The end of the Cold War saw the major powers cut back their forces, nuclear as well as conventional, providing a modest ‘peace dividend’. The numbers were insufficient to impress disarmament campaigners. Instead of the challenge of dealing with the fragility of the balance of terror, there were now opportunities made possible by the obsolescence of the balance. The issue of a nuclear-free world appeared again on the agenda, potentially as a matter of practical politics.1 Yet the nuclear issue’s loss of salience and urgency worked both ways. The effort to prove that deterrence was an inappropriate and possibly counter-productive strategy no longer appeared so important when even orthodox opinion was unsure whether there was anything left to deter. It did not necessarily matter if there was a lack of momentum behind disarmament by design so long as there was a powerful logic building up behind disarmament by default. If nuclear weapons could not be eliminated at least they could be marginalized.
Marginalization2 followed essentially the line of nuclear existentialism. In the 1980s the credibility of this form of deterrence depended on the evident links between war and the weapons. A rational process of decision-making that would result in nuclear use remained hard to describe, and attempts to design force structures that could introduce a modicum of rationality, remained frustrating, but it was not hard to believe that an irrational process could soon lead to disaster: the weapons were well spread, to be found in most likely areas of conflict and there were well-rehearsed, almost automatic, procedures for their use. But now, with less to deter, the weapons could be assigned an even lower profile, kept off alert status and made as difficult as possible to use. This still accepted that they could come back into play and could never quite be eliminated. Glenn Buchan suggested that: ‘trivially small nuclear forces, if operated properly, would probably satisfy the basic political ends that nuclear forces could reasonably be expected to achieve.’3 Michael Mazarr took this line of argument to its conclusion with his proposal for virtual nuclear arsenals. The weapons would exist but could not be launched except with a great degree of noisy and prolonged preparation.4
Marginalisation was a deceptively easy option for the West. Now that they had conventional superiority over all-comers, NATO countries had every reason to drain nuclear weapons of any residual legitimacy. At the same time, their potential opponents, realising that they could not win a conventional battle, had incentives to keep the nuclear option open. In this sense the West’s conventional superiority provided a potential boost to the spread of nuclear weapons, or at least of other weapons of mass destruction. The more proliferation of this sort, the harder it was going to be to really push western nuclear arsenals to the margins.a low-key one. It ought not to be understood, still less presented, as seeking merely to substitute a new North versus South or Rich versus Poor framework of deterrence for the old East versus West one … The concept need not and should not rest on an assumption that any particular state or class of state, whether defined ideologically, politically or otherwise, is an adversary to be fended off. It would genuinely reflect a non-specific concept of helping to underpin world order in whatever context it might be threatened, and to help reduce the risk of major war wherever it might occur.6
The word ‘generally’ provided a sufficient get-out for powers claiming that they had no interest except in deterrence of extreme acts against them, and the Court’s argument was for disarmament under strict and effective international control.7The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake.
The advisability of maintaining a low profile for political if not strategic reasons was illustrated when in 1995 France announced, to a general outcry, a nuclear test series in the Pacific. Part of the outcry had an anti-colonial impulse: if, as was claimed, these tests were so environmentally harmless why not undertake them in France rather than inflict them on a distant region? The major question was why a state as relatively secure as France would still assign any sort of priority to preparations for a nuclear war. Paris rationalized these tests as a necessary precursor to adhering to a test ban, and no more followed.8 The award of the 1995 Nobel Peace prize to Joseph Rotblat, President of the Pugwash conferences on science and world affairs, was widely seen as a rebuke to France. Another response came from Australia, one of France’s most vociferous critics. It established, in November 1995, the Canberra Commission, charged with developing ‘ideas and proposals for a concrete and realistic program to achieve a world totally free of nuclear weapons.’
The Commission included people normally associated with more mainstream strategic thinking, including Professor Robert O’Neill of Oxford University, a former director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The most significant convert, at least in terms of his past responsibilities was General Lee Butler, who, until his retirement in 1993, had been in charge of the USAF’s Strategic Air Command, and thus in some senses had been the world’s leading nuclear warrior. Butler also acted as the leading spokesman for a statement issued by a collection of former military officers who signed a manifesto addressing ‘a challenge of the highest possible historic importance: the creation of a nuclear-weapons-free world.’ This statement was sponsored by The State of the World Foundation.9 Elsewhere the Stimson Center had a Project on Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction, which sought ‘to explore the obstacles to, and implications of, the progressive elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons from all states and to consider measures that might bring all states closer toward that goal.’10
There was a tendency in this push for disarmament to assume that the new debate could easily pick up where the last one left off, except that now those in favour of possession had lost their best arguments. As a result the hurdles appeared as largely technical in nature, or else the familiar opponents of the best causes—weary cynicism, old thinking, vested interests and insufficient political will. Jonathan Schell, returning to his old theme, insisted that the choice was truly stark, between ‘on the one hand, condemnation of nuclear weapons and their abolition and, on the other, their full normalization and universalization.’11 Either nuclear abolition or nuclear proliferation. As with all such stark choices, it carried the assumption that when the sloganeer’s preference proved to be unobtainable the only alternative was catastrophe.
The decline of the old rationales for western nuclear capabilities was used to argue against possession.12 The Canberra Commission refuted the main claims for continuing to maintain nuclear arsenals: prevention of war between major powers; protecting the credibility of security guarantees; deterring the use of other weapons of mass destruction; conferring political status and influence; providing effective deterrence at lower cost; defeating large-scale conventional aggression. It concluded that the ‘only military utility that remains for nuclear weapons is in deterring their use by others.’13 Yet such a statement was highly conditional. A monopolist nuclear power might find all sorts of uses for an arsenal. So might a state locked in total war with a non-nuclear rival, if other nuclear states had declared themselves wholly neutral or if states otherwise inclined to meddle were deterred. In addition, the range of political as well as military purposes that might be served by a nuclear arsenal remained quite wide.14 The conviction that sets of nuclear arsenals had no purpose other than to deter each other’s use reinforced the assumptions that the solution to the problem lay in a general agreement to eliminate all sets simultaneously. Their residual rationales would be eliminated at the same time. This implied a rather unlikely degree of orchestration.15 The problems of Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, all of which could be traced back at least to the 1940s, would have to be solved as preludes to wider progress on disarmament.
A further difficulty was that levels of warheads much lower than those at which the Cold War concluded would still provide the wherewithal for utter catastrophe, and it was not even clear what would constitute a zero when it came to nuclear weapons. Schell, for example, distinguished between a technical zero (when the weapons are truly dismantled and cannot be covertly reconstructed) and a political zero (when nuclear use has been completely disavowed). A political zero, to be confirmed by treaty, would raise all the familiar problems connected with the design of a regime that was both transparent and enforceable, the resources and time required for safe decommissioning, the possible role of ballistic missile defences as a form of reassurance, worries about biological weapons, the mood in Russia, the real insecurities in South-Asia and the Middle East, problems that could not be handled by a well-turned phrase or side-stepped altogether or placed deftly into some quite separate negotiating basket to be sorted out later. One high-level American study group, essentially making the marginalist case in arguing for a ‘regime of progressive constraints’ designed to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, suggested that a far better term for the ultimate objective would be ‘prohibition’, on the grounds that complete elimination could never be guaranteed.16
Following the Canberra Commission the pro-disarmament case received little attention as the international community came to be distracted by the ‘war on terror’ and the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was revived in January 2007 when Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William J. Perry and Sam Nunn published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘A World Free of Nuclear Weapons’.17 The content of the article offered little that was new, with its focus on the dangers of North Korea and Iran becoming nuclear powers and the threat of ‘non-state terrorist groups’ acquiring a nuclear weapon. Instead, it was the stature of the authors themselves, all prominent members of the US security establishment, that made the difference. As they had put their names to an article with this provocative title there was a snowball effect as other prominent figures sought to associate themselves with the theme of nuclear disarmament. This led to the formation of what became known as the Global Zero movement.18 President Barack Obama spoke in Prague in April 2009 about a ‘world without nuclear weapons’. Yet as with speeches on the same theme the idealistic rhetoric was also qualified. Actual progress towards this goal remained limited. In the same speech Obama also noted ‘This goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime’. Moreover, he cautioned, ‘As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies’. What was important was the direction rather than the pace. In practice, incremental steps in arms control were still given priority.
Despite the interest in a nuclear-free world, little progress was actually made towards this goal in the following years. At Helsinki in 1997 Clinton and Yeltsin agreed that the goal of START III would be to get down to 2000–2500 on each side by the end of 2007. In November 2001, President George W. Bush proposed to President Putin that the US could cut its nuclear warheads by about two-thirds. The issue then became whether these reductions required a further treaty, or at least some written undertaking, as the Bush Administration appeared to have developed an abhorrence of accepting any legal obligations. In May 2002 Bush and Putin met in Moscow. It came almost three decades to the day after Nixon and Brezhnev has met in the same city to sign the first strategic arms control agreements, including the ABM Treaty that the Bush Administration had already decided in 2001 to abandon. Between these two summits the numbers of nuclear warheads had risen dramatically—because of MIRVing—and were now reducing. The actual warhead numbers agreed in 2002, however, putting the anticipated numbers at 1700–2200 by 2012, were remarkably similar to the pre-MIRV launcher numbers of three decades earlier, with the two sides being allowed to draw down the numbers in stages and keep warheads in reserve rather than destroying them. The new treaty also reverted in another sense to the arms control of the earlier era, marked by a short document—just five brief articles—compared with voluminous legalistic documents that had been produced during the intervening years. Bush announced that the Treaty would ‘liquidate the legacy of the Cold War.’
Thereafter only in two areas was there any movement: arms control (New START in 2010 and a deal with Iran in 2015) and nuclear security (the Nuclear Security Summit initiative). Little progress was made at the 2010 NPT Review Conference despite reiterating a commitment to nuclear disarmament, with the exception that the final document of the conference reaffirmed ‘the need for all states at all times to comply with applicable international law, including international humanitarian law’.19 The 2015 NPT Review Conference was less productive. Although it was now two decades since the landmark 1995 review conference and the ICJ ruling it was hard to detect much change in the actual arsenals of the nuclear states. Declaratory policy remained much the same. Nor was there any indication that nuclear weapons were being devalued given that the leading nuclear states were contemplating substantial investment in their modernization over the coming decades. In effect, this was likely to prolong the nuclear era indefinitely.20
This lack of progress saw new movements of non-governmental organizations and non-nuclear weapons states emerge, dissatisfied with the status quo. Whereas civil society and the disarmament movement previously had been marginal players in the post-Cold War period, after 2010 in particular, they re-emerged as a powerful force in the nuclear debate, at least to the extent they were taken seriously and publicly opposed by the nuclear states.21 Stressing the humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons and the need to close legal loopholes, this movement sought to side-step the NPT process by seeking a nuclear weapons convention to ban this category of weapons. The effort to ban the bomb was intended to place a stigma on nuclear weapons, to encourage opposition to their acquisition and to build political and moral pressure from the bottom-up on the nuclear states to abandon them.
The ‘humanitarian approach’ was not new, having been particularly prominent in the early years of the Cold War but then falling into decline. Its resurrection was due in significant part to the perceived successes of the bans placed on antipersonnel mines (1997) and cluster munitions (2008), and based on the idea that a similar type of international campaign could be mounted to ban nuclear weapons. Advocates of a nuclear weapons convention recognized that it was unlikely to make a significant difference in the short to medium-term. States that possessed them as well as those states benefitting from extended deterrence were likely to remain opposed. Instead this approach to nuclear disarmament relied on a long-term strategy that aimed to engage public opinion in ways that arms control did not. One aspect of this strategy was to shift the nuclear discourse away from one that praised nuclear weapons for their role as a deterrent promoting stability, to one in which they were regarded as weapons of terror that promoted instability. Supporters of a ban were in general agreement about the broad outlines of its purpose, though they disagreed about many of the details, such as what should be prohibited or permitted, particularly the threat of use and the transit of nuclear weapons, and whether nuclear states could sign up to a Ban Treaty before eliminating their arsenals or at least with a plan to disarm.
Paradoxically, for the nuclear weapons states, and particularly for those states that benefitted from extended nuclear deterrence, the longer-term implications were probably of less importance than the immediate problems a nuclear ban might pose, including the limits on the transit of nuclear-related materials through the airspace and territorial waters of states that had signed up to the convention. Within NATO there were concerns about splintering the consensus on the Alliance’s nuclear posture. Nevertheless, there was a more general concern that the ban would erode the concept of extended deterrence, a fundamental aspect of many states’ national security policies.22
To counter the arguments of the disarmament advocates, arms control proponents expressed their opposition on the grounds that a nuclear ban would divert efforts from a ‘practical’ step-by-step approach to reducing the number of nuclear weapons. At issue were two conflicting philosophies. Many of those who advocated a Global Zero were supporters of arms control, with its emphasis on slow but steady progress. On the other side were those traditional advocates of disarmament who sought more radical measures, rather than what they derided as a ‘managerial approach’.
The problem for the supporters of arms control was that progress on US-Russian agreements ground to a halt following the ratification of New START. Unlike with previous arms control treaties in which the arms control process continued, with talks about follow-on agreements beginning immediately, this was not the case after 2011. As Alexei Arbatov observed in 2016, ‘the current period of arms control is unprecedented with literally every channel of negotiation deadlocked and the entire system of existing agreement under the threat of disintegration’.23 The only proposal of note that emerged was an offer announced by President Obama to reduce strategic deployed stockpiles by one-third; an offer that was dismissed by Moscow.
There were a number of reasons for this deadlock. Domestic politics in both countries played a large role. But rather than reduce the explanation for the deadlock to domestic politics alone, a more holistic understanding required some recognition that the character of arms control itself had shifted and grown more complex over the years. From the early days of US-Soviet arms control negotiations in the late 1960s there were many variables to account for when considering the advantages of placing limits on particular categories of weapons, with many categories simply deemed beyond the scope of negotiation. By the 2010s, the number of variables had steadily increased. Missile defence had emerged as one of the most significant obstacles to progress in US-Russia and US-China arms control talks. Though it had been an impediment for many decades, the types of roles that missile defences could play in different scenarios had expanded when linked to other technological advances, particularly with non-nuclear weapons. Due to improvements in the range and accuracy of missiles it had become possible to substitute nuclear warheads with conventional ones to achieve the same destructive effect on many types of targets. The long-term implications of drones were an additional factor to be considered alongside the improvements in missile technology. Likewise, cyber-attacks could also be employed to disrupt command and control systems. Combining these different technologies raised the prospect of a non-nuclear attack on strategic nuclear assets. This increased the risks of miscalculation and nuclear escalation by placing the defenders in a ‘use it or lose it’ predicament.
These factors created a situation in which countries such as Russia or China had little incentive to decrease their nuclear arsenals in the absence of controls being placed on these other non-nuclear, but still nuclear-relevant, capabilities. Opponents of arms control proposals also argued that reducing nuclear arsenals would eliminate an important check on US power as it would only serve to make the world safe for American conventional superiority. This had been an issue from the early 1990s. To the extent that they enjoyed conventional superiority it was in the interests of the Western powers to play down the role of nuclear weapons, and present them only as a deterrent to the nuclear weapons of others. For the same reason those who feared Western hegemony often saw nuclear weapons as being essential to maintaining their independence and securing their interests.
In July 2017, 122 states voted on and adopted the text of a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and beginning in September the treaty was open for signature. Shortly thereafter, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Thus the profile of the disarmament community had reached new heights though this then presented the challenge of sustaining interest in the nuclear ban to ensure more countries continued to sign and ratify the treaty. As for the sense of bleakness that cast a shadow over arms control this was further exacerbated with the election of Donald Trump as US president and his administration’s declared intent to increase the diversity of the US nuclear arsenal rather than reduce it, similar intent expressed on the part of Russia, and the lack of any substantive US-Russia dialogue on promoting ‘strategic stability’. At best, it was speculated that New START would be extended beyond 2021, thereby ensuring that the numerical caps on nuclear forces remained in place. There was little or no prospect of a new agreement that would reduce the US and Russian arsenals below the New START levels. US policymakers expressed their reluctance to place their trust in Russia to abide by any arms control because it had violated past agreements.24 In October 2018 the Trump Administration announced it intended to abrogate the INF Treaty, one of the landmark achievements of the late stages of the Cold War, on the grounds that Russia was cheating.25