There are many reasons why nuclear weapons have been retained and acquired by sovereign states. It is an instructive insight into the workings of the war system at the core of the state-centric world order that the first five nuclear weapons states happened to be the five states given preeminent status in the United Nations, having been made permanent members of the Security Council with a right of veto after the end of the Second World War. Because of the devastating potentialities of nuclear weaponry to destroy the human future, there was from the start of the nuclear age a public outcry against their retention and widespread revulsion about dropping atomic bombs on densely populated Japanese cities. This dialectic between hard-power maximisation and public canons of sensitivity to state-sanctioned atrocity has been evident ever since 1945. The outcome has been the retention and development of the weaponry with related efforts to limit access to the extent possible (the ethos of nonproliferation) and vague affirmations of a commitment to seek nuclear disarmament as a matter of policy and even law. This asymmetry of goals has given us the situation pertaining to the weaponry that haunts the future of humanity. It is epitomised by the geopolitical energies devoted to implementing the nonproliferation provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970, including 190 states. And as evidenced by making the feared apprehension of future acquisition a casus belli in Iraq (2003) and with respect to Iran, hopefully a second nonproliferation war being averted by Iran's willingness to limit the country's nuclear programme in such a way as to minimise any prospect of acquiring a nuclear bomb. In contrast, the nuclear disarmament provision, Article VI of the NPT, is treated by the nuclear weapons states as pure window dressing, having the outward appearance of being a bargain reached between nuclear and nonnuclear weapons states, but in reality a commitment by the latter to forego the weaponry in exchange for an empty promise that has been discredited by the absence of credible efforts at implementation over a period of almost half a century. Part of this reality is the unwillingness of the nonnuclear states to raise their voices in concerted opposition to the one-sided implementation of the NPT, exhibiting their reality as states without geopolitical leverage. The liberal version of this deceptive Faustian bargain is the claim that the NPT and nuclear disarmament are complementary to one another and should be linked in thought and action. The statist reasoning that offers a rationale for this stresses the desirability of limiting the number of nuclear weapons states while efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament move forward. Among the world's most astute commentators on nuclear weapons policy is Ramesh Thakur, who heads the secretariat on the Asia Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. In a recent article in The Japan Times entitled “Link Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Efforts” that appeared on 12 August, Thakur tells us: “There is an inalienable and symbiotic link between nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.” He regards “the key challenge … as being how to protect the political gains and security benefits of the NPT, while also working around it to impart momentum into the disarmament process leading to the total abolition of all nuclear weapons.” From this perspective, Thakur laments the failures of the nuclear weapons states to embrace this linkage in a credible manner and worries that nonnuclear states are threatening to disrupt the benevolent NPT regime that he credits with greatly restricting the number of states possessing the bomb and helping avoid any recourse to the weaponry over the 68 years that have elapsed since Nagasaki. “Globally, more and more countries are coming around to the conclusion that the NPT is being used cynically by the nuclear powers not to advance but to frustrate disarmament,” he says. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for the nonnuclear governments to reach this conclusion, or at least to acknowledge their disaffection in a public space. The mind game played so well by the nuclear weapons states, above all the United States, rests on the proposition that the main threat posed by the existence and possession of the weaponry is its spread to additional states, not the weaponry itself and certainly not the nuclear weapons states themselves. This inversion of the real priorities has shifted the policy focus away from disarmament for decades and put the spotlight on proliferation dangers where it doesn't belong, Iran being the current preoccupation resulting from this way of thinking. The geopolitically discriminatory nature of this mind game is further revealed by the treatment of Israel, what Thakur calls “the global double standards” that are “reinforced by regional hypocrisy, in which all sides have stayed studiously silent on Israel's bombs.”
KEEPING THE BOMB: My disagreement with Thakur rests on his central assertion of linkage. In my view, the NPT regime has been posited for its own sake (operationalising the sensible global consensus that the fewer nuclear weapons states, the better) but even more robustly, and here is the unacknowledged rub, as a long-term alternative to nuclear disarmament. In other words, while it is theoretically possible that the NPT regime could have been established as a holding operation to give time for a nuclear disarmament process to be negotiated and acted upon, it has been obvious from an early stage that the government bureaucracies of the leading nuclear powers have had no intention of accepting an arrangement that would deprive them of the bomb. What the Faustian bargain imposed was the false pretension that nuclear disarmament was integral to the policy agenda of the nuclear weapons states. From time to time political leaders, usually with sincerity, express their commitment to nuclear disarmament. At various times, several American presidents, including even Ronald Reagan, have affirmed their dedication to such a nuclear-free future, most recently Barack Obama in his Prague speech in 2009, but after a flourish of attention, nothing happens. Understanding why nothing happens is the real challenge facing the global disarmament movement. It is here that attention should be given to the ideologies of realist geopolitics that shape the worldview of the policy elites that control the formation of government policies and the supportive self-interested bureaucracies that are deeply entrenched in the media, think tanks, weapons labs, and the private sector, the phenomenon US President Eisenhower flagged as “the military-industrial-complex” in his 1961 Farewell Address. It is these ideological and structural factors that explain why nothing happens and is never allowed to happen. What should have been treated as a startling confirmation of this disheartening assessment occurred when four former top US government officials with impeccable hard-power, realist, credentials decided a couple of years ago that the only way to uphold US security dominance in the future was to abolish nuclear weapons. Even their eminence did not prevent their hard-power arguments for nuclear disarmament from being shunted to one side by the US nuclear weapons establishment (George P Shultz, William J Perry, Henry A Kissinger and Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, 4 January 2007, and Shultz et al., “Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation,” Wall Street Journal, 7 March 2011). Winning the mind game is a process that needs periodic diversions from the actuality of the global apartheid approach to nuclear weaponry that has never been seriously challenged but is deeply antithetical to the Western-professed repudiation of genocidal tactics and ethos. When fears mounted of a breakdown in the bipolar standoff during the Cold War there did take place a popular mobilisation of opposition to nuclearism. The anti-nuclear movement reached peaks in Europe after the scares of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and in response to some of the weapons deployment decisions by NATO. The main ground of anti-nuclear opposition was fear, although the most articulate leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the UK historian E P Thompson, expressed antipathy to nuclear weapons and doctrine on essentially ethical grounds. Thompson argued on the basis of an illuminating analysis that the culture that embraced the then-prevailing policies of mutual deterrence was already an “active accomplice of Satan” by its announced willingness to annihilate tens of millions of innocent people should its will to survive as a state be tested by an unacceptable enemy provocation. It is indicative that the governments of the nuclear weapons states, and here most notably again the United States was most adamant, were never unequivocally willing to commit themselves to no-first-use policies, even in relation to nonnuclear adversaries. In other words, nuclear weapons were treated as instrumental to foreign policy contingencies, and not tainted with illegitimacy based on the supposed nuclear taboo. Nonproliferation was the most brilliant of all the diversions from the transparent acknowledgement that, whatever rhetoric was used to the contrary, the lead states never accepted nuclear disarmament as a genuine goal of their foreign policy, quite the contrary. All moves to manage the arms race, including reductions in the size of nuclear arsenals and arrangements about communications during times of crisis, were also designed to reduce public fears of nuclear war and thereby weaken anti-nuclear movements, first through the message that steps were being taken to minimise risks of an unintended or accidental nuclear war, and second that these steps were steps on a path leading to eventual nuclear disarmament. This double-coded message provided the policy rationale for arms control. Militarist contributors to this process raised their doubts about whether risks were in fact being reduced if military options were being constrained by arms control measures. But it was the second element in the arms control approach that enjoyed tacit and sometimes explicit bipartisan support in the United States where this kind of debate mainly took place. The entire spectrum of policy-making elites agreed that the enactment of nuclear disarmament was both unrealistic and dangerous, and if a visionary president allowed his moral enthusiasm to get the better of him the backlash would be swift and decisive, as even Reagan found out after informally agreeing with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at their Reykjavik Summit in 1986 on a treaty framework that was premised on getting to zero nuclear weapons. In reaction, even liberal Democrats in the US political establishment chided Reagan for being “naïve and insufficiently informed” and he was blamed for mindlessly stepping across the invisible but rigorously enforced red line that separates managerial arms control from transformational nuclear disarmament. The lesson was learned, as the next presidential administration, headed by President George H W Bush, adopted as a cautionary internal slogan: “No more Reykjaviks.” The “no” of the American establishment to nuclear disarmament could not have been clearer, nor could the belligerent “yes” to upholding by war if necessary the NPT regime. With such an understanding, my disagreement with Ramesh Thakur becomes clear and fundamental, and to make it unmistakable I would conclude by saying that the time is now ripe for the total de-linkage of nonproliferation from disarmament with respect to nuclear weapons policy. Without such de-linkage, false consciousness and confusion are unavoidable. It is time to generate populist impatience with the refusal of decades by the government establishment to act on the basis of reason, ethics and prudence: this requires the adoption of policies truly committed to the total abolition of nuclear weaponry in a period of not more than seven years.
AFTERWORD: I have been preoccupied for many years with the multiple challenges posed by nuclear weapons, initially from the perspective of international law and morality, later with regard to prudence diplomacy and political survival in international relations, and in all instances with an eye favouring deep denuclearisation. This is associated in my mind with an abiding abhorrence of the use of atomic bombs against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II and with the avoidance of any future use of nuclear weaponry or even threatened use. The annual observance of these terrible events encourages reflection and commentary on this darkest of legacies. Zero nuclear weapons is the unconditional goal that I affirm, achieved in a manner that creates as much public confidence as possible that the eliminations of weaponry and enriched uranium stockpiles are being faithfully carried out. In this spirit, I want to call attention to a notable volume on the continuing menace posed by nuclear weapons that has just been published in the US under the editorship of Geoffrey Darnton bearing the title Nuclear Weapons and International Law. The book contains the entire text of the judgement issued by the London Nuclear Warfare Tribunal (1985), a civil society initiative presided over by four judges, three of whom were Nobel Prize winners, the great dissenting opinion of C G Weeramantry in the Advisory Opinion on the Legality of Nuclear Weapons issued in 1996 by the International Court of Justice, and other documents and texts discussing the continuing imperative of nuclear disarmament. I recommend the book highly to all those who seek a broad understanding of why the citizen pilgrims of the world should unite in an urgent effort to create a climate of public awareness that pushes governments to make a genuine effort to fulfil by way of a practical disarmament process the often-articulated and affirmed vision of a world without nuclear weaponry. What is crucial is to shift the discourse from affirming the elimination of nuclear weaponry as an ultimate goal to the adoption of nuclear disarmament as a programmatic goal of practical politics, especially in the nine nuclear weapons states. Whether this entails a simultaneous partial disarmament of conventional weaponry by some states, especially the United States, is a further issue to consider. At Darnton's invitation, David Krieger, president of the US Nuclear Age Foundation (NAPF), and I contributed a jointly authored foreword to the volume, as well as a dialogue on nuclear weapons and international law. Krieger, a lifelong advocate of a zero nuclear world, has devoted his professional life to the attainment of this goal, travelling around the globe to reach diverse audiences and take part in a variety of NGO anti-nuclear efforts. The NAPF heads a coalition of civil society groups that support the historic Marshall Islands legal initiative, currently under consideration in the International Court of Justice and in American federal courts, that demands fulfilment of the nuclear disarmament provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The writer is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and a research fellow at the Orfalea Centre of Global Studies. He is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
