Nuclear Weapons and International Security

Ramesh Thakur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317609285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume brings together more than three decades of research and writings by Professor Ramesh Thakur on the challenges posed by nuclear weapons.

Following an introduction to the current nuclear state of play, the book addresses the challenge of nuclear weapons in three parts. Part I describes the scholar-practitioner interface in trying to come to grips with this challenge, the main policy impact on security strategy, and the various future nuclear scenarios. Part II addresses regional nuclear challenges from the South Pacific to East, South and West Asia and thereby highlights serious deficiencies in the normative architecture of the nuclear arms control and disarmament regime. In the third and final part, the chapters discuss regional nuclear-weapon-free zones, NPT anomalies (and their implications for the future of the nuclear arms control regime) and, finally, assess the global governance architecture of nuclear security in light of the three Nuclear Security Summits between 2010 and 2014. The concluding chapter argues for moving towards a world of progressively reduced nuclear weapons in numbers, reduced salience of nuclear weapons in national security doctrines and deployments, and, ultimately, a denuclearized world.

This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, global governance, international organisations, diplomacy and security studies.

1 Introduction The challenge of nuclear weapons

DOI: 10.4324/9781315749488-1

‘The threat of global nuclear war has become remote, but the risk of nuclear war has increased. Today’s most immediate and extreme danger remains nuclear terrorism …. Today’s other pressing threat is nuclear proliferation’.

– Report on Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States, 12 June 2013¹

‘We may no longer live in fear of global annihilation, but so long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe’.

– US President Barack Obama, Berlin, 19 June 2013²

In 1962, with America trapped in an expanding arms race with the Soviet Union, US President John F. Kennedy described the bomb as having turned the world into a prison in which humanity awaits its execution and called for progress on nuclear disarmament.³ In 2014, there were still more than 16,000 nuclear warheads distributed among nine nuclear-armed states, 94 percent of them in Russian and US arsenals. There are many fewer nuclear weapons today than during the Cold War, and the risk of a deliberate nuclear war being started between the United States and Russia may well be negligible. Yet, paradoxically, the overall risks of nuclear war have grown – as more countries in more unstable regions have acquired these deadly weapons, terrorists continue to seek them, and as command-and-control systems in even the most sophisticated nuclear-armed states remain vulnerable to human error, system malfunction and, increasingly, cyber attack. Even a limited regional nuclear war could have catastrophic global consequences.

While the need for total nuclear disarmament is more urgent than ever, its achievement remains little or no closer, both among the nuclear weapons states (NWS) as defined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – and the other four nuclear-armed states outside the NPT: India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. There has been dramatic progress in reducing the overall US and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles and the number of deployed strategic weapons and some progress in improving transparency among some NWS. But there has been only minimal progress in shifting nuclear doctrine and none in taking weapons off high-alert launch status. Issues of ballistic missile defence and conventional arms imbalances continue seriously to inhibit further disarmament movement.⁴ Moreover, the cause of nuclear disarmament has gradually lost civil society traction and eased serious political pressure on governments.

The net result is that the nuclear arms control regime centred on the 1968 NPT is under challenge on many fronts. In some quarters of the international community of states and civil society, there is exasperation at the failure of an accelerated timetable of nuclear disarmament by the five NPT-licit NWS (the N5). In western circles, there are worries about some non-nuclear signatories cheating on their NPT obligations, especially North Korea and Iran. The 2008 India–US civil nuclear cooperation deal split analysts on whether it would mark an advance on or a setback to the nonproliferation agenda. Almost everyone remains concerned about the potential of terrorists acquiring and using nuclear weapons and also about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in the midst of grave political crises and turmoil.⁵

In recent times, on the one hand, there was fresh interest in the longstanding goal of nuclear abolition by a surprising coalition of heavyweights from the US strategic community who have published a series of influential articles in The Wall Street Journal (2007–13).⁶ As Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal tell us, ‘this vision of a world free of nuclear weapons … has been endorsed by no less than two-thirds of all living former secretaries of state, former secretaries of defence, and former national security advisers’.⁷ On the other side, a group of former NATO generals issued their own clarion call for a commitment to the first-use of nuclear weapons by the West in order to prevent undesirable actors from acquiring them and threatening their use.⁸

This chapter proceeds as follows. First I will provide a very brief historical sketch of the growing interest in arms control. Then I will describe the current state of the nuclear arsenals and doctrines of the nine nuclear-armed states in alphabetical order. Third, I will briefly discuss the possible renaissance in nuclear power. In the final part, I will outline the agenda for action adopted by the NPT Review Conference in 2010 and recommended by the last authoritative blue ribbon international commission in 2009.

Arms control

Other P5 countries (the UN Security Council’s five permanent members who happen to be the five NPT NWS) were quick to join the United States in the exclusive nuclear club (Table 1.1). The global stockpile of nuclear weapons climbed steeply until 1986 but has been falling steadily since then (Table 1.2). Along with an interest in the normative framework for going to war and then regulating the conduct of belligerents engaged in hostilities, analysts and policymakers have long been interested in regulating the tools and weapons of warfare as a means of limiting the death and injury toll of armed conflicts, as well as lessening the temptation to go to war because of the ready availability of an abundant supply of weaponry. As an old saying has it, to him who has a hammer, the world looks like a nail. At the same time, however, states believed that to protect themselves from becoming the victims of the use of force by others, they had to be adequately armed themselves: ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’ is an even more common mantra. This increased the chances of defeat for any hostile state contemplating aggression and, even if victorious, raised the cost of victory.

Table 1.1 The world's nuclear forces, 2010–2014

	First test	2010	201	2012	2013	2014
						Deployed^*	Other	Total
US	1945	9600	8500	850080	7700	1920	5380	7300
Russia	1949	12000	12000	008000	8500	1600	6400	8000
UK	1952	225	225	225	225	160	65	225
France	1960	300	300	300	300	290	10	300
China	1964	240	240	240	250		250	250
Israel		80	80	80	80		80	80
India	1974	60–80	80–100	80–100	90–110		80–10	90–110
Pakistan	1998	70–90	90–110	90–110	100–120		100–120	100–120
North Korea	2006						6–8	6–8
Totals		22,595	20,535	19,035	17,245	3,970	12,402	16,372

Source: ‘Nuclear forces reduced while modernization continue, says SIPRI’, SIPRI Press Release, 16 June 2014; http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_2014. *‘Deployed’ means warheads placed on missiles or located on bases with operational forces

Table 1.2 Number of nuclear warheads in the inventory of the five NWS, 1945–2014

Year	US	USSR/Russia	Britain	France	China	Total
1945	6	0	0	0	0	6
1950	369	5	0	0	0	374
1955	3 057	200	10	0	0	3,267
1960	20,434	1,605	30	0	0	22,069
1965	31,982	6,129	310	32	5	38,458
1970	26,662	11,643	280	36	75	38,696
1975	27,826	19,055	350	188	185	47,604
1980	24,304	30,062	350	250	280	55,246
1986^*	24,401	45,000	300	355	425	70,481
1990	21,004	37,000	300	505	430	59,239
1995	12,144	27,000	300	500	400	40,344
2000	10,577	21,000	185	470	400	32,632
2005	10.295	17,000	200	350	400	28,245
2010	8,500	11,000	225	300	240	20,265
2014	7,300	8,000	225	300	250	16,075

Sources: Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, ‘Nuclear Notebook’, Bulletin of Atomic Sciences 62:4 (July-August 2006), 64–67, using data from the Natural Resources Defense Council; 2010: Shannon N. Kile, Vitaly Fedchenko, Bharath Gopalaswamy and Hans M. Kristensen, “World Nuclear Forces”, SIPRI Yearbook 2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Table 7.1, 320; ‘Nuclear forces reduced while modernization continue, says SIPRI’, SIPRI Press Release, 16June 2014; http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_2014. Altogether, more than 128,000 nuclear warheads are estimated to have been built since 1945, with the US and USSR/Russia accounting for 55 and 43 percent of them, respectively. *Peak Year Globally

The failed Hague Peace Conference (May–July 1899) was followed by the call in the League of Nations Covenant (Article 8) for ‘the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations’. Reflecting the conventional wisdom on the role of pacifism in the unchecked rise of Fascism, there was a relative downgrading in importance of arms control and disarmament from the League Covenant to the UN Charter (Article 26). Just weeks after it was signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945, the United States conducted the world’s first nuclear test at the Alamagordo Air Bas...