Chapter One: Why Disarmament? Why Now?

Abstract

Rarely in the atomic age have hopes for genuine progress towards disarmament been raised as high as they are now. Governments, prompted by the renewed momentum of non-proliferation and disarmament initiatives, have put nuclear policy at the top of the international agenda.

But how can countries move from warm words to meaningful action? By what means could the world be weaned from its addiction to nuclear weapons and who should undertake the task of supervising this process? This Adelphi examines practical steps for achieving progress toward disarmament, assessing the challenges and opportunities associated with achieving a world without nuclear weapons. It places the current debate over abolition in the context of urgent non-proliferation priorities, such as the need to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of extremist regimes and terrorists. It distils lessons from states that have already given up nuclear programmes and from the end of the Cold War to suggest ways of countering the efforts of Iran and North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons. For the longer term, it offers policy recommendations for moving towards a reduced global reliance on nuclear weapons.

Notes

United Nations General Assembly, Resolutions Adopted on the Reports of the First Committee: Establishment of a Commission to Deal with the Problems Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy, first. sess., 24 January 1946, available at http://www.un.org/documents/resga.htm.

McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House 1988), pp. 158–76.

Joseph Rotblat, a Nobel peace laureate, welcomed Gorbachev's speech as a revival of the old nuclear disarmament plans and the beginning of a new era in this regard. See Joseph Rotblat, ‘Past Attempts to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’, in Rotblat, Jack Steinberger and Bhalchandra Udgaonkar (eds), A Nuclear-Weapon Free World: Desirable? Feasible? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1993), pp. 17–32. See also Rebecca Johnson, ‘Nuclear Disarmament Initiatives’, paper prepared for the conference ‘The NPT and a World Without Nuclear Weapons’, organised by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Helsinki, 22–24 October 2009.

Lawrence Freedman, ‘I Exist, Therefore I Deter’, International Security, vol. 13, no. 1, summer 1988, pp. 177–95.

Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley, 1957), pp. 50–2.

Michael Krepon, Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 99–105.

See T.V. Paul, ‘Complex Deterrence: An Introduction’, in Paul, Patrick M. Morgan and James J. Wirtz (eds), Complex Deterrence: Strategy in the Global Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

For a critique of nuclear alarmism, see John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, ‘A World Free of Nuclear Weapons’, Wall Street Journal, 4 January 2007.

Campbell Craig, ‘American Power Preponderance and the Nuclear Revolution’, Review of International Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, January 2009, pp. 27–44.

Barry Posen, ‘Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony’, International Security, vol. 28, no. 1, summer 2003, pp. 5–46.

Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), p. 218.

Task Force on the United Nations, American Interests and UN Reform (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2005), p. 74.

Different forms and levels of deterrence are discussed in Tom Sauer, ‘A Second Nuclear Revolution: From Nuclear Primacy to Post-Existential Deterrence’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 32, no. 5, October 2009, pp. 745–67.

In this context, we use the term ‘virtual’ in its literal meaning, ‘existing in essence though not in actual fact’.

Scott D. Sagan, ‘Shared Responsibilities for Nuclear Disarmament’, Daedalus, fall 2009, pp. 157–8.

Johnson, ‘Nuclear Disarmament Initiatives’.

See ‘Arms Control Revisited: Nonproliferation and Denuclearization’, report of the Warsaw Reflection Group, 20–21 November 2008 (Warsaw: Polish Institute of International Affairs, 2009); and T.V. Paul, ‘Global Power Shift and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons’, paper prepared for the conference ‘The NPT and a World Without Nuclear Weapons’, 2009, pp. 20–22.

William J. Perry, keynote address of the former Secretary of Defense at the conference ‘Post-Cold War US Nuclear Strategy: A Search for Technical and Policy Common Ground’, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, 11 August 2004, http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/cisac/PGA_049763.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Arms (Stockholm: Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, June 2006), p. 28, http://www.wmdcommission.org/files/Weapons_of_Terror.pdf.

‘Reinforcing the Global Nuclear Order for Peace and Prosperity: The Role of the IAEA to 2020 and Beyond’, report prepared by an independent commission at the request of the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), May 2008, p. 3, http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/PDF/2020report0508.pdf.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, ‘Nuclear Security in Pakistan: Reducing the Risks of Nuclear Terrorism’, Arms Control Today, vol. 39, no. 6, July–August 2009, p. 6.

Reagan's abolitionism has been documented by Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005).

Quoted in Todd Fine, ‘Using the Reagan Arms Control Legacy Correctly’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10 June 2009, available at http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/.

Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Death in the Nuclear Age’, Commentary, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1961, pp. 231–4.

Schell, ‘The Abolition of Nuclear Arms: An Idea Whose Time Has Come’, paper delivered as part of the International Security Studies Brady–Johnson Grand Strategy Lecture Series, Yale University, 25 March 2009.