The post-Cold War WMD order: two divergent paths

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 legal aspects of the succession, see Edwin Williamson and John Osborn, ‘A U.S. Perspective on Treaty Succession and Related Issues in the Wake of the Breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia’, Virginia Journal of International Law, vol. 33, 1993, pp. 261–274; and Yehuda Blum, ‘Russia takes over the Soviet Union's Seat at the United Nations’, European Journal of International Law, 1992, pp. 354–361.

2. See Graham Allison et al. (eds.), Cooperative Denuclearisation: From Pledges to Deeds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, CSIA Studies in International Security, No. 2, 1993), pp. 26–71.

3. Strictly speaking, it was the Additional Protocol to the NPT safeguards document INFCIRC/153, which would itself be applied more rigorously.

4. In a large literature, see Rebecca Johnson, Indefinite Extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Risks and Reckonings, Acronym No. 7, Acronym Institute, London, September 1995; and John Simpson, ‘The Nuclear Non- Proliferation Regime after the NPT Review and Extension Conference’, SIPRI Yearbook 1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 561–589.

5. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 2nd Edition, (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 13.

6. Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, agreed in New York, May 1995. See: http://www.basicint.org/nuclear/NPT/1997prepcom/principl.htm

7. The Shannon mandate to negotiate the FMCT was agreed upon at the Conference on Disarmament in 1993 but the negotiations have not got under way.

8. The UK led a group of states (including Russia), which insisted that entry into force should be contingent upon ratification by all states having the potential to detonate nuclear explosives. After much debate, an entry into force clause was eventually adopted along these lines. India immediately stated that this was unacceptable and that it would not sign or ratify the treaty, thereby obstructing the treaty's entry into force.

9. Ian Clark, The Post-Cold War Order, p. 104.

10. The Republican obstruction of multilateral processes was aided by Jesse Helms' long chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

11. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

12. See Michael O'Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000) and Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000).

13. Janne Nolan, An Elusive Consensus: Nuclear Weapons and American Security after the Cold War (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999)

14. See Robert Litwak, Rogue States and US Foreign Policy: Containment after the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

15. To my knowledge, Leonard Spector was the first to draw serious attention to this development in the series of books published in the 1980s under the aegis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, beginning with Nuclear Proliferation Today (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).

16. Proposals for a weapon-free zone in the Middle East were enunciated in UN General Assembly Resolution 47/48 of December 1992. At various times, Shimon Peres expressed his conditional support for the proposal.