Weapons of mass destruction and international order to 1990

Abstract

How should the ‘problem of order’ associated with weapons of mass destruction be understood and addressed today? Have the problem and its solution been misconceived and misrepresented, as manifested by the problematic aftermath of Iraq War? Has 9/11 rendered redundant past international ordering strategies, or are these still discarded at our own peril? These are the questions explored in this Adelphi Paper.

It opens by focusing attention on the linked problems of enmity, power and legitimacy, which lie at the root of the contemporary problem of order. The Paper shows how the ‘WMD order’ that was constructed during and after the Cold War was challenged from various directions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It shows how the growing disorder was a cause and effect of a potent ‘double enmity’ that arose in the US against both ‘rogue states’ and the international constitutionalism that had been espoused by previous US governments and bound states to a common purpose.

An ordering strategy that is imperious and places its main emphasis on counter-proliferation and the threat of preventive war cannot be successful. The recovery of order must entail the pursuit of international legitimacy as well as efficacy. It will require all states to accept restraint and to honour their mutual obligations.

Notes

1. On the history of chemical warfare and its inhibition, see Edward Spiers, Chemical Warfare (London: Macmillan, 1986).

2. Resolution A/RES/1(1) of 24 January 1946.

3. Ibid., paragraph 5(b)

4. I am grateful to Ben Sanders and Jozef Goldblat for having brought this history to my attention.

5. A valuable collection of essays on Hiroshima can be found in Michael Hogan (ed.), Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Most scholars now accept that the numbers of lives saved by using the atomic bomb against Japan were exaggerated to provide retrospective justification for the action.

6. See John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972)

7. See John Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)

8. Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1946), p. 76.

9. See Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper 171 (IISS, 1981).

10. William Walker, ‘Nuclear Order and Disorder’, International Affairs, vol. 76, no. 4, October 2000.

11. In International-Relations theory, as distinct from other fields, the word ‘system’ is now commonly used to refer to a structural entity without normative content (especially in the neo-realist concept of the anarchic ‘international system’), in contrast to ‘order’, which has structural and normative elements. I am assigning normative content to my above use of the term system.

12. In an enormous literature, see Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960) and Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).

13. The finest account of the NPT's origins and construction remains Mohamed Shaker, The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Origins and Implementation, 1959–1979 (New York: Oceana Publications, 1980).

14. The export-control system was only constitutional in embryo, as the Nuclear Suppliers' Guidelines of 1978 took the form of a gentleman's agreement and had no basis in international law. On the development of international safeguards, see David Fischer and Paul Szasz, Safeguarding the Atom (London: Taylor & Francis, 1985).

15. See Michael Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation: the Remaking of US Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ian Smart (ed.), World Nuclear Energy: Toward a Bargain of Confidence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and William Walker and Måns Lönnroth, Nuclear Power Struggles: Industrial Competition and Proliferation Control (George Allen & Unwin: London, 1982).

16. See Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

17. Michelson and Morley's experiments in the 1880s disproving the existence of the ether were the only major contribution by American scientists to developments in physics prior to the 1930s.

18. Ikenberry, After Victory, p. 29.