서강대학교

초록/요약 도움말

This thesis has the aim of examining how significant political actors’ role is in nuclear renunciation process, and investigating the hegemonic countries’ influence in nuclear rollback decision making process based on individual political leaders’ perception about nuclear weapons. Moreover, this project puts weight on the role of hegemony in the process of nuclear rollback, and concurrently keeps sight of the degree of each political actor’s role in negotiation and interaction. That is this project also takes note of understanding a leader’s perception of hegemony and strategic interaction between actors within the hegemonic control. By examining nuclear rollback cases, it is found that certain variables have an important bearing on nuclear reversal. Sometimes, one variable, which is effectively applied to one case, does not work applied to another case. In this sense, customized procedure is needed now that the motivations for developing nuclear weapons are all different. In this study, among other variables, as mentioned above, the degree of political leaders’ influence, when determining the nuclear rollback, will be tested. So, limitations and implications of the political leaders’ role for each different case, Ukraine, South Africa and Libya, will be discussed in detail. In the case of Ukraine, this thesis focuses on the influence of Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program in the process of nuclear renunciation. The case of South Africa will present how significant the president de Klerk’s determination about nuclear reversal was while the case of Libya will show that, without the change of regime, the change of characteristic of existing regime, Gaddafi regime, made it possible to accomplish nuclear rollback. Once the motivations driving nuclear rollback are understood, the ultimate solutions that de facto nuclear weapon states lead to nuclear reversal will be drawn. Hence, analyzing the pervious case studies of nuclear rollback, such as Ukraine, South Africa and Libya should antecede to examine the degree of the political leaders’ role in nuclear renunciation, which is a core variable to be tested in this study. Keywords: Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Rollback, Political Leaders, Beliefs and Norms