The breakdown of WMD order

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. Among many texts, see J. N. Dixit, My South Block Years: Memoirs of a Foreign Secretary (New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1996); George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Hilary Synnott, The Causes and Consequences of South Asia's Nuclear Tests, Adelphi Paper 332 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 1999); and Farzana Shaikh, ‘Pakistan's Nuclear Bomb’, International Affairs, vol. 78, no. 1, January 2002, pp. 29–48.

2. The sentiments are transparent in Jaswant Singh, ‘Against Nuclear Apartheid’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998.

3. As I wrote on another occasion, India's actions were propelled partly ‘by its intense grievance over being locked into what it sees as an inferior status due to the regime's politico-legal stratification’. See William Walker, ‘International Nuclear Relations after the Indian and Pakistani Test Explosions’, International Affairs, vol. 74, no.3, July 1998, p. 512.

4. Keith Payne and Colin Gray's critiques of deterrence were especially influential. See Keith Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001) and Colin Gray, ‘To Confuse Ourselves: Nuclear Fallacies’ in John Baylis and Robert O'Neill (eds.), Alternative Nuclear Futures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 4–30. For a contrary view, see Michael Quinlan, ‘Aspirations, Realism, and Practical Policy’ in Baylis and O'Neill (eds.), Alternative Nuclear Futures, pp. 45–55.

5. The Report was submitted by the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld.

6. The Act required the President to authorise deployment of missile defences once he had satisfied himself that the proposals met certain criteria (related to technical progress, the threat, system costs and the impact on arms control).

7. Open letter to President Clinton from the Project for the New American Century, 26 January 1998. Its signatories included Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom would gain prominent positions in George W. Bush's administration, in addition to Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan and William Kristol. A most useful source of this and other texts relating to Iraq is Micah Sifry and Christopher Serf, The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Touchstone, 2003).

8. ibid.

9. On the origins and implications of counter-proliferation, see Mitchell Reiss and Harald Müller (eds), International Perspectives on Counterproliferation, Working Paper 99, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington DC, January 1995.

10. Walker, ‘Nuclear Order and Disorder’, p. 720.

11. Condoleezza Rice, ‘Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest’, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2000.

12. The phrase ‘shape a new century’ occurs in the Project for the New American Century's Statement of Principles enunciated in 1997. The point is that the century should be American.

13. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992); Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); and Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power.

14. Warnings of nuclear terrorism became quite commonplace in the mid- to late-1970s, but they often came from individuals and groups who saw danger in plutonium fuel-cycles. See, for instance, Mason Willrich and Theodore Taylor, Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1974).

15. See Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (London: Gollancz, 1998), Morten Bremer Maerli, ‘Relearning the ABCs: Terrorists and “Weapons of Mass Destruction”’, The Nonproliferation Review, Summer 2000, pp. 108–119.

16. See Magnus Ranstorp, ‘Interpreting the Broader Context and Meaning of Bin Laden's Fatwa’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 21, no. 4, 1998.

17. Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), p. 150.

18. ibid., p. 152.

19. See Langdon Winner, ‘Complexity, Trust and Terror’, Tech Knowledge Revue, vol. 3, no. 1, October 2002.

20. The precise words used by President Bush in his address to the US Congress on 20 September 2001 were ‘Everyone, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’. ‘Those who are not with us, are against us’ is the statement that has gained common currency. See ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, 20 September 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

21. On the National Security Strategy and its ramifications, see Brad Roberts, American Primacy and Major Power Concert: A Critique of the 2002 National Security Strategy, Institute for Defense Analysis, IDA Paper P-3751, 2003.

22. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, p. 1, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

23. This quotation comes from President Bush's graduation speech delivered at the US Military Academy, West Point on 1 June 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html

24. National Security Strategy, p. 27

25. ibid, p. 30

26. The quotations are taken from the National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction of December 2002, pp. 2–5. Its full text can be found on http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/WMDStrategy.pdf.

27. National Security Strategy, p. 15.

28. ibid., p. 1

29. Michael Mazarr, ‘George W. Bush, Idealist’, International Affairs, vol. 79, no. 3, May 2003, p. 513.

30. George W. Bush, ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress’, 20 September 2001.

31. Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xvi.