THE ABOLITION ASPIRATION

Abstract

The goal of abolishing all nuclear weapons has often seemed unrealistic, if not utopian. The Cold War posed intractable apocalyptic dangers, and the post-Cold War “peace dividend” proved scant. But over the decades, nuclear arms control and nonproliferation successes have been as important as the setbacks, and in 2010 the abolition aspiration has made something of a comeback. This article surveys the most important challenges facing nuclear disarmament progress today. The article considers the interrelationships among the positions of the key categories of states shaping the contemporary global nuclear order, for good or ill, as a capstone to the other pieces in this special section, which focus on those categories individually. The article concludes that progress toward disarmament will not be easy or fast. Weaning states off their reliance on threats to either use or acquire nuclear arms requires progress in improving the conditions of global governance more generally. But the goal of eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons is a realistic prospect and, consequently, an essential imperative.

Keywords:

• Nuclear weapons
• nuclear abolition
• disarmament
• Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

Notes

1. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2006,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2006, pp. 64–66.

2. At a press conference, Kennedy said he was personally “haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful [in achieving a nuclear test ban] there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of 4, and by 1975, 15 or 20,” See John F. Kennedy, “The President's News Conference of March 21, 1963,” in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, “The American Presidency Project,” University of California at Santa Barbara, <www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9124&st=&st1=>.

3. William Walker describes how the emergence of an “international nuclear order” in the 1960s and 1970s entailed the simultaneous emergence of a “managed system of deterrence” and a “managed system of abstinence.” William Walker, “Weapons of Mass Destruction and International Order,” Adelphi Paper 370, International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2004.

4. Hans Kristensen, “United States Reaches Moscow Treaty Warhead Limit Early,” Federation of American Scientists (FAS), FAS Strategic Security Blog, February 9, 2009, <www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2009/02/sort.php>.

5. North Korea could arguably count as a fourth “loss”: it has demonstrated an ability to trigger a nuclear explosion, but whether it can yet fashion usable nuclear weapons remains uncertain. Although North Korea acceded to the NPT in 1985, it has never been a member in good standing; it failed to reach the required safeguards agreement with the IAEA to verify its compliance, with the prolonged effort to do so eventually leading to the 1993–94 confrontation with the United States.

6. South Africa destroyed seven nuclear bombs that it built in secret, while three newly independent republics emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union—Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—surrendered the “inherited” nuclear weapons deployed on their territory. In none of these cases, it should be noted, did the governments publicly embrace nuclear deterrence in their security policies or test a nuclear device, and in all cases the decisions to surrender nuclear weapons capabilities were associated with proximate regime change. These threshold conditions strongly qualify considering these cases as genuine nuclear “rollback.”

7. The final non-nuclear state to accede to the treaty was Cuba in 2002.

8. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's omnibus global security report noted that at least forty countries now possess the industrial and scientific infrastructure to build nuclear weapons in some foreseeable time frame. See “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the Secretary General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change,” United Nations, 2004, p. 39. The longer list presented in this article uses deliberately inclusive criteria for stipulating “nuclear-capable” states, including all states listed in the CTBT Annex II with some further additions. The intent is to make the graphical representation in Figure 1 more meaningful by filtering out the many countries unlikely ever to consider a nuclear weapons option; while the threshold of “nuclear capable” is debatable, marginal variations in the list do not alter the overall pattern.

9. At the same time, the legal obligations of NPT membership and the technical oversight of IAEA safeguards cannot guarantee nonproliferation. The degree and manner in which these limited constraints affect state decision making is a vital topic of ongoing research.

10. For one review of the implications of these developments, see Wade L. Huntley, “Threats All The Way Down: U.S. Strategic Initiatives in a Unipolar World,” Review of International Studies 32 (January 2006), pp. 49–67.

11. “Trident Plan Wins Commons Support,” BBC News, March 15, 2007, <news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6448173.stm>.

12. John Lichfield, “Chirac Threatens Nuclear Attack on States Sponsoring Terrorism,” Independent, January 20, 2006, <www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/chirac-threatens-nuclear-attack-on-states-sponsoring-terrorism-523780.html>; Ann MacLachlan and Mark Hibbs, “Chirac Shifts French Doctrine for Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Nucleonics Week, January 26, 2006.

13. Jeffrey G. Lewis, “Chinese Nuclear Posture and Force Modernization,” Nonproliferation Review 16 (July 2009), pp. 197–209.

14. The success of the country's recent nuclear and missile tests has been dubious, with no demonstration as yet of a capacity to fashion a deliverable warhead, but some dangers of Pyongyang's ambitions are independent of its technological achievements. See Wade L. Huntley, “U.S. Policy toward North Korea in Strategic Context: Tempting Goliath's Fate,” Asian Survey 47 (May/June 2007); and Wade L. Huntley, “Dealing with North Korea's Tests,” Foreign Policy In Focus, June 19, 2009, <www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6204>.

15. For different articulations of this viewpoint, see Jita Mishra, The NPT and the Developing Countries (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2008), esp. pp. 180–81; George Perkovich, “Bush's Nuclear Revolution: A Regime Change in Non-Proliferation,” Foreign Affairs 82 (March/April 2003), pp. 2–8.

16. George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007, p. A15. Note that this essay spoke for the viewpoints of sixteen other high-level specialists participating in the conference convened for this purpose, adding special import to the essay.

17. “Remarks By President Barack Obama,” Prague, Czech Republic, April 5, 2009, <www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Barack-Obama-In-Prague-As-Delivered>.

18. The Independent Task Force on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy (co-chaired by William J. Perry, coauthor of the Wall Street Journal op-eds on nuclear disarmament) in April 2009 issued an analysis and recommendations intended as input to the Obama Nuclear Posture Review. The taskforce included individuals who subsequently entered the administration (and therefore were not party to the report). See William J. Perry, Brent Scowcroft, and Charles D. Ferguson, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy,” Independent Task Force Report No. 62, Council on Foreign Relations, April 2009.

19. The Obama administration's decision to cancel the Bush administration's plans for deploying an ambitious missile defense system in Poland, to be replaced by a smaller-scale system less threatening to Russian strategic forces, removed a significant roadblock.

20. George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2008, p. A13; Marc Champion, “Putin Signals Desire to Return to Presidency,” Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009.

21. See Wade L. Huntley, “Nuclear Fallout—Implications of the World's Nuclear Deal with India,” Canada-Asia Commentary No. 53 (September 2008), <www.asiapacific.ca/en/cac/number-53-nuclear-fallout-implication-worlds-nuclear-deal-with-india>.

22. Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan acknowledged many nuclear and missile dealings with North Korea, Iran, Libya, China, and other countries in a recent interview. See “Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan Discusses Nuclear Program in TV Talk Show,” on “Islamabad Tonight,” discussion program hosted by Nadeem Malik, Aaj News Television, August 31, 2009, transcript by Open Source Center. Despite increased Western access to Khan, many details of the network he established—including the extent of culpability of the Pakistani government—remain unclear. See International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A.Q. Khan and the Rise of Proliferation Networks (London: IISS, 2007).

23. President Obama has announced that in March 2010 he will convene global summit on securing nuclear materials.

24. See Wade L. Huntley, “U.S. Policy toward North Korea in Strategic Context,” pp. 476–77.

25. See Huntley, “Dealing with North Korea's Tests”. Pyongyang's more moderated posture in late 2009 may indicate a better grasp of the diplomatic circumstances; but it could also indicate that the year's behavior followed a domestic timetable (technological or political) insulated from external influence.

26. North Korea's suspected assistance to the Syrian nuclear facility bombed by Israel in September 2007 is a recent example of extensive contact with Middle Eastern states, including Iran, and its suspected nuclear cooperation with Myanmar is a concern for Southeast Asian neighbors.

27. Wade L. Huntley, “The Context of Iranian Nuclear Aims,” in Soushiant Zanganehpour and Wade L. Huntley, eds., Iran in the World: The Nuclear Crisis in Context (Vancouver: Simons Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Research, 2008).

28. See, for example, Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and the Danger of War,” International Security 20 (Summer 1995), pp. 5–38.

29. Symbolically, the Obama administration had invited Iranian diplomats to join July 4 celebrations at U.S. embassies in locations where both countries maintained representation. As the measures of the post-election violence became clear, this invitation was withdrawn.

30. Jungmin Kang, et al., “South Korea's Nuclear Surprise,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 2005), pp. 40–41. Potential Obama administration resistance to South Korea's “pyroproces-sing” initiative may complicate renegotiation of the U.S.–South Korean nuclear cooperation agreement, due to expire in 2014. See Daniel Horner, “S. Korean Pyroprocessing Awaits U.S. Decision,” Arms Control Today, July/August 2009, <www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_07-08/SouthKorea>.

31. “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,” United Nations, p. 44.

32. An episode of nuclear diplomacy indicates the likely challenges of fashioning such an arrangement: days before the start of the 2005 NPT Review Conference that otherwise exhibited nothing but stalemate, the United States, Iran, France, and Japan found common ground in opposing a proposal by then-IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei for a five-year global moratorium on all new uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. See David E. Sanger, “Threats by Iran and North Korea Shadow Talks on Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, May 1, 2005, <www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/international/middleast/01nuke.html>.

33. For one conception, see Wade L. Huntley, “Roadmaps to Disarmament: A Strategy for the Second Nuclear Era,” in David Krieger, ed., At the Nuclear Precipice: Catastrophe or Transformation? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

34. Etel Solingen, Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).