Sixty Years On: The Quest for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World

Presentation by Dr. Sean Howard
Adjunct Professor of Political Science

Room CE 310, Cape Breton University, Thursday March 24, 2005

The title of this presentation is ‘Sixty Years On: the Quest for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World.’ There is no way I could do justice to such a complex and momentous subject even in a full year’s course, never mind a lunchtime talk. What I do want to do, though, in the next 30 minutes or so, is sketch out some basic points and introduce some major themes for discussion and reflection.

And I want to stress before I start that I do not claim to have any easy answers to the main question before us, namely: is it possible to build a world free of nuclear weapons, or – to put the matter more simply but not, I think, simplistically – can humanity survive the threat it has created, is the fate of the Earth safe in our hands? I believe – and I know that many people hold sincere views to the contrary; views which I’m happy to hear and discuss – but I believe that nuclear disarmament, nuclear abolition, is the only way we can dig ourselves out of this hole, and that to accept the alternative – to try to learn to live with the Bomb as a fact of life – is to dig our own grave. I don’t believe, in fact, that life can live with the Bomb, survive for long in the shadow of its absolute opposite. So I do think it’s simple: we get rid of It, or It gets rid of us. But that doesn’t mean that I think getting there will be simple, or is inevitable, or even probable.

In 1996, the Canberra Commission on Nuclear Weapons – an international panel of distinguished scientific, military and political figures, including former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara – concluded, quote, “the proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.” I agree completely: but this doesn’t make me optimistic that sanity, as I see it, will prevail. Because, in our intensely militarized, polarized and unjust world, the proposition that nuclear weapons will be eliminated before disaster strikes also stretches credibility. I think that if we can imagine an alternative, nuclear-free reality, the scope of the credible, the range of the possible, will expand dramatically: there is, perhaps, still time to save ourselves if we can grasp how little time may be left to act. But the record of the atomic age so far is generally one of missed and squandered opportunities to disarm, to build momentum towards a nuclear-free world, alongside rarely missed opportunities to arm, to invest huge amounts of time, money, energy and skill to build more, bigger, ‘better’ bombs.

Of course, it does depend who is doing the imagining – or, rather, whose imagining counts. For most of the Cold War, because nuclear ‘deterrence’ was considered – by enough powerful people, usually men, in enough states that ‘mattered’ – to be ‘credible’, the nuclear arms race proved possible. When Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, declared in 1985 that a nuclear-free world was achievable within fifteen years, major reductions in nuclear arsenals suddenly became possible. Since the Cold War, nuclear weapons have not only been acquired by more states but have been rehabilitated as an important part of Russia’s ‘status’ as a major power and incorporated into a new US warfighting strategy aiming to eradicate the threat of weapons of mass destruction – in other hands. In a situation where not even non-proliferation seems credible, disarmament is again being presented – by the states that would have to do the most disarming – as ‘impossible.’ A new nuclear ‘future’, in other words, is in the process of being imagined – and realized. Dust is gathering on the report of the Canberra Commission and many other lucid, cogent, realistic disarmament action plans. I say ‘realistic’: but you can’t make real, real-ize, what you haven’t imagined is possible. All realities are the result and combination of paths chosen, paths rejected, and paths missed. And every reality – with one exception – also contains and suggests its own alternatives. The ‘real world’ of the present is also the possible world of the future. All life forms – and political, social and economic structures – contain the potential for their own evolution. The one exception? Nuclear catastrophe, the apocalyptic end-of-evolution which is the dominant, pervasive possibility – the existential ‘futurelessness’ – of our time.

How, then, can we ‘realistically’ place ourselves on the path away from this abyss. The starting point, I am arguing, is imagining the right destination: a nuclear-weapon-free world. As the Canberra Commission says, unless we imagine that nuclear weapons will somehow never be used again, we have to presume that they will be. And this is, in fact, the starting point of the major international agreement drawn up to tackle the nuclear threat: not by managing or dealing with it, not even by reducing it, but by working to eliminate it.

This agreement is the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, to which almost all states on Earth now belong. The title of the accord, non-proliferation treaty, is both accurate and incomplete: accurate, because it prohibits states without nuclear weapons from seeking them; incomplete, because it also requires states with nuclear weapons to get rid of them. Non-proliferation and disarmament are seen in the treaty as two means to the same end: a nuclear-weapon-free world. Thus, the NPT is unusual among international treaties in that it seeks its own obsolescence, aims to be a victim of its own success: its replacement by a permanent successor treaty completely banning the Bomb, in the same way that Conventions already exist banning all biological and chemical weapons. The NPT, we can say, explicitly contains and suggests its own future, an alternative to the reality that made it necessary in the first place. And, because of the stakes involved, the fate of the NPT will help determine the fate of us all: the fate of the Earth itself.

Which is a terrifying thought, is it not? Because how many people know there is an NPT, let alone what it stands for, or that its future and theirs are so entwined? Do we teach children about the NPT – to think about the cloud over their heads, and the need to lift it? What percentage of university students leave the so-called ‘halls of learning’ without learning about the treaty, or, for that matter, anything about the nuclear threat? How many newspaper columns or news hours does it fill in a year, compared to such earthshattering subjects as steroids, Nortel or celebrity crime? Earlier this month, I gave a lecture here on the NPT. The class was not large, around 20 students; but only one thought he had heard of the Treaty – when he was living in the States.

And, as that student added, what he remembered hearing about the NPT bore little or no resemblance to the treaty I’ve just described: the one dedicated to building, through both non-proliferation and disarmament, a nuclear-weapon-free world. Instead, he heard about a phantom treaty, one which doesn’t actually exist but which does sometimes feature on CBC, or the BBC, or CNN. In this fantasy version, the NPT is designed to allow five states – the US, Russia, Britain, France and China – to maintain a neat and tidy ‘nuclear club’, while outlawing the Bomb for everyone else. This would indeed be a dream treaty for these five states; but it would be a nightmare for almost all other states, who would have had to have been drugged, bribed and lobotomized to agree to such a bizarre arrangement. They didn’t: they agreed not to proliferate on condition, and in the expectation, that they would be rewarded with a nuclear-free world, not condemned to live, and face destruction, in a nuclear-armed one.

Three major weaknesses have plagued the NPT throughout its 35-year history. Those weaknesses are currently combining to put acute, and perhaps intolerable, strain on the treaty: and remember without the NPT, there is nothing in international law that either prohibits a state from acquiring nuclear weapons or requires the nuclear-weapon states to engage in what the treaty calls “good faith” negotiations leading to complete nuclear disarmament.

The first of these three weaknesses has been the demonstrable “bad faith” shown by the NPT’s five nuclear-weapon states. Since 1970, these states have never, not for a day, sat down together to even discuss, never mind negotiate, disarmament. With the important exception of the Gorbachev era and its aftermath, when serious disarmament did occur, Washington and Moscow have been committed to an arms control, not a disarmament, process: they have signed agreements regulating and consolidating their nuclear relationship, not bringing it to a close. And Britain, France and China have been extremely happy to be excluded from this process, conveniently blaming their inaction on the comparative ‘smallness’ of their nuclear arsenals compared to the Superpowers’. But as they say in the peace movement, all it takes is one nuclear weapon to ruin your day; and these three countries possess between them hundreds of strategic – high-yield, long-range – weapons each capable of killing millions of people in minutes. In what meaningful moral or existential sense are such arsenals ‘small’? And, in any event, according to the NPT it isn’t the size of your stockpile that matters, it’s what you do with it: and the treaty says, in black on white, that there’s only one thing you can do with it: get rid of it.

The second weakness is strongly connected to this abysmal record of disarmament inaction. From the beginning, a small number of states opted to remain outside the NPT and pursue a nuclear capability. One of these states, Israel, already had nuclear weapons by the late 1960s when the treaty was being negotiated. To include Israel as a sixth official nuclear-weapon state would have led many countries – especially, but not only, in the Middle East – to reject the treaty. Indeed, Arab states, and others, wanted a treaty that would leave the door open for Israel to join as a non-nuclear-weapon state. Faced with this awkward problem, the negotiators came up with an even more awkward solution, naming an arbitrary date – January 1, 1967 – before which you had to have exploded a nuclear device in order to be classified as a nuclear-weapon state. After that date, if you were outside the NPT, you could legally become a state with nuclear weapons, but you could never become another NPT nuclear-weapon state.

Two other states, not yet with the Bomb when the treaty was signed but clearly not far away – India and Pakistan – denounced the NPT identification of five nuclear powers as a sham and a farce, designed to perpetuate rather than eradicate the divide between the nuclear haves and the nuclear have nots. If, however, the nuclear ‘haves’ in the NPT had honoured both the spirit and letter of the treaty by beginning to disarm, then it would have been increasingly hard for India and Pakistan to continue to level this charge of hypocrisy. If the NPT had delivered on its promise of disarmament, it is, I think, inconceivable that India and Pakistan would have done what they finally did in 1998: cross the nuclear threshold by testing and then deploying nuclear weapons, bringing the number of nuclear-weapon states – I’m sorry, states with nuclear weapons – to eight.

Which brings us, briefly, to the third major weakness in the NPT. From the beginning, a sizeable minority of non-nuclear-weapon states – a few dozen countries – made clear that they wanted a form of ‘insurance’ built into the treaty, in the event that it failed to deliver a non-nuclear environment either in their region or globally. In truth, many states didn’t believe that the nuclear-weapon states would disarm, they feared that this refusal would in the long-term inevitably lead to proliferation, and they wanted to be able to respond by proliferating if they felt they ‘had to’. This insurance came in the form of a provision in the treaty encouraging and promising to support the operation of nuclear reactors for ‘peaceful purposes’: mainly, though not exclusively, for the generation of energy. But what happens when you produce nuclear energy? You produce the materials needed to make nuclear weapons: highly-enriched uranium and plutonium, an element that exists nowhere in nature and can only be produced in a reactor.

By taking advantage of this provision, a state can run an ostensibly ‘non-military’ programme that opens the door wide to the Bomb. When the treaty was being negotiated, there were widespread predictions of between 20-40 nuclear-armed nations by 2000. As we have seen, there weren’t: there were 8. But there were over 30 nations operating nuclear reactors: 30+ nations capable of crossing the nuclear threshold within a few years. Indeed, one of these states, North Korea, has almost certainly done just that, announcing its withdrawal from the NPT in January 2003 and since claiming – all too credibly, alas – to have nuclear weapons. North Korea cheated on its NPT commitments long before withdrawing from them. NPT states are required to open up their nuclear reactors to inspection, and to place all the nuclear material they produce under what is known as the ‘safeguards regime’ – operated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – designed to prevent diversion of that material into a weapons programme. North Korea lied to the IAEA about how much material, and even what facilities, it had. Iraq did the same thing in the 1980s, and there are now similar allegations surrounding the Iranian programme. But most states with reactors, while they probably could cheat the inspections system, don’t want or need to: they don’t want to get the Bomb, they want to be able to in a crisis. And, in such a crisis, they could simply withdraw from the treaty and get on with it.

So, to recap these three weaknesses. The first is hypocrisy: the disarmament obligations of the treaty have been consistently ignored. The second is lack of universality: three nuclear-armed states remain stubbornly outside the treaty, and a fourth almost certainly nuclear-armed state has withdrawn from the treaty. And the third is nuclear energy: the treaty’s ironic encouragement and support of the means necessary to proliferate.

Of these three weaknesses, for reasons suggested above, I believe the first is by far the most serious. Progress on disarmament would not only have solved the universality issue by drawing India, Israel and Pakistan into negotiations on a nuclear-weapon-free world, it would have reduced the incentives for states to hedge their bets by building nuclear reactors. With serious disarmament underway, the treaty would not have to be amended or rewritten in order to overcome or compensate for these weaknesses. With no serious disarmament underway, the treaty cannot be significantly improved or strengthened. This, at least, is the view of the great majority of NPT states, a view voiced most passionately and articulately in recent years by a group of seven countries – Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden – known as the ‘New Agenda Coalition.’ The Coalition was formed in June 1998, by coincidence within weeks of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan. The Coalition’s ringing and urgent call for a new nuclear disarmament agenda reads in part as follows:

“[Under the NPT], the vast majority of the membership of the United Nations has entered into legally-binding commitments not to receive, manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons... These undertakings have been made in the context of the correspondingly legally-binding commitments by the nuclear-weapon states to the pursuit of nuclear disarmament. We are deeply concerned at the persistent reluctance of the nuclear-weapon states to approach their Treaty obligations [to bring about] the total elimination of their nuclear weapons. … The international community must not enter the third millennium with the prospect that the maintenance of these weapons will be considered legitimate for the indefinite future, when the present juncture provides a unique opportunity to eradicate and prohibit them for all time.”

NPT member states convene for a Review Conference every five years. At the 2000 Review Conference, the New Agenda Coalition led a successful fight to get the five nuclear-weapon states to sign on to a detailed, 13-point ‘nuclear disarmament action plan.’ Point 6 of the plan refers to an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” Point 9 calls for the “engagement as soon as possible of all the nuclear-weapon states in the process leading to the total elimination of their nuclear weapons.” The rest of the action plan listed specific steps in this direction, including support for a 1996 treaty banning all nuclear tests, deep and irreversible nuclear reductions, taking weapons off ‘hair-trigger alert’ to avoid the possibility of accidental nuclear use, and the preservation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty strictly limiting missile ‘defences’ on the grounds that they only encourage the proliferation of missiles and could spark a new arms race, on Earth and perhaps in space.

The Review Conference ended in May 2000 with a feeling of relief and excitement on the part of the New Agenda Coalition and its many supporters, including Canada, and a feeling of confidence that the nuclear-weapon states had finally received a wake-up call even they could not ignore. Ten years late, but better than never, the post-Cold War era of the nuclear age – potentially and logically the age of transition to a postnuclear era – could, perhaps, finally begin…

Then, in November 2000, there was an election in the United States – and the rest, as they say, is history. At least, as far as the Bush Administration is concerned, the disarmament action plan is now an “historical document” of no relevance or binding effect either legally or politically in the radically changed world of 2005.

And, indeed, a great deal has changed in the last five years: almost all the points in the action plan, for example, have been rejected or contradicted by US policy. I don’t have time to lay out the whole string of broken promises, but here are a few ‘highlights’, or ‘lowlights’. The US has pulled out of the ABM Treaty and begun to deploy an ambitious and unproven missile defence system which may well grow to include space-based weapons in the future. Around 12,000 American and Russian nuclear weapons – deployed each day on land, at sea, and in the air – remain on ‘hair-trigger’ alert, running what former US Democratic Senator Sam Nunn called last year “the irrational risk of an Armageddon of our own making.” The number of deployed warheads is planned to drop to between 2,200-1,700 each side by 2012, under the terms of the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions (SORT) Treaty. This deployment level, however, particularly combined with a permanent ‘hair-trigger’ alert system, still represents a Cold War posture of Mutual Assured Destruction – or disaster waiting to happen. In addition, the SORT Treaty, unlike the previous Strategic Arms Reduction (START) Treaties signed in the 1990s, contains no provisions for verification or inspection, and no requirement to destroy warheads and missiles, and the nuclear material in them, so they can’t be used again.

Russia, at least, together with Britain and France, has ratified the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). President Bush has denounced it – not least because of his Administration’s possible future need to test new nuclear weapons. The US hasn’t conducted a nuclear explosion, at its massive underground test site in the Nevada desert, since 1992. President Clinton was a strong supporter of banning all tests forever, partly because of the environmental damage they cause (even underground), but mainly because he understood their main military purpose: not to check whether existing weapons are still OK, but to see if new designs work. America didn’t need any new weapons, Clinton argued, while US national security would clearly benefit from a treaty making proliferation much more difficult. The current Administration, however, has begun researching two new warheads: a ‘mini-nuke’, with a ‘low’ yield of 5 kilotons (the radioactive equivalent of 5,000 tons of high explosive), one-third the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima; and a high-yield ‘bunker-buster’ – known officially as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) – many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. If ever deployed, the mini-nuke would be designed to wipe out forces armed with weapons of mass destruction – nuclear or, much more likely, chemical or biological weapons – on the battlefield. The RNEP would be designed to destroy weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or command-and-control centres buried underground or otherwise heavily protected from attack. A bunker, for example, located deep inside a mountain is invulnerable to conventional high explosives. If, however, you can vaporize the mountain…

On the non-proliferation side of the equation, too, the last five years have been bleak indeed. I’ve mentioned North Korea’s self-declared withdrawal from the treaty, after years of non-compliance with it. I also referred to the widespread suspicions not only that Iran intends to build the Bomb, but that it has been attempting to enrich uranium and construct new production facilities out of view of international inspectors. The general problem of illegal nuclear activity – a black market in material, equipment and expertise – has been propelled to new prominence by the exposure of an extensive criminal network headed by the weapons scientist A. Q. Khan, known as the ‘father’ of the Pakistani Bomb. The related problem of ‘loose nukes’ – the legacy of poorly-guarded, badly-maintained and in some cases unaccounted-for nuclear material in the former Soviet Union – continues to worsen with time. The spectre of ‘nuclear terrorism’ – involving either a comparatively simple but massively destructive ‘briefcase bomb’, or a radioactive ‘dirty’ bomb spreading poison and panic – has obviously loomed large since the horror of 9/11. And most significantly of all, perhaps, we have seen the tragic fiasco of an international search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq arbitrarily terminated by two nuclear-weapon states, the US and UK, in order to launch an illegal war against a phantom threat.

So: it is to this cheery backdrop that the next NPT Review Conference is due to be held in six weeks time, May 2-27 at the United Nations in New York. The great majority of states, including the US, are in complete agreement over the need to strengthen the IAEA safeguards regime and take other steps to make it harder, politically and practically, for states to cheat on their non-proliferation obligations. It is over the disarmament obligations in the treaty that the Conference is likely to split, and may sink.

The NPT turned 35 on March 5. A distinctly ‘unhappy birthday’ message was delivered by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who noted both that “today, the NPT confronts profound challenges to its effectiveness and credibility,” and that “progress in both disarmament and non-proliferation will be essential” to get the treaty back on track. Neither disarmament nor non-proliferation, Annan added, “should be held hostage to each other.”

The Secretary-General also announced his intention to “recommend priority measures to strengthen the NPT…for consideration by the Review Conference”. These proposals, previewed just four days ago in Annan’s major report on UN Reform entitled In Larger Freedom, are based on the ‘seven steps to raise world security’ unveiled by Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei, the Director-General of the IAEA, on February 2. No less than six of these seven steps are related to strengthening the fight against proliferation. Under step 6, however, “the five nuclear-weapon states…[would] accelerate implementation of their ‘unequivocal commitment’ to nuclear disarmament.” In his new report, the Secretary-General names five tokens of “good faith” he believes should be given by these states at the Review Conference. These are: 1) a commitment to reduce non-strategic (medium- and short-range) nuclear weapons – a step which Russia refuses to take in protest at the eastward expansion of NATO; 2) a commitment to negotiate strategic nuclear reductions involving inspection, verification and the destruction of warheads and missiles – a suggestion vehemently opposed by the US; 3) a reaffirmation of promises not to attack non-nuclear-weapon states – a promise already broken by the new US pre-emptive warfighting strategy; 4) support for a treaty banning the production of uranium and plutonium for military purposes – a proposal strongly supported by President Clinton but dismissed by President Bush as “unverifiable”; and 5) a commitment not to conduct any more nuclear tests – a pledge Washington is not prepared to give.

In short, for the US, it seems that no package of proposals containing any nuclear disarmament commitments will be acceptable – however much the non-proliferation measures set out by ElBaradei and Annan make utter common sense from the viewpoint of legitimate US national security concerns and interests. Instead, the US seems hell-bent on using the Review Conference to decisively break the basic NPT link between non-proliferation and disarmament. Henceforth, in this view, the non-proliferation treaty should be just that, only that: for all intents and purposes, a non-proliferation and non-disarmament treaty, a nuclear apartheid treaty setting these weapons apart for a privileged handful of states. The day after ElBaradei announced his ‘seven steps’, for example, US Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker described the “entire [disarmament] debate” as “a regrettable distraction from the real compliance issues that confront the NPT and threaten the security of all nations.” On March 7, President Bush argued that “we cannot allow rogue states that violate their commitments and defy the international community to undermine the NPT’s fundamental role”; that role being – what else? – to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. And on September 7 last year, in an article in the Financial Times entitled ‘An All-Out War On Proliferation’, US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, now nominated to serve as America’s next Ambassador to the UN, declared that “the Bush Administration is reinventing the non-proliferation regime it inherited” by “assembling allies, creating precedents and changing perceived realities and stilted thinking.”

To conclude.

Inside the NPT conference hall, many countries – including, I believe, Canada – will take a stand against this fateful US attempt to ‘reinvent’ the Treaty. The position of the New Agenda Coalition was made clear in an article by its seven foreign ministers in the International Herald Tribune on September 22 last year. In 1998, they wrote, our countries “joined together…to work toward a security order where nuclear weapons would no longer be given a role. Today, we are more convinced than ever that nuclear disarmament is imperative for international peace and security. … Non-proliferation is vital. But it is not sufficient. Nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament are two sides of the same coin and both must be energetically pursued. Otherwise we might soon enter a new nuclear arms race with new types, uses and rationales for such weapons... And the primary tool for controlling nuclear weapons, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, risks falling apart, with further proliferation as a consequence.”

Outside the hall, thousands of peace activists, hundreds of non-governmental organizations and a large gathering of municipal leaders from around the world – including the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – will be demanding strong, urgent action on disarmament. In his annual Peace Declaration on Hiroshima Day – August 6 – last year, the Mayor of the city, Tadatoshi Akiba, a survivor of the bombing, announced the launch of a ‘Year of Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear-Free World.’ Akiba stated: “The seeds we sow today will sprout in May 2005. At the Review Conference on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons…the Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons will bring together cities, citizens and NGOs…to work with like-minded nations toward adoption of an action program that incorporates, as an interim goal, the signing in 2010 of a Nuclear Weapons Convention to serve as the framework for eliminating nuclear weapons by 2020.”

Sixty years on from the hell of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unendurable prospect of the future use of nuclear weapons – of a far greater hell – is high and growing. The radical but entirely credible proposals of the Mayor of Hiroshima, and the Emergency Campaign he mentioned, have no chance at all of being adopted at the NPT Conference. The past victims of the nuclear age – speaking not only for the dead of sixty years ago but for all of us, the potential victims of the nuclear ‘future’ – remain on the sidelines, certainly not silenced but certainly marginalized, by the nuclear believers, the nuclear warriors, and the nuclear profiteers. And there is surely a link between this absurd distribution of power – away from the people who know and matter the most, toward the people who understand and care the least – and the ultimate absurdity still facing us all: the end of life, the death of the future, here, on this beautiful planet.

Presentation given by CIS member Dr. Sean Howard, adjunct professor of political science at the Cape Breton University (sean_howard@capebretonu.ca).