A World Without Nuclear Weapons

by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson

In other words, the NPT represented a holding pattern — an attempt to put a lid on proliferation — as an interim step toward a nuclear weapons-free world. And, all in all, it has been a great success. It is the most widely adhered-to international treaty after the United Nations charter. Every US President since Nixon has affirmed it as a bedrock of American and global security. In nearly forty years of existence, only one country — North Korea — has withdrawn from the treaty, when in 2006 they abortively tested a nuclear device.

But the achievements of the NPT, though impressive, are imperfect, and this imperfection points to the treaty’s fatal flaw. Only four nations originally refused to sign the treaty: Cuba, Israel, India, and Pakistan. Of these, Cuba later relented and signed, and Israel — with its peculiar security environment and well-known, though officially unacknowledged, nuclear arsenal — is a unique situation. But India, despite its historic anti-nuclearism, cited an unwillingness to be a second-class global citizen in a situation it describes as “nuclear apartheid,” and developed a nuclear arsenal in the 1990s. Pakistan, its regional rival, likewise declined to sign up indefinitely as a non-nuclear state and followed shortly after India in developing the Bomb.

The logic of India and Pakistan, writ large, will eventually be the downfall of the NPT. Put simply, the security benefit we have received from the nonproliferation regime — a world with few nuclear powers — was purchased on credit, so to speak. The price was the promise of a nuclear weapons-free world, in which the Cold War powers laid down their arsenals while the other powers declined to develop their own. But the interim system enshrined by the NPT — a two-tiered world of nuclear haves and have-nots — seems to much of the world to have become a permanent condition. And the non-nuclear creditors are starting to call for payment in full of the pledges that the nuclear powers made, being increasingly skeptical that they have any intention of holding up their end of the bargain.

This is not an unreasonable concern: how many Americans understand our nuclear arsenal as a temporary quirk of the Cold War — as our treaty obligations have it — rather than a permanent guarantee of military supremacy? And so the non-nuclear powers see a world of nuclear haves and have-nots, where the nuclear haves get to do what they want and the have-nots have to take it. In this climate, American criticism of potential breakout states like Iran has all the moral authority of a temperance sermon preached from the atomic barstool. This situation cannot endure, and will at some point result in nuclear breakout, likely in the form of cascading regional proliferation in Asia and/or the Middle East.

Let me say this as plainly as I can: If the nuclear powers do not change course and uphold their end of the bargain, someday and someway the dam is going to break. Other nations will go nuclear. And when that happens, at some point it will become impossible to prevent bomb material from falling into hands that cannot be deterred. As long as some countries possess these weapons, other countries will try to acquire them. That’s why, in the post-9/11 era, there is no such thing as responsible possession of nuclear weapons.

This is the shift from Cold War paradigms that the American public must come to understand: that the very existence of the weapons we built to ensure our ultimate security has become the ultimate threat to us all. We tend to think of nuclear weapons like a gun: dangerous, but okay as long as the good guys have control of the business end.

But in our post-Cold War, post-9/11 context, nuclear weapons are like a cancer that threatens the whole body. Would we celebrate a tumor on the liver because we believe it to be more responsible than the brain? Understand this: in our day, it does not finally matter where the weapons are. Like cancer cells, until we get to zero, nuclear weapons are an inherently instable and finally terminal mass that will continually threaten to spread. And until we get to zero, we may not know when the metastasis will happen, but we know the name of what will get us in the end.

A SECOND FUTURE

Before we sink into collective, paralyzed despair, remember that I mentioned this was one of two futures. There is another option — there is one other option: the complete elimination of all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.

I am aware that this sounds almost unbearably utopian, a tie-dyed fantasy. And, to be fair, I should acknowledge that champions of nuclear weapons abolition include such noted hippies and leftist activists as:

George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn — four Cold Warriors who, joined by sixteen former Reagan officials, called for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons in a 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed;
Seventy percent of the living individuals who have served as Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, or National Security Advisor, including people like Colin Powell, Jim Baker, and Madeleine Albright — a nonpartisan supermajority of America’s security elite;
An extraordinary new group of international leaders called Global Zero (globalzero.org), which has brought together nuclear technicians and policymakers with leaders from business, civil society, and religion;
2008 US presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, who separately affirmed the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons;
US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who in April 2009 issued an unprecedented joint announcement pledging their two nations to the attainment of a “nuclear-free world”;
And, finally, the watching spirit of President Ronald Reagan, the most ardent nuclear abolitionist ever to sit in the Oval Office, who described nuclear weapons as “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, and possibly destructive of life on earth,”² and who proposed to Soviet President Gorbachev in 1986 that they abolish nuclear weapons entirely.

Critics — and they are Legion — are quick to write off abolition as naïve and unrealistic. This mystifies me. Doesn’t the caliber of support for this idea demand that it receive a fair hearing? Even the skeptics among us say to ourselves: “these people are nobody’s fools; maybe they’ve thought of answers to my knee-jerk response?”

What supporters of abolition have realized is this: the elimination of nuclear weapons is indeed a spectacular challenge, but it’s the only option available to us. We are like someone clinging to a vine on a cliff face: there’s a short and easy way to the bottom, but survival requires an arduous climb. The third option — maintaining the status quo of “responsible” nuclear powers — is simply not a sustainable option.

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Comments

james hayes

Slavery was intrinsically evil. A weapon, like an ax , is morally neutral.

I am not convinced that we could afford to disarm with little hope that all adversaries would actually disarm.

Bob Snodgrass

I certainly disagree with Mr. Wigg-Stevenson's assessment on the need to disarm nuclear arsenals. History seems to show that disarmament is naive, even reckless. That's the claim of Professor David Schaefer, who sums up the point better than I could...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123923509427103247.html

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