West vs the Rest mentality gives deems Oriental countries as barbarian and “not to be trusted” with arms or nuclear weaponry.

Gusterson suggests that this was facilitated with the deployment of ‘subtle orien- talist ideologies’ by the West in an effort to essentialize the Otherness of the Third World vis-a`-vis the West.96 Furthermore, the West sought to represent itself as a col- lective ideological front that: (1) makes the simultaneous ownership of nuclear weapons by the major powers and the absence of nuclear weapons in the Third World seem natural and reasonable while problematizing attempts by such countries as India, Pakistan, and Iraq to acquire these weapons; (2) it presents the security needs of the established nuclear powers as if they were everybody’s; (3) it effaces the con- tinuity between Third World countries’ nuclear deprivation and other systema- tic patterns of deprivation in the underdeveloped world in order to inhibit a massive North-South confrontation; and (4) it legitimates the nuclear monopoly of the recognized nuclear powers.97 The struggle for legitimacy to acquire nuclear weapons is fought further on the grounds that: (1) Third World countries are too poor to afford nuclear weapons; (2) deter- rence will be unstable in the Third World; (3) Third World regimes lack the technical maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons; and (4) Third World regimes lack the political maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons.98 In this struggle for legitimacy, ‘the claim to rational decision-making is fre- quently used by great powers to justify the possession of nuclear weapons. Conver- sely, the purported lack of rationality, on the part of other states, particularly revolutionary regimes like Cuba or Iran, is routinely invoked to explain why they cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons’.99 The existing literature on arms control and disarmament is replete with rhetorical polarizations that depict the West as the trustworthy and responsible actor that needs to police the rebellious and recalcitrant Third World that is not up to the task, whose science and technology is not even capable of addressing their basic population and food problems and is constantly seeking attention. All these ‘recurrent images and metaphors . . . pertain in some way to disorder’.100 It is possible to launch recursive arguments on each of these invocations but the significance of these ‘distorted representations of the Other’ is that they also disclose the West’s ‘buried, denied, and troubling parts that have mysteriously surfaced’.101 The West reiterates the same arguments with regard to poverty, instability, and 346 CONTEMPORARY SECURITY POLICY lack of technical and political maturity that it had deployed in the late 19th and early 20th century to prevent the acquisition of weapons by the colonies. This rhetoric dis- plays a persistent sense of fear and vulnerability that ‘[i]n any contest in which one side is bound by the norms of civilized behaviour and the other is not, history is, alas, on the side of the barbarians’.102 This suggests that arms control and disarmament are practices to facilitate binding the barbarians by particular norms of civilized behav- iour. It is therefore not enough to undertake an exposition of how norms as standards of civilization are constituted in arms control and disarmament. It is equally pertinent to express concern about how particular norms of behaviour are deployed to civilize/ discipline others.