Nuclear Politics in Asia

Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani, Ariabarzan Mohammadi, Marzieh Kouhi-Esfahani, Ariabarzan Mohammadighalehtak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138714694
• eBook ISBN: 9781351858113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Asia has the world's highest concentration of nuclear weapons and the most significant recent developments related to nuclear proliferation, as well as the world's most critical conflicts and considerable political instability. The containment and prevention of nuclear proliferation, especially in Asia, continues to be a grave concern for the international community. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of nuclear arsenals, nuclear ambitions and nuclear threats across different parts of Asia. It covers the Middle East (including Israel), China, India-Pakistan and their confrontation, as well as North Korea. It discusses the conventional warfare risks, risks from non-state armed groups, and examines the attempts to limit and control nuclear weapons, both international initiatives and American diplomacy and interventions. The book concludes by assessing the possibility of nuclear revival, the potential outcomes of international approaches to nuclear disarmament, and the efficacy of coercive diplomacy in containing nuclear proliferation.

1
Shifts in the global nuclear landscape

Shashank Joshi

Nuclear weapons have cast a shadow on international politics for over 70 years. The potential global existential risks associated with their use, the possible defensive advantages thought to accrue to their possessors, and the unique relationship between possession and status in the international political order have all lent nuclear weapons a unique importance in global politics (Futter, 2015a). Although global nuclear stockpiles have steadily fallen and the risk of a world-threatening nuclear war has significantly diminished since the end of the Cold War, new nuclear risks have emerged. These include nuclear and radiological terrorism, cyber-attacks on early warning or nuclear command and control systems, the threats posed to smaller nuclear forces by a new generation of precise conventional weapons, the re-emergence of tactical nuclear weapons, and the renewed prominence of nuclear weapons in Europe. The world’s nine nuclear-armed states are roughly evenly divided between those who have reduced and those who have grown their nuclear arsenals in the past decade or so,¹ although all four states in the former category – including the two most important, the United States and Russia, have renewed and modernised their forces. In addition, the suspected nuclear ambitions of other states – both real and perceived – have resulted in crises, wars and sustained periods of diplomacy. The most important recent example is the July 2015 agreement between Iran and a six-nation bloc of world powers over the former’s contested nuclear activities. This chapter examines how the global nuclear horizon has changed over time – particularly over the decade from 2005 to 2015 – and whether any discernible trends, positive or negative, might be identified.

Nuclear trends

There are certainly reasons for optimism. According to data collated by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), around 125,000 warheads were built since the dawn of the nuclear age in 1945 (Kristensen and Norris, 2013). Nearly all those warheads were built by the United States and the Soviet Union or its Russian successor. Today, under a tenth of those weapons – just 10,000 – survive, distributed across nine nations although concentrated, of course, in the hands of that initial pair. One has to go back a generation, to the late 1950s, to find a time when so few nuclear weapons existed – and that was a period of rapid change, uncertainty and anxiety in the nuclear order as the United States came to grips with the loss of its nuclear monopoly (of fission bombs in 1949 and thermonuclear bombs in 1953), direct US–Soviet military confrontation in the Korean War, and overt nuclear threats during the Suez War (Booker, 2001). Of course, it might be reasonably argued that nuclear risks exist in a wholly non-linear proportion to the number of warheads, such that the first few (or first tens or hundreds) of warheads for any country generate disproportionately large risks, particularly if that state is in prior conflict with an existing nuclear-armed state. In this view, the reduction in nuclear risk brought about by US–Soviet arms control in the 1990s was perhaps washed out by, say, the over-nuclearisation of India and Pakistan in 1998. There is no definitive way to adjudicate these contrasting views.

There is, however, a case for optimism in relation to what we might call the counter-factual nuclear path. Most intelligence estimates over the years have drastically overstated the number of countries likely to obtain bombs. A declassified American document from 1964, the year of China’s first nuclear test, highlighted ‘at least eleven nations’ (India, Japan, Israel, Sweden, West Germany, Italy, Canada, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania and Yugoslavia) ‘with the capacity to go nuclear’, and ‘South Africa, the United Arab Republic, Spain, Brazil and Mexico’ forecast to follow (Gavin, 2005, p. 17). Of these states, only India, Israel and South Africa would in fact obtain nuclear weapons, with only two continuing to possess them. Other states on this list – like Sweden and Brazil – initiated nuclear weapons programmes, but later abandoned these (Panofsky, 2007). Others still – like Japan – are not known to have had nuclear weapons programmes, but maintained a high degree of nuclear latency, such that it would not take very long to design and fabricate deliverable nuclear weapons (L. Hughes, 2007; Hymans, 2011; Sagan, 2010, p. 98). Francis Gavin, in his overview of proliferation alarmism, goes as far as suggesting that ‘no nation has started a new nuclear weapons programme since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991’ (Gavin, 2005, p. 19). In particular, certain proliferation ‘domino effects’ between rival states that might have been thought inevitable simply never transpired. When the Soviet Union obtained the bomb, Yugoslavia and Sweden – the former a state that was to break in particularly bitter fashion with Moscow, and that therefore had every reason to fear Soviet intentions (Judt, 2005, pp. 144–145, 173) – did not have security guarantees.² But neither followed, though both preserved a nuclear option for a time (Johansson, 1986; Mukhatzhanova, 2010). Taiwan did not follow China, even after the 1972 US–China rapprochement reduced the credibility of its external security guarantees (Albright and Gay, 1998). South Korea followed neither China nor, later, North Korea (C.W. Hughes, 2007, pp. 96–98).

Why does this continue to be the subject of intense academic debate? It is in part the product of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970, an audaciously successful attempt to lock in the nuclear monopolies of the time. Nicholas Miller has argued that it is precisely that which we now dismiss as alarmism – ‘nuclear domino theory’ – that spurred the United States to adopt policies that prevented such dominos from falling in the first place (2014). The slow pace of proliferation is also connected to the cost and difficulty of building these complex weapons. Jacques Hymans points out that the seven countries that embarked on nuclear weapons programmes before 1970 all succeeded in obtaining weapons, whereas the ten that sought weapons after 1970 produced only three bombs, with only one of the failures (Iraq) making any serious progress. Pre-1970 bomb-seekers took an average of seven years to get the bomb, but their post-1970 counterparts took 17 years. Hymans attributes this shift to the political meddling in scientific affairs characteristic of authoritarian states (Hymans, 2012a). Regardless of the cause, this is a largely fortuitous nuclear legacy.

Recent nuclear aspirants

This trend has persisted more recently. Over the last 25 years, Iraq, Syria and Iran have all pursued nuclear weapons programmes, to greater or lesser degrees. Iraq’s programme had slowed greatly by the time of the First Gulf War and was ended following Iraq’s overwhelming defeat in that conflict, although a combination of Iraqi deception efforts and flawed Western intelligence assessments contributed to the ill-fated decision to invade Iraq nonetheless in 2003 (Duelfer, 2004; Hymans, 2012b, pp. 79–123). In Syria’s case, a nuclear reactor being constructed with North Korean assistance was bombed by Israel in 2007 (Follath and Stark, 2009). Subsequent Syrian efforts are likely to have been slowed or halted by the Syrian civil war from 2011 onward, although some have argued that some limited nuclear work might have continued (Follath, 2015). In both the Iraqi and Syrian cases, nuclear proliferation in progress was disrupted or altogether halted by military action.

Iran’s case is worth exploring in more detail, not because of the severity of the dispute but because it was resolved – or at least substantially eased – through peaceful rather than violent means. From 2002 onward, Iran’s reluctance to clarify allegations over its historical activities, the discovery of clandestine nuclear-related facilities, and a subsequent build-up of nuclear infrastructure, particularly centrifuges capable of producing enriched uranium for a bomb, resulted in a drawn-out crisis (Joshi, 2012). This included periods of heightened military tension, with serious and credible threats of airstrikes between 2011 and 2013 (Goldberg, 2012; Richards, 2014, p. 322). But on 14 July 2015, six world powers, known as the EU3 + 3, comprising the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), plus Germany, struck a seminal agreement with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In exchange for substantial, long-lasting curbs on and intrusive inspections into its civilian nuclear programme, Iran would receive sanctions relief, recognition of its long-claimed right to enrich uranium, and other benefits (Tertrais, 2015).

The JCPOA was highly polarising. Its defenders claimed that it defused a crisis that had threatened to erupt into war, demonstrated the effectiveness of coercive diplomacy, established powerful new precedents for international inspections of suspected nuclear activity, and showed that nuclear-armed states and the West in general was not seeking to deny nuclear technology to non-nuclear-armed states (Bohlen, 2015; Fitzpatrick, 2015; Patman, 2015). The JCPOA’s critics argued that it rewarded Iran’s prior transgressions and therefore sent a dangerous message to other states of concern, enriched Tehran during a period of heightened rivalry with Arab states, and merely deferred the issue for a decade or so, when several key restrictions on Iran would expire (Cohen et al., 2016; Miller et al., 2015; Moore, 2015; Norell, 2015). The NPT neither explicitly accords nor denies the right of states to enrich uranium, a central demand of Iran throughout negotiations that it eventually won, with caveats (Glaser et al., 2015). In truth, the JCPOA sets a fundamentally ambiguous precedent. While it might be seen to vindicate Iran’s view of the right to enrich uranium – and therefore undercut earlier US-led efforts to persuade states to forego domestic enrichment when developing nuclear energy programmes – it also establishes that such a right, if operative, can be heavily curtailed by the UN Security Council and, if pursued independently, can lead to long periods of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. While future proliferators might well cite the JCPOA as a justification for domestic enrichment, thereby sparking fresh nuclear crises, others can cite the same deal to demand tightened inspections, mutually agreed limits, and the use of coercion to secure these conditions.

One of the greatest concerns about the JCPOA was the effect it might have on Iran’s regional rivals. Israel and Arab nations, particularly Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf monarchies, had been apprehensive and frequently hostile to nuclear diplomacy with Iran (Hokayem and Legrenzi, 2006). They were particularly concerned by the revelation of secret US–Iran back-channel talks in Oman that began in 2013. Middle Eastern thinking is not uniform – Israel compared the deal to the appeasement of Munich, while Saudi Arabia cautiously welcomed it in public – but there is a clear undercurrent of concern.

Those concerns are partly non-proliferation concerns – that this framework agreement won’t turn into a final deal, or that Iran will exploit or even violate a final deal – but they are also, indeed largely, non-nuclear concerns: that Iran will use the fruits of its non-proliferation diplomacy, including both sanctions relief and less tangible gains like regional prestige and US acceptance, to further its regional objectives. Those objectives include support for divisive Shia militias in Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria (on whose side it intervened with larger numbers of troops in autumn 2015), Houthi rebels in Yemen battling a pan-Arab military coalition from March 2015, and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has been implicated in terrorist attacks against Western and Arab interests throughout the world (Kulish and Schmitt, 2012; Levitt, 2013). Sceptics have pointed to Iran’s ballistic missile tests of 2 October 2015, its support for a Russian-backed military offensive in Syria in late 2015 coupled with a rigid stance at the November peace talks, a rocket test in close proximity to a US aircraft carrier on 26 December 2015, and its toleration of the ransacking of Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Tehran on 3 January 2016 as evidence of Iranian aggression.

Critics retort that in the absence of a deal, Iran’s behaviour in these areas would be just as, if not more, active and forceful, and that the consequences of a US–Iran military confrontation would be catastrophic. Such linkage between international security and arms control, such that ostensibly win–win agreements are seen to impinge on broader non-nuclear areas, is nothing new. US–Soviet arms control of the 1970s was interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the accompanying collapse of détente (Zanchetta, 2013, pp. 290–292), much as US–Soviet arms control of the 2010s was disrupted by tensions over Ukraine – more on which below. But this is a reminder that in the Middle East as anywhere else, non-proliferation dynamics are embedded in – and typically subordinate to – broader political dynamics that cannot be ignored.

In light of these Israeli and Arab perceptions, what are their options? Israel enjoys the luxury of around 80 nuclear weapons, deliverable with great precision onto any location in Iran from land, air or sea (Cohen, 2010). Turkey, locked in a proxy war with Iran in Syria, hosts two US air force bases, one of which – Izmir Air Station – includes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Shifts in the global nuclear landscape
• 2 Nuclear weapons in global security
• 3 Nuclear security: transcending the policy objectives of the nuclear non-proliferation regime
• 4 Human security approach in nuclear disarmament: towards a nuclear-free world?
• 5 Non- proliferation through forceful persuasion? American coercive diplomacy on the ‘axis of evil’
• 6 Understanding Israel’s nuclear ambiguity
• 7 China’s nuclear modernisation: the evolution of Chinese nuclear doctrine, strategic ambiguities and implications for US–China relations
• 8 ‘Eating grass’: Pakistani nuclear capabilities, a brief historical background and the danger of proliferation
• 9 South Asia’s emerging military postures and challenges for regional stability
• 10 Concluding remarks
• Index