Suchergebnisse

This article analyses the role of Italy in international policing, focusing on the reasons, specific features, multifaceted character and value of its contribution. The argument is made that participation in such operations has become a distinctive character of Italy's international projection and ideally suits its security culture and foreign policy objectives. Italy's role is positively appraised because it responds to the international community's demands for a more robust, specialized and highly trained police force that is needed to meet the complex challenges of the contemporary global security environment.

Of the five North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) European countries of US nuclear forward deployment, Italy is the least-known and studied case, even though the country hosts the largest number of US nonstrategic nuclear weapons (NSNWs) and still has two bases of deployment. The paper aims at filling this gap by analyzing Italy's current view on the presence, value, and future of NSNWs hosted on its territory. The analysis begins with the examination of the process of profound devaluation that has minimized, starting from the end of the cold war, Italy's original interest in this category of weapons. It then examines the reasons why Rome continues to pursue conservative nuclear weapon policies and distances itself significantly from the progressive camp of NATO members, particularly Germany, that explicitly call for the withdrawal of US NSNWs from Europe. Through the study of the Italian domestic politics and security culture, the article explains Italy's opposition to any radical change in the NATO nuclear status quo, and its reluctance to pursue policies that are consistent with the process of nuclear devaluation that the country has experienced over the past two decades. Adapted from the source document.

The article tries to explain why China, after having launched a crash programme in the mid-1950s to develop a nuclear deterrent, did not formulate a clear operational doctrine with respect to the targeting and employment of atomic weapons until the mid-1980s. Propositions derived from neoclassical realism are used to shed some light on this puzzling aspect of China's nuclear doctrine. The general hypothesis of the study is that, international predicaments notwithstanding, China's domestic politics prevented the possibility of articulating a clear and detailed nuclear doctrine during the period following the first nuclear test, when such a doctrine was more necessary.