The 1980 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference will chiefly be remembered for the inability of the delegates to agree on a final document. There were several visible reasons for this, some related to the immediate political concerns of the participants, some linked to the nature of the treaty itself. The statements of the participating states indicated that they held differing conceptions of the purposes of the treaty, and possessed very diverse views on the action that should be taken to achieve them. Four sets of assertions dominated the discussions: that the nuclear states had not fulfilled their obligation to negotiate measures of nuclear disarmament as specified in Article VI of the treaty; that the advanced industrial states had not fulfilled their obligations to assist and encourage the global development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy contained in both Articles IV and V of the treaty; that the attempts by the United States government to discharge its obligations under the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act by threatening to terminate fuel supply contracts to both treaty parties and non-parties, unless they accepted International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards on all their nuclear installations, was inequitable and improper (the same accusation was also directed at Canada); and that the major danger of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and Africa originated in the threats posed to the states in these regions by the regimes in Israel and South Africa. One issue on which there did appear to be agreement, however, was that the safeguards regime foreshadowed by Article III of the treaty had functioned satisfactorily, in that no Feaches of it had been reported to the Review Conference by the IAEA. Yet the differing interpretations of the balance of rights and obligations contained in the treaty masks a much deeper set of issues: what precisely is the problem of nuclear proliferation, to what extent is the predominant diplomatic rhetoric of nuclear non-proliferation discussions unrepresentative of the real concerns and interests of the participants, what was and is the relationship between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and does the NPT itself address (or was it ever intended to address) the problem of nuclear proliferation in the form in which it seems likely to be encountered in the 1980s?

Official boycotts of trade by individual countries and UN sponsored economic sanctions against South Africa have been on the international agenda for a good many years. India and Pakistan were the first countries to declare an official boycott of trade with South Africa in the early 1950s although Pakistan withdrew her boycott in 1956. As long ago as 1963 some twenty-five countries,, largely in Africa and Asia, had declared an official boycott against South Africa, In addition attempts to organize unofficial voluntary consumer boycotts against South African products such as fresh and canned fruit, wine etc., began as long ago as 1959 in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. Since 1973 there has been an embargo on oil sales to the Republic by the Arab members of OPEC and a UN embargo on arms sales in 1977, Voluntary consumer boycotts have failed to reduce the level of sales in Western countries. Even in the case of countries that officially boycott South Africa, trade has not been eliminated entirely if one looks at official statistics. But besides officially recorded trade, there is a good deal of trade via intermediaries. It is well known, for example, that South Africa continues to recieve some arms supplies from Western countries in this way. In the case of oil, while 90 per cent of South Africa's supply came from Iran, which refused to join a partial embargo until the Shah's fall, most of the balance is still supplied by countries like Bahrain, Oman, Quatar and the United Arab Emirates, which subscribe to an official embargo. This oil gets to South Africa, probably without the knowledge of the governments concerned, via intermediaries of the major international oil companies. The vulnerability of South Africa to an oil embargo will be discussed at some length later.

The present international monetary regime has been characterized as a ‘non-system’, an assessment containing an important element of truth from both the economic and juridical standpoints. Indeed, the (more or less) freely floating exchange rate regime which has prevailed in fact since the upheavals of 1971–73 and in law since 1978 is not so much a system as a collective admission that no system is really feasible in the context of the present world economy. A close look at the present order, however, reveals a very interesting phenomenon the importance of which, unfortunately, is sometimes obscured because it is not reflected in any formal legal structure: this is the de facto division of the world into a two-tier order consisting of industrialized states on the one hand, which generally maintain flexible exchange rates, and developing countries on the other hand, which typically have chosen to fix their exchange rates (either against one of the major currencies, or else against a basket of currencies).

In his article on ‘The enigma of Martin Wight’ (Review of International Studies, i, 1981, pp. 15–22), Michael Nicholson makes some questionable assertions. One concerns the object of international studies. He says, ‘Surely the point of studying international relations or any other aspect of human behaviour is to improve the human condition not to stand as passive spectators deploring the appalling standard of play’ (p. 19). He goes on to doubt whether Wight's position was really that of the passive spectator, but on the revealing ground that a man who had such a big impact on others could hardly have been in the business for its ‘entertainment value’ (p. 20). I find this a remarkable pair of alternatives: improvement or entertainment! There seems no place here for the scholar, the man dedicated to finding out how the world works because he is fascinated by it. Nor is account taken of the vocation of teaching, the desire just to pass on to others the understanding one has gained. Of course, I am sure Nicholson would say that his remarks were not an exhaustive account of the possibilities. But what he does seem to be, saying is that the scholar must also be concerned about making the world a better place. I see no ground for this position. It implies a moral deficiency in those who are simply devoted to learning or who do not believe in the possibility of progress. This is a large claim.

Alan James makes a noble effort to rescue me from my puzzlement concerning Martin Wight, but I confess myself still confused. As he implies, probably the root of the matter lies in differences of temperament and experience. This being the case, it then becomes the task of the academic to pursue the argument back to the basic point at which one party asserts one set of premisses and the other another, but neither side can offer further justification of these premisses, or at least not in terms which would be acceptable to the other. This I shall endeavour to do at the end of this note. Where Alan James's article is particularly helpful is that it makes it a little clearer that Wight was a part of an intellectual tradition and that this sort of ‘private pacifism’ may be less uncommon than I had supposed, partly, presumably, becauseit is private. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it rests on, at best, a curious set of premisses; but about this later. There are some initial points to make.

John Vasquez, in a recent number of the Review, attempts to document the two-part ‘claim that the Realist paradigm has dominated quantitative international relations and has to this time (1979) failed.to explain (state) behaviour adequately’. He labels this the ‘colour it Morgenthau thesis’.

Since the publication of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Keohane and Nye's call for a new paradigm in world politics, there has been increasing attention within the field as to what paradigm or paradigms dominate it and how they can be assessed. ‘Colouring it Morgenthau9 attempted to answer both those questions and in the process to develop measures for Kuhn's concepts that would permit some of his propositions to be tested. It is significant that although the original ‘Colour it Morgenthau’ thesis has been criticized, and various counter-views put forth, none of these have ever attempted to test their positions with data in a manner that would permit falsification, or even put forward a research design that would indicate how paradigm evaluations might be conducted. If criticism is to advance knowledge, then it is important that critics present not only counter-views but counter-research or, minimally, a research design that would allow their points to be tested.