Nuclear Disarmament

A Critical Assessment

Bård Nikolas Vik Steen, Olav Njølstad, Bård Nikolas Vik Steen, Olav Njølstad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429649356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume, Nuclear Disarmament, provides a comprehensive overview of nuclear disarmament and a critical assessment of the way forward.

Comprising essays by leading scholars on nuclear disarmament, the book highlights arguments in favour and against a world without nuclear weapons (global zero). In doing so, it proposes a new baseline from which an everchanging nuclear arms control and disarmament agenda can be assessed. Numerous paths to nuclear disarmament have been proposed and scrutinized, and with an increasing number of countries signing off on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, it is vital to ask which path is the most likely and realistic to succeed. Thechapters here also address the rapid pace of technological, political and climatic developments, in relation to nuclear disarmament, and how they add to the complexity of the issue. Taking care to unite the different tribes in the debate, this book provides a community of dissent at a time when academic tribalism all too often prevents genuine debates from taking place.

This book will be ofinterest to students of nuclear proliferation, arms control, security studies and International Relations.

PART I

Is ‘old school’ nuclear disarmament dead?

1

Is ‘old school’ nuclear disarmament dead?

Lawrence Freedman

If ‘old school’ nuclear disarmament is not dead, this is in part because of the efforts of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. In 2017, they awarded the prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The citation praised its work for drawing ‘attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons’. In her lecture accepting the award, Beatrice Fihn used familiar language to describe the choice facing humankind: ‘Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?’ She noted that those who possess the weapons admit that their real utility ‘is in their ability to provoke fear. When they refer to their “deterrent” effect, proponents of nuclear weapons are celebrating fear as a weapon of war.’¹ This was the eighth Peace Prize to be won by an individual or group associated with nuclear disarmament.²

One of the first was the British politician and activist Philip Noel-Baker. His position on disarmament had been forged prior to the nuclear age. He had been involved in the League of Nations and in the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference. He had not given up on his old pre-nuclear aspirations, and so was even more ambitious than ICAN. ‘[I]t makes no sense to talk about disarming,’ he asserted in 1959, ‘unless you believe that war, all war, can be abolished.’ What he shared with ICAN was a belief that the problem was one of irrationality and lack of will. War was a terrible way to settle disputes: There were far better forms of dispute settlement, and they now needed to be applied. ‘Unless there is an iron resolution to make it the supreme object of international policy and to realize it now,’ he insisted, ‘I believe all talks about disarmament will fail.’ With this iron will, then, there could be success.³

The difference between disaster and harmony therefore lay in the application of reason. ‘Bertie’, observed the economist John Maynard Keynes talking about the philosopher and pacifist, Bertrand Russell,

sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simply and easy since all we had to do was carry them on rationally. A discussion of practical affairs on these lines was really very boring.⁴

This habit of mind continues. When insisting that the choice was binary and between insanity and sanity, Fihn described ICAN as representing ‘the only rational choice’. Meanwhile the ‘proponents of nuclear weapons’ appear not as people who might have a valid approach to avoiding nuclear war, but essentially evil: ‘puffing their chests by declaring their preparedness to exterminate, in a flash, countless thousands of human lives’.⁵

Was it only evil at worst or impoverished thinking at best that led governments to conclude early on in the nuclear age that the rational course was to hold on to their weapons? The claim that the only real choice was between extermination and disarmament was made right at the start of the nuclear age – ‘One World or None’.⁶ But as the Cold War created its own imperatives, issues of trust and a fear of cheating came to the fore. Gradually both governments and commentators became impressed by the argument that mutual fear was keeping the peace. This argument was set out trenchantly by Hedley Bull, Noel-Baker’s former research assistant, who explained why states insisted on keeping control over their armaments, which were a consequence of and not a cause of political tension. For Bull, war between the nuclear powers was anachronistic precisely because of these terrible armaments. Thus, a ‘function of nuclear armaments in the international system at the present time is to limit the incidence of war’. This is why it was quite rational to refuse to conclude a ‘general and comprehensive disarmament agreement’.⁷

This was not an argument ever likely to be recognized by a Nobel Peace Prize, for the committee takes for granted the relationship between disarmament and peace. Recognition did come, however, when the Prize for Economics was awarded to Thomas Schelling. His citation made an explicit reference to Schelling’s contribution to deterrence theory. His work had ‘great relevance for conflict resolution and efforts to avoid war’. In his acceptance lecture, Schelling opened by celebrating a ‘stunning achievement’ – sixty years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki without nuclear weapons being used in anger. In explaining this, he paid tribute less to the crude fear of nuclear retaliation and more to the ‘taboo’, to a sense that nuclear weapons were in their destructiveness a ‘breed apart’ that imposed a special inhibition when it came to contemplating their use.⁸

And there we have the core issue. On the one hand, a conviction that possession of nuclear weapons is tantamount to their use and therefore both wicked and dangerous; on the other, an appreciation of the welcome fact that the consequences of possession and even preparations have – thus far – been surprisingly benign. On the first view, disarmament is essential to the challenge of eliminating war; on the second, it is largely beside the point.

It was the latter view that held most sway among governments, apart from a brief but futile effort to abort a nuclear arms race before it had a chance to get started in the late 1940s. Once the arms race had begun, attempts to reverse it were tentative and opportunistic at best. The greatest effort went into keeping to the fore the idea that these weapons were so dreadful that they must remain a breed apart and stay unavailable for a conflict. There were a few acts of true nuclear disarmament (the 1987 INF (Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, for example) but they were rare and partial. There were more moments when political leaders adopted the language of disarmament and supported claims made in its name about how in the long run they intended to make everyone safer. But this was in the Augustinian spirit of ‘Lord, make me pure, but not yet.’ In the short term, they found it more prudent to rely on deterrence or else to attempt to address the sources of conflict directly through diplomatic means.

One of the curiosities of nuclear disarmament advocacy is that, like the nuclear deterrence advocacy, it acquired a self-contained quality, as if it can be understood in its own tight little framework, disconnected from a wider context. The relationships between nuclear arsenals create conditions that, according to this perspective, either reinforce deterrence or demand disarmament. This perhaps is why disarmers put so much effort in trying to disprove the theory of deterrence, and why deterrers are so dismissive of disarmament. The two relationships clearly interact with each other. The disarmers see the deterrers making demands for more and different types of weapons. As Charles Glaser notes in this volume, the deterrers worry that as force levels are reduced, the system will become less stable.⁹ The argument is over speculative risks. The deterrers point to decades of non-use as a source of comfort but while the weapons remain, they cannot prove that this achievement can be sustained. Equally, the disarmers may have cried wolf too often. They have been predicting a ‘sooner or later’ disaster for over seven decades. But one day, they may be right.

The evaluation of risk depends on developments in the wider context. Both deterrence and disarmament may become easier if political tensions ease. The degree of risk is influenced by all sorts of factors, from the numbers and quality of conventional forces, to the issues under dispute, to the cohesion of alliances. In addition, disarmament/arms control measures, however idealist in aspiration, are realist when negotiated. How they turn out will reflect considerations of power and interest. A failure to appreciate this leads not only to disappointment at the outcome of negotiations but also to a failure to understand how measures that are couched in the language of disarmament and peace can nonetheless seem one-sided and unfair to those whose concerns have been disregarded.

Disarmament: a means to an end

While the simple answer to the question of whether ‘old school’ nuclear disarmament is dead is that it was never very alive, except in the rhetoric of its advocates, the more complex answer is that there never was a single ‘school’ of disarmament, nuclear or otherwise. Although ‘disarmament’ suggests quite a specific approach, requiring removing weapons from inventories until eventually there are none left, in practice, it has historically covered a range of different activities that often have little to do with actual removals. This is as true of nuclear disarmament as it was of the disarmament of an earlier era, especially if one includes ‘arms control’.

At issue is not the numbers of weapon but the prospect of war.¹⁰ Disarmament is a means to an end, best considered not as a sole means to a more peaceful world but as part of a package of measures intended to render war unnecessary when settling quarrels between states as well as almost impossible to conduct. In many schemes for global peace, as they were developed from the late eighteenth century onwards, disarmament played a secondary role to new institutional arrangements. Kant’s prerequisites for ‘Perpetual Peace’ of 1795 involved the abolition of standing armies, but there was no suggestion that this could be sufficient. Ideas for new arrangements to ensure peace went up to and included world government, but less ambitiously courts and commissions to investigate and arbitrate disputes over boundaries and minority rights. It was the package that gave disarmament its role and credibility. Unless states came together as part of a wider project, how could there be confidence that disarmament would be followed exactly as intended by all parties? Without everybody signing up to the whole package, then war was always a possibility. In the event of war, states feared defeat because of past naïveté, by agreeing to measures supposedly for the common good that affected them disproportionately or granted their enemies opportunities to cheat.

The history of disarmament is bound up with the ebb and flow of Great Power relationships and has tended to reinforce trends rather than create them. If the political conditions were favourable, negotiations might be successful, but any agreements could soon unravel if conditions then deteriorated. The relationship between negotiations and avoidance of war was therefore complex. The simplest idea was that disarmament would eventually close off the means of waging war so that it could not occur even if there were willing belligerents. In practice, however, the objective of negotiations was often not so much to make wars less likely as to render them less harmful. Proposals were about containing rather than eliminating war by smoothing its rougher edges and limiting the hurt it might cause.

There was an obvious tension between what was required to prevent wars from occurring and what might be done to mitigate their effects, should they occur. One view, which gained greater credibility in the nuclear age with the focus on deterrence, was that anything that made war more acceptable made it more likely. Another view was that if war was going to happen anyway, then everything should be done to reduce the pain and suffering. Either way, the promise of disarmament always raced ahead of actual achievement. The saloon-bar philosopher Martin Dooley, the creation of the American humourist, Finley Peter Dunne, offered a commentary on the Hague Peace Conference of 1907. Dooley explained how the Tsar had called a meeting of ‘the Powers’ in Holland to devote their time ‘to making war impossible in the future’. When there was an early call, however, for ‘the Powers’ to agree to immediate disarmament, they all opposed it. The motion was only supported by ‘the Weaknesses’. In a satire demonstrating the self-serving nature of the negotiations, he describes the ‘excitement’ created by the ‘delegate from the cannibal islands who proposed that prisoners-of-war be eaten’.

The German delegate thought that this was carrying a special gift of one power too far. It would give the cannibal islands a distinct advantage in case of war, as European soldiers were accustomed to horses. The English delegate said that while much could be said against a practice which personally seemed to him rather unsportsmanlike, still he felt he must reserve the right of any cannibal allies of Britannia to go as far as they liked.

The most cutting comment of all was that the ‘larger question’ that concerned the whole conference was ‘how future wars should be conducted in the best interests of peace’.¹¹

This captured not only the tension between elimination of war and its mitigation, but also a common complaint directed against the Hague Conferences. Although initially hailed as a breakthrough for peace, they had little to say on disarmament. When he called the first conference in 1899, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia wanted to deal with the cost and danger posed by ‘terrible engines of destruction’, but the delegates found it difficult to agree to measures to deal with specific engines. As Mr Dooley’s example of the cannibals illustrated, different military capabilities tended to suit one power, if not others. It also threw into relief the problems pacifists faced when assessing international agreements. If all weapons were bad, how could one set be singled out for special treatment while others were left untouched? And if there were advantages to be gained by cheating, how was compliance to be enforced? Enforcement would require putting together a war-making capability to get the transgressor into line.¹² In the end, the conferences were about containing war’s inherent violence in order to sustain it as a political institution. The right of a sovereign state to declare war was to be protected. The humanitarian effort that might have been directed against the institution of war instead concentrated on limiting its effects.¹³

The Hague process therefore largely reflected the anxiety generated by the prospect of warfare burgeoning out of the categories in which it had previously been contained. For war to be retained as a political instrument, then somehow it had to be kept tolerable for civilized societies. It already had a clear legal framework – declarations were necessary to start wars so that otherwise criminal and barbaric behaviour could be encouraged rather than proscribed. Then treaties were needed to end wars so that violent behaviour could once again be denounced as criminal. While the war was underway, belligerents had to be kept separate from neutrals, combatants from non-combatants, and means of warfare from those of commerce. There was plenty of evidence by the time of the First World War (not least from colonial wars but also the American Civil War) showing how difficult this was going to be. In particular, civilians were moving from being seen as unintended victims of a clash of armies into potential targets. With the move from ‘cabinet wars’ decided by governments for matters of state to people’s wars, encour...