Learning Arms Control in the Italian Alps

By Doniyor Mutalov, MALD 2025 Candidate, The Fletcher School

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in a course at the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO) held in Andalo, Italy from January 7-14, 2024. ISODARCO focuses on the issues of arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament of conventional armaments, as well as weapons of mass destruction. The title for this year’s winter term was “Nuclear Order and International Security After Ukraine,” and it featured several broad concerns that were exacerbated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. These include the suspension of the U.S.-Russia arms control treaties and the current lack of bilateral dialogue, the increased boldness of North Korea’s actions amid the deadlocked UN Security Council, and the tenuous fate of the Iran nuclear deal, to name a few. 

This course took place in the mountains of Northern Italy and was  well-organized, both logistically and academically. The choice of guest speakers for the winter school was impressive, as we had some of the best practitioners and academics working in the nuclear realm, including Laura Rockwood, a former lawyer at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and Francesca Giovannini from the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University. What particularly drew my attention were two sessions on the IAEA and the nuclear safeguards regime it established. Those two sessions were led by long-time practitioners working in the IAEA. They introduced me to the loophole of “non-proscribed nuclear military activities” and the complexities arising from applying safeguards to naval nuclear propulsion. This issue gained prominence after the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) nuclear-powered submarine deal was signed in 2021.

Nevertheless, I went to this course with a putative project in mind about the P5 process or ‘nuclear five’ meetings and what the future of this ad-hoc group could be. I hoped to garner fresh ideas and comments, particularly from Russian and Chinese experts. 

This process meets the criteria set for the IIGO (an informal intergovernmental organization) as a non-formal and non-legally binding arrangement that brings together like-minded or unlike-minded states. Since February 2022, at least six meetings in the ‘nuclear five’ format have been convened under different auspices, which is striking since most bilateral or multilateral venues with Russia are currently suspended or have been discontinued. Therefore, the P5 process remains the only forum where five nuclear weapon states can still deliberate and agree on strategic risk reduction measures. However, there is little academic literature on the ‘nuclear five’ format, a gap I would seek to fill in my research. Thanks to the ISODARCO, my project got considerably traction, and over the summer, I plan to work on improving and publishing it. I think one of the personal takeaways from this course for me was  that sometimes it makes prudent sense to engage with your adversaries, even if there is a high probability that nothing substantive would  come out of it. In certain situations, the dialogue itself can be an end rather than simply means, especially if that discussion is nascent, as is the case with the U.S.-China arms control talks.

I would also like to note that I was the first participant from Uzbekistan to participate in the course’s decades-long history. My participation and representation would have been impossible without the generous funding from the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program. I would certainly recommend the ISODARCO program to other students looking to augment their knowledge and research on arms control, and I thank the program for its financial support.