Scientific findings for lowering the planet’s rising temperatures are in abundance; research into ending the existential risk from nuclear weapons is scarce—and policymakers seldom raise alternatives to nuclear deterrence.
Against a background of renewed nuclear tensions, two separate international studies examine steps towards bringing about the demise of nuclear weapons and the importance of recalibrating security thinking away from belief in their relevance.
Their analysis is of relevance to Canada as it grapples with the uncertain consequences of U.S. threats to withdraw the ‘nuclear umbrella,’ and has echoes of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s “strategy of suffocation” to end the arms race in 1978.
In 1986 the world came close to abolishing nuclear weapons at the Reykjavik summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, leaders of the Soviet Union and U.S., whose legacy was major arms control agreements.
But current weakening of nuclear restraints threatens a renewed arms race. U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambiguous threat to Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight” and Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats in the Ukraine war have fanned nuclear angst three decades after the end of the Cold War left the impression nuclear dangers had been interred with it.
Planners tend to view contemporary nuclear risks through the prism of the 1950s and 1960s, says Nick Ritchie, a professor of international security at York University in the UK, part of a research program to determine how nuclear ‘abolition or relinquishment’ can be achieved.
The investigation, led by the Nuclear Knowledge Program at Sciences Po, a public research university in Paris, is examining the conditions under which nuclear-armed states would most likely give up their weapons.
The lack of urgency regarding nuclear disarmament is illustrated by the absence of study it receives, the investigators point out. Research is hamstrung by the “relative scarcity of direct evidence of nuclear disarmament” to which specialists can turn.
The importance of the project stems from the fact that “we live in a different world from the Cold War and nuclear weapons aren’t going to provide stability,” says Ritchie.
Separately, a policy paper, the conclusion of a two-year project coordinated by the London School of Economics Non-Nuclear Deterrence Project, draws the same conclusion: it urges a shift in security thinking away from nuclear deterrence, while warning against a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to current tensions.
The paper, produced by the Network for Effective Security, a group of scholars and practitioners from across Europe and North America including the former head of Britain’s Royal Marines, declares, “democratic resilience offers a safer, more effective path to securing Europe and defending democratic values than nuclear deterrence.”
“In response to Russia’s war against Ukraine and growing uncertainty about the U.S. commitment to European security, European countries have agreed to increase defence spending and are discussing the possibility of a European nuclear deterrent,” the paper says.
“There is, however, very little public discussion about the nature of current threats and about the most appropriate way to counter them. There is a risk that decisions being taken now may mis-frame the threat, with long-term dangerous implications for the future.”
Despite the widespread perception among policymakers that nuclear weapons are irreplaceable and alternatives unrealistic, growing opposition to the war with Iran—waged on dubious claims about that country’s nuclear activities—offers context for changing the narrative. While the war demonstrates the limits of military intervention and may reshape the global order, it offers no reassurance about the use of nuclear weapons and highlights the strain the global nuclear non-proliferation regime is under.
Whether nuclear arms control has reached an inflection point may become clearer from the outcome of the five yearly review (April 27 – May 22) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the global bargain attributed with curbing the spread of nuclear weapons. If its 191 member states cannot reach agreement, says Izumi Nakamitsu head of the UN’s disarmament office, it risks being ‘hollowed out;’ UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned the treaty is ‘eroding.’
A bookend to current discussion about nuclear weapons is provided by a new history examining the roles of experts who established the architecture of arms control in the Cold War. Benjamin Wilson’s ‘Strange Stability’ publication catalogues how disarmament was rejected in favor of the continued modernisation of weapons by strategists and science advisors, many in the pay of the US military industrial complex, in pursuit of so-called strategic stability.
“Strategic modernisation is not a failure of arms control. It is an accomplishment of arms control’s most important Cold War success: the intellectual marginalization and political defeat of disarmament,” Wilson writes. Tellingly, some estimates put the final bill for the 30-year modernisation of the U.S. nuclear arsenal at three trillion dollars.
Canada appears to have forsworn its own nuclear option after Trump’s threat to deprive the 32 member NATO alliance, of which it is a prominent member, of the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
But 81 years after the first atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the more than 12,000 thermonuclear nuclear weapons in possession of nine countries are more than capable of destroying life on earth, the nuclear Gordian knot becomes tighter bound.
Time to recall an observation of the Cold War by Robert McNamara, the longest serving and reviled U.S. defense secretary who recanted after his support of the Vietnam war and became an opponent of nuclear weapons: “it was luck that prevented nuclear war.”
