Christoph Hartmut Bluth


Christoph Hartmut Bluth is a professor of international relations and security at the University of Bradford.

Family and education

Christoph Bluth was born in Frankfurt and grew up in North Rhine-Westphalia. He is the son of Winfried Bluth who was an evangelical Christian and a publishing consultant. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, where he completed a BA in mathematics and an MPhil in ecumenical theology. His master's thesis, Just War Theory and the Falklands/Malvinas Conflict, was supervised by Bill McSweeney; its conclusions were published in the Journal of Peace Research. At King's College London, he conducted research for his PhD thesis on "Soviet Strategic Arms Policy under Khrushchev" under the supervision of Lawrence Freedman at the Department of War Studies.

Career

At the age of 18, Bluth published his first book, Der Ursprung des Lebens, a creationist critique of evolutionary theory. After he completed his undergraduate studies he worked as the representative from Northern Ireland for the Student [Christian Movement of Great Britain|Student Christian Movement].
Bluth's work has focussed on the role of nuclear weapons and the risks of nuclear proliferation in global security. His early work studied the Soviet Union. Subsequently, he worked on US-Russian cooperation on nuclear security and safety in the context of the Nunn-Lugar programme on co-operative denuclearization.
Bluth's recent work on nuclear proliferation has been controversial for his view that nuclear proliferation is rare and that the spread of nuclear weapons has been less critical to international security than is often claimed. He states that his work in peace studies has been dedicated to education and research in international security studies, with the purpose of providing insights that contribute to the understanding of the risks of nuclear war and paths towards removing nuclear weapons from international relations in the future.

Publications