended article has been restored with DOI 10.1126/science.aae0287 referencing the URL https://www.science.org/content/article/ridding-research-reactors-highly-enriched-uranium-take-decades-longer-projected. Meanwhile, the conflicting article has been issued a new DOI 10.1126/ade5025 and restored at the URL https://www.science.org/content/article/germanys-excellence-program-gets-good-grades. SibeliusHicks (talk) 17:24, 23 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Review Conference, rescheduled from 2020 to 2022

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The article currently has this sentence:

The 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was held at the United Nations in New York from 27 April to 22 May 2015

but there isn't anything on the next Review Conference. It was scheduled for 2020 but it is finally happening in 2022. Would someone please find one or more suitable sources and edit this article accordingly? Oaklandguy (talk) 04:08, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How does this source look? (sorry, I'm rusty at turning this into a proper citation 
[1]

Oaklandguy (talk) 04:39, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ {{Citation
    | last = Fassihi
    | first = Farnaz
    | last = Levenson
    | first = Michael
    | title = U.N. Chief Warns of Rising Global Nuclear Threats
    | newspaper = New York Times
    | date = August 1, 2022
    | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/world/europe/nuclear-war-un-guterres.html?searchResultPosition=1
    }}

Ukraine

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A section on Ukraine has been added. The section is problematic because it relies entirely on one article, which is mostly an opinion article, though couched as an academic paper. This paper is not representative of scholarship on the subject (Mariana Budjeryn an d Steve Pifer would be more reliable and balanced sources) and makes highly questionable assertions, most notably that Ukraine possessed the nuclear weapons that were deployed on its territory in 1994. NPguy (talk) 02:33, 20 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

American Disengagement

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With the rise of MAGA Isolationism and aggression towards traditionally allied states there is a growing call at restarting nuclear proliferation in Europe and Asia. Might that be a worthy addition to the criticism section or its own section. Historically speaking a big argument for non-proliferation was guarantees of protection from either the American or Soviet blocks. Today the Soviet block is of course gone, and the American block appears in fast decline and looking inward at a time when large states are re-embracing military force as a solution to rivalries and border issues. While much is still uncertain it is possible there will be some sort of proliferation boom in the next 10 years among rich countries no longer protected by the U.S. or indeed view the U.S., Russia, and China as imperial aggressors. 2600:1015:B039:B94C:F90B:F15:2FEE:A89D (talk) 00:43, 9 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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