Disarmament Diplomacy

Editorial

The Nuclear Conundrum: Security or Terror

Rebecca Johnson

"There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control."
International Court of Justice, July 8, 1996.

Are nuclear bombs a weapon of terror or a security enhancer? In the Cold War days when the doctrine of deterrence relied on the notion of mutual assured destruction, academics spoke of a balance of terror, and argued that the more terrifying the prospect of the use of nuclear weapons the better they worked for deterrence. Since retiring, some of the people who were in charge of Cold War defence policies and nuclear forces, like Robert McNamara and General Lee Butler, have let us know that it wasn't that simple. As General Butler expressed it: "Deterrence was a dialogue between the blind and the deaf, born of an irreconcilable contradiction".

Whether one buys the Cold War logic or not, we no longer live in that strategic environment. What, then, is the role of nuclear weapons now?

Policymakers seem to be in denial about this question, as was strikingly manifested in two meetings I participated in recently. The first was in New York, and was convened to consider weapons of mass destruction and the United Nations (diverse threats and collective responses); the second, two days later, involved a cross section of ambassadors and officials in Geneva, who met to discuss and prepare for the forthcoming meeting of states parties to the NPT.

In New York, where the meeting was attended by Kofi Annan and a host of senior UN diplomats and academics, terrorism was the focus of attention. Here, it was normal to treat nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as terror weapons that pose threats and dangers requiring a universal and collective approach, with a mix of treaty-based and institutional instruments and mechanisms, reinforced with multilateral, regional and national measures and actions. By contrast, at the Geneva meeting, the subtext was of managing the meetings so that the persistent demands for nuclear disarmament (as opposed to the weapon states' persistent failure to comply with their disarmament obligations) would not derail the 2005 Review Conference.

Though the NPT enshrines a clear nuclear disarmament undertaking by the weapon states, in the narrow context of many nuclear weapon related discussions, this obligation is treated as little more than rhetoric - a kind of fiction, or perhaps a misunderstanding. Though they would seldom say so publicly, far too many officials from the nuclear weapon states and, indeed, some of their allies, consider that those who hold the view that nuclear disarmament is a real undertaking that must be pursued in earnest are somewhat naïve, a bit stupid, not living in the real world.

Yet in the real world that is concerned about nuclear proliferation and terrorism, as well as the threats and consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, the pragmatics of real world security are creating pressures for actions that would best be achieved in the context of a prohibition regime - disarmament, in other words. Seen from this angle, it is the outdated ideology of the few nuclear weapon possessors that gets in the way of the most effective approaches for nuclear nonproliferation and security.

The biological and chemical weapons regimes are based on prohibition - on norms and taboos that are nondiscriminatory and universally applied against acquisition and use of these weapons. That is not to say that these regimes are fine as they are. The point is that addressing their weaknesses, as well as dealing with non-state actors and hold-out states, proceeds from a widely accepted prohibition based on revulsion and the rejection of such weapons as barbarous and inhumane - in other words, as terror weapons that no sane or responsible government would nowadays seek to deploy. No-one publicly declares the security value or military utility of biological or chemical weapons these days.

For most people in the world, nuclear weapons are the most barbarous and inhuman of all the terror weapons. They don't just kill; they contaminate and irradiate for generations to come.

The meeting in New York was attended by very senior diplomats and officials from the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China. When discussing terrorism, it is noticeable that few try to assert the security value of their nuclear arsenals. They know better. The biggest nuclear arsenal in the world cannot deter against terrorism. Preventing acquisition is the only sensible security approach; and the only way terrorists can acquire nuclear materials or bombs is through buying or stealing them from those who have them, i.e. states.

Yet nuclear weapons are still not prohibited. Moreover, whenever the question of disarmament is raised, nuclear weapons are protected by some of the most powerful states, who claim they are necessary for security. On the contrary, our ability to deal with proliferation threats arising from the prevalence or acquisition of nuclear weapons or missiles is severely hampered because the weapons are not banned. It's time to give the world the best possible tools to eliminate nuclear threats.

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© 2004 The Acronym Institute.