International Cooperation for Enhancing Nuclear Safety, Security, Safeguards and Non-proliferation

This open access book examines key aspects of international cooperation to enhance nuclear safety, security, safeguards, and nonproliferation, thereby assisting in development and maintenance of the verification regime and fostering progress toward a nuclear weapon-free world. Current challenges are discussed and attempts made to identify possible solutions and future improvements, considering scientific developments that have the potential to increase the effectiveness of implementation of international regimes, particularly in critical areas, technology foresight, and the ongoing evaluation of current capabilities

The role of verification in international relations: 1945-1993

The role of verification in international relations is liked with the urge to verify which is evident throughout human history. This study focused on the evolution of this role in light of political circumstances and technological progress. Several different approaches to verification can be identified – bilateral, regional cooperation, global arrangements, and individual national efforts. Moreover, several themes characterize the existing verification regimes. These issues – namely the sharing of intelligence, managing compliance questions, and the integration of different regimes – present themselves as the negotiating ground for future years. One of the important result of the paper is that it demonstrates how the concept of verification, once a contentious political instrument, is encompassing anew actors, new frameworks, new technologies, and new fields

The elephant in the room: The rise and role of India in the climate change negotiations

The climate change negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have been ongoing since the first conference of the parties in 1995. Twenty years on there has been little progress reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the climate regime is in a state of flux and the role of developing countries therein is changing. During this period the majority of the work on climate change from within the International Relations discipline has been framed in a neoliberal institutionalist or neorealist frame. Studies in the climate policy canon have been predominantly similarly located, albeit implicitly. In its focus on India this dissertation provides a bridge between the climate policy literature and the theoretically framed climate change policy studies in the International Relations literature. This dissertation employs the Critical International Relations theoretical framework of Robert Cox. His theory outlines a 'framework for action' that enables and constrains how states act, and how they conceive of their agency. This framework, or historical structure, is created by a particular configuration of the forces exerted by ideas, institutions, and material capabilities, which when aligned, create a hegemonic historical structure. In the climate negotiations, India has been a vocal proponent of the ideas of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities from the earliest days of the Convention. India's changing material circumstances and geo-political status in the past decade raised the question of its role in the regime in relation to its long-supported ideas. This is a qualitative case study using documentary evidence triangulated with interview data from a range of key Indian stakeholders. I found that in the transition from abstract principle to operational precept the intersubjective idea of addressing climate change did not transmute into an intersubjectively shared idea of differentiation. Furthermore, once the idea of differentiation was to be operationalised in the negotiations, its primacy, indeed its very "intersubjectiveness", was contested by the idea of symmetry of obligations and responsibility. The ongoing regime flux is the outcome of this contestation between ideas held collectively by groups, as no stabilising hegemonic historical structure has been created. India's emergence has been insufficient to reinstate differentiation as an intersubjectively held idea and it is thus unable to secure a hegemonic historical structure in favour of differentiation

Calibration of DART Radiative Transfer Model with Satellite Images for Simulating Albedo and Thermal Irradiance Images and 3D Radiative Budget of Urban Environment

Remote sensing is increasingly used for managing urban environment. In this context, the H2020 project URBANFLUXES aims to improve our knowledge on urban anthropogenic heat fluxes, with the specific study of three cities: London, Basel and Heraklion. Usually, one expects to derive directly 2 major urban parameters from remote sensing: the albedo and thermal irradiance. However, the determination of these two parameters is seriously hampered by complexity of urban architecture. For example, urban reflectance and brightness temperature are far from isotropic and are spatially heterogeneous. Hence, radiative transfer models that consider the complexity of urban architecture when simulating remote sensing signals are essential tools. Even for these sophisticated models, there is a major constraint for an operational use of remote sensing: the complex 3D distribution of optical properties and temperatures in urban environments. Here, the work is conducted with the DART (Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer) model. It is a comprehensive physically based 3D radiative transfer model that simulates optical signals at the entrance of imaging spectro-radiometers and LiDAR scanners on board of satellites and airplanes, as well as the 3D radiative budget, of urban and natural landscapes for any experimental (atmosphere, topography,…) and instrumental (sensor altitude, spatial resolution, UV to thermal infrared,…) configuration. Paul Sabatier University distributes free licenses for research activities. This paper presents the calibration of DART model with high spatial resolution satellite images (Landsat 8, Sentinel 2, etc.) that are acquired in the visible (VIS) / near infrared (NIR) domain and in the thermal infrared (TIR) domain. Here, the work is conducted with an atmospherically corrected Landsat 8 image and Bale city, with its urban database. The calibration approach in the VIS/IR domain encompasses 5 steps for computing the 2D distribution (image) of urban albedo at satellite spatial resolution. (1) DART simulation of satellite image at very high spatial resolution (e.g., 50cm) per satellite spectral band. Atmosphere conditions are specific to the satellite image acquisition. (2) Spatial resampling of DART image at the coarser spatial resolution of the available satellite image, per spectral band. (3) Iterative derivation of the urban surfaces (roofs, walls, streets, vegetation,…) optical properties as derived from pixel-wise comparison of DART and satellite images, independently per spectral band. (4) Computation of the band albedo image of the city, per spectral band. (5) Computation of the image of the city albedo and VIS/NIR exitance, as an integral over all satellite spectral bands. In order to get a time series of albedo and VIS/NIR exitance, even in the absence of satellite images, ECMWF information about local irradiance and atmosphere conditions are used. A similar approach is used for calculating the city thermal exitance using satellite images acquired in the thermal infrared domain. Finally, DART simulations that are conducted with the optical properties derived from remote sensing images give also the 3D radiative budget of the city at any date including the date of the satellite image acquisition